The Usurper's Crown (57 page)

Samudra sat in the silence of the temple, alone with the Mothers and the heat and scent of the sacred fire. If the priests came and went, he did not hear them, sunken as he was in his own thoughts. At last, slowly, the layers of anger, worry and reproach peeled themselves away, and he saw into his own memories, and found the answer waiting there.

Samudra prostrated himself once more to the Mothers, and got stiffly to his feet. He had no idea how long he had sat in his meditations. But it was cold now, and when he stepped outside, the moon was well up. He breathed in the air made chill by the deepening night and returned to his borrowed residence.

Hamsa had been carried to a side chamber and laid on a pallet of blankets. A fire smoldered in the hearth, and her body servant slept beside her. Samudra looked down on his sorceress and noted how drawn her face was from the day’s exertions. Still, he was not surprised when her eyes fluttered slowly open. She had ever known when he needed her.

“Majesty,” she croaked, and reached for her staff to help her stand.

Both Hamsa and the servant, who was also now wide awake, struggled to rise. He waved his hand to keep them both down on their beds. Hamsa obeyed, lying back on her pillows, but her servant scuttled backward, moving herself off to a polite distance so her presence might not intrude on their conference.

“Hamsa.” Samudra settled down cross-legged next to her. “You have done me good service today.”

She bowed her head humbly, but he saw the deprecating twinkle in her tired eyes.

“I am afraid I will have to ask yet more of you.”

“I stand, or lie,” she gestured toward her pallet ruefully, “ready to serve however I can.”

“I was taking council with the Mothers,” he said, rubbing his hands slowly together. “And they reminded me of my coronation, when you told me certain things. You told me that you could curse an enemy of Hastinapura, no matter how great the distance.”

Hamsa shook her head. “I cannot,” she said. “But you can, Majesty.”

“I am no sorcerer.”

“No, but you are lord, bound to the land and the heavens through your anointing and your sacrifices. I can make a working that will give your will force and weight in the ethereal realms, but it must be your will, and your words must form part of that working.”

Samudra considered this in silence for a long moment. “It is a difficult undertaking then?”

Hamsa nodded.

“Will there be a price?”

Again, the sorceress nodded. “Normally, it would be mine, but, in this case, my price will only be partial payment.” She met his eyes, her face set and serious, an expression he knew well from his childhood, when she was trying to drum in some particularly difficult lesson. “Because it is your will that sets this thing in motion, you too must pay. Some day, in the future, you may lose what you hold dear because of what this curse sets in motion.”

Again, Samudra turned over her words silently. “Will it be Hastinapura I lose?”

“I cannot say, Majesty. I think not. But it could be a child, or your queen, or your life. It will be a high price, that much I can be certain of.”

Samudra continued to rub his palms slowly together, as if he could feel the shape of the truth between them. “I do not like magic,” he said at last.

Hamsa smiled. “I know.”

“It is imprecise, and it has too many hidden costs, and the powers play their own games in the Silent Lands, and no man may know how their dice are cast.”

“These are true things, Majesty,” Hamsa agreed soberly, but he could still see a ghost of a smile on her face. These were matters they had spoken of often before.

“But even if I sent a missive to the queen this instant and bid her act against Yamuna, even if I sent to Kacha in the north and bid him stop this nonsense, it would be tens of days before any action could be taken.”

“Even with my help, yes, Majesty.”

He was talking himself into an unpleasant task, and he knew it. Hamsa knew it as well, and she, as usual, simply let him do it.

“Hastinapura itself is at stake,” he said. “If Isavalta is fractured, the Huni and Hung Tse will begin seizing territory in the north. With new men and new resources, the Huni will be bolstered and we will never root them out, and they will expand again, like the poisonous weeds they are.” He growled the last words, letting anger shore up his resolve. “I do not have time to deal with Chandra myself, yet he must be dealt with, and now, and your magics are all I have to cross such distances in such times.”

“I can have all ready in two days, Majesty,” was all Hamsa said. Her voice held no tremor or hesitation, but all Samudra had to do was look at her to see how close to utter exhaustion she was. Neither of them spoke of that. Neither of them ever would.

“Thank you, Hamsa.” Samudra stood and bowed to her, giving her the salute of trust, with his palms over his eyes. She returned the gesture, and he left her to go seek his own bed, although it was a long time before he found sleep there.

Two days later, Samudra received a message from the Huni saying they would deign to meet him, and an additional message from Makul’s chosen spy saying there was a break in the mountain pass that might be exploited by a small force of men as part of a larger attack. Both missives were highly welcome and allowed Samudra to spend time with his maps and his generals, deep in thoughts and plans that he understood well. This, in turn, kept his thoughts diverted from the Temple of the Mothers. Hamsa had disappeared in there the morning after he had laid out her task, and he had not seen her since.

Hamsa had been a part of his life since he was an infant. She had been chosen by the most learned sorcerers and astrologers his father’s court held as the one who would best be able to serve and support him in his life, as it was thought, as high prince. She had cared for him alongside his nurses. She had taught him alongside his other tutors. She had saved his life more than once with her art when he was a young and reckless warrior, chafing at watching Chandra, spoilt, spineless and careless on his father’s throne. She, even more than the priests, had presided over the horse sacrifice that had bound him to throne and land, and set the seal on his rightful claim to the throne.

He had set old and dear friends to tasks that might take their lives before, but not like this. Never like this.

It was evening again, with the dim, orange sun just balanced on the rim of the world when Hamsa’s woman servant knelt in the map room and said, “It is time, Majesty.”

Without a word, Samudra rose from his place at the table and left the house while his generals and servants bowed around him. He followed Hamsa’s servant up to the Temple of the Mothers and through the winding corridors to the sanctuary.

Inside, heat struck Samudra even before the light did. All seven of the dedicated fires leapt up waist high from the fire pits. The central fire burned just as fiercely. Even over the incense and sandalwood, he could smell the sweat of the priests, two for each Mother. A hump-shouldered bullock stood beside the central fire, its tether held by three acolytes in pure white tunics. In the center of it all, her skin glistening in the light and heat of the sacred fires, stood Hamsa. One hand clutched her staff. The other clutched a curved, bronze knife.

Samudra knelt, prostrating himself to both the Mothers and Hamsa. When he rose again, Hamsa nodded once and drew back her shoulders. Samudra recognized the gesture. Hamsa was calling on her magic.

Hamsa lifted her staff from the ground. An acolyte ran forward to take it from her. Unsupported, on legs as thin as twigs, she walked to the bullock, which bellowed nervously. Samudra saw how glassy the sorceress’s eyes were. Wherever her mind was, it was a great distance away.

Hamsa laid her free hand of the bullock’s shoulder. With one swift, clean gesture, she slashed the knife against its neck. Blood, dark and fresh from the vein, poured freely into the great stone bowl that waited for it. The bullock bellowed and the acolytes tightened their hold, patting its neck and murmuring to it soothingly as it fell to its knees, breathing in the steam from its own swiftly draining blood.

Hamsa gave her knife to an acolyte, and held her cupped hands under the flowing blood. She anointed herself: head, hands, and the soles of her feet. When she arose again, her face was terrible and her eyes as bright and hard as diamonds, and Samudra knew that by her working Hamsa had become an aspect of Vimala, the Mother of Destruction.

Hamsa began to dance. Slowly, she circled the central fire, leaving bloody footprints behind her. Her arms waved high over her head, weaving new patterns in the air as if she were painting the stars with her stained hands. Gradually, her steps grew quicker, wilder. She touched each Mother, each priest, bringing them all, heartbeats, breath, pulse of life into her dance. She laid both hands on the bullock, gathering up even its death into her working. All was done in silence, with no sound but the slap of her feet against the stones, the ragged breathing of the witnesses, the dying of the bull, the crackle of the fires, and yet, as Samudra’s ears strained against the near-silence, he seemed to hear a deeper music — a rushing that was neither the wind outside, nor the blood in his veins, although he heard both. This was a deeper pulse, a rhythm more strange and more compelling, and yet more terrifying. It was too great, too strong, too wild, like Hamsa’s bloodstained dance in front of his eyes. It called to the depths of his heart, and his heart knew it would swallow him whole.

But all at once, Hamsa stopped stock-still before him. She lifted his hands, pressing them between hers, and her eyes were wild with that rhythm they both felt to their cores.

“Speak, Lord of Men,” she cried. “Speak, Son of the Land. I will hear your words.”

But the voice was not Hamsa’s. Samudra knew this and dropped to his knees before the goddess. “Curse him, Mother,” he whispered. His breath did not wish to leave his body, lest it be pulled free and drowned by the rhythm pulsing through him. “Let the works of Yamuna
dva
Ikshu Chitranipad turn in his hand and cut him to the heart. Make his greatest weakness his only support. Blind him with his own sight, drive him out with his own folly.”

“It is heard, and all is accepted,” said the voice that spoke through Hamsa. She let go of his hands and rose to her feet, her arms stretched over her head. “It is spoken and may not now be undone.”

Again, the dance took her, tracing its bloody trail on the stones, around the fires, around the priests and their acolytes, and the Mothers in their watchfulness, around the dying bullock and its spilled blood. Over and over the pattern repeated, filling Samudra with its wild rhythm until he felt he must burst. It was too strange, too strong. It surrounded him, bound him, called him through the stones of the temple and the stones of the cliff beneath them. He could not move, could not think, could not breathe, there was only the rhythm and the dance and it was inside him and outside him, it was everything and all, and he was everything and all.

Without a sound, Hamsa stepped into the central fire, her arms raised, her face ecstatic, and the flames enfolded her in a lover’s embrace, and she was gone.

The spell broke like a string snapping. Samudra shuddered, his strength failing, and pitched over onto his face. Gasping from pain and shock, he pushed himself upright. He saw the room, the blazing fires, the bemused priests, the dead bull, and Hamsa’s staff in the hands of a dazed acolyte.

She was gone. Samudra passed a shaking hand in front of his eyes. Of course. He should have seen this was how it must end. How could she remain part of the mortal world once she had danced with the Mothers? She had surely known this, even though she had not told him.

And I did not ask
. Samudra pushed himself shaking to his feet. Every person in the sanctuary stared at him, none of them fully themselves yet.

“Let the funerary rites be prepared for
Agnidh
Hamsa,” Samudra said to the priests, a little amazed that his voice had returned to him. “Call me when all is in readiness.”

“Majesty.” All bowed, but Samudra did not stay to acknowledge their obeisance. He teetered around and staggered for the door.

Out on the broad steps, he breathed deeply of the night air, his fists clenching and unclenching, trying to find something to grasp for support. But there was nothing. His support had gone, burned alive in the Mothers’ fire. Gone because his need had used her up.

“Brother,” he whispered to the night. “Chandra, I would have let you live. I gave your son position and power. I gave you land and freedom when my advisors said I should have you trampled to death. But the Mothers say we must bear our brother’s burdens, and I tried, Brother, I tried.” He swallowed. The servants would remember their duty and be behind him in another moment. “But you would break apart the realm like a child’s toy, and for that you will pay. For that, and for Hamsa, you will pay.”

There, in the darkness, where none could see, the emperor of Hastinapura wept for his loss.

The Vixen sat on a wooden throne on the crest of her green hill underneath the spreading thorn tree. She was not currently a fox, but a woman of sleek and strong build, red-haired and green-eyed, wearing a garment of gray fur belted with black. A cluster of foxes, red, white and gray, lay at her feet. Thus, she prepared to greet her visitor.

The second woman came on foot. Brown-skinned, black-eyed. She wore little besides the ropes of pearls around her neck and the sword belt at her waist. More pearls bound her black hair high on her head. Her footsteps left behind bloody prints on the grass.

The Vixen made no move to hinder the woman as she climbed the green hill and came to stand in the shadow of the thorn tree. They looked into each other’s eyes for a moment, before the woman bowed courteously, and the Vixen nodded to receive the gesture.

“Welcome, Mother,” said the Vixen mildly. “How is it I have come to merit a visit from so illustrious a personage?”

“I am come with a message from my sisters.” The Vixen’s voice had held the wild tones of the green wood. This woman spoke coldly, like the winds of autumn.