Chapter 33 Bhumika
BHUMIKA
The sickroom was tense. Dark. There was no noise but the rasp of breath; one small body laboring over air, and Ganam matching the cadence of it. In, out. In, out. As if he were keeping them both going by sheer determination alone.
“Ganam,” Bhumika said. She entered the room quietly.
“Kritika’s just been.” That was Ganam’s low voice. “She doesn’t know what to think. She doesn’t want to admit it to me, but I know her. I saw it in her face.”
“How is he?” Bhumika asked. She was not far from the bed now. There was a blanket over Rukh’s body, but he’d managed to kick it aside, or it had been shifted, and Bhumika could see one bare foot; one thin ankle, vulnerable, limned green.
“He’s sick,” Ganam said in a low voice. He was sitting by Rukh’s bed. “He said Ashok—did something to him. Before he stopped talking again.”
Rukh was unconscious. There were new veins of green at his throat. The rot had spread further upon it; reached its tendrils through his blood, his organs. Priya would be heartbroken.
Bhumika touched her fingertips to that ankle. The boy didn’t even twitch. But he was warm, still. And the realization brought a lump to Bhumika’s throat.
Rukh. Her daughter. Her daughter.
The fear was constant inside her. The vise of it was only tightening, with every single thing the yaksa did.
“I’ll return,” she said softly. Ganam said nothing as she departed, his eyes still fixed on Rukh.
She didn’t seek out Ashok. She didn’t have to. Everywhere she went she felt him like a shadow. And sure enough, when she walked into the orchard—beneath canopies of leaves laden with strangeness, the rot that watched her with the yaksa’s terrible sentience—he followed her.
Ashok found her with her palm against a great tree that was split through the trunk by a fleshy wound. She didn’t want to look at him.
“What did you do to him?” Bhumika asked. “Ashok, what did you do to Rukh?”
“He’s still alive?”
“Yes, he’s still alive.” She turned. “Were you trying to kill him?”
Ashok said nothing, nothing, and Bhumika wanted to scream.
But she did not. It wasn’t her way. She drew her strength around her and looked at him—simply looked at the strangely distant, lost expression on his face.
The way the earth had grown new things at his feet—flowers, buds—grasping him with green hands.
“The brother I remember was often cruel,” Bhumika said levelly. “Often a fool.”
“I was never a fool.” He sounded offended.
“Often,” Bhumika repeated, stressing the word with all the anger in her, even as she felt a rush of thankfulness that he was still in there—still sharp, still difficult, still unwilling to bend to her over even the smallest things.
“But he never destroyed needlessly. He always convinced himself there was need for the cruelty he inflicted. He excused himself. So what is your excuse, Ashok? What were you trying to do?”
“I was not trying to hurt him,” Ashok said distantly. “I gave him a gift.”
“What gift?”
“Ask him what he knows,” said Ashok. “I gave him wisdom.”
“He’s a child.”
“The yaksa have always understood the value of children,” Ashok replied, and Bhumika did not flinch.
Did not think of her daughter. He did not even seem to realize the barb had landed.
He was still talking, all swift, stumbling words.
“They hollow everything,” Ashok said. “They hollow the world. The trees, the plants, the people. They don’t know what they’re doing, Bhumika.
They’re ripping everything apart—changing everything—so that they may survive and win. ”
“What are they?” Not the spirits she’d worshipped, surely. Not this. “Ashok. What are you?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He sounded bewildered. She had never heard him sound like that, and it made her stomach lurch. You are not my brother. This is not my brother.
“You are my brother,” she said firmly. “You are. But what else?” Her hands tightened on his arms. “You must tell me. They have Ahiranya. They have Padma as hostage and they want Priya. Or want to do something to Priya. I know they do. So for her sake, if not Padma’s, if not my own—”
“I am a mask.” His voice was desperate. “I am a mask. I am not Ashok at all, even if I believe I am. Even if I wish to be.”
She tried to find her equilibrium. Her control. She did not want to feel like the girl she’d once been, beholden to her elders, small and obedient to the will of others. She resented the change in her circumstances wholly. She could barely breathe through it.
“This can’t go on,” she said. And her voice was thin, but carried in it all her conviction.
“Ashok, if you are yourself—even a shadow of what you once were—will you truly harm your own for no purpose, not even the glorious future you once hungered for? Will you allow the rot to take Ahiranya wholly?”
“Bhumika.”
It was not Ashok who spoke.
She whirled.
“He can’t help you,” said the yaksa who looked like Chandni. Today, she was wearing Chandni’s mien only lightly. Her skin was the pearl of shell. “But we are yours, as you are ours, Elder Bhumika. If you have questions or fears, let me ease them.”
Breathe in. Out. Bhumika forced herself not to flinch—to lower her gaze in respect and speak.
“I have been foolish,” said Bhumika. “I should never have distrusted you. But it is… frightening, to face what you worship. You must forgive your temple daughter’s weakness.”
Chandni’s silence was almost a threat.
“Tell me, daughter,” she said eventually, “what you fear.”
“The rot,” Bhumika said. Wishing her voice were not so weak. Wishing it would not waver. “It grows worse. Our people will die.”
“We are trying to make a future,” said the yaksa, her eyes glowing bright. “We gave up so much to be here. Why then, shouldn’t we reshape the world? Make room for ourselves, make it in our image? We are flesh and flower alike. Why shouldn’t you be, too?”
Those words could not have struck Bhumika harder than they did here, in what had once been her husband’s prized orchard.
“The elders once welcomed us,” the yaksa Chandni crooned, as if she were singing, the vines undulating around them as lulling as waves. “The first of your kind let us in. They did it so sweetly, so easily. They were glad to have us. Glad to serve us.
“Perhaps you did not know what we were, when you entered the waters. Perhaps the ones who raised you did not know. But you let us in all the same.” Her hand against Bhumika’s cheek.
“You are bound to us. We carved a place out inside of you and made it our home. You are no more a creature of this world than we are.”
Bhumika wanted to scream. Her skin crawled with revulsion. But she remained still, allowing the touch on her face.
“And what is our purpose?” Bhumika asked.
“You must understand, yaksa, as children we were taught that our purpose was to venerate you. Encourage your worship and remember you for the glory you gave Ahiranya—and for the sacrifice of your deaths. But you are here now, and I think perhaps you seek more than worship from me.”
“Worship never goes amiss,” the yaksa said lightly, smiling with Chandni’s mouth, with Chandni’s eyes that crinkled up at the corners.
“But no, it is not worship we seek from you. You have the same purpose your ancient elders had, when we first came to the shores of your world and made them into more than the mortals they were.” The yaksa leaned closer.
“War, Elder Bhumika. A brilliance of war, so large that it sweeps all of Parijatdvipa into our waiting arms.”
“You’re reshaping the world,” Bhumika said, keeping her voice deferential. “It will all fall to you eventually. What need is there for war that may cost you worshippers?” Or end your time on this world, as it did in the Age of Flowers? Bhumika thought.
She knew better than to say it. You do not confront a powerful man with his failures. And for all they were spirits, gods, they wielded power with a very human cruelty indeed.
“Necessity,” the yaksa said simply. Bhumika thought she would say no more, but then the yaksa sighed, a sound like the susurration of leaves, and said, “There are natural laws that must be obeyed.”
Natural laws. That meant nothing. The yaksa was hiding something from her. She could feel it.
She nodded. “I understand, yaksa,” she lied.
Bhumika knew the pain of being conquered. She knew what it felt like to have your history, your culture, your pride erased by increments.
She had thought, all this past year, that she and Priya and the mask-keepers had been rebuilding. Bit by bit, returning Ahiranya back to itself. But the country they had been building—sewn together by fragile threads—was no more than a shroud for an old beast.
She had a duty to protect the people of this land. She had always tried to do so, in small ways and large. But ah, she was so tired, and nothing made her wearier than the horror that seeped through her as the yaksa before her smiled and smiled, as if she had learned smiling from a tale.
“What do you need from me? How may I serve?”
“A feast,” Chandni said. “Your yaksa desire a feast to celebrate our return, that all the highborn of our land must attend.”
Bhumika inclined her head. Her stomach a stone.
“A feast,” she repeated. “It will be done.”