“I spent the next few years in the temple with the doctors and the monks learning their craft, studying herbs, and making medicines. Eventually I returned home to Yen, but when I arrived I found that my father had died and my mother and brothers had all left the city. No one could tell me where they’d gone.”
“Did you search for them?”
“No. I didn’t feel any great need to see them again, and I wouldn’t have known where to look anyway. Instead, I carried on looking for new creatures and plants to make my own medicines and trying to help the people I met along the way.”
“I see.” Priya reached out one hand to touch Asha’s knee. “You said that you awoke changed. That you had a piece of the dragon’s soul inside you?”
Asha pulled back her hair, knowing what the nun would see. Her entire right ear was flecked with shining gold scales, her skin there smooth and hard, and very warm to the touch. But the nun did not open her eyes to look. Asha dropped her hair and said, “The dragon’s soul is still in my ear. Through it, I can hear the souls of other living creatures. People, mostly. Their souls are the most active and noisy, even after death. But I can also hear the souls of animals and plants if I listen carefully enough. Their souls are sleepy and childish, only thinking or feeling one thing at a time.”
“Animals and plants have souls, and you know it beyond faith?” The nun squeezed Asha’s hand. ”Can you hear the turning of the wheel of reincarnation?”
Asha smiled. “I wouldn’t go that far. I’m not even sure they’re the same as human souls, but they sound very similar.”
“What do they sound like?”
“Like humming, or singing, or rain falling, or the wind in the leaves. A hundred different things. Only I don’t hear it out there in the world. I hear it inside.” Asha tapped her right ear. “And I can tell them apart. It helps me to find the herbs I need for my medicines, and to avoid certain dangers.”
“So if this lotus has a soul, then the ghost of girl must be twisting that soul with her own anger and fear.”
“And love.” Asha gestured to the vines and blossoms embracing the nun.
Priya nodded. “And love, too. It’s astonishing. So many great scholars have spent their lives searching for a revelation like this. To hear the souls of animals and plants.”
Asha shrugged. “Does that change how you feel about being here, like this?”
“No. But what you’ve told me about the souls of all living things…” The nun trailed off as a faint wrinkle of thought creased her forehead. “This knowledge carries us beyond faith into a new age of possibilities and revelations. You must tell the world about this. Everyone must know what you’ve told me.”
Asha laughed. “Sorry, but I’m not much of a teacher. I’m just trying to find a better cure for dry elbows and snoring, not to set people on the path to enlightenment.”
“Ah. No, you’re right. It was wrong of me to ask. That task should be mine.”
Asha raised an eyebrow. “Really? You mean you want to leave the cave? Can you even do that?”
“I think I can, if you will help me.”
7
Asha knelt over the nun and inspected the lotus roots and vines again. The green shoots slipped under the woman’s skin in dozens of places on her arms, shoulders, and head. “Does this hurt?”
“It did at first, but now it feels like a part of my body.”
Ashe frowned as she tugged at the tendrils in the nun’s arm. “I can probably remove these, but it will take some time and I’ll need more light. I’ll have to cut away the vines right here, and then when we’re outside in the sunlight, I can try removing the rest.” She glanced around the dark expanse of the cave on every side of them. “I can’t hear anyone else in here with us. Is the ghost still with you, or did she move on?”
Priya frowned. “I don’t know. I haven’t felt her presence in a very long time. And I haven’t seen her since that first day when I arrived.”
“All right. Then maybe we’re alone here after all.” Asha produced a steel scalpel from her shoulder bag. “Hopefully, this won’t hurt you. I’ll try to be quick.” She lifted one of the green stalks away from the nun’s arm and sliced through the tender lotus flesh.
The nun shivered. “It doesn’t hurt, but it does feel strange. I feel colder.”
Asha nodded and continued peeling back the vines and cutting them away from Priya’s body. She left at least half a foot of each stalk where they were embedded so she would be able to see them and grasp them easily later when she removed them fully. Within a few minutes, she had trimmed all of the vines from the nun’s bare arms, which now wore a thin coat of slender green shoots. Priya slumped forward, placing her hands on the stone to hold herself up. “It’s so much colder now. I feel weak. Tired.”
“Here, chew this.” Asha pressed a piece of dried fruit to the nun’s lips. “You’ll feel better as soon as we get outside in the sunlight.”
She then began paring away the lotus roots and stalks around the woman’s head, working faster than before. She left several feet of the lotus including leaves and white blossoms still attached to Priya, not daring to cut any closer in the dark.
When the last of the plant had been cut away, Priya sat shivering on the stone, her arms wrapped around her belly, her breathing shallow and rapid. Asha put away her scalpel, gathered the frail woman in her arms, and lifted her off the altar.
A single deep boom echoed through the cave like the beat of an enormous drum.
Asha waded through the waist-deep water, straining to hurry as fast as the cold pool would allow. The woman in her arms felt so light, like a bundle of sticks in a silk bag. The leaves and blossoms clinging to Priya’s head bobbed and shuddered with each step.
Another deep boom echoed through the cave and Asha paused to listen. The water shushed quietly around her, the surface rippling, tiny waves slapping at the sides of the vast chamber. But there was another sound, a subtle sound underneath all the others. It was the sound of roots waking up and beginning to stretch and reach out through the silt.
Asha plunged ahead, willing her legs to run through the cold, sluggish water. But soon the sandy bottom angled up and the pool became shallower, making each step lighter and easier. She jogged to the edge of the tunnel where she could see a tiny disc of pale blue light in the center of the darkness ahead.
The tunnel walls groaned with the crumbling of old stone and dried earth. Dust trickled from the ceiling in steady streams, and larger clods and chunks of dirt began falling to the floor. The light at the mouth of the cave was much larger now, but the view was already partly obscured by tumbled stones and hanging roots.
Behind her, the entire the cavern hissed and slithered as the chamber amplified and echoed the sounds of the roots moving beneath the pool. The water shivered and the stone shook. Asha dashed down the tunnel, her bare feet sliding in the soft mud around the stream in the center of the floor. Something cold and wet snaked past her ankle. Then she stepped on a root that curled up sharply around her toes.
Asha tripped and fell. She crashed into the floor face-first, dropping the nun in front of her. A thick bundle of lotus tendrils whipped around her leg and yanked her back toward the pool. As she struggled to untwist the roots from her leg, Asha listened for something else behind the moaning, keening, crying of the roots. The lotus was frightened and confused, but beyond that she could hear a buzzing like the swarming of angry hornets. The sound of the ghost’s fury raced round and round the cavern, rising and falling, lashing out at everything and nothing in a whirlwind of terrified rage.
As a second and a third lotus tentacle tried to grip her arms, Asha felt the tiny claws of a young mongoose running down the length of her body and in the shadows she saw Jagdish gnaw at the roots around her leg. The roots snapped back into the darkness and Asha snatched up the little mongoose as she ran for the exit, pausing only to grab the nun under her arms and drag her the last few steps, squeezing through the narrow opening, and spilling out onto the sun-warmed grass outside.
Gasping for breath, Asha pulled the unconscious Priya to the wide stones by the water’s edge where the langur had slept the night before. From the safety of the stones, she watched the pale lotus roots creep out from
