Chapter 52 Bhumika
BHUMIKA
They went into the forest. Deep, dark trees enfolded them. The branches seemed to turn to meet her. The undergrowth rustled at her feet. Above her, the leaves were dark as lacquer, the light bleeding through them.
The last thing she had done before leaving the mahal was write a letter.
Priya,
Perhaps you’re dead and gone, and I have done you the cruelty of not mourning you. But I think you live. I hope you live. And though I also hope you will never return here, I know that if you are alive, you will.
When you do, I hope you can forgive me for leaving you behind.
The bower of bones waited for them. Above them, bound into the trees with ribbons of yellow and red, the bones clicked against one another. But the bower was otherwise silent, without even the chirp of birdsong.
Ashok waited for her, standing among a riot of oleander blossoms that seemed to grow from nowhere—that twined through his hair, and wound at his feet.
“Why here?” Bhumika asked.
“It’s a space for travel,” he said. “From here, you can go far.”
The bower was both the entrance to a path carved long ago by yaksa hands, and a grave where rot-riven animals came to die.
Cursed and strange, it did feel like a fitting place for Bhumika to leave her life behind.
She raised her head and stared at the bleached bones hung above them, warning the unwary that they had come to a place where no sensible person should.
“What shall I do now?” she asked.
“Kneel,” Ashok said. “And then we can begin.”
Jeevan was silent, as Bhumika kneeled on the ground. She looked up at his face. His gaze was heavy, full of grief and unspoken things she did not want to contemplate. Not now.
“Don’t fear for me,” she said softly. “Jeevan.”
He said nothing. Only looked at her in return.
“You think I am being self-sacrificing,” Bhumika went on, straightening where she sat, so that her spine was a tall, unbroken column, her shoulders unbowed. A noble enough look, she hoped, from the outside. She did not want Jeevan to fear for her. She did not want to fear for herself.
“You are being self-sacrificing,” said Ashok. “That’s what the magic demands of you.”
Jeevan lowered his eyes.
“No. Sacrifice would be remaining here and trying to carve out a measure of safety for our people. My people,” she corrected.
Because whatever Ashok was, he was no longer one of her own, no longer mortal and frightened, struggling against immortal strength vast enough to crush them with the faintest breath, the vaguest desire.
“Sacrifice would be doing so day in, day out, even with the sure knowledge of my inevitable failure.
“The Parijatdvipans think they know what it means to sacrifice,” she went on.
“Grand gestures of self-destruction, they think. They glorify it. But it’s not so.
The slow way, fighting even when you know it may have no worth…
that is sacrifice.” She thought of all her people in the mahal.
And thought of Padma, laughing, Bhumika’s heart clutched in her perfect, tiny fists.
Felt her heart turn and break, as she said, “And this? This is freedom. This is escape.”
This was a foolish chance.
Ashok snorted. “Call it what you like,” he said.
“I will not know what I have to mourn,” she said. “Not for a long time. Perhaps forever. What greater gift can I ask for?”
And then, undoing all her own work, she turned her head away from her brother who was not her brother, and covered her face with her hands. And wept.
She heard the sound of footsteps. Jeevan’s voice, as he said, “A moment. Just a moment—”
“A moment, Ashok,” Bhumika agreed, voice choked. “Then I’ll be ready.”
More footsteps. She felt it, as Jeevan kneeled before her.
“My lady,” he said. She did not answer. “Bhumika,” he murmured. “He’s gone.”
She looked at him through her fingers. His hand was held out, palm upraised. She forced the tears to stop—breathed through the simple grief that had overwhelmed her—and placed her hand against his own.
“Whatever you cannot mourn, I will mourn for you,” Jeevan said quietly. “And when your work is done, I will bring you back. I vow, as long as I’m living, it will be done.”
She stared at him: his severe face that concealed the gentleness that resided inside him, his straight back, and his steady gaze. Her breath caught for a moment as she looked into his eyes. She believed he believed it, and she was glad of that. That he could hope for her, even when she could not.
She leaned forward. Pressed her mouth to his.
It was the softest touch of her lips to his own.
She felt the warmth of his breath; the sudden clench of his hand around her own, holding her as if he were afraid she would vanish if he let go.
But he kissed her in return gently, with a tenderness that made her heart ache for what could have been, and what never would be.
She drew back.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Whatever ephemeral thing had grown between them deserved better than the kiss she had given him, kneeling in the dirt, on the verge of losing herself.
But Jeevan only touched his thumb to her cheek, brushing away her tears.
Then he released her hand. He stood, and stepped back, and turned his face away to stare into the woods, his face in shadow.
“Ashok,” Bhumika said. Her throat dry.
She thought, perhaps, she’d feel embarrassed. But when her brother appeared and she looked at him there was no expression on his face. Nothing human, really, left in his eyes at all, to make her feel shame.
“Are you ready now?” Ashok asked.
No. No. This was madness.
“Yes,” she said, and held out her hands.
He kneeled with her. He took her hands in his own.
She entered the sangam, not with the slow ease she always had, breath by measured breath, but with the awful suddenness of a blow to the skull, or a body being dragged under a river’s inexorable weight. She was in her skin, and then in the space of a breath she was not.
Stars above her head, skeins and threads of them tangling and bursting light. The rivers winding around her. And as before, she could not feel Ashok. Could not see him or touch him.
That made sense, of course. She understood now.
He was not Ashok. He only wore his skin, his dreams, the dust of his memories. Only masqueraded as him. He was a yaksa—old and strange, and misled by her brother’s heart.
And she had placed her life in his hands.
Beneath her, in the water, flowers bloomed up, rising through dark liquid to curl against her, where the shadow of her body met the water. A ring of yellow at her waist. Marigolds, the color of fire. Oleander, a piercing yellow, a warning and welcome, a poison.
Hands settled on her shoulders.
“Don’t look.” A voice from behind her. Not her brother’s entirely, but something layered. Two echoes twining. “Don’t look, Bhumika. I don’t know what you’ll see.”
“I won’t,” she said. She looked down. There was no true sun here, no true light, and yet she felt as if she could see their shared reflection in the water.
Her own form, haloed by something profuse in leaves, with the steady strength of an old tree grown twisted, made strange by ill winds. “How do we begin?”
“You’ve already hollowed yourself for us. You’re already bound to the yaksa—by rivers, by root, by emptiness.” The flowers were growing more swiftly now, more thickly. Filling the water. They were climbing her now, winding around her body, reshaping her, bloom by bloom. “We’ve already begun.”
The last touched her mouth.
She opened her lips. And.
Knowledge poured through her.
How the yaksa had clawed their way from one world to another. Mani Ara, the first, with her thorn-sharp smile, her flowering eyes. And all the others, flowering and growing, gathering followers. The way the world changed where they walked. The way the world became their own—
(She heard a cry, distantly, in the sangam. Or felt it. Something had realized what was being done, here. Someone had turned their focus toward her and Ashok. Someone was coming.)
The knowledge poured into her. Poured and she remembered—cutting out her own heart.
Hollowing herself open. This was the same and yet worse, a thousand times worse.
Knowledge flowed into her, and with it an understanding of the immortal that wore her brother’s skin and memories as if it were his own.
It was not a simple kind of knowledge, this.
It was as ancient as the yaksa, and as complex.
It was a thing that could not be stored in tomes, had never been recited by poets.
It was memory: the feel of soil underfoot.
The first time this yaksa had spilled blood.
The world they had come from, and the world they sought to build.
The sacrifices they had made in order to come here. The dark grief in their hearts.
I know how you can die, she tried to say. I know, I know, I know. But the knowing had eaten its way through her, filled her hollowness to the brim.
“I need to do it before they find you,” said Ashok-who-was-not-Ashok. And very suddenly, she sagged forward, back in her own flesh again. “I need to…”
He went silent as she reached up and touched his face. When she drew her hand back, she drew moss with it, thick with blood.
“It’s all falling away,” she said.
He stared at her. Eyes as yellow as the flowers that had consumed her.
“You have it,” he said. “You have everything I know.”
He touched her face in return. A mirror of her movement.
“Goodbye, Bhumika,” he said.
She felt something twist. Something deep within her go silent. Dizziness overcame her.
When she next opened her eyes, she could see trees above her. She was in someone’s arms.
“Where shall I take you, my lady?” the man asked. Jeevan, her mind whispered, and then the name turned to dust. Fled from her.
“You cannot—call me that. Anymore,” she whispered. Her eyes would not stay open. But she tried. She could hear the huff of his breath. The crunch of undergrowth beneath his feet as he carried her as swiftly as he could, as if he feared the yaksa were at his heels.
“Bhumika, then,” he said. “Where shall we go?”
A lake of knowledge in her head. A history with its roots cut. She licked her dry lips.
“The seeker’s path,” she said. “And then—Alor. Take me to Alor.”
Who is Bhumika? she thought. And then nothing. Nothing.
The last thing she saw was the night sky above her.