Sign of the Dragonfly: Chapter V

The house of Ula Se Barat was not grand by Gujirati standards, but its gardens deserved every word of praise Hathi had ever heard for them. Willows trailed their branches over ornamental ponds where lotus blossoms drifted on the water and segmented scolopedes and golden carp swam leisurely among their roots, passing in and out of shadow. Reeds waved in the humid wind blowing down the hills, all stepped with rice paddies where the rani’s peasants toiled. It would have calmed Hathi greatly, perhaps eased some of the pain of his last four years, except that a yard from where he crouched, Jahan was raping the rani’s youngest son.  

“He’s as soft as rabbit skin,” the rajah panted, thrusting away. He had a hand on the back of the boy’s neck, holding his face crushed into the dirt. The boy’s sobs had ceased minutes ago. He was perhaps fifteen. “I want you to kill him just as I finish, dog. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, master,” said Hathi.

The gardens were littered with the dead already. The rani had sent out her household retainers to meet Jahan’s soldiers in the swaying bamboo, beneath the pear trees with their fragrant blossoms. They had fought bravely and died badly, the rest retreating to the house to huddle behind its stone walls. The rainy season would be upon them soon. The gardens would be washed clean. There would be no sign left of what Jahan did now. 

“Ah, dog, I’m almost there.”

Hathi rose. He took his glaive from where he’d stood it up against a nearby willow and went to stand beside the boy. A dull brown eye stared up at him. The ring of soldiers standing guard over the rajah’s fun chuckled and nudged each other.

I wish I could free you, he longed to tell the boy. But if I spare your life, even if I kill him, even if I kill every man in these gardens, he will reach out from the grave and destroy everything dear to me. You cannot ask me to trade my world and my heart for yours.

Jahan let out a low grunt, his toes curling. Hathi swept the glaive in a fierce arc. The boy’s head rolled. Blood sprayed Jahan’s face. Mikara, kneeling at his side, pulled him to her and kissed him deeply, their tongues lashing in each other’s mouths, blood smearing beneath her scarred fingers. Hathi wondered if anyone had told her what had become of all her predecessors, or if she sensed it herself. She was no fool. The sword of Jahan’s boredom, hovering at the nape of her neck.

Someday he will turn to me and say, ‘Dog, I want you to kill her just as I finish.’ 

Jahan pulled his iron cock out of the dead boy’s ass, the length of it dripping with blood and shit. Mikara knelt and undid the harness belted about his hips, kissing his hipbone, and began refastening the clasps of his sherwani over his soiled underrobe. He twined his fingers through her hair as she worked, tilting his head back and breathing in the smoky air. Much of the garden was aflame now, black curling across the bowl of the sky.

“It’s a beautiful day,” said Jahan, smiling.

That evening, as the rani Ula Se Barat and her daughter, the latter dressed for betrothal in what had been a fine red gown, burned alive over the cookfire in her own great hall, Ula screaming curses, the girl just screaming, Hathi thought again of killing Jahan. He had thought of this every day since he’d killed Captain Indirat and taken her position, staring at this hateful, beautiful man and his hundreds of soldiers, at the people of his village on their knees in the dirt, swords at their throats. Jahan laughing, his hand on the shoulder of Hathi’s wife, Aya.

I have heard that Hathi i’Mati is the greatest swordsman in the province.

No, my lord. I am only a fool with a stick.

Then you will be my fool, or this dunghill will drown in blood. And remember, dog of war, if ever I should fall, or you should fail me, this place will be razed to the dirt and its people trampled under the hooves of my riders and fed to devils.

And so Hathi i’Mati, last and least and greatest pupil of the far-famed swordmaster Drunken Kamba, knelt in the black mud of the left bank of the Gris and offered his glaive to Jahangir Eru Vandifatori, the emperor’s bastard, who was only one and twenty but already as cruel as a scorpion. In the four years since he had killed at Jahan’s command, cutting down peasants, lesser nobles, monks, and countless others, or delivering them up to be tormented by Jahan and his favorites. Had he killed more than lived in his village? Almost certainly. At night he meditated on their faces. Captain Indirat, and everyone who had come after.

I am a prisoner in Hell, he thought, watching the rani’s daughter jerk and twitch where she hung over the flames. Her legs and feet were black. Yellowish fluid leaked from cracks in her cooked skin. I died on that riverbank, and became the act of cutting.

“It’s incredible, the sounds they make,” said Jahan. He sat in the rani’s carved oak throne, Mikara at his feet with her cheek resting on his knee. They looked almost like siblings. Black hair. Sharp faces. Wide-set eyes. That was probably why Jahan had spared her life, Hathi thought. For the chance to ruin his own reflection, and then fuck it. “Do you think that can return to the wheel, after something like this?”

The girl spasmed one final time, chains chiming, and then fell still. Her mother’s screams had become a long, low moan of misery, a ceaseless sound that rose and fell as the fire chewed at her legs. Hathi wondered if she could feel anything at all anymore. He wondered if she knew that her children were dead, that Jahan’s soldiers were killing and raping in her halls. She lasted a few minutes longer, and then fell still, her head lolling against her chest. Her dark hair smoldered. The air was full of the smell of cooking meat. Perhaps a cleverer man would have found a way out of this snare, a way to kill Jahan and save his village, but Hathi had never been clever. He was only a fool with a sword.

That night, as he slept in the abandoned rooms of some retainer of the rani’s, Hathi dreamed he was a child again. In his dream he ran along the bank of the Gris, Aya running ahead of him. Gharials sunbathed on the rocks. The sun flashed through the needle-like teeth in their long, slender jaws. Little birds came and went, cleaning the detritus from their hides and from their open mouths, and Hathi ran on after Aya. She had stolen a little pistachio cake that his mother had made for him. He wanted it back. Flamingos burst from the reeds in screaming clouds of pink and blue feathers. 

What is more useless and evil than a sword, idiot?

I don’t know, Master.

Your stupidity grows day by day. Any fool knows that only one hundred swords could possibly be more useless and evil than one.

Hathi jerked awake on the pallet he’d laid out beside the dead man’s bed. He rubbed his shaved scalp, tracing the ridge of an old scar from his right ear to his eyebrow. A Chanian warrior monk had given it to him a year ago in Amnh. A bad night in the Saffron District. A very bad night. He reached for the pitcher of water one of the slaves had brought in, and that was when he saw the man perched in the windowsill. The stranger was perhaps fifty, or a little younger, cheeks deeply lined, eyebrows woolly, with a hawkish nose and a pronounced philtrum. He wore gray robes and a heavy sash from which six iron weights dangled from little rings. Hathi shot to his feet, snatching his glaive from where it leaned against the bed, and leveled the blade at the interloper.

“Hathi i’Mati,” said the man. Sticky blue discharge drooled from his nostrils and from the corners of his deep-set eyes. When he spoke, his teeth glowed the same poisonous color, and wisps of gaseous fog spilled from his lips. “I have an offer for you.”

“Speak, devil,” said Hathi. “And then be gone.”

“Perhaps a three-week march from here, in the mountains on the Chanian border, there is a shrine consecrated to the Lord Humada, the sacred hermaphrodite who guides women through the pain of childbed,” said the stranger. “It’s called Danh Dang, ‘Third Womb’ in Old Chanian. If you guide your master there by the fourth of Patang, I guarantee you, no harm will come to your little village on the left bank of the Gris. No harm will come to your sons, or to your daughter, or your wife. No harm will come to your venerable father, who prays daily by the river for your safe return.”

“That’s all?” Hathi asked.

“That’s all,” said the stranger.

Hathi took a step toward the window, keeping the blade of his glaive level with the stranger’s throat. “Who are you?” 

“No one of consequence,” said the stranger, more gas spilling from his smiling mouth. His teeth pulsed with that sickly blue light. His pupils seemed to squirm and ripple. “The fourth of Patang, Hathi i’Mati. Don’t forget.”

“What do you want with my master?”

But between one word and the next, the man was gone. There was no smoke, as in the stories djinn and devils, only an empty window looking out on gardens ravaged by fire. Hathi set his glaive against the wall. He looked out at the carnage. A few blackened trees still smoldered, embers whipped from their dead branches by the sultry breeze. A rangy red dog trotted through the ashes, stopping to sniff at a woman’s curled corpse, and then continued on into the dark.

Perhaps the time for cutting is over, Hathi dared to think. Perhaps, at long last, it is time for the blade to chip and shatter.