“Bandits,” said Jeevan. His face was violently bruised. “They thought we had coin.”
“Do you?”
“Not anymore.”
The man laughed.
Bhumika, with their coin bound with cloth to her thigh, kept her head down and watched the fields blur alongside them.
Jeevan was not a natural charmer, and conversation between the two men soon withered. But Bhumika had expected that. She waited until the silence was particularly painful, then allowed herself to speak, shaping her voice into something timid, curious.
It wasn’t long before the man began to soften and speak to her in turn. She managed to coax him into telling her about his grandchildren, first—in her admittedly limited experience, even men who thought very little of their wives and daughters were softfor their grandchildren, and this man was no exception. He told her about his four granddaughters and his five grandsons proudly.
“And you,” he said. “Do you have any children?”
The words were aimed expansively at both her and Jeevan. She saw the telltale stiffening of Jeevan’s shoulders. Unintentionally, unknowingly, the stranger had touched on a bruise.
She thought of the shape of her own body—the silver tracery of marks at her belly, her breasts—and then carefully thought no more of it. Her body remembered things she did not, and to dwell on them was to invite madness.
“One day, if the nameless god has written it in my stars, I would like to give my husband a family,” Bhumika said, and the man hummed his agreement.
Jeevan did not look at her. She noticed that, too. Because she was looking at him.
By the time they reached a rickety set of roadside stalls serving tea and food to travelers, he was talking easily to Bhumika about the problems facing Alor. The men who had gone to war on behalf of the king of Alor, and the way the rot had destroyed field after field. Not enough to concern him yet, but she was sure in a month or two either he would have no grain to transport, or he would have to hire guards to protect it on his journey to sale.
She’d won him over so thoroughly, somehow, that he bought her and Jeevan a meal and waved away any effort to refuse him. “You said you have no money,” he said gruffly. “What good would starving do? How will your wife have children if she’s starving?” he said to Jeevan.
Jeevan lowered his head at that, and it was left to Bhumika to offer him a shy but effusive thanks. The food was good, and she didn’t regret taking it.
The man hesitated when he rose to his cart. His gaze darted about. Then he said, “I could carry you farther. Another caravanserai lies ahead.”
Bhumika brushed a hand against Jeevan’s arm.
“We cannot,” Jeevan said. “But I thank you, friend.”
“The monastery…” The man trailed off, then shook his head. “Such a place isn’t for people like us. They’ll turn you away. But ah, if you want a god’s blessing on your marriage, what can your elder say to you?”
“The monastery,” Jeevan repeated.
“Where else could you be going?” A snort. “There’s nothing else of worth here, friend. I’m no fool.”
The rains began again, wild and unseasonal, as soon as his cart vanished around a bend in the road. Bhumika sighed, feeling the water trickle down her face and through her clothing with a resigned humor.
“He was only partially a fool,” she murmured.
“He was kind to us.”
“Kind onlyafterwe flattered him.” A pause. “Yes. He was kind.”
They moved under the canopy of a stall. It was barely any cover, but it was enough. There, they watched the rain pour down, beads of water arrowing through patches in the canvas into the ground around them.
“The monastery.”
The question wasn’t in his voice but in the way he turned his head toward her.
He did not sayWe have passed a dozen monasteries of the nameless god. But she understood.
She considered how he was just as beholden to the push and pull of her knowledge as she was. But he did not feel it beating, screaming, thrumming in his skull as she did in her own. She thought of telling himI feel in every bone and every beat of my heart that this is where the one I seek will meet me. And if they are not at the monastery, where the waters show the way to the nameless, then I do not know where I will find them. I do not know if such a person exists at all.
