As I walked back to the palace with Magha, he talked to me about dharma and duty, about the unquiet citizens of the city, the battles he had won in the south and the chieftains he had quelled.
‘So we put them on bamboo spikes,’ he said, and made a number of popping sounds with his lips. ‘A warning. All along the road. To show the beasts what it means to choose the wrong side.’
I felt myself become physically weak. I still remember how I pictured the thing to myself, and it left behind a certain inner trembling. This is again why I could never have been a physician or medicine man.
‘Tell me what the peasants see in this Buddha’s tooth that they’re always talking about,’ Magha said to me. ‘How can you worship a man’s tooth like a god?’
‘It’s hard to say, my lord. I suppose because every word the Buddha ever spoke passed over that tooth. And it’s his words that—’
‘Ha!’ Magha said. ‘And that’s why they’ve squirrelled it away somewhere in the hills. You asked me before – you asked me why Krishna killed Shishupal. Do you see it yet? It’s simple: it’s his duty – do you see the beauty of it? Every man has to fulfil his dharma; every man has to fight towards his destiny. That’s what the rebels in Rohana don’t understand. That’s what that rat rotting in his cell back there didn’t understand.’
Magha seemed agitated that day, and I was struggling to keep up with his thoughts. He always seemed to enjoy sharing them with me, since I never interjected or disagreed, but merely nodded and complimented him occasionally on his insight. To take my mind off the poor wretches in the south, I thought of the bruised face of Pushpakumara, his skin three sizes too large, and his great knowledge of ink. How they used to say he could identify even the most exotic inks just by their smell.
As we drew under the shadow of the palace’s enormous wooden beams, with the lamps and prayer flags swinging high up in the rafters, Magha and I passed a ragged cohort of prisoners. They were naked and resting for water beneath the bowed stems of coconut palms. Their heads were shaved, and they had glassy, passive expressions, as though the world were a story being told to them. I knew them, if only by this, to be monks, and noted some of their horrific and fresh deformations. Magha gestured to them as we passed, as though they proved his point.
‘Why,’ he asked, ‘would a man follow a god who won’t even fight on his behalf? Who won’t even make him brave?’
‘Because some want a god who doesn’t carry a sword,’ I said, without thinking. The moment the words were out of my mouth, I realised where I’d got them from. I wanted to snatch them out of the air and stuff them back in. Magha looked very hard at me, and I felt the blood rushing to my cheeks.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘What idiots they are.’
We passed a temple courtyard as the afternoon bells began to ring, and the flock of pigeons pecking for spilt grain between the flagstones took flight all at once, wheeling around the courtyard in a cloud before settling back where they had begun. The King dabbed his forehead, which was bright with a sheen of sweat.
He was still wearing his armour and mail, despite the heat of the day. Desperate to change the direction of the conversation, I remarked on this: ‘Is the maharaja preparing to leave for battle again?’
He looked uncomfortable suddenly, and cast his eyes over the passing monks and worshippers.
‘Every day is like a battle for me, Asanka.’ He drew closer to me, and whispered, ‘A knife was found. Outside my chambers, in the palace’s forecourt.
I realised at once that the weapon he was talking about was the dull coconut knife I had thrown over the balcony. Cold scorpions scuttled from the base of my spine up to my neck. What if someone had seen me?
‘I believe there may be plots against my life forming in the mind of every malcontent in the city,’ he hissed, and tapped the scales of his breastplate. ‘The Tamils, the Sinhala rebels, this Sankha upstart on the hill across the river – they think I’ve never met their kind before, but by the gods I have. There could be any manner of renegades hidden within my very servantry; they’re swarming throughout the poor district, that den of filth and crime and treachery. It’s always best to be vigilant.’
‘Of course it is, raja,’ I replied. He was scared, I saw that now, and also saw that I had caused it – I who had spent the last five months living in constant dread of him.
‘Assassins could be anywhere,’ I muttered as an afterthought. ‘You must be prepared, Maharaja. They could be hiding in every shadow.’
‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘You know what it says in the textbooks of war? That the path to victory lies not in attack, but in making one’s own position unassailable. That’s what my father taught me. Yes – that an enemy can never defeat you unless you give him the means of doing so.’
As he said this, he stroked the leather thongs that held his armour together at the neck.
‘He’s a great king, my father,’ he said. And then, as if from nowhere, he said, ‘All these people living so close together. The modern life of the city. Don’t you think it brings out such tensions in people? They way we live these days?’
‘The tensions aren’t so modern, Maharaja. I think they’re very ancient,’ I said.
He sighed, and nodded. When we reached the palace, he put out his hand and touched my shoulder, squeezed it slightly and held it for a long time.
‘How is the fifth instalment coming?’ he asked, looking me directly in the eye. ‘It’s not too much?’
‘It’s going magnificently, Maharaja,’ I said. ‘Like a bee’s honey or a worm’s silk.’
He gave my shoulder an extra squeeze, and let it go.
‘I’ve brought you a gift, Asanka,’ he said, and produced a little package wrapped in a cloth. ‘Some treasure from the campaign. I hope it brings you good luck.’
As he walked away with his guards, I unwrapped the bundle to find the most beautiful golden stylus I had ever seen. The curling-vine pattern that wound up its side caught the sunlight in warm, bright streaks, and at the very top a tiny Buddha sat. I felt sick. I couldn’t imagine what holy place Magha had robbed this from, and what had happened to the monk who owned it. On my way home, I threw it in the canal with a heavy plop.
The rest of the day I spent in the baths, trying to scrub out the sour smell of frightened animal from my skin. I went to the library temple, too, to look up some of the words that were giving me the most trouble in my work on the fifth instalment. I returned to my room after dark to find the ceiling bathed in a flickering orange light, making the kind of patterns you might see on the undersides of leaves that hang over water. I walked to the window, and saw streaks of flame striating the city to the east, belching a high pillow of smoke into the night and underlighting it in orange. I watched the poor district burning for some time. I didn’t have it in my heart to feel more pity.
The days drew on, baking the earth, and Magha’s men cleared the ash and debris from beneath the east wall. I passed them several times on my way to the temple, watched them kicking through pots burst open in the heat, prayer beads melted to pools of glass, the blackened ribs of houses. In the following days, once the area was properly cleared, they erected tents and pavilions on the debris, increasing the permanent garrison in the city. The people who had once lived there were gone.
It was one night after that, before the first half-moon, that you came to my room and woke me. I started awake as you touched your cold hand to my forehead, and your voice half-mixed with my dreams.
‘Asanka, I can’t sleep,’ you said.
I remember the shape of your face loomed over me in the dark, and though I knew it to be you, your features rearranged themselves into a grotesque shape so that I sat up sharply and gasped.
‘What is it?’ you asked in a small voice.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘A dream. How did you get in here?’
‘It’s not so hard,’ you said.
‘Didn’t the servants bolt the gate?’
You pulled at my arm, and I groaned. ‘Anay, stop it. Get into bed, if you want.’
‘No,’ you said. ‘I want to go outside. Let’s go for a walk.’
You showed me how you’d tied the hem of your sari around your anklet so your steps wouldn’t make a sound. I felt sleep fall away from me, and got up to get dressed.
We left my villa and walked a little along the canal, where a perfect half-moon shone white in the water, and the dark mass of the citadel wall loomed on our left. Torches were lit in the guardhouses.
‘With the King back in the city, I don’t like to be in my room at night,’ you told me as we walked. ‘Hopefully he’ll go back to his butchery soon and leave us in peace.’
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. When we came up against the wall of the Nandana garden, you pulled at my elbow.
‘Let’s go in,’ you said.
‘In?’
‘Let’s go into the gardens. We could do it – look.’
You motioned at a tree that was overhanging the wall, its lowest branch within grabbing distance of a good jump.
‘No, we can’t. We’ll be caught, and what then?’
‘Don’t be a coward,’ you said. ‘Give me a leg-up.’
Realising that it was hopeless to argue, I gave a long out-breath, and cupped my hands for you to step into. I brushed my cheek against your thigh as you did.
‘Hey!’ you said, and jumped up to grab the branch, swung yourself deftly on to the top of the wall. You reached down your hand to me, and I took it. You were so strong – that always surprised me. You gripped my wrist as I walked up the side of the wall, and with only a little scrabbling at the end, we both dropped down into the walled garden at night.
It was strange and beautiful. There were the sounds of cicadas, the light of stars and the moon giving everything that odd silver edge. We whispered for fear of waking up the servants or watchmen in the palace. As we rounded the groves of plantain trees near the pond, fireflies dipped and wheeled around in the air, and you murmured, ‘The night before the half-moon, the stars grow wings and fly.’
Your normally golden eyes were opaque black. We kissed in the darkness, then moved on, listening for the sounds of other footsteps. When we reached the steps down to the royal bathing pool, you tugged at my hand.
‘Come on, Asanka,’ you said. ‘Let’s take a bath.’
‘Are you crazy?’ I hissed. ‘If anyone sees us—’
‘We’ll jump back over the wall,’ you said.
‘I don’t think I can climb that fast.’
‘You don’t have to – just stay here and say to the guards “I am the King’s poet, and if you’ll excuse me, I’m trying to bathe!”’
You laughed, that taunting laugh that drove me mad, and pulled me along with you.
The water of the bathing pool was as still as black marble. You shuffled to a halt at the top of the steps that disappeared beneath its surface, then knelt down and broke its perfect stillness with your hand. Ripples moved out over the pool and rocked the lilies growing at its edges, scattered the moon in its surface.
When you splashed me, as I knew you would, I pretended to be angry, and brushed the water from my chest and face: I feigned for a moment that you had hurt my eye, and when you advanced with genuine concern and outstretched arms, I pushed you into the water – do you remember? I hadn’t done anything like that in a long time.
There was a crash of waves, and you shrieked so loudly that I worried someone might wake up, even though we had by that point travelled some way from the palace. You parted the curtains of your wet hair, and swam out into the centre of the pool, then back.
‘Come in!’ you said, and when you began to tease me, I slid into the dark water with my sarong billowing up around my stomach; it was cold, and I held on to the shallow ledge that ringed the pool. You swam over and kissed me. I could smell the water on your skin. Your cloth had come loose – I felt one of your breasts slide free of your clothing; your skin felt oily, your wet hair cold against my cheek. We were both shivering, and suddenly all laughter had left the air. The only sounds were the chatter of crickets, your breaths in my ear and the water of the pool lapping against the sides. This is heaven, I thought. This is what it feels like to die.
Afterwards, we lay on the grass together, allowing the warmth of the night to dry us. I was on my back, with your cheek on my chest. I stared up at the constellation of Prajapati, the sky god who in legend made love to the dawn. The mainlanders say that he was born alone in the vastness, and split himself to ease his loneliness: peeled himself apart into man and woman. The three stars in a straight line across his waist wink so beautifully that it’s hard to believe they are the arrow that killed him.
‘Did you hear about what happened on the south road?’ you said. ‘The men who attacked one of Magha’s patrols.’
Word had been spreading through the markets.
‘They left the soldiers dead in an irrigation ditch,’ I said, wanting to change the subject. ‘They’re calling them bandits.’
‘That’s what the guard is calling them, anyway,’ you said. Your voice was level and cool. ‘But you know what they aren’t saying? That all the soldiers were found with eyebrows painted on them. Big, thick, bushy eyebrows. I heard it from Kunjan.’
I swallowed hard. I felt silence creep up on us, a kind of thick inkiness, and felt an overwhelming urge to tell you something I had never told you before. I closed my eyes.
‘When I was a child, my village shared farmland with three others,’ I said. I felt as if the words were coming out of nowhere. ‘There was one higher village, one lower – and a Tamil allotment. The children of our villages would gather in gangs, and all play games together. We would even let the Tamils play, when we played at war. They complained sometimes because there were so many of us, and we always chose where the battles were fought. Our parents beat us for fighting in their rice fields, so we went down to the chenas of the allotment children to fight. I remember being caught in the rains while stealing pepper from the tall vine in their garden, throwing stones at them as they chased us, splashing and laughing in the ditches alongside the hill paths. I find myself thinking about that time a lot. It was around then that my father died.’
I felt your fingers tighten a little on my chest.
‘He was trampled by an elephant,’ I said, hearing my own voice as though from far away. ‘A great big, tusky elephant that had drunk up a jar of rice liquor stockpiled for a festival. I went home that night, with my mother and all my sisters weeping. One of my uncles got drunk, too – drunker even than the elephant had been – and told us all that when a bull elephant wants to kill a man, it lifts him up with its trunk, and then throws him against the ground so that every bone in his body breaks. Then it stamps him to a chutney of flesh and hair. I’ve – I’ve been scared of elephants ever since. Isn’t that stupid?’
You said nothing, but the tips of your fingers tightened against my chest. For the longest time I thought you were asleep – but then you spoke.
‘I was born on the far shore,’ you murmured.
At first I thought you were speaking in your dreams, but there was a purpose to your voice that made me quiet my breathing so as not to miss anything you said.
‘My parents were killed by Chola mercenaries when I was young. They were puppeteers,’ you said. ‘We travelled from village to village on the far shore, performing stories. The old Hindu legends.’
You went on in that low voice, and told me about your sisters, a family waking up in a different place each night, always beds of sacks and hay, living off whatever the villagers had to pay you.
‘My parents,’ you said. ‘They always told me that once they’d earned enough money with their puppets, they’d send me to a temple school, and I’d learn how to write stories of my own. When they died, and my sisters were taken away, I begged for a time. Then I was adopted by the priests in the temple of Brihadeeswarar in Tanjavur.’
You described to me the building of sharply cut sculptures, gods and heroes and animals all climbing into the sky in a great staircase. How young you were when you first saw it. Dark corridors lit by lamps, flowers rotting to mulch on the altar.
‘I don’t remember much of my life before the temple,’ you murmured. ‘Or what my parents looked like.’
Your father was tall, you said. He did the voices for the male puppets. His favourite was the cunning trickster Shakuni, who casts spells on the other characters, and cheats Yudhisthira in the game of dice. Your mother had soft, quick hands, and she loved performing the old stories. The Ramayana, the Mahabharata.
‘I remember them most clearly,’ you said. ‘The stories.’
You paused for a moment, and swallowed.
‘When I went to the temple, I thought that this would be my chance to learn how to write, and tell my own. I would’ve settled for being a scribe, even. But the priests apprenticed me as a devadasi from the day they took me in.’
‘You were married to the gods?’ I said, and tried to keep the petals of laughter out of my voice. ‘Magha’s gods?’
You didn’t find it funny. Perhaps if I had been more knowing of the world, I might have heard the stories about how the Chola priests treated their dancing girls.
‘You said you never danced,’ I said.
‘I don’t.’
The soft noises of the city outside the garden sank into our conversation for a little while. Then you went on:
‘The devadasi are married to the gods in their hearts, but their bodies belong to the priests of the temple, and once they are old enough, they belong to any man who will pay.’
I felt a tingle pass through my fingers.
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ you said. ‘Not ever, so don’t ask me.’
You told me about how you escaped that place, how you hid in caravans, walked dust roads and begged for food, all the way to the coast and Mylapore. You told me about nights spent sleeping under sacks waiting to be loaded at the quays, and how you eventually became desperate enough to stow away in the cargo of a dhow headed for Lanka, with an Arab crew. How you survived by stealing food from the crew – mainly some flatbreads that were a bit like rotis.
‘I stayed hidden,’ you said. ‘If they found me, I think, they would have sold me on to a brothel in Persia or as a slave in Africa.’
‘Why that ship?’ I asked, amazed and horrified by your story. ‘Why Lanka?’
‘I don’t know,’ you said. ‘Chance, I suppose. I met a girl who told me that the ship was sailing the following morning, that the sailors were all drinking coffee in the port town. I wanted to put the sea between myself and Tanjavur. But there was another reason too: I remembered how my mother told me the Ramayana as a child. Perhaps some part of me soaked up the descriptions of Lanka: Ravana’s golden palace, the bridge that the monkeys built.’
I felt your cheek move into a smile against my chest.
‘I wanted to see it, I think. The place where the story happened. When I arrived at Gokarna, I found it a more horrible place than even Tanjavur, full of soldiers and sailors and thieves, so I left and followed the Mahaweli River south.’
You told me about how beautiful the river was at that time of year. A wide ribbon winding through the land. All the trees so green, the palu and banyan, with peacocks roosting in them. You told me how you foraged enough food to keep yourself moving. The hot days, the cool mornings.
‘At night I climbed trees to be safe from leopards and bears,’ you said, ‘but I still imagined that Ravana the Demon King was lurking somewhere in the night, hungry for a feast of little girls. You could hear him, sometimes, in the rustle of the trees, or a palm squirrel gnawing its way through the young coconut husks.’
After weeks of wandering the forests alone and starving, you rounded a bend in the river and saw Polonnaruwa, white as a gem, with the lake a plate of bright steel. You knew in that moment that this was where you would spend the rest of your life. That you would never care to move from this place.
‘But after such a long journey, I didn’t have the strength to reach the city,’ you said. ‘I collapsed into the river, and a group of women found me washed up on the rocks as they came to rinse their clothes. They took me back to their village – Aliyagama. They took me in, taught me to peel cinnamon and weave cloth. Taught me how to honour the Buddha and pray to his trees. Some of the men worked as washermen at the palace, and they petitioned there for me. Because I was young, I was taken on as a servant. And here I am. Still lost. But at least now I can write, the way my parents wanted. And now I’m not alone.’
Your fingers clutched at my chest, and I shivered, tightening my hold around you.
‘Why did you tell me all this?’
You looked up, and I could see that your face was wet with tears. Your eyes were still black in the moonlight.
‘I am not a Princess Rukmini to be saved, Asanka. No poor Sita, either. If the Kalinga forces me to marry him, I’ll run. I’ll choose death the way Queen Dayani did. I’ll escape somehow.’
Now I felt tears stinging my own eyes.
‘We can’t run away,’ I said, my voice only a whisper. ‘Not until the fifth instalment is finished. When he finds out what I’ve done, he’ll hunt us across the whole island. We need a head start.’
‘I’ve already stayed in this city once for you,’ you said, as though you had thought it many times.
‘Sarasi,’ I said. ‘If we escape before I’ve finished my translation, he’ll find another poet to complete it. Then this other poet will tell him about all the changes I’ve made – the things I’ve written about him. He’ll have guards at every port, patrols through the forests, and spies everywhere. He’ll put bounties on our names. He’ll send word to Kalinga and the Tamil kingdoms – he’ll hire assassins, mercenaries! There’s no end to that man’s cruelty.’
‘Do you think he’ll let us go, if you finish it? Once you’re no use to him?’
‘No,’ I sighed. ‘But if we had enough time, we could make it to General Sankha’s fortress on Gangadoni: they say the rebellion there is getting stronger. It’d take ten thousand men to seize that hill, and Magha won’t risk a battle just to reclaim some worn-out poet. Once I’ve given him the fifth instalment, we’ll have a month before I have to see him next. That should give us enough time.’
Another two weeks. That’s all I had to put up with, before we could be free. But there was something else, too. The dead voices, and the mad poet who had left them to me. I had to know who was behind them, and with Pushpakumara rotting in the dungeons, I finally had some hope of working it out. I breathed out and let your story settle into me.
‘I’ve never seen the sea,’ I said, realising suddenly how much larger the world must seem to you. ‘Only in poems.’
You reached up to kiss me, and I knew then that the next two weeks would feel like a hundred years. I didn’t believe I could last that long without going mad with fear.
‘It’s Deepavali next month,’ you said. ‘Will you still marry me?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Even if we hold the ceremony in the forest, and the only priests are the monkeys in the trees.’
We lay on the grass until morning. Before I slept, in that halfway place between wakefulness and dreams, I thought to myself what magic it is to close your eyes and die for just a while. I dreamt of chasing you through the dark forest of Ravana’s kingdom, but you were always too far ahead, and my legs were as heavy as water-filled urns. Then the Demon King swooped down and took you from me. I had the sense that I was Rama, but I didn’t know where I was, or what I should do to save my Sita.
When I woke up, you were already gone, and I had to explain myself to the confused-looking guard who found me lying in the grass.
‘I fainted,’ I told him, ‘last night, after reading a poem of such beauty you wouldn’t believe. A poem by Kalidasa – you may not have heard of him.’
The man grunted, struck my leg with the butt of his spear, and sent me on my way.