feeding him somehow. At best, he’s a fool. At worst, a fraud.”
“Always thinking in dualities,” Priya said. “There are always more than two possibilities.”
Asha sighed. “Yes, well he could be a god or a ghost or a donkey, I suppose. Listen, the sun has just set and I’d like to sleep someplace dry. Or dry-ish. Can we please go find an empty house or stall or something for the night?”
“Of course,” the nun said mildly. “No need to suffer unnecessarily.”
Asha led the way back toward the intersection, but stepped off the road when she found a small market stall with a solid roof. The ground smelled faintly of mangos. It’s always mangos, Asha mused. She spread her wool blanket on the damp earth and shared a handful of nuts and berries with Priya, and then they slept.
Asha dreamed of warm food.
She had no idea what the nun dreamed about.
3
The next morning Priya returned to the congregation at the foot of the little tree. The rain had faded away in the night somewhere over the eastern ridge and the sun rose bright and clear in a pale blue sky. Everything high dripped and everything low gurgled as the water slowly drained across the land toward the nearest river, which roared quietly off to the west beyond a low hill.
Asha was still picking her teeth when Priya set out unaided for the crowd of pilgrims and their young sage. The herbalist finished her teeth in her own good time, draped her hair over her right ear, and trudged carefully after her friend. The mud puddles lay thick and deep about her, and she could hear the worms wriggling in the murky water. She wasn’t afraid of them. She wasn’t afraid of any living creature. But the thought of stepping on a pile of wet worms was… unpleasant.
When she reached the crowd, the first thing Asha looked at was the tree. Not the little tree behind the boy but the other one across the road. The almond tree towered in its prime with leaves both long and broad, and tiny white flowers that would soon bear tiny red fruits, each with a single precious nut inside. Its shade fell across most of the road, though no one sat beneath it, and as she glanced around the hovels of Kasar she could easily pronounce the almond tree to be the most beautiful thing in sight. She had noted it before, but now she could appreciate it fully. Her right ear coursed with the sounds of flowers and unborn fruits, of the rich seeds and the dusky grey-gold wood locked away within the bark. It was a wonderful creature, that tree. Asha could think of a dozen ways to use its leaves and flowers to heal and sooth all manners of ailments, and she reminded herself to gather a few specimens before they left.
Then with a sigh she turned her attention back to the crowd, and the boy, and the miserable little sapling at his back. It was a twisted and gnarled little tree with feeble limbs and precious few leaves and Asha could barely hear the life of it in her scaled ear. She guessed it was a diseased old teak, and that its pathetic appearance in some way made the boy’s meditations all the more holy. Asha shook her head as she tucked a sliver of ginger into the corner of her mouth and waded through the crowd of muddy pilgrims still asleep in the middle of the road.
Priya sat on the grass beside the boy, and her saffron robes and bound eyes seemed to add a new layer of majesty and mystery to the setting because Asha noticed dozens of the filthy vagrants sitting up to take notice and make joyful wails and gasps. Asha only spared the boy a glance before turning her attention to the boggy field behind the tree to wonder what useful insects or grasses she might find down there.
“Asha?”
She looked at Priya, who was frowning. Jagdish jumped down off the nun’s shoulder and began sniffing the tree’s roots. “What?”
“Could you please take a look at the boy? I’m afraid I cannot hear his breathing, even with my keen ears. I think your expertise is warranted. But please do not disturb him.”
Asha returned to the tree, aware of the countless eyes fixed on her every movement, and she knelt down beside the boy. He appeared unchanged from the night before. Still sitting in the lotus position, eyes and mouth closed, head perfectly hairless, and not the slightest tremor in his fingers or toes. Asha plucked a blade of grass and ran it lightly along the boy’s feet and palms. There was no reaction. She peered at his eyelids, but could see no darting impressions of his eyes to betray his thoughts or dreams. After watching his chest for several minutes, she could not say she had seen him draw a single breath and she pulled a small mirror from her bag to hold before his nose and mouth, but after several more minutes not even the smallest cloud of fog appeared on the glass.
Asha glanced nervously at Priya and then at the other pilgrims. “I’m going to touch his arm now. Just for a moment.” No one spoke, which she took to be silent permission, so she placed her fingertips on the boy’s inner wrist.
No pulse. His skin was smooth though fairly firm, and he was only slightly warmer than the earth he was sitting on.
“Some sort of comatose state, maybe,” she muttered.
“Like the family we found in the mountains?” Priya asked.
Asha winced and glanced up at the withered tree to check for strange fruits. There were none. “Similar, maybe. But not the same.” She reached up and placed her fingertips against the side of the boy’s throat and waited. Minutes passed, and minutes more. Finally her arm grew too tired to hold up any longer and she relented, leaning back to sit and rest and think. Still no pulse. Not even a very slow pulse. And yet he was slightly warm.
“Is something wrong?” asked an elderly woman behind them.
Asha didn’t turn to look at the woman. “Probably. He’s not breathing and he has no heart beat. How long has he been here like this? When was the last time anyone saw him eat? Or even just move?”
No one answered. The nearest pilgrims just shrugged and shook their heads.
“No one?” Asha grimaced. “How long have you been here?”
They answered one by one:
“Two days.”
“Four days.”
“Seven days.”
Seven days, at least. Asha sighed. The boy might have died just recently, just hours ago, perhaps even during the night while she slept nearby. If so, he would be cool in a few hours, and he would finally fall over.
“We need to move him,” she said softly. And then louder, “I’m sorry, but we need to move him. He’s not well.”
No one seemed to have heard her. No one stood or spoke, or even looked at her.
“You there, come help me, please.” She looked at two young men near the front who had glanced in her direction. One of them looked away but the other frowned and nodded and stood up. He came over to the boy and Asha directed him to stand across from her so that together they could lift him. The boy’s whole body was so firm, so stiff, that she hoped they could simply carry him away in his seated posture and avoid making a scene.
Together she and the young man bent down and took hold of the boy’s legs, and lifted. Nothing happened. Asha strained to the point of grunting out loud, but the boy did not move. She pulled up so hard that her feet began to sink down into the soft wet earth. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her assistant was faring no better so she let go and waved him back. After a moment’s rest, she directed the young man again, this time to dig their hands as far under the boy as possible. The earth was cold and a bit slimy, but they both reached under to form a platform with their arms and again they tried to lift him.
And again the boy did not move, did not even shudder or jostle. He remained perfectly still. Asha dismissed her confused assistant with a grateful look. A soft murmur ran through the gathered onlookers, but she ignored them.
“What happened?” Priya asked. “What’s wrong now?”
“We couldn’t lift him. It was like he’s nailed to the earth, or he weighs as much as an elephant. I can’t explain it.”
The nun smiled. “I don’t suppose you’d like to entertain the thought that this wise child can bend space and matter to make himself too heavy to lift?”
“Not just yet,” Asha said calmly. She chewed her ginger and studied the boy. Both she and the young man
