Chapter 6
1
Asha lay awake, listening. She didn’t need her poisoned ear to track the souls of the men coming toward her hut. She could hear their boots crunching through the undergrowth, crashing along like mad elephants through the dry bracken.
She reached over to cover Priya’s mouth just as the nun woke up. Asha whispered, “Stay very calm. Do whatever they say. Let me do the talking.”
Priya nodded as Asha took her hand away. Both women sat up. Asha slung her bag of tools and herbs over her shoulder and Priya gathered up the long, lean form of Jagdish, their young mongoose who wasn’t so young anymore. Asha tried to remember how long they had been together. Has it really been three years?
They had slept in yet another abandoned house, the decaying remains of something that had once been a home to someone but was now just a rotting arrangement of boards and pegs and dry grass. It had seemed as good a place as any to rest outside the bustling city of Jaipur. Now, as she sat listening to the soldiers approach, Asha wasn’t so sure it had been the right decision. There was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
Footsteps circled the hut and shadows slid across the gaps in the walls. They moved toward the empty doorway, a gaping rectangle that offered her a view of a few trees and an unplowed field beyond. And then a man stepped into the doorway. He wore the blood-red armor of a Rajput soldier and carried a talwar saber sheathed at his side. His helmet fit close over his head, and his majestic black mustache swept out to each side in a manner that made him look as though he were smiling.
He was smiling.
Asha blinked.
The soldier asked, “Are you the herbalist Asha of Kathmandu?”
“I am,” she said.
“I have been sent by His Royal Highness, Maharana Pratap Singh, lord of all Rajasthan, to summon you to the royal palace on a most urgent and private matter.” The soldier bowed his head curtly.
Asha stood up and helped Priya to stand beside her. They both stepped outside the hut into the early morning light and found eight more men armed and armored outside in two lines of four. To buy a few spare moments to think, Asha said, “Pratap Singh? I’m sorry, but we’re from the distant east. We’re not familiar that name.”
The commanding soldier with the smiling mustache nodded. “Maharana Pratap is the grandson and heir of Maharana Sangram Singh, lord of Mewar. The wars with the Persians have brought us quite far from home. Through the vagaries of fortune and fate, our lord now finds himself master of all Rajasthan and the protector of our great nation against the foul Persians.”
Asha nodded politely, not caring at all about the vagaries of Rajput politics and hoping only to learn more about the man who had summoned her. How dangerous would it be to refuse? “And may I ask why Maharana Pratap wishes to see me?”
The soldier frowned for the first time, but not at her. He glanced away and cleared his throat. “It is a private matter.”
“A private matter to be addressed by a homeless herbalist from the east?” Asha glanced at the other men, but they all stared straight ahead at nothing, like dolls waiting for a command to return to life. She pitied them. “I suppose it must be serious.”
The commander nodded.
“A medical problem. One that the prince’s master physicians have already tried and failed to treat?”
He nodded again.
Asha reached into her bag for a fresh sliver of ginger. She chewed the soft root for a moment. “My friend must be welcome where I am welcome.”
“Of course, Mistress Asha.”
“And we must be free to come and go as we please.”
“As long as it pleases my lord, yes.”
Asha nodded. That’s probably the best offer we’re going to get. “All right then. I’ll come. Lead the way.”
The men formed ranks in front and behind the two ladies and they all set off down the narrow dirt path back to the main road with the commander in the van. Once out on the dusty highway again, Asha glanced back at the overgrown lane where their hut stood absolutely hidden from the main road, and she wondered how the men had found her.
Turning her attention back to the path ahead, Asha studied the outline of Jaipur, the city she had deliberately tried to avoid the night before by insisting that they sleep in the hut instead of finding shelter among the cottages crowding along the road. Farms and villages were one thing, but cities were quite another and it had taken her all night to prepare for the onslaught of noise.
People.
Too many people, too many busy people bustling around and over and under one another. Asha could hear them all, all their noisy souls clambering with ideas and schemes, with needs and desires, with hungers and passions. All those thousands of souls roared through the herbalist’s poisoned ear like a maelstrom, churning and gushing, noise beyond comprehension, beyond purpose. Just noise. Endless, pounding noise.
Asha rubbed her forehead, and then her eyes, and then began digging through her bag for something, anything, that might be strong enough for the headache throbbing through her skull.
The city rose up around them in fits and starts. A few larger houses here, a sprawling marketplace there, first one temple and then twenty more just beyond it. The height of the city steadily increased as well, the rooflines rising to block out the forests, and then the distant mountains, and then the sky itself. Soon Asha and her entourage were marching down a vast canyon of Rajput temples and estates and palaces and fortresses, some ancient and some new, some broken and partly repaired, others gleaming in perfection. Red stone and white stone, towers and domes. And the endless processions of windows in level upon level rising above them, repeating over and over in their intricate design until the design lost all meaning.
“What’s it like?” Priya asked.
“It’s big,” Asha said. “Bigger than I expected.”
“Oh.” Priya touched her arm. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s all right.” Asha found a ginko leaf to chew. “I’ll just try to keep this visit brief.”
For most of an hour they strode through the streets of Jaipur. The commander rarely had to speak to clear a path through the crowds. Most people took one glance at the red Rajput armor and silently moved aside. Still, Asha found the journey all too slow and miserable for the press of bodies and faces and voices all around them. Several times she thought to ask the commander how much farther, how much longer, but she kept her peace and chewed her leaves and waited.
Eventually she noticed that the city was growing smaller and quieter again. The rooflines receded and the crowds thinned, and Asha began to wonder whether their destination was inside the city at all when the commander paused to point out a small palace just ahead.
“The Jal Mahal.”
Asha saw where the road ended and a vast lake began. The water lay quite low below the level of the street and rising above the surface of the lake was a wide bridge of many arches and small towers reaching out across the water to a small island.
The palace, the Jal Mahal, sat on a low rise of earth so that it seemed almost to float on the water itself. As a building it was not at all remarkable, merely a large square two levels high with small domed towers in each corner and a great many dark windows staring out at the world. But as a creation of man and nature, as an act of artistry and subtlety, it was one of the most beautiful places Asha had ever seen. The walls shone with sunlight dancing off the little waves of the lake, and the lake reflected the towers and the bridge to create the illusion that
