What do you want from me?
And even more dangerous.
What do I want from you?
BHUMIKA
Even Bhumika’s most loyal guards protested when she called for a palanquin to be arranged.
“Your health, my lady,” they said. “The child…”
“Is inside me,” Bhumika said, “and has no plans to go anywhere yet.”
One said tentatively, “If General Vikram hears of this…”
“He won’t be pleased,” Bhumika admitted, huffing as she donned her strongest, lined boots, with some difficulty. The girth of her belly was ever interfering with her daily business. “But why would he hear of this? Fetch my shawl, please.”
One of her girls brought over the shawl and arranged it neatly around Bhumika’s shoulders.
“We,” one hesitating guard said, “would hate to see more conflict between you and the master.”
“Perhaps I should take a war chariot instead of a palanquin,” mused Bhumika. She smiled, to show she was joking. Mildly, she added, “We’re going now.”
Only a handful of Lord Santosh’s men had remained in the household to act as spies, and she avoided their notice simply by ensuring that her departure did not cross over with any of their guard shifts in the vicinity of the stables or the mahal gates. With the assistance of her own men and women, she had learned to track their patterns—the watches they took, the duties they demanded be assigned to them, the questions they asked.
She had met Santosh only once, when he’d first arrived at the mahal. It hadn’t taken her long to understand what he was: a pompous man, petty and small-minded, and hungry for power. She hadn’t thought much of him.
Santosh liked to think he was keeping a close eye on her husband. He had not yet realized that his spies were being watched in return, and he likely wouldn’t. He lacked the sense to be wary of maidservants. Like many of his ilk, he looked right through them.
Bhumika’s husband had allowed the markets to reopen after the raid on the brothel, albeit reluctantly, out of necessity. People needed to buy food, after all. The streets of Hiranaprastha were still relatively quiet, but people could not put aside all their daily cares because of rebel activity or the general’s soldiers patrolling, even if they wanted to.
Through the net of the palanquin’s sliding doors, Bhumika watched the bustling food stalls pass, tables laden with pans of hot oil for frying freshwater fish, pakoras and samosas, even Srugani-style rice dumplings with carefully pleated edges.
As a girl, Bhumika had loved the bustle of Hiranaprastha, the constant motion and energy of the city. She had never been able to enjoy it directly—as a noble daughter, she had been sheltered, only able to watch the city through a palanquin screen as she did now—but she had preserved the image of it in her mind like a miniature portrait. Noise. Life. Her own quiet body, hidden and protected, watching it all.
The world beyond the palanquin screen had changed since her girlhood. Although the sound and motion remained, the edges of the portrait had frayed. There were more beggars now. The buildings were poorer, drabber. Color had leached out of Hiranaprastha. And Bhumika was no longer just a quiet body, consuming the city with her eyes alone.
She was carried from the bustling center, out beyond the quieter markets, the pottery district where she had once bought exquisite blue vessels for her rose cuttings, over a stretch of overgrown fields and barren hills dotted with houses, toward the burnt, flattened field where imperial traitors were put to death. Here, there were only a few homes—a scattering of dwellings for the men and women who guarded the jail and then cleared away the dead. Behind those houses loomed the high walls that encircled the field. Forbidding walls of wood and stone, rimmed with jagged points of glass. In the morning sun, they shimmered like the dome of a crown.
She rapped the side of the palanquin—three raps, an easy way to alert the bearers to slow their pace. A moment later, she saw a figure exit one of the dwellings—an ancient woman with thick white hair piled upon her head in a neat, knotted bun, dressed in a plain gray sari with a brown shawl thrown loosely around her shoulders. The woman bowed her head. Waited.
Bhumika’s palanquin bearers lowered her to the ground. Bhumika alighted, ignoring the twinges of her body as she bent and stood, her spine and hips burdened with the uneasy ache of the child in her belly. She thanked the servant who offered her an arm, taking it gratefully so that she could rise to her feet with some modicum of dignity.
“Are you sure this is best?” Her servant was frowning.
“Yes,” Bhumika said. “Entirely.”
She had not cultivated servants and followers who obeyed without question. But sometimes she tired of all the hesitation, the concern. It had grown so much worse since… well.
She touched her fingertips to her stomach, then tucked them away once more beneath her shawl. The old woman nodded at her in greeting.
“It’s begun,” said the woman. “We can watch from the east.”
She guided Bhumika and her servant to a staircase that led to a tower overlooking the execution grounds. Within the walls was a macabre theater of death. There was a watching crowd—a thick throng of men standing shoulder to shoulder, with the wealthiest watchers seated above them, in high stalls—and soldiers stationed in the opposing watchtowers, ready with arrows.
At the center of the grounds were the elephants. Parijati war elephants were enormous, heavy-tusked, and small-eyed. Bhumika had never liked elephants, and these were blinkered and whip-flayed, their tusks already wet with gore. One unfortunate scribe—recognizable by his tonsured head—was being forced down to a plinth of rock, his head pressed to the surface as the mahout led the elephant close and urged it to raise its leg. And lower it.
The noise of the scribe’s screams and the wet splinter of his skull were only partially masked by the yells of the crowd. Bhumika watched and listened and did not wince. In some ways, she was a temple daughter, still.
