Empire of Bones (35 page)

Sirru was asleep. He lay flat on his back with his hands crossed over his chest like a fallen statue, his face peaceful and remote. But his skin was ashen, and his breathing quick and shallow. Rajira Jahan whimpered in her sleep, and Jaya turned. She could see a film of sweat glistening upon Rajira's brow.

Halil, too, mut-tered and mumbled, locked in dreams.

For a brief, unnerving moment, Jaya could see the content of those nightmares. Halil was dreaming of the alien: a tall pale presence, with a demon's teeth. Jaya sat back on her heels and looked inward, searching for signs of illness, but there were none. She felt alert and alive, her awareness heightened to almost animal sensitivity. The glimpse of another mind that she had just received was nothing like the speech of the ship. It was close and low and human; familiar. It seemed ironic to Jaya that all about her should be falling sick whilst she re-mained well. Gently, she crouched by the child's side and brushed a hand across his forehead. Halil's skin was cold as mountain snow. Wondering, Jaya tucked his blanket about him and left him in peace.

As she stood back, she saw that Rakh was awake and watching her. There were questions in his gaze, and Jaya nod-ded.

"Something's wrong," she said.

Rakh struggled sleepily to his feet and accompanied her out into the compound. This high in the hills, it was chilly, and there was the glaze of ice on one of the water tanks. No wonder the child's temperature was so low; she hoped that was all it was. She wrapped her arms about her chest in reflex action, yet she herself could not feel the cold. She said, "I think they're ill—Rajira and Halil, and the alien."

Rakh said, without surprise, "It's always the way."

"What do you mean?"

"You said it yourself. Colonizers. They bring sickness with them. Sometimes they die."

"But he healed Halil."

"Did he? By attacking him? You just said that the boy's sickening again."

"Yes, but I don't think it's with Selenge. That doesn't start like this—it begins with a rash and vomiting."

"Who knows what diseases they carry with them? Perhaps that's the plan. Maybe Sirru is a carrier. A sacrifice."

"Maybe," Jaya said doubtfully.

"If it wasn't for the fact that Sirru healed the boy," Rakh said, "would you let him live?"

Jaya looked at him. "I don't know. But even if I didn't, I don't think others would be far behind him. We ought to wake them," she added, briskly. "Find better shelter, if we've got wounded on our hands."

But Rajira could not be woken with the others. Jaya came back from a hasty wash in the water tank to find Rakh kneel-ing by her prone body.

"Rakh? What's wrong?" Jaya asked.

"I don't know. I can't wake her."

"Wonderful," Jaya said bitterly. "First everything else, and now this…" She glanced across at Sirru. For a moment, she thought he was still asleep, too, but then the golden eyes snapped open. The warmth of unexpected relief spread in a rush through Jaya's stomach. At her side, Rajira murmured something and woke. She blinked up at the worried faces around her.

"Rajira?" Jaya said. "Are you all right?"

"Yes… I think so. Except I had dreams…"

"What sort of dreams?"

"I could hear other people. I was in their heads." Rajira sat up and clutched her shawl more tightly about her plump form. She looked down at her ringed hand as though she'd never seen it before. "Where are we?"

"Not far from a place where you'll be safe," Jaya said, with a confidence that she did not feel. Rajira glanced uncertainly toward Sirru. The alien was now sitting cross-legged beneath the cross-pole of the cowshed, his robes folded neatly about him. He was wearing an absent smile, which lent him an un-settling resemblance to a skinny Buddha. Jaya scrambled across, knelt in front of him, and felt for his pulse. Sirru looked down at her without surprise. His skin retained its coolness; she wondered how sickness would manifest itself in one so strange.

"
Are you all right
?" she tried to convey, but she got the im-pression that he wasn't even listening to her, as though she were nothing more to him than one of the flies which hummed through the undergrowth.

"Very well," Jaya said, wearily. "Let's get going."

As they progressed up the slopes, the landscape became in-creasingly familiar to her. There was the cluster of rocks be-hind which they had hidden when Anand's militia stormed the valley. That boulder over there was where her lieutenant, Hakri, had died. With a chill Jaya remembered turning to speak to him and seeing him sitting peacefully by her side, quite dead, his mouth slightly open as though on the verge of a reply. There was the spring that had tasted of snowmelt and freedom. All these memories of place returned to Jaya as they traveled, and she knew that Rakh was feeling the same things. They did not speak, but he moved to walk beside her, as he had done for so many years now, in order to lend her strength.

Toward the head of the valley, the first peaks were visible. They towered up like clouds, tinged with the light of the sun, floating and unreal. It had been a long time since Jaya had been in these mountains, and these were only the foothills of the Himalayas. Remembered awe caught in her throat and she thought:
We should not be here. This is somewhere sacred, somewhere only the gods should live
. She noticed that Sirru was staring straight ahead, purposefully putting one bare foot in front of another as if drawn by the magnet of the mountains.

They met no one, only a herd boy with a straggly flock of goats. The child sat silently on a boulder as they passed and gazed at them with wide, frightened eyes. Along the valley, Jaya could see a building—another cottage abandoned in the wake of revolt. It seemed derelict, and no one came out to watch them go by. Jaya was thinking ahead, wondering whether the fort at Yamunotri would be the same, how it might have changed. The past was compressing, folding back upon itself; it seemed only a few days since she had last walked these passes.

She gazed ahead to the distant peaks, falling now into their familiar configurations: Swargarohini's spires hidden in cloud; the summit of Bandarpunch arching against the back-drop of the sky. Her husband, Kamal, had known these mountains from childhood, had been raised here among the changing light and the glacial air, and it was her belief that he had come back, his spirit renouncing the wheel and rebirth and fleeing into the snows like the Christian ghosts were said to do. Yet she did not think he would know her if he should glimpse her again. She felt, somewhere deep in her heart, that he had become another kind of being altogether, something as ancient and strange as this alien Sirru who now walking by her side. And she thought:
What are we becoming, for surely change is not so far away
.

Her senses retained their unnatural alertness. She could see a hawk coasting on the air, far down the valley, and though it was no more than a speck in the distance she could hear its thin sharp cry. Voices floated past her on the wind like the spirits of the dead, and she could hear the thoughts of those around her in fragmented cacophony. Accustomed as she had become to speaking with the ship, this did not seem so strange, and gradually she learned to filter them out. Rajira was weary; Halil afraid. She placed a comforting hand on die child's shoulder but he shook it away; she could feel his resentment like a burning coal clasped in the palm of his hand. He still blamed her, and there seemed little enough that she could do about it. She had tried talking to him, but he wouldn't listen.

It was very quiet. They had come up onto the path now, and Jaya was concerned that they might meet a pilgrim climb-ing toward the little shrine that lay at the gate of the fort, but there was no one. The land was empty as far as the high peaks. Way down the valley, she could hear the bells of the goats. A bird rocketed up out of the thin grass and was gone.

Jaya stepped around a curved wall of rock and suddenly die ruin of the fortress was there before them, unchanged. The Yamuna River, no more than a torrent slicing through the rocks, boiled down toward the valley. The fortress stood on its left bank. Veils of steam from the hot springs drifted across the stones.

The place where Kamal had died was still there: a rocky ledge jutting out across the river. The old story said that if you bathed in the waters of the Yamuna, you were spared a painful death. So much for that.

Jaya had to force herself to look, but of course there was nothing there. Before her surren-der, she and two of Kamal's lieutenants had carried the body up into the glacier, to the lake of Saptarishi Kund. She tore her gaze away from the rock and strode grimly on.

The fortress was deserted, but there were still traces of the revolution's last stand: a rotting rucksack tossed carelessly into a corner; empty shells of ammunition littering the stone floor. It even seemed to her for a moment that she could see foot-prints in the dust and blood on the walls, but then she looked more closely and there was nothing there. With Rakh, she al-lotted rooms for the night: herself, Halil, and Rajira in one of the abandoned antechambers, the men in another. Sirru had found his own place, out in what had once been a garden but which was now little more than a tangle of weeds around a pond whose water was as dark and still as the bottom of a well.

When all the necessary tasks were done, she went down to the shattered shrine. The silver image of Yamuna was still there: serene lunar daughter of consciousness and the sun. Perhaps the goddess of the moon would look favorably upon visitors from another world. Jaya breathed a prayer, but had no garlands to offer. The shrine was cold and damp, and she did not stay long.

Tomorrow, they would head up toward the lake and the passes. There were too many memories here, and besides, Jaya did not like retracing her steps into a place that Amir Anand knew so well. She turned over possibilities in her mind. He would surmise that she had headed up here, but would he think it was too obvious a place for her to stay, or would he suspect that she was attempting a double bluff? Now that Ir Yth had remained behind in Varanasi, would he even care? Jaya believed that he would, and that being demoted would only have fueled his fury.

She had expected to die here, during those days of revolu-tion, and now she could feel change coming in like a storm over the horizon's edge. She sat on the windowsill, perched high above the stones of the hillside, and listened to the wind. Rajira, wearing a petticoat and holding a sodden sari in her hand, stifled a gasp.

"You shouldn't sit there like that. What if you fell?"

I've already fallen
, she felt like saying, but she smiled at the courtesan and shifted to a more secure position. Turning her head, she watched the kites wheel high above the valley, no more than motes in the clear air. Thunderheads were massing over the peaks, and she took a deep, anticipatory breath. Far below, she could see Sirru. He walked slowly, picking his way across the stones and pausing to stare out at the mountains. She saw his arms slide about his waist and wondered whether he was shivering. Then he turned and walked slowly back toward the fort. He moved like someone old.
hike I used to move,
before they cured me
, Jaya reflected.

Threads of understanding were beginning to pull and weave within Jaya's mind.
Colonization and
disease
. Sirru had suggested that something had gone badly wrong with this lit-tle world, but what, exactly? To people who could speak with-out words, who spoke with a language of the body, what would sickness mean? Would it mean the same thing as it did to a human? She had lain close to illness all her life: listening to her father talk about the medicine markets, how everything was sewn up by the multinationals and how illness was the only legacy that the poor had to pass down.
When the British
came
, he would tell her,
they brought cholera. They brought syphilis. They brought influenza.

Disease accompanies coloniza-tion like flies accompany shit
. And the conjuror's daughter thought now:
But what if disease was the purpose of coloniza-tion? What if it was not originally intended
to harm? Can illness have functions other than destruction? What does "harvest" really mean
?

There were too many questions… She turned to Rajira, who was shaking her sari out of an adjoining window. Water drops sparkled in the sun.

"Rajira? This morning… I thought you might be sick. Are you all right?"

The courtesan gathered up the sari and frowned.

"I don't know. I keep hearing voices; I told you that. And it's like a fever-—it comes and goes.

Sometimes I feel hot." She gave a rueful smile. "Then again, I haven't had so much exer-cise in years.

Maybe that's it." But a lost look crossed her face for a moment, as though she sensed that something might be very wrong. Her mouth tightened, and she turned back to her laundry. She barely seemed to notice when Jaya slipped away.

£.
't4ranast

Kharishma had done her best to take Jaya's place, but she came in a poor second. Tokai's people reported that many of the acolytes who'd flocked around the Temple of Durga had drifted away, in search of new dreams and diversions, and Kharishma was enraged to find that far from being the center of attention, she had managed to quiet the whole affair down.

The military had come and sniffed around the temple, accom-panied by UN teams, and despite exhaustive tests had ap-parently found little to occupy them. American soldiers had finally been allowed in, under Pentagon command. Kharishma had gained some satisfaction from their obvious approval of her, but their general had been a cold-eyed man who seemed to regard her as an unwelcome distraction.

Eventually she had been forced to withdraw.

Kharishma did not know how Tokai had gained access to his information, but he seemed to have been granted a re-markably free rein by the government of Bharat. Scientists had taken soil samples from the temple courtyard, but apart from the little animal that had been captured, tlie monkeys that had once haunted the precincts had vanished. Kharishma did her best to find out what was going on, but Anand wouldn't tell her a thing, and she rarely set eyes on Tokai. Perhaps that was just as well, because Tokai frightened her, with his old turtle's face and lipless grin, and the cane always seemed to be sniffing around her sari skirts.