Chapter 42 Bhumika #2
“This is not a child’s tale,” said Bhumika.
“A story about children,” he said. “Not for them, perhaps. Though it shaped them. It shaped you.”
“Why tell me this?”
“The yaksa had a secret. He never told any of his kin,” said Ashok.
“He hid it from them for a long time. But he loved one child dearly. More than all the rest. She loved knowledge more than any other child he had met, and he gave her a surfeit of it. He told her everything he had taught the other children—his temple children. And when she passed through the waters, he gave her even more. Every secret the yaksa had. But on her third journey through the waters she nearly died. She came back alive, but the waters were poisoning her. She wouldn’t live, bound to them as she was.
And he could not stand to see her die, even if her shadow would remain with him forever. ”
Bhumika listened, saying nothing. Somewhere behind her she could hear the spit and crackle of kitchen fires. The cold of the courtyard, the night, was settling in her bones.
“She could not live with the waters,” he said. “So he tore her free from them.”
Tore her free.
She thought of the scroll in the library. The body with roots running through it. Not roots, perhaps, after all, but rivers of gold and green and red. Rivers of heart’s blood. Rivers of soul and living.
“And what,” Bhumika asked, throat tight, “became of her?”
“She had hollowed herself for the deathless waters,” he said.
“For their magic. What remained of her after was a shadow of a girl. Magic lost. Memories in fragments. She was herself, but not herself at all. She remembered everything he had taught her. Every tale. Every secret. But she did not remember who she was.”
Ashok took a step closer. His movements were jerky. As if he didn’t know his own limbs.
“He bound her again to the waters, in the end. He couldn’t stand to see her as she was.
He couldn’t stand not to feel her, her soul in the waters with him.
Bhumika, I…” Ashok’s voice. Familiar, a little rough.
Panic woven through it. “I heard you. And here I am, you see? I don’t have long.
But I have what you need. You want our people to be free.
And I… I have the knowledge that will let you free them.
I have so much knowledge inside me. Knowledge I’m afraid to touch.
I am not… myself. I am…” He sucked in a breath.
“You know what I am. But you, Bhumika. You’re a temple daughter.
You’re bound to the yaksa. Bound to me.”
Her not-brother looked at her. One of his eyes was mortal, gleaming with tears. The other was living wood scraped bare, green and weeping sap.
“I can give you what he gave those children,” said Ashok-who-was-not-Ashok. “I can give you all the secrets of the yaksa. I can give you the tools to destroy them. And then I can set you free. All it will cost you is—”
“My self,” whispered Bhumika. “My memories. Is that what you mean?”
“Yes. Only that.”
“Ashok, are you utterly mad?”
“I tested the skill on Rukh. He’s not thrice-born, not a temple child. But he had the waters in him, through his rot. I know it will work.” His voice changed a little again; deepened, a fracture of wood rippling across his cheek. “I owe it to you, child,” he said. “I made you, after all.”
A groan of pain. His head tilted forward.
She could have held him. Could have raised his face with her hands and looked at him and allowed herself to fear for him, worry for him.
What is wrong with you? What has become of you?
Could have. But did not. She thought of all that the yaksa had done in that feast—the bodies sundered by striations of wood, and Ashok’s lost, frightened eyes—and stood where she was, as unmoving as the oldest tree, deep-rooted, steadfast.
“Why now?” she asked instead, when he raised his head. “Why offer me a weapon now?”
“Because Ashok wanted a better Ahiranya,” he said.
“Because Ashok had a dream, a dream he died for, and this is not what he dreamt of.
Because at the feast I thought I would weep with horror, and whatever is mortal in me hates what the yaksa have done.
And what is yaksa in me knows what we will do, and fears it.
“The yaksa are not the only ones who want to shape this world.” Ashok was sweating, strange pearls of sap running down his face.
“We do not want a war. We know war is inevitable. Even as we have begun to return, to make the sacrifices necessary to crawl back into this world, others have been awakening too. Seeding messages in names and prophecies. Teaching mortals the secrets of sacrifice. They’ve written those secrets into the blood, the bone, the earth, just as we have.
But we’ll be stronger this time. We’ve given up so much more than they have.
This time we’ll take the world entirely.
Hollow it and make it home. But we can be stopped.
We know it and we fear it, because losing will destroy us. ”
“Ashok.” She made her voice a whip, hard enough to crack through the glazed look in his eyes. He blinked then, looking at her, and she pressed on, trying to keep him present and with her. “Please. Talk to me. Explain. What would you have me do?”
He blinked at her with his one mortal eye. “Ashok,” he repeated. “I’m not Ashok anymore. Not really. Am I?”
“You are still Ashok,” she said, with conviction she did not feel. “You saved our sister when our siblings burned. You kept her alive. Then you gave her to me. You have died before. And you came back. Died with our siblings. Died when you let Priya go. You can come back again. You have.”
“That wasn’t death,” he rasped. “You don’t know what death is like. True death—it’s something unlike anything else. I was picked to pieces. Scraped clean, the bones of me reassembled into something of use to them—to me.”
He took a step closer to her.
“Bhumika,” he forced out. “I am a yaksa. No different from the one who wears Chandni in her smile, or uses Sanjana’s voice. No different, although I believe I am.”
“You are still you,” she said, but saw her own uncertainty mirrored in his face.
“I am only the scraps of myself. The tatters. Take this armor apart, this thin skin, and I won’t be Ashok anymore.
I know it. The yaksa know it. They don’t know why I cling on but it makes them curious.
They’re waiting to see what will happen.
They think it’s funny. You always loved humans, they told me. And I did. Maybe I still do.”
Bhumika felt the thud of her own heart, painful as a fist.
“You are a temple elder,” he said. “Bound to us by choice and sacrifice. Bound by my—by a yaksa’s—choice.
We can give you so many things. We have given you so many things.
Strength. Power. The earth and plants at your bidding.
And I can give you more. I can give you knowledge, Bhumika, the kind of knowledge that could kill us in the right hands.
A secret that can be forged into a weapon.
Is losing yourself not worth that price? ”
What capacity did she have to do anything with that kind of knowledge?
What could she possibly accomplish? To know the right knife for a task was one thing—to actually be able to wield it was another matter entirely.
And yet her hands shook and her voice trembled as she said, “If I take this knowledge with me, I can stop the war?”
“You can try,” said Ashok. “And that is more than you can do now. You’re bound. Good as chained. This is all I can offer you.”
“If you know how the yaksa can be stopped—if you feel guilt—why will you not act to stop the war yourself? Why must it be me?”
“Because it’s only the part of me that is Ashok that wants to,” he said. “This—skin of me.” He gestured, helplessly, at his own body. “And I’m not going to be here much longer, Bhumika. You must see it. I’m fraying. I cannot leave, but—but you can. For a price.”
She closed her eyes, searching for calm.
“Everything demands sacrifice.”
“Of course,” she said. “Of course it does.”
“You’ve forgotten. But once, beneath the waters, a yaksa offered you a blade of sacred wood.
It told you to cut out your heart for it, and you did.
” His voice was quiet but deep. Ashok’s voice but also—not quite.
Not quite. “You made space for the sangam inside you. The rivers are in you, flowing through you. We can find you anywhere, because you carry the waters. We can live in you, because you carry the waters. But if you are not bound to the waters…”
“I understand,” she said. Closed her eyes, one brief moment, then opened them. “A typical Ashok strategy,” she said tiredly. “To risk my health and my life—and all those who rely upon me—for the slimmest chance of success.”
“When I risked death, I did it for a higher cause,” he said. “Our autonomy. Our freedom. Risk is not shameful.”
“Shame! You talk of shame. You wanted a return to our glorious past,” she said, with all the savagery she had never been able to direct at him when he was living; that he had denied her by being her enemy, then denied her by dying and leaving both her and Priya behind.
“What do you think of it, now that we have it?”
“I think you’re asking a ghost about wanting to resurrect ghosts, sister,” he said, with a weight and quietness she’d never heard from her brother’s lips. “I’m not real anymore, Bhumika,” he said. “What I once wanted doesn’t matter. But you are real. And the choice is yours.”