RAKSHASA IN A POT

RAKSHASA IN A POT, by Prashanth Srivatsa, artwork by Miguel Santos

Blademaster Savithri was nine months pregnant when she arrived in the agraharam, under strict orders to deal with the rakshasa hiding in the mountains. The villagers, largely a docile, god-fearing lot, gathered with their mouths open, breaths stuck in their throats, and welcoming garlands quivering in their arms. Savithri slid off the wagon and trudged towards them, one hand cupping her belly.

Her body raged against movement. She refused the garlands and permitted only a hurried ritual. Sandalwood, myrrh and rose water, a hymn to appease the gods. A pair of crones to circle her, and ward off the evil eye.

She regarded the villagers through her exhaustion. Gods! She could smell the prayers on them.

“Kala,” she labored, holding the wagon’s ledge to turn and sigh at the driver. The man at the helm abandoned fastening the harness, swung to draw a sword from a scabbard lying in the wagon’s pit and rushed to her side, the hood slipping off his turbaned head. His pale, white skin glowed brighter than the blade under sunlight, lending him the appearance of a corpse gone cold.

Whispers and murmurs sprung up at once. The agraharam shot collective looks of scorn. Pearly skin did that to the people here. Or perhaps, the fact he had refused to remove his turban in front of the priest. Or his footwear. Or the garland of clam shells and bones around his neck. Or the stench, of woodsmoke and ash and of tanning factories and funeral pyres.

Wagon drivers with a history of undesirable past births were, quite simply, not welcome in the agraharam.

Nobody deigned to utter a word  against Kala in front of Savithri, though. Nobody wagered their actions against her reputation.

Disquiet bubbled beneath the surface. That itch to grab a pebble and hurl at Kala. To blurt a flurry of invectives that’d make Savithri realize that wounds sustained in battle were easier to bear. After all, what were blood-dried scars in front of words that cursed the fate of your birth?

When the priest and the village chief offered to lead Savithri to the temple moments later, she refused.

“Take me to the closest home.”

A woman broke out of the crowd and bowed to Savithri. She looked no older than twenty, but there was a fierceness about her face that added age to her eyes. “My home is nearest. Come, devi.”

The priest and the chief exchanged uneasy glances. “Amba, is this necessary?”

“Yes,” Savithri moaned in exhaustion, replying in Amba’s stead. “And now, please.”

The villagers had little to bargain. A hundred-strong procession, like a cult, with Savithri invariably its head, crawled to the end of the street, to a sun-baked house detached from the rest of the agraharam.

Junipers dead in the courtyard, bushes untrimmed and left to wander like monks. A stifling darkness within, made worse by incense wafting out of censers on a shelf. A bump on an ugly rug caught her eye before the fragrance from the spice jars on the shelves assaulted her nose. It took Savithri less than a heartbeat to realize the significance of that uneasy glance between the priest and the chief:

Amba, sporting a pout on her face, appeared to be an indispensable annoyance to the agraharam. For her age, Savithri wondered how the agraharam permitted her to live alone.

The rest of the village formed a circle around Amba’s house, impervious to the sweltering sun and taking solace in poorly drawn veils and kerchiefs draped over their heads.

Hope was their shield. And Savithri, the purger of their despair. Well, she was here now, wasn’t she? As long as they didn’t realize the desperation behind her eyes, she would do what was needed.

She had killed rakshasas before. As long as her desperation did not manifest, as long as she’d attain her reward at the end of her job, she would kill again, as befit her reputation.

Amba presented Savithri with a vessel of hot water, urging her to dip her feet into it. Sweet gods, that was bliss. Savithri closed her eyes and breathed out. The warmth climbed the rest of her body, snaking into the crevices of her muscles, calming her tormented child.

“Is… is the once-born required to be here?”

The priest’s voice. Savithri blinked in puzzlement, before realization drove her sight to the door. Kala’s bulk stood in shadow, fingers clasped around Savithri’s sword. Before she could respond, Kala let the blade lean against the frame, and slipped out like dust scattered by wind.

The priest exhaled a smug, satisfying smile. The chief, fearing to utter a word, wiped the sweat of his forehead and introduced himself. “My name is Darmukha Shastri. Thank you for coming to our aid, devi.”

Savithri glanced at his companion. Nothing from the priest. He rocked where he sat, eyes unmoving, the sensation of something overbearing lingering around him that she feared wouldn’t hesitate to shift bodies.

“Duty, Shastri ji, that’s all it is,” Savithri replied. “I go where my Order sends me. Now…” She helped herself on the cot, fingers of one hand splayed over her stomach. Her face contorted in pain, yearning for a buttress to her back. Amba, immediately sensing her need, rushed to build a fort of pillows and stuffed it behind Savithri, who returned a smile, which was all she could afford in the moment.

“It is how we wrote in the scroll to your Order,” Shastri lowered his voice. “It… what has transpired… defies what we have learned in our scriptures, devi. Our prayers, our rituals, our hymns, they have not been sufficient.”

“You mean useless,” Amba offered.

Shastri unleashed a glare that silenced her. The priest, meanwhile, took up the mantle. “The Lord perhaps slights us for a misunderstanding. Or maybe he has a greater purpose for us than this life.” His voice held a hint of pride, as though even in suffering, it was important to preserve their identities, their hodgepodge of rituals and divine solace.

“Where is the rakshasa?” Savithri asked.

Shastri shuddered. Terrible beings, cursed and transformed into demons by the gods, rakshasas rarely tormented villages at the fringe of the realm. They were powerful, but they usually obeyed the commands of the gods who transformed them. And the gods rarely held grudges against an entire village, let alone an agraharam. An agraharam was a place of piety. Of tranquility and prayer. Who birthed priests and monks, and translators of scriptures for the Empire to assimilate into their ideological fold.

A rakshasa drawing the blood of agraharam devotees felt unnatural. Savithri, however, knew she would get few answers from Shastri and the priests. Amba, on the other hand, living in her reclusive abode, looked like a rebel who harbored secrets.

For the sake of respect, Savithri looked to Shastri and the priest for an answer.

“The mountain is its home now,” Shastri said, once his shudder ended. “It wanders the fields at night and, once a moonfall, plucks villagers from their homes and drags the corpses to its lair. Its growl… it shakes the ground beneath us.”

Savithri scratched her forehead and emitted a low puff. “Sounds reasonable. Tell me this – has the rakshasa tried to communicate with you in the past? You know, make demands. Or have you offered a truce to pacify it?”

The priest considered the question an affront. “A truce? We are brahmins, Savithri devi. It is against the brahminic discipline to barter with what we consider inhuman and polluted. And it is a work not of our Lord, but of what is ill in the cosmos. We are victims of a battle in the heavens. The rakshasa seeks only blood, and to that end, it has taken even my son.”

Savithri could glimpse genuine pain in the priest’s eyes now, through a crack in his will to not let his tears swell. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, aware that watching a child growing in the belly of another was not the greatest comfort for one who had just lost theirs.

Shastri, however, had decided it was time to address the elephant in the room. He averted his gaze as best he could, lingering only for a fraction of a moment on Savithri’s stomach. “I do not mean to doubt your skills, devi. You are, after all, the finest blademaster this land has ever seen. But… it is a question everyone has on their lips.” He paused here, hoping he would not have to carry on further, and that Savithri would come forth of her own accord and complete the conversation for them.

When she didn’t, Shastri gulped. “Will you be capable of… fighting this demon?”

Outside, a whiff of the morning breeze drifted in to tickle her nape, reminding her of her true purpose. Something wriggled within her belly, squirming to listen better to what was being discussed outside.

“Yes,” Savithri muttered, one eye coursing to where Amba continued to scoff at the priest and the chief.

 

**

 

Churning out learned folk was a respectable trade. They were rare in the land, plucked out of agraharams after years of rigorous immersion in the texts, crouched besides lamp light under a banyan tree until the eyes swelled and the mind grew blades. Until everyone was convinced that their souls were tethered to the gods themselves, and that it was merely a matter of discipline and devotion to listen to what the heavens commanded. Savithri’s visits to the ashrams across the land had given her, if nothing, a glimpse of that life. Of dharma, righteousness and statesmanship.

In an empire of bloodstains, metal and treachery, this was calming.

This felt right.

“Water?” Amba extended a pot. When Savithri received the water, Amba hissed in a low voice. “You’re a fool to have come here, devi. Don’t think I don’t see what you’re trying to do.”

Savithri gulped the offering and smiled. “And what am I trying?”

Amba pursed her lip. She paced across her tiny home, frustration ample on her forehead. “The rakshasa is not your run-of-the-mill cave troll you warriors pride yourself on purging. This one is… calmer. Angrier. Casts illusions and deceives us. With that thing growing inside you, you stand no chance.”

Savithri did not cease smiling. Quietly, she ignored the taunt and gestured to the trapdoor at the end of the room, covered by the rug and half a table. “Are you going to tell me about that?”

Amba’s eyes widened. She took a step back. “H-how did you know?”

“I was born beneath a trapdoor,” Savithri smiled. “Bulging carpets were my roof and creaking ladders my world. I was a daughter once, and that curse can limit your universe. Now, I wager nobody else in the village knows about this?”

Amba masked her blush. “It’s an open family secret,” she said, shifting the table and kicking the rug aside to reveal a dust-smacked, square incision on the floorboard. She lifted the incision to let the darkness slither out.

“Have you heard of the swapnaswarg?” Amba asked.

Savithri shook her head.

Amba continued, “It is religious lore, the kind that’s debated. A rage among the ponytails on evenings in temple courtyards. It talks of a god who was forced to banish his son to the earth, making him mortal. But there was a catch which none of the other gods witnessed. The son was given a pot of nectar by his father in secret, a concoction of the blood of the heavens itself. Once banished, when the son drank from the pot, he not only dreamed of the gods and the heaven every night, but was born as a brahmin in his next birth. Dispatched straight to the womb of a woman in an agraharam such as this one. Good karma through inheritance.”

A derisive chuckle followed that would have invoked the ire of any priest. Sweat rolled down the sides of her face, which, under the candle’s flickering lights, was also brimming with disdain. But then, that was Amba, Savithri understood. She couldn’t be blamed for acting on her own whims in a place where worship and scriptures were the only professions. Come to think of it, Savithri had done the same.

Through their own defiance and rebellions, she now found something more she could like about Amba. It reassured her of her own life’s choices. Ones that had hardened her, forcing her to dance with death and suffering everyday.

“The priest,” Amba said, “believes the swapnaswarg can be recreated, and made eternally available to the agraharam. Or at least, I have given him and Shastri the impression that it can. My father was an alchemist. An abhorred profession in these parts, if you must know. He tried while he lived, and was killed by the rakshasa. Now it’s my turn. It’s the price a blasphemer like me has to pay to remain here. If I cannot recreate the swapnaswarg, the agraharam will ask me to leave, and I have no place to go to.”

“Recreated?” Savithri asked, ignoring Amba’s helplessness.

Amba closed the lid of the trapdoor and released her foot from the rug. A cloud of dust kicked up as the rug smacked against the floorboard, suggesting the concoction was not meant for Savithri’s eyes yet.

Amba shrugged at the question. “Nothing wrong in wanting to dream of the gods, they say.”

Savithri was not certain how that answered her question, but the pain in her belly was returning, the life within her waking up from its slumber to torture her insides, to cull her desire to move, to even speak.

“Where did they send Kala?” she finally asked Amba.

“Beyond the fields, I suppose. There’s a ruined house before the forest. Once a crone’s abode, but now it lies vacant. That’s… as close as they’ll permit. Think of it as a kindness.”

Savithri did not reply, and closed her eyes, arching her back. She remembered Kala’s expression when the villagers had glimpsed his face. Would he still consent to her plan at the end of it all, knowing that he was among people who hated his very presence? When she slept, she wondered what it was like to dream about the gods every night.

 

**

 

The following dawn, the priest suggested they perform a ritual in the temple before Savithri departed for the mountain. She politely declined the offer and ordered Kala to fetch the wagon to Amba’s house. The village had gathered once more in the early hours of the day, expressions torn between hope and adoration towards her, and disgust towards Kala. Shastri was at the helm, hands folded in front of his chest, questioning Savithri if visiting the mountain in that state was practical.

Savithri took an age to answer, and another age to climb on to the wagon’s back, belly grazing the ledge, each stutter making her grit her teeth until she blew hair out of her eyes and turned to wave at the villagers amid a flurry of frantic breathing. “It’s duty, Shastri ji. Nothing I can’t manage.”

She wore no armor. Her belly wouldn’t permit one. Just gauntlets on her arms, and plates on her shoulder, all strapped over a gray robe. The robe was held to her body well above the waist with a cummerbund fitted with daggers, their tips pointing down at her pregnancy.

She caught sight of a disapproving Amba stalk away from the crowd as the wagon pulled away on the muddy trail. There would be time later to appease her. Right now, Savithri desired a clear head. Unimpeded by the roots of the village.

For the next hour, she slept on the wagon’s platform, one hand clutching the waterskin. Occasionally, her eyes opened to catch fleeting glimpses of corn fields and silhouettes of the mountain. A slowly evolving landscape morphing into the corner of the empire not trampled by harsh footfalls and galloping cavalries.

When the wagon creaked to a halt, the surrounding had transformed. The fields lay far behind. Around them now lay a thick jungle of withered eucalyptuses and balsams, dark hides offering a shield to the mountain’s slope rising in front of her. Thirty feet above, like a yawning mouth, a cave opened up to be gobbled by the mountain.

Savithri ordered Kala to remain with the wagon by the fields. When he left, she took a deep breath and absorbed the air of the forest. Only a rakshasa. It did not justify a senior blademaster’s presence; they could have sent any of the lower rungs, the ones itching to claw out of the whetstone yard, desperate to prove themselves. And yet, she’d convinced the Order to let her go. That she was aware of the risks, and had measured her chances of success. A cure for the itch. That nagging, choking smoke around her waist as it widened with each passing day, urging her to make choices before it was too late.

She had, of course, not expected her back to be screaming in anguish like now. All said and done, she had overestimated her ability to handle this situation, seeing how a stroll up a slope was chewing away her strength. Full of pretense and desperation. All her skill and knowledge slashed to accommodate her accident.

Her fun night. A night that should never had transpired, and yet now stretched endlessly, elastically, as a part of her life. Her life of violence now reduced to only pain and worry for the reward of a night of forbidden pleasure.

At the mouth of the cave, she sheathed her sword and let the light from the torch lead her way.

The cave floor lured her downward. Now was perhaps a good time to turn back, to dismiss her desperation and act as befit her experience and reputation. She had planned to scout, not to confront.

But, but… nothing of what she had seen until now was any indication of her foe. Chasing the hollowness was all that was left to her. Each step echoed. Somewhere, from deeper within the cave, a clank ensued, as though her feet were falling not on stone and earth, but on chinks of glass.

Why? Why not simply ensconce oneself beside candlelight and win all the land’s respect and reverence by reciting the mantras instead of trudging through a cavern, hunting a demon? Bless the living, bless the dead, teach the people to be soft and kind and mellow and to love others, to create a family and celebrate festivals. So much more worthy of a life. Why not all of that instead of this cursed life of the blade?

Savithri stumbled, pain jolting up her body as she teetered towards one side of the cave. She nearly fell, if not for the alcove on the wall that absorbed her sway and only roughened up her arm. She blew some of the hair falling on her face, dusted her arm, breathed hard and pushed herself forward.

Rakshasas liked their sleep and solitude until hunger and the desire for magic forced them out. Taming the moon, she would call it. But a drumming roar now pulsated from ahead – nothing like she had heard before. She had dealt with rakshasas of all kinds in the past. The raging and the mellow, the kind and the cruel. But something about the air around this one unsettled her. The roar intensified before dimming as though heaving and falling with each breath.

It made her wonder if her sword would be sufficient. And if it wasn’t, well –  no! A pulse throbbed within her that made her realize that she couldn’t afford to not care about her own life anymore. That apathy of walking undaunted into a battle had slipped down a great abyss right after the consequences of her fun night. The promises of her abstinence for the sake of the Empire had evaporated, and created something that would torment her soul.

All her courage had melted into a maternal something that made her remember the others she had once blissfully scorned at.

The opening appeared without warning, as if the swollen blackness had spat out a sliver of light. Almost immediately, a torrential wave of pain swept over her, clamping her muscles. Darkness blinked and her eyes blurred in that spectral haze as light appeared in bluish white cones along the periphery of her vision. A dormant heat gripped her, grateful for being given someone to cling to.

By the time her eyes adjusted to the light, she realized she had stepped on to a slope forking into the cave’s mouth like a stone tongue that lolled fifty feet above the ground.

The cavern was enormous, pretending to be the belly of the mountain itself, its majesty dwarfed only by the beauty of what grew on its red-crusted hide.

Shards! Crystalline, with their insides frozen in bluish white speckles, like crushed topaz or zircon scattered within the hundred or so cabochons that spread across the hide like a vast honeycomb. Only, the comb blinked and glowed and cast light like a wall of hastily arranged glass pillars would. They were everywhere she looked. Suspended from the ceiling like stalactites or branching out of fissures on the walls. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them. A whirring, droning sound emanated from the gems that glowed brightest.

The shards looked alive.

And in the midst of those crystal shards, alone in that incandescent colony, the rakshasa slept on the cavern’s floor on his back, hands twined behind his head, legs wide apart and chest heaving in tandem with each throb of the shards. Smoke issued out of his mouth with every breath as though he were snorting the remains of a flame burning inside him. A coldfire beside him snorted its own greenish hues into the air, so that the rakshasa’s face was visible only in silhouette. A contrast to the torch burning in her hand. A chill to smite the warmth in the cavern.

A large earthen pot lay next to the coldfire logs, steam wafting out of it in delicate curls before being smothered by the smoke rising up from the coldfire and the rakshasa’s mouth.

That was when Savithri’s guts lurched. For around the pot, the coldfire, and the rakshasa, was a circle of severed heads. From the distance, it was easy to mistake them for stones.

The villagers. The heads were… cold, as though all the blood had been drained out of them. Nothing to differentiate the men from the women. Pale white skin, eyes nothing but hollow sockets, and head shaved but for a pinch of hair along the fringes where the neck ended and the cavefloor began. She wondered which of them was the priest’s son.

She averted her gaze for a moment to stare at the corridor of ancient stone behind her, deep breaths punctuated by the bile that was forcing itself out. Like the uneasiness of a bad hangover.

She wanted to get closer to understand the rakshasa better. He bore no weapons. A more prudent servant of the Order would have acknowledged that rakshasas rarely displayed their weapons until the time of battle. But she had already decided something about this one was off. Even the etch of violence was absent, despite the decoration of heads. She had little doubt this one could read her mind, so she guarded it; easing the protection around more obvious secrets, luring him towards them in order to dissuade him from penetrating the deeper ones.

“Hello.”

Savithri nearly toppled from the rim of the cave’s mouth. Pressing one hand against the wall, she hastened to take a step back, unsheathed her sword and lowered it in the direction of the rakshasa. The voice had been guttural, jarring the silence in the cavern.

“What are you doing in a place as peaceful as an agraharam?” she asked, cringing at the hollow echoes that followed. Pain began to rise again in her belly. The worst of times!

“Peaceful? Ha! It’s a little experiment that I’ve been indulging in. Come down, I’ll show you.”

Savithri managed a weak smile, using the hilt to sweep the sweat off her forehead. Gods, it was hot!

“What is your name?” Another procedural question.

Even standing was becoming tiresome. She was in half a mind to accept the invitation to go down and sit. Sit, sit, sit.

The rakshasa inclined his head ever so slightly in her direction. Even from that distance, she could see the seething allure of his form, face still masked in shadow and the cloud of his own breath. “Once I was called Ayvara. Now I am Inchi, the hoarder of dreams.” The voice echoed across the cavern, the droning trail of the word ‘dreams’ vibrating in the air.

A thought sprung in her head, the accusation melting to be replaced by Amba’s words clawing out of a hidden trapdoor. “Quite a long banishment, I must say,” she taunted him.

If he was affected by her conjecture, he masked it. “I can assure you there is nothing long about this.”

“Well, it must end soon. Your antics in the agraharam have not gone unnoticed by the Order.”

The rakshasa grumbled, like how a rock would sound if it laughed. “I am merely doing what my father has ordered me to do. An obedient son cannot be held for his father’s crimes. Punish him, if you dare.”

“He’s not here,” Savithri said. “You are.”

“That’s… fair, I suppose. And I would also suppose that you don’t care either way, whether I am guilty or not. Your sense of justice has been buried beneath what you grow within yourself.”

The shards around him suddenly shone, brighter than they had been in dormancy, before dimming once more. Whatever was simmering within the pot gave a lurch before setting down. It all happened in a matter of seconds, but it forced her into a shell of caution.

She inspected a possible way down, instead of continuing to listen to Inchi from the platform. A narrow path of rough stone emerged from ten feet below, sloping downward in an elongated curve, hugging the side of the mountain. She judged there to be at least half a dozen leaps, and each leap would illicit nothing less than a struggle from her child.

On the other hand, she had never doubted the rakshasa to have grasped her weakness. Inchi was staring at her. Through that speck of shadow beside the fire, his head turned her way, his horns hidden in the labyrinth of darkness that encircled his head.

“Rather ironic to question my sense of justice sitting next to an altar of heads, don’t you think?” she said.

The rakshasa smirked. “I only protect it from those to whom it does not belong.”

“It?” Savithri’s eyes involuntarily came to rest on the pot. “What is it?”

“It is a concoction I used to brew as a child, when father would lock me up in the Crevice. I used it to spy on the others at night, for in my dreams I used to see what they were up to. When they discovered my invasions, they rallied against my father. He tried to first assuage their fears by transforming me into a rakshasa. But that didn’t stop me from dreaming. So he banished me altogether, pot and all, down to your lands. I’m not complaining, though. It’s not all that bad, at least not until the past few mooncycles.” The rakshasa took a moment to yawn, stretching his arms above his head and wriggling against the ground to rub an itch on his back.

Savithri squinted from her vantage, trying to get a better glimpse of what was churning inside the pot.

“You don’t seem to believe me,” Inchi said, rather disappointed.

His intrusion into her head deepened. She knew she could resist most rakshasas, but Inchi appeared to be no ordinary demon. His invasion intensified all of a sudden, melting the walls she had erected around her mind like the breaking of a dam.

Which meant… No!

“You are being naive,” he continued calmly. “A part of you knows what you seek will not come to pass.”

No, no, no!

“You have decided to place your trust in people whose truths differ from your own. And when truths differ –

“Stop!” She shrieked. Something gurgled within her belly. A kick? She was not certain. Weakness enveloped her. Her fingers had begun to lose their grip on the sword, her other arm shivering as it pressed the cavern wall. She prayed for her knees to not buckle. Right then, the only thought racing in her mind was that she wanted to kill Inchi and be done with it. This was what had she had come for. Her duty. Duty had no superior.

“I’m only trying to help you,” Inchi said, his voice now low but clear, like a baritone poem. The words struck her heart like a corrugated knife. Pain was becoming synonymous to existence. She couldn’t bear to stand anymore.

And that’s when her water broke.

Her knees wobbled, and she felt the moistness on the underside of her thighs before the trickle of water awoke her to the reality of her need.

Inchi seemed to have glimpsed it, too, for he sat up, his face emerging out of shadow in a miasma of red and black, skin marred by pocks and boils, eyes shrunken and burrowed into his face. The horns on his forehead glinted momentarily. His entire body appeared a red mound of flesh, arms a burnt, sinewy bark, belly kept in shape by a girdle of tongues strapped to leather. Tongues gone cold, beautified in strange colors.

“Return to the village, blademaster,” Inchi said, his voice suddenly a whisper away from her ear. “I do not wish to spill the blood of a newborn on my soil.”

She spun in alarm, but found nothing but the trail back out of the cave. To light. When she wheeled towards the cavern again, Inchi had disappeared, leaving the pot and the heads as they had been in their cryptic altar. The topaz shards and the filaments of gems within the cabochons began to shimmer now, as though someone was sucking the light, but letting it out every other second. The entire inside of the mountain seem to blink in their brilliance.

She clasped the sword, swore under her breath, looked down at the little pool of water that had formed between her feet and began to puff out her breaths.

No more time to waste. She was a fool and she hoped she would live to regret her actions today. Slowly, avoiding the rain of dust from the ceiling, she clambered back the way she had come, each step a laborious struggle through the darkness and into the light of the forest.

Her mind buzzed while her body responded to nature. She wanted to beg for time to stop. She would go down on her knees, risk her inability to ever stand up again if it meant it would all stop. One step, then another, and another.

Was she lost? She looked around as she walked, fearing, or rather, imagining, that all ways inevitably led back to the cave, to that scarring alcove on the hillside, and that she was trapped in a maze that had no end but only a swirling centre where Inchi the rakshasa waited with his reasonableness.

At one point, in the thick midst of trees and haywire branches, she stopped and swayed, unable to contain the contraction. Slowly, she dragged herself to the nearest bark and slid down. Before her eyes closed and her body slumped to rest, she thought she felt a heavy arm on her shoulder. And then, everything went black.

 

Part C: The Child

 

When she opened her eyes, she found herself on the platform around the sacred banyan tree in the heart of the agraharam. A dozen women stood around, casting curtains from old saris. Amba was running towards her with a pail of water, a grin spattered across her face.

Kala lingered behind them, hands folded, the afternoon heat sizzling around his frame, her sword in his hand.

“Get out,” one of the women yelled at him, stepping away to avoid brushing with him, eyes furiously downcast, and ripples of anger and horror at the footwear he had never discarded. “Untouchable! This is a place of worship. And of good karma. Defiler!”

Kala hastily retreated, tightening the rolls of the turban around his head.

Savithri had lost all the strength in her voice required to beg him to stay. More of the village had slowly begun to gather around the tree while the women readied the curtain. A pair of them began to sing, and that soothed Savithri somewhat. She didn’t care that it was meant for the child, to be coming out listening to the soft voices of the agraharam’s maidens.

“There’s nothing to worry, devi. You’ll be fine. Someone get me a knife!”

She closed her eyes for only a second before the squelching jolt of a contraction got her up again. She bit the cloth graciously stuffed into her mouth and steeled herself. This was nothing, she spoke to her heart. She had crawled through the thorn hills of Arankat, had come off less worse after languishing between the teeth of a tiger; she had extinguished the flames on the backs of demons and had bathed in the frigid waters of the Glace; she had walked on fire and had braved a knife to her gut for half a night. This had to be nothing, and yet this was more. This wanted to be more, desperate to be the pinnacle of her suffering.

The women made her spread her legs wide before discarding her gown and rubbing the mound of her stomach with oil. “Push, kanna. Push and it’ll be over soon.” And so she pushed, gnawing into the cloth with all her might, eyes only for the blanket of leaves overhead and the vermilion hues of the skies peppered through the canopy. She drove everything down her chest, and feared her heart might also slip down that alley. Amba was at her feet, massaging the thigh. “The head’s coming, devi.”

Savithri pushed for the next few minutes, throwing everything she had at getting rid of the baby inside her. Whoever was coming out had better apologize.

Her sight began to blur again. Her head swam. The leaves above dimmed in light, and a strange someone was placing the palm of a hand over her eyes. A wet palm. No, no! She wanted to see. Feeling wouldn’t be sufficient.

In that instant, her body began to feel considerably lighter. But there was still something tethered to her, like an ancestral possession. She tried to raise her arms, but someone lowered them. “Not now, devi.”

Then there was a cry. A rush of maddening sound that eliminated all the pain from her body, chewed at the numbness until the harsh scaffolding gave way to a tenderness she had never imagined herself to possess.

She tried to raise her head.

Every villager’s face was a mask of shock and silence. Bloodsoaked hands hanging in the air, as though this was not the reward they had been looking forward to.

A hundred pair of eyes were glued to the little half-opened blanket in Amba’s arms, at the pale, white flesh that lay on that cloth, shadows flickering on Amba’s bosom. And then collectively, the legion of eyes lifted and scrambled over and beyond the crowd, to where, like a criminal awaiting trial, Kala stood – bemused, blinking, and unmistakably proud.

“Oh, well,” Savithri slurred a moment later, her eyes rolling to rest. “About that…”

For the second time that day, her mind ceased to run and broke to a standstill. Her eyes closed, inviting her to the blackness. The last thing she heard was the sound of her baby crying and the maniacal laughter of Amba, who was cradling him.

 

Part D: The Pot

 

“Oh, jolly! You’re up.”

Savithri was back in Amba’s house, sagging on her cot amid the smells of tallow and sandalwood. Her boy curled within a makeshift crib next to the cot, much quieter now, eyes struggling to open, and body like a kitten. Amba was standing on the other side of the crib, starting intently at Savithri.

“Wh-where’s Kala?”

Amba giggled at that. “You’ve nerve, I’ll give you that.”

She then sighed at Savithri’s impatient glare. “He’s out there somewhere, back to the hunter’s abode, I suppose. I don’t know. I was more worried about you.”

“I… I have to go back to the mountains tomorrow. At first light.”

“You do realize you just gave birth to a baby, don’t you? You won’t be able to walk properly, let alone swing a sword.”

“I’m stronger than you think.”

Amba shrugged in mock defeat. “I’ll give you that. Honestly, if my water broke, I wouldn’t have crossed the threshold of this house. But this – fighting a rakshasa? Maybe that is too much even for you.”

There was nothing Savithri could say that would make sense. Now, she just let silence roost between them. After a while, she stood up, much against Amba’s protests, and walked to the kitchen. She pulled the carpet out and lifted the lid on the trapdoor, which gave way to a ladder that burrowed into the earth, lit weakly by lamps ensconced into the wall. She exchanged a glance with Amba, who rolled her eyes and nodded in resignation.

The chamber downstairs was not as dramatic as Savithri had anticipated it to be. Only an earthen stove with a pot on top of it, surrounded by walls caked in mud.

With one hand on her belly, almost out of habit, Savithri peered into the vessel.

A thick, black liquid squirted out bubbles every few seconds. There was something inherently wrong about the concoction,.

“It’s lacking in one ingredient,” Amba said.

“Which is?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I pretend to know, of course, and that it’s just a matter of time, but honestly? I don’t. There are a lot of dream awakeners that have gone into this, sleep inducing agents that also tickle up your nerves and your mind to perpetuate colorful dreams. But what these people seek is far beyond that. Divine dreams require divine ingredients.”

Savithri nodded as though she understood every word of what Amba was saying. She wanted to assure Amba that the agraharam’s myth of the swapnaswarg had its roots in a truth Savithri had glimpsed only a few hours ago in the cave.

But no. Not yet.

The ones who knew had ventured into the mountains and had returned with only the ghost of their sins. More curiosity would only end up hurting them. But what choice did Savithri have? And even if she were given a way out, would she take it?

 

**

 

All night she slept with her baby next to her, waking up every few minutes to ensure she had not rolled over and crushed the child. When morning came, Amba took the child in her arms and strapped half a dozen skins of water to the girdle Savithri was going to wear to the mountains. “You’ll need them,” was all she said. “And be careful, you are going to experience a lot of soreness and pain.”

“I already am.”

“Then may the gods know why you want to do this now.”

Savithri kissed her baby on his forehead and left. Even at first light, most of the agraharam had turned up outside their homes to see her off. She ignored their stares, and their quiet words of comfort. They meant well, of course, and it was important that she put on a brave face, even if it meant in gratitude for their help in delivering her child. To them, she was only the pest killer. Why, then, was it so hard to forget their expressions when her baby had crawled out, resembling his father?

On the outroads, Kala waited for her. Silent, and deep in thought. Ever since their marriage, he had only become more taciturn, as though to speak was to bring harm to their relationship. But the dam broke within him at the sight of her distended figure. No father could have resisted that.

“How – how is he?”

Savithri chuckled. “Cries a lot, but is mostly obedient. He has kicked me less after coming out.”

Kala smiled. It was odd to see a man whose face was chiseled and hardened as though carved out of granite to be able to smile. All the way to the mountains, they spoke then, their memories pouring out in words at last, as though they finally had a form to relive them in. Kala did not hide that he was intimidated by her. He was, after all, at his most tender in times like these, when she would set out on her jobs, stalking into the crust of the earth to weed out malforms and evils.

When she touched him on the shoulder, he jerked to a halt, turned around and kissed her. It was his message that he would rather have her back from the mountains today than lose her fighting a battle she had drawn herself into.

They reached the forest within the hour, the quiet of the morning manifesting in rolling dewdrops and the pale light of the sun breaching the canopy of leaves to sparkle on the earth. Savithri left Kala where she had the previous time, but as always, kept from saying goodbye. It was better than he did not glimpse her face. She walked away as fast as she could manage, lest he understood that she did not wish to abandon him, and not knowing whether she would return or not. It was wiser to let him think of her as brave.

She carried the soreness in her body to the caves. It was easier to walk, and along the way, she attempted a few stretches, testing her body’s limits, the agility of her arms as she assaulted the air with her sword, swinging it back and forth until she started to sweat, her breathing once again coming in long, groaning stretches as she buried the sword into the cave floor and leaned over it, suppressing the uneasiness springing up from her well. Pain swelled in her breasts, now nearly twice their size from all the milk they carried. Finest blademaster in the lands, her sweet, sore bottom!

Every inch of her way beyond that was a drag. The air was colder and sharper, swooping past her in occasional gusts until the cave deepened and the flooring more ragged.

At the opening to the vast cavern, she came to a halt, blinded by the light from the shards. Brighter than yesterday, and somehow, more beguiling to her senses. There was a pattern to their glow, a series of ascending contrast to the dome before the cabochons descended in a rush of dimming hues all the way to the cavern floor. She followed the trail of lights down the side of the cave to the floor.

Inchi, however, was nowhere to be seen.

The coldfire had been smothered, leaving a strange warmth, and only the last vestiges of the embers sparking near the pot and the circle of heads, both of which had been left untouched from last evening. Slowly, she made her way across to the pot, her head constantly spinning around the cavern for a sight of the rakshasa.

She looked into the vessel.

The broth had a pinkish surface, and at the centre, a swirling whirlpool bore down into the concoction, churning by itself. Savithri could feel herself bending closer towards it, the temptation to merely lick the rim of the vessel, get a taste of that heavenly brew. She freed one hand from her sword and let it slide down the pot.

The cavern shook then. It dispelled grains of earth and stone from the ceiling and caught her off guard. The soreness magnified in that instant, and she felt a moistness, a bloody moistness down there from where her baby had been driven out. Oh, no! She pulled her hand away,

When she turned, Inchi was standing a foot away from her, his face breathing down hers, snorting out of his nostrils, his mouth clamped shut with a hint of canines. His face was twice more terrifying than seen from the crest – a burning red face, an amethyst glinting on the tip of his nose, cheeks puffed and scarred. Horns like broken elephant tusks, jutting out of his forehead, surrounded by cracked skin, like glass would look at its weakest point before it shattered.

Instinct made her take a step back, pull her sword and slice it towards his torso. He grabbed the edge of the blade with his hand and thrust it back, throwing her off her stance. Light from the shards began to flicker, and then, began to ooze out of the larger cabochons, sucked towards where Inchi stood, grinning down at her in sadism. He was suddenly surrounded in a darker, sapphire light, face retreating into shadow, the last strands of his hair splaying out as a sign of madness. She stumbled backwards, nearly falling over and into the pot, but at the last moment, buried her sword into the ground and pulled at the hilt to keep from falling.

“The arrogant woman came first,” Inchi said, and Savithri assumed he meant Amba. “But she was only… curious. She desired to talk, and that was all. The ones who came after her, they wanted more. They were thieves. I had no choice.”

Savithri quietly eyed the brewing pot beside her – the other half of the incomplete swapnaswarg – and then at the circle of heads. Each one had a fleeting remnant of someone who had spent decades of their life squinting at scriptures.

Before she could react, however, pain assaulted her in short but repeated spasms across her body. Something stretched within her and then deflated again.

Inchi looked disturbed. “You still believe. Even after they have seen the face of his father.”

Savithri blew the hair out of her face, stood up straight and spat to one side. “They are the best future he will get. What do you know? You’re an embarrassment to the one who birthed you.”

A forced chuckle and a tilt of his head. “Yes, well. That’s one way to shut me up. But it doesn’t answer your problem.” He moved a step sideways and the light followed up, the aura expanding in incandescent layers before settling behind his head. “Like me, he will grow to hate the one who birthed him. And I don’t mean you.”

“Kala will be a great father to him,” she seethed.

“Listen to me,” Inchi’s voice lowered to a plead. Some of the glow around him began to fade in blinks and flickers. “The first thing he will be taught is the consequence of his actions. Not now, not of the future, but of his past. He is who he is because of what he once was. His soul always remembers. It weighs and reinvents itself in this reincarnated life. The sins of his past will haunt him now, will define what he is. But so will his goodness. And that is the tinted glass through which he will view the rest of the world. That philosophy will be forced down on him until it guides him across the lands. He will not see Kala as a good father or as a man separate from the sins of his prior birth. To him and that village, Kala is polluted because of –

“I know,” she screamed. “But I cannot take my son back to my life. It is better to have a few prejudices than to suffer being a servant of the Empire.”

One of Inchi’s thick eyebrows raised to an arch.

She bit her lip, eyes once again drifting to the pot, where bubbles burst on the surface of the concoction, as though someone was drowning underneath. There was no question of her duty here. The end was clear; the haziness persisted only in what lay after.

She charged again at him, her body unflinching, the sword raised behind her head and a look of anguish on her face. Ten feet away from him, she leapt, knowing well that it was as futile a blow as the one before.

But Inchi did not move, save for a slight bowing of his head. The sword fell clean on the back of his neck, splitting the skin, tearing into his flesh, forcing the head into a deeper bow. Blood released in frantic spurts, red at first, and then tempered to a pinkish hue, quite like the contents of the pot, before morphing into a silvery dream, as though bathed in moonlight.

Savithri yanked the blade in shock and landed on her feet. Her legs hurt almost immediately, threading into the rest of her body as, alongside the pain, an unavoidable retch surged up to be released. This time, she did not resist.

The silvery red blood formed a pool around the fallen body of Inchi. It entered the periphery of her vision as she threw up. The soreness reemerged and made her want to lie down.

“It’s okay.”

She spun in fright, her sword raised again. The sound had risen from Inchi’s head, swimming in the pool of his own blood, a few feet away from the rest of his body. The eyes were frozen but alive, skin peeling away to reveal something golden beneath. The transformation stopped the moment she realized what was happening, so that Inchi’s face was now somewhere between a deformed rakshasa and the god he once was, neither here nor there, but doubly terrifying in ways Savithri could only feel in the depths of her soul.

“It’s okay,” he repeated, voice now transcending beyond his reach and echoing off the cavern walls. “You know, I got tired of killing them. Sick, actually. The villagers from the agraharam. It… wasn’t right. Only, it was what I was told to do by my father. The swapnaswarg is not meant for mortals, especially the ones in these agraharams, who believe themselves to be more than what they are, and who scorn at the ones who are born with dirty hands and in rotting homes. Caste has tainted their souls. And they use my father’s name to justify it. Our reality up there is forbidden to them. They don’t deserve to dream of the gods. No mortal does.”

“Their dreams don’t matter to me,” Savithri said.

“Yes, yes. I know. For anyone who has seen the slime of these lands, a trickle of bias hardly concerns you. But in case you wish to weigh my words, I would suggest that once I stop talking, you pour all the remaining blood from my head into that pot.”

“Why should I do that?”

“Because that is the only way I can fulfill my father’s commands for all eternity.”

She remained silent at that, shifting her glances between Inchi’s twisted face and the pinkish broth bubbling in the pot. Somehow, in the span of a heartbeat, like all realizations are born, she had understood how the concoction worked.

“And if I refuse?”

“Then,” Inchi sighed, or rather his head shook in imitation of a sigh, “I don’t know what my father will do. I have seen far braver souls than you not take that chance.”

She did it anyway. Not because she was afraid of what would happen, but because her mind was now circling in turmoil, thinking of Kala, Amba, her just born son and the agraharam. A fleeting image of her life flickered in front of her. She picked up the head by the horn and cast it into the pot.

There was a hissing sound accompanied by a faint, relieved groan, as though Inchi had been redeemed from his own version of damnation. The concoction burned brightly, shooting sparks out. The smell was Inchi’s himself, of the earth and of things Savithri could not put a finger to, but it was pungent and that alone made her turn away from it as the potion simmered and settled to the color of molten stone.

Placing the sword back into her scabbard, she took a deep breath and watched as the shards, one by one, began to grow dark. Light ceased to scatter and gleam across the cavern, replaced by clouds of sparkling dust. Something beautiful had been destroyed while her job was done.

 

Kala ran towards her as she stumbled out of the forest with her fading vestiges of energy, and with the pot under her arm.

 

Their journey back was quiet. Kala did not ask any questions as ever, not even about the pot, nor did he make any efforts to dab her wounds. She did not mind his reclusion now. Her thoughts were only for her child as they rode into the village, the sun high up on their backs, the heaviness in her heart tethered to a leash, refusing to abandon her.

As they entered the agraharam, the people streamed out of their houses. One look at Savithri’s blood-soaked garb, her matted hair and her expression of silent triumph was enough. Cheers rose in the courtyards and the square. The women arrived with a plate of aarti, while the maidens sprinkled jasmine petals on the path that Kala crushed ruthlessly with his cart.

At the centre of the congregation were both the priest and Shastri. Savithri placed the pot on the wagon’s seat and met them. Amba came at last, carrying her child, her smile faltering at the sight of the crowd. She handed over the child to Savithri and nodded, as though the trouble had been worth the outcome.

“Devi,” the priest said. “We cannot thank you enough. You have rid us of a pestilence that will surely earn you brahmanhood in your next birth. May the gods praise you.”

She ignored the tone of pride in his voice, and rocked her child against her bosom, playing with his hair, soaking in the softness of his scalp and skin. “Be worth it all”, she whispered in his ears.

Shastri took a step forward and bowed. “I know you are tired, devi. Perhaps it is best we retreat to a warmer surrounding and talk about how much we owe you.”

The cut for the Empire’s blademasters. She hesitated to move. “I… do not want gold, Shastri ji,” she said.

Shastri’s shocked reaction evoked a chuckle from Amba, who had now perched herself on one of the low-hanging branches and viewed the crowd with disdain.

“What do you mean, devi? We owe you payment for your job.”

“I said I don’t want gold, Shastri ji. I never said anything about not taking any payment.”

Silence flourished like a rice crop in rains. Everyone in the crowd was still, except the baby against her bosom, who cried, unaware of the future Savithri was thrusting him into.

The head priest took a step forward to stand even with Shastri. “What is it you want, then?”

A low breeze wafted in from the hills then, choking the silence into something more sinister. She couldn’t help but sound a little pleading. Desperate, even.

“I want my son to remain here, and learn your ways and grow to become a pandit.”

Calm now, the honesty was important. She could sense the growing unrest, the slow turning of heads in the crowd to regard each other as one did when waiting for someone else to take up the mantle of speaking.

Nobody spoke for an entire minute, as though, her son’s tears alone would undo her words. When that didn’t come to pass, the crowd began to murmur in collective disturbance.

Shastri looked from the baby to Kala, and then his eyes came to rest on Savithri. “He… he is not permitted, devi. What you ask is… is…”

“-sacrilege,” the priest stepped forward, scorn developing in his voice. “He is the son of a man who beats the drums in funerals. Only one who is born a brahmin can learn these scriptures. Your son will never be able to assimilate the wealth of the ancient texts.”

“He was born yesterday,” Savithri reasoned. “There is nothing he can or cannot do if taught right.”

“But he’s an untouchable,” the priest said, lacing that last word with a lifetime of detestation and disgust. “He is not permitted to even listen to the scriptures being taught, let alone learn them. This is blasphemy, devi. Did you think you could curry a favour of this sort simply because you killed a rakshasa? That was your job. Your duty. It is not to be exploited for such purposes. Everyone in this world is born with a purpose, and what you ask is not his. Nor is it ours to take up the sword like you have.”

It wasn’t the worst time to tell him then, that she had run away from her own agraharam when she was eight, tired of the rituals and the whole circus of faith, tired of her family whom she saw in all these people’s eyes. But she kept that to herself. It wasn’t going to be about her.

“We cared for you,” the woman with the aarti plate shrieked. She had tears in her eyes. “I helped give birth to your son.”

And then what ? she wanted to ask. You took a look at Kala and then stopped caring.

You cowered beneath the scowls and scriptures of the priest who spearheaded your ideology.

And it was his word that would count the most.

When the priest spoke next, it was with a more frigid coldness. “Our souls are curious beings, devi. Maybe in his next birth, he will be one of us.”

She nodded. That one tilt of her head drained all her strength, suppressing her anger. There was no point in continuing to fight. Every villager’s eyes spoke of that same revulsion to the thought of entertaining her son – no, Kala’s son – as one of their own. She glanced at Kala, who, wordlessly, had moved behind the crowd, standing under sunlight, emotions masked by the shadow that fell on his pale, white face. If only he would lend her his support now, and come and bash all of their heads in, use that wicked strength of his that went into forges and drum-beating instead, for that meager gold that gave him nothing more than a vacant lot beside the crematorium.

In that instant, in that crumble, she foresaw her son grow to wield the blade as she had all those years ago, circle the Fallen Hills and hunt for demons in darkness and moonlight. Be a servant. Obey. Execute. Everything was the right thing as long as the orders came from up there. There would be no escape from this.

Amba came to her then and put a hand on her shoulder, urging her to leave. “Let’s go to my house. You need to lie down.”

Savithri did not resist. Allowing to be pulled away by Amba, she deposited one final glance at the agraharam, at the silent Shastri and at the proud, little priest, before she shut her eyes, wrapped her hands around her child and walked away.

“I-I’ll get you your gold today evening, devi,” Shastri added loudly before she was out of earshot.

 

That night, she packed her belongings, washed her sword, spent an hour in the bathhouse and ate a full meal. Amba sang a song for the child, rocking her in the crib, all the while glancing at the pot Savithri had retrieved from the mountains. Amba knew what it contained and in that suffocating knowledge, the song suffered.

“Take him for a walk, will you?” Savithri asked her. “I want to rest for a while, and I don’t want him crying all night. We will be leaving the agraharam tomorrow at first light.”

Amba stared at her. It would still take some time to succumb to the reality that Savithri was going to be the boy’s mother for the rest of his life. All this time, her heart had been manipulated into accepting that other untruth, that delusion with which she had walked into the agraharam three days ago.

Once Amba left, however, Savithri showed no inclination to sleep. Instead,  she opened the trapdoor and carried the pot down to the hidden cellar. She set it beside Amba’s larger pot, and took a deep breath. Inchi’s silvery pink concoction continued to swirl on its own, like a brooding tempest. She watched it for an entire minute, almost tempted to drink all of it herself, for even now, she was not certain if she was doing the right thing. Her instincts were being driven by a more primal anger within her, one that had been shaken back to life.

Her patience wore out. She emptied the contents of Inchi’s smaller pot into Amba’s larger one, shielding herself from the fresh sparks that burst out of Amba’s vessel. There was a hint of something topaz, a bluish flicker in that storm that now brewed in that chamber, a flash of that cavern where Inchi lay on his back next to the coldfire, contemplating thousands of years of descending from revered godhood to one of cursed mortality, of that once child-like innocence of wanting to dream of his fellow gods.

The flicker passed and the brew finally settled into the color of hate.

Savithri sighed.

Amba would find a way to survive. And the agraharam would drink from this broth and dream of Inchi, the rakshasa, in his hideous form. They would never know the tainted gold beneath that monstrous face, nor the silver ichor that only manifested as a twisted darkness night after night. They would scream in their nightmares of a demon, never realizing that he was the god they had always desired to dream of.

 

________________________________________

Prashanth Srivatsa is a speculative fiction writer from Bengaluru, India. His works have appeared in magazines such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Reckoning and Three-Lobed Burning Eye among others. His debut fantasy novel, The Spice Gate, is scheduled to come out in Fall 2023 from Harper Voyager.

Miguel Santos is a freelance illustrator and maker of Comics living in Portugal.  His artwork has appeared in numerous issues of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, as well as in the Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Best-of Volume 2.  More of his work can be seen at his online portfolio and his instagram.