Empire of Bones (2 page)

An elderly woman said sharply, "Hold your tongue, Indri Shamal. More respect for the gods might make you less stu-pid."

The villagers nudged one another with sly grins, and Jaya saw the young man's face grow sour. His friends laughed. Jaya breathed out, slowly so as not to disturb the flow of ash, and prayed to whatever god might be listening:
Don't be angry. Please don't be angry with us
.

"See," Jaya's father murmured as the villagers pressed for-ward to collect the sacred ash. His voice was sweet as candy, with no trace of its usual bitterness. "
Vibhuti
, the manifesta-tion of divinity. The gods are kind; the gods are wise." He brushed the ash on the forehead of a woman who knelt before him, making a powdery smear between her eyes that covered the red mark of her marriage. She bowed her head in grati-tude.

First the ash, then the bowl-and-bean trick, then the disap-pearing wooden duck in a bucket of water.

And then it was time for the real conjuring: the ultimate show, the illusion of death.

"You see my daughter?" her father demanded. "She's a pretty one, isn't she? But the gods don't care how pretty you are; they'll take you if they want to, snatch you into death and bring you back to life again…"He glanced up with sharp abruptness. "I'll show you what it's like, when the gods decide to take a child. It's a terrible thing. Don't watch if you're faint of heart. But for those who are brave enough to look, take careful note of this ring." He held up a little band of bronze with a garnet set in it. "This is a magical ring, and it can save you from anything."

"Even the new sicknesses? What about Selenge?" asked a skeptical voice.

Jaya's father was earnest as he replied, "
Anything
. As long as you have faith, and have no doubts. The ring will only pro-tect my little girl if she loses her faith in me. But first, she must be silenced, in case she cries out and offends the gods."

Slipping the too-large ring onto her finger, he gestured to Jaya, and obediently she knelt before him on the dusty earth.

"Your tongue, child."

A stillness fell over the crowd, as though time had stopped. Jaya slipped the goat's tongue from her cheek so that it pro-truded between her lips. At first the trick had revolted her, but now she was used to it. Deftly, brandishing the knife, her fa-ther pretended to sever the tongue. Jaya made a convincing grunt of anguish and the crowd flinched. Jaya rolled her eyes in mute horror.

"Now. Lie down." Jaya's father covered her with a grimy cloth, blew into the fire so that the smoke swirled upward, and swept the blade of the long knife across her throat. She saw the blade come up, red and dripping. The crowd gave a great gasp, but Jaya lay still. Once, the smoke had made her eyes water; she had long since learned to keep them closed. She held her breath. The thick goat's blood seeped in a pool be-neath her neck; she could feel the punctured bladder nestling softly against her ear. Her father was speaking, covering her deftly with the cloth, and she knew that he was drawing the attention of the crowd, the conjuror's sleight of hand and slip of voice that makes everyone believe that nothing has hap-pened at all. A few seconds: enough for Jaya to worm her hand up to her throat and wipe away all trace of the blood from her neck. The cloth was snatched away; she sprang up, smiling.

"I'm alive!" she cried. The crowd, pleased to be so de-ceived, burst into applause.

After the show, Jaya's father sat and smiled beatifically, staring into the hot pale sky as if his gaze were fixed on Heaven. He did not ask for money, but soon the bag that Jaya held was full of notes. Jaya closed the bag, and her father took her by the wrist and hauled her up from the ground. The vil-lagers were reluctandy dispersing.

"Well?" Jaya's father said sharply, into her ear. "That showed them, eh?" There was always this same sour triumph after a successful performance. "Your dad might be just a poor untouchable, but he can still fool his betters, isn't that so?" His face twisted, and Jaya held her breath, waiting for the familiar litany.

"Untouchable, indeed! I had a good job, once—I worked in a laboratory. I was paid decent wages, and then they brought in this caste restoration program—
The old ways are the best ways
, they said.
The
country needs stability
, they said.
We all have to knuckle down
. Who has to? Us, that's who, the lowest of all, nothing but cheap labor and now even less than that…"

It was a familiar complaint, and the slightest thing would set it off. Jaya just nodded dutifully and followed her father as he limped through the village, his head held high with a pride he could barely afford.

Later, beneath the shadows of die neem trees which lay be-yond the village, her father said, "Show me again." He watched closely as Jaya held her small hands out before her, ghostly in the light of the fire. A coin tumbled from her fin-gers.

"Again."

She palmed the coin, twisting her hands over and over again to show that there was nothing concealed, the coin rest-ing between the backs of her fingers.

"No, that's no good. I can see the edge."

Jaya looked up and said with guilty defiance, "I can't do it. My hands are too small."

"It doesn't matter whether your hands are small or not. These tricks are best learnt while you're young; I've told you a thousand times. If you were a boy—" He broke off. His hand cuffed the side of her head, not lightly. "Watch what I do." The coin glittered in the firelight as his skillful hand turned. "Now, again."

SHE thought she would never learn, Jaya remembered now. Once, these tricks would have been the province of the con-juror's son alone, but Jaya had no brothers. Her mother had died, leaving only a cheap garnet ring and the memory of san-dalwood, faint and fragrant as the smoke from the funeral pyres. Her mother, so her father said, had not liked tricks and conjuring, for all that she'd married a
gilli-gilli
man. But within a year or two, Jaya had picked up all the tricks that had made her father's name as a magician, a man to whom gods listened.

Memory unscrolled like a film: now, from the prison of the hospital bed, Jaya watched herself traveling the dusty roads of Uttar Pradesh. She saw her father sitting back on his heels in the dirt as his magical child conjured ash and money and medals and rings to fool the villagers of rural Bharat. She saw the avid gaze of the crowds as she was killed and resurrected, over and over again. She saw the seeds of her life beginning to green and grow.

The summers wore on and the rains still came, but each year was drier than the last. By the time she was ten, Jaya had made a name for herself in the district. People seemed to trust her, though she didn't understand why that should be. Even then Jaya knew that her life was a lie. Tricks and conjuring and illusion—it was like eating air. Every time she performed a faked miracle in a god's name, she expected Heaven to strike her down. But it never happened, and at last she came to won-der whether the gods were even there.

Yet she was always troubled by the sense that there was something more, something beyond the lies and the tricks. In the stillness of the long, burning nights, she lay awake, listen-ing, and it sometimes seemed to her that she could hear a voice, speaking soft and distant beyond the edges of the world. It was faint and blurred with static, like a radio tuned to the wrong station, but she did not think it was a dream—though maybe, she would muse, it was just that she wanted too much to believe. The voice fell silent, for months at a time, and Jaya would give up hope all over again, but then she'd hear it once more. It was the only secret she had.

Lying restlessly in the hospital bed, she blinked, conjuring the memories back. She was thirteen years old.

The monsoon season was beginning, and Jaya ran out into the welcome rain, spinning in the dust until the fat drops churned it into mud. She spun until she was dizzy and her sari was soaked, then she bolted for the shelter of the trees. She crouched in the long grass, reveling in the feeling of being unseen. Then she real-ized that something was watching her after all. There was a locust climbing a stem of grass. The grass bent beneath the lo-cust's stout green body, and Jaya held her breath, waiting for it to reach the tip of the stem and leap away. And as she stopped breathing, so time stopped, too. The day seemed to slow and slide. Darkness engulfed Jaya's sight, and then there was a brightness at the edge of the world, like the sun rising. The lo-cust turned to her, gazing through golden eyes, and said with-out words,
I have
been waiting for you
.

Jaya felt her mouth fall foolishly open. The locust said im-patiently,
When the Tekhein designate
speaks, you hear, do you not
?

"I don't understand," Jaya whispered, and the locust gath-ered itself up and sprang away out of sight. She sat in the grass for a long time, listening. She could hear something hum-ming, just at the edge of sound, and she couldn't get it out of her head. Slowly, she rose and made her way back to the hut.

She wondered whether she had imagined the whole thing, but she had become too used to telling what was real from what was not: the legacy of the conjuror's child. Her throat was dry with the thought that there might be something be-yond the tricks after all.

But then, with a bitter pang of disappointment, she learned what she at that time believed to be the truth—that the magi-cal locust, and the voice she heard, were nothing more than the result of sickness.

That night, she woke in a fever, and the next few days passed in a blur of heat and pain. Her father's worried face swam above her, begging her to get well; promis-ing her that if she did he'd give up the tricks and listen to the gods. Even in the depths of the fever, Jaya didn't believe him. She heard a woman's calm voice saying in poorly articulated Hindi, "I'm giving her a dose of antibiotics; we'll see if that brings the fever down."

"But what's wrong with her?"

"I don't know. I'm sorry. We're seeing a lot of new diseases; some people say it's due to the crops they're growing now, the genetic modifications… No one knows for sure."

And later, her father's uneasy, shifty voice: "I don't know where I'll find the money to pay, you see."

"The mission will pay, don't worry. That's why we're here."

Eventually, Jaya woke and found that the fever had gone. Light-headed, she stumbled through the door of the hut into the compound. Chickens were scratching in the dry earth and a small child, one of the neighbor's babies, stared at her with an unblinking gaze. Then suddenly the child's eyes became as yellow as the sun, and Jaya screamed, but no sound came. The baby's gaze was abruptly soft and dark.

Shaking, Jaya leaned against the wall of the hut. Her joints burned and ached, and when she reached for her plait of hair she was horrified to find that it was gone. Tears welled up in her eyes. Then her father was there, with the nurse from the mission.

"Where's my hair?" Jaya shouted, and saw the nurse stifle a smile.

"Don't worry, sweetheart, it isn't gone forever. It'll grow back. We had to cut it, you see; it was full of lice. You wouldn't want that, now, would you?"

In a little voice like a child's, Jaya heard herself say, "No."

"Well, then. Now, do you feel better?"

"A bit. My hands hurt."

The nurse took Jaya's hand in her own pale fingers and turned it over, as though she was going to read Jaya's palm.

"How does it hurt?"

"It burns."

"Your knuckles are swollen—you poor little thing! I'm go-ing to leave some medicine with your dad; we'll see if that works. We'll soon have you feeling better, won't we?"

Jaya was silent. The nurse was very kind, but she was talk-ing to Jaya as though she were a baby, not an almost-grown woman with a role to play in the world. Her father nudged her. "Thank you," Jaya said after a pause, and the nurse smiled.

"You're a good girl. You'll soon be well again."

But this, too, turned out to be a lie.

"COULD we just go over this again, for the benefit of these people?" Dr. Fraser said. It was the day after Jaya's latest es-cape attempt. She'd had it figured out. This time, she'd use the tranquilizers to drug the duty nurse and slide out down the back stairs. But just before six a medical team had shown up from England, arriving on an early flight. Now, they were clustered around the bed: two men and one woman.

All of them were staring at Jaya as though she was nothing more than an interesting problem to be solved.

Fraser continued, "Let's just run through your symptoms, shall we?"

Jaya sighed. "At first, my joints would get stiff, like arthri-tis, and they'd burn in the monsoon season. I used to feel shaky and hot. But it came and went, and it didn't really get that bad until a few years ago."

Dr. Fraser reached for her laptop and began to download data. In between discussing the case with her colleagues in English, she made a great effort to explain to Jaya what she thought was wrong. She used clear, simple words and drew litde pictures on the screen with a lightpen. Jaya bit back a sharp remark.

A cigarette might have helped her mood, but she knew it was illegal in the West and she hadn't dared ask the doctor if she could smoke. She had a feeling that the an-swer would be an outraged
No
. Only Westerners could refuse you something on the grounds of your health when you were on the verge of death.

On the little laptop, Jaya could see the spirals of her own DNA uncoiling, strands highlighted crimson and green, bright as jewels against the dawn-background of the screen. There was a part of the pattern that the program seemed un-able to represent properly: it shifted and changed, twisting around the core in an unstable formation. It was, Jaya was given to understand, a mutation, lodged deep in her genetic makeup, and it was this that was probably the reason for her long illness.

Someone said in English, "Dr. Fraser, is your view that whatever this woman is suffering from is in some way related to the Selenge retrovirus?"

The speaker was a middle-aged man, with fair, thin hair and a high-arched nose. His face was red from sunburn. Jaya became very still. Fraser glanced at her, and she schooled her face to show nothing.