New Decameron Twenty: Usman T. Malik (Patreon)

The Well that Never Ended

by Usman T. Malik

1

I was twelve when my father brought my stepmother home.

She was a tall, slim, gorgeous creature. When I first saw her, she was wearing a green chaugha, long robes, which brought out the grass color of her eyes. Her hair fell to her shoulders in rivulets of black satin. Her nose was so narrow and straight that it transformed her face into a cast even more fantastic than Huur, the Goddess of Beauty, whose statue was placed in the sleeping quarter of every young girl in Manda Village.

I was so astonished that I did not offer her the Courtesy. I just stared at her until my father, who had dismounted the horse, came forward, and placed two fingers on my head.

“You will do our guest and your new mater the Courtesy now, baita. Do you want the curses of the gods flung on our roof?" His hand gripped mine, but I did not stop staring at her.

 "New mater? You got married in Soolan then, pater?"

"You do not ask any questions before the Courtesy has been performed, lad. Now do it before I wring your hands inside out." 

I nodded then, coming out of the stuporous state. Sliding my hand out of his, I ran forward, bowed deep, and plucked a hair out of the thick curly straw-colored growth on my head. I placed it on my palm and stretched out my hand to her. She had hard lines around her mouth. Grit-lines, Barkat the Village Beggar, used to call them.

"Welcome to Manda Village, jinay! I offer you this hair from my pate, and hope you will accept the invitation from me and my family, to stay under our roof, thatched as it may be, for one night. " 

She smiled, and the lines turned into waves of flesh that flowed around her lovely mouth like...

...like chamielieon meat changing patterns in the fire.

I was startled at this thought flitting through my head like a teasing nymph dancing across the surface of a lake. 

Her face lit up with, what I could only judge was, pleasure and a hint of excitement. Yet something about her disturbed the Hades out of me. Her eyes shone. They shone a bit too much.

She spoke, and I was taken aback. Her voice was deep, reverberant, toneless, kind of like a haandi boiling on deer dung stove. It slapped against my ears instead of passing right through.

"I am honored to be given the hair from your head, Noni. That is your name, is it not?" I nodded, and she rumbled on, "Well, I have been hoping to stay for more than one night unlike other guests you have had before. And I believe you would not be averse to that, will you, bache? "

She smiled brilliantly at my father standing behind me, watching us with his huge arms folded across his chest, and reached out with her hand to pick the hair up. 

A whipping gust of wind came from nowhere and screamed in my ears. I saw my stepmother's shawl lift from her bosom and spin; she grabbed and managed to get a fist on it before it sailed away.

Red dust rose in a gritty cloud around me. I tasted it on my tongue, then the wind was shrieking again, tearing at my hair, clawing with a fury far beyond my strength to fight. 

I sank down to the ground and hid my face away from the wind before it sucked my eyes out of my face.

Two strong hands landed on my shoulder.

"Get up, child! The wind has settled down." My father's voice was low but firm.

I opened my eyes and leaning on his hands, slowly got up. The Red Plain was all still again. It was hard to believe that a moment ago I had been surrounded by an evil wind shrieking like a banshee from Gondola.

"Mother of the Sacred Cow!" My father said. "That was definitely a DustDevil, and in the Red Plains too. Bless our souls, Hanuman.”

However, I was not listening to his mutterings any more.

I was looking at my stepmother.

She was watching me, her face contorted a little so it did not seem goddess-pretty any more. Her eyes had narrowed down to tiny slits that sparkled with emerald fire. She was standing with one sandaled foot turned slightly out, toes from the other crossing below the bow of the sandal and digging into the thick dust of the plain, and all of a sudden it made me sick to look at her ... to look at her feet, and I turned my head away and started trudging to our hut.

"Noni!" Her voice boomed out from behind me all at once. "The hair, bache. Will you not complete the Courtesy?"

I glanced back. “The wind took the hair from my hand and carried it with her to the Court of the Gods, jinay. The Courtesy has been done in the alternate fashion."

She looked at my father. He nodded. 

That night I opened up the knot in my chaugha and took the hair out. It shone silver in the light from the Blue Eye in the night sky.

I burnt it in the spark from two hunting stones I had on me.

2 

My father's wife settled in our house and took to the Village quite nicely. She was charming, pretty, hospitable. The neighboring warrior huts, like our own, welcomed her and not just because she was the young wife of Haroon, the Chief Guard of the Warriors of Ehtashaam. They adored her. I even heard Binda, wife of Murad, say to her husband in hushed jealous tones, "Natasha is like a nymph: Much too wondrous for her own good."

One evening I sat down with Mali under a tree in the Red Plains. Mali had accompanied my father on his journey, and he told me the story of how my father met her.

My father -- the Chief Guard -- and his warriors had been travelling as a convoy with Our King's caravan. The caravan had been taking Our King's golden rugs to Soolan, where -- the king's shaman told him – an alchemist had invented a power to make carpets fly like hippogriffs. Our King had decided time was now ripe to extend a friendly hand to the Emperor of Soolan; and so the caravan had begun its journey. Apart from the rugs, there were fifty boxes of treasure as a token of the bond between the two lands Ehtashaam and Soolan.

"The caravan, "said Mali, "had crossed the Valley of the Five Rivers and the Panj-nad where all five come together to fall into the Arabian Sea. We had been traveling for a week now and still had five more Red-Sun days left before we reached Tansabool, the heart of Soolan, where Our King's gifts were to be delivered to the Emperor. The horses were exhausted from the journey and three of the twenty-five camels we needed for the desert travel in Gandola had died.”

I brushed dust off my chaugha. Everyone knew Gandola was home to churails and banshees, perhaps the most feared of deserts in the seven lands. 

Mali seemed unperturbed. He went on, “Your pater knew that if we lost any more beasts the journey through Gandola would become longer than two Red-Sun days, perhaps more than four, and he knew both merchants and warriors were terrified of the desert nights there. So when the first foliage of Changa Manga -- the last green we would see for we were almost in Gandola -- came in sight, he ordered the men to stop and set up camp.

"That night was blacker than the new mistress's hair. We started fires with hunting stones. The merchants had strange beliefs about using matchsticks in Gandola; they said the flare and hiss called churails nearer. Soon the smell of meat cooking, most of it giant chamielieons, began to scent the forest clearing. Three warriors went off in search of deer and unicorn meat -- they were rumored to abound in Changa Manga -- and what with the neighing of horses and the laughter of merchants and warriors sitting together swapping funny stories, the terror of the vicinity of Gandola lessened a little... ‘til the throat-ripping, agonized scream of a man rose into the night, shattering the facade of gaiety.

“The warriors leapt to their feet, the Chief Guard having drawn his scimitar so quickly so as to shame the most sudden of lightning flashes. I can still see his face gaunt and fearless as he drew the sword back in the warriors' poise of readiness, the iron armor on his chest gleaming in the blaze of fires. 

"As it turned out, the only thing to roll out of the night was Babar, the unicorn meat-seeking warrior, who dived to the ground as soon as he appeared from behind an Everlasting Bush. I swear upon Hauman the Merciful’s name that at least twenty arrows, three clubs and a spear shot over his head and disappeared into the dark.

" ‘Hold them in," he yelled from the ground. ‘I just killed a warebear.’

"Forty arms lowered themselves. A warebear is the only creature near Gandola that can scream like a human.

" ‘You stupid, mule-dragging fool!’ your pater said. ‘Why the Hades did you not shout that out from behind that infested bush?’

" ‘Ameer-e-Aala, I was going to, but another warebear appeared and started licking the dead one's face, so I wanted to kill that one too.’

" ‘Did you then, you son of a Soolani whore?’ The Chief had taken out his dagger and was playing with it now. Babar looked at the blade, his throat clicking.

" ‘No, Ameer. I could not because...’

“ ‘He could not, because I did not want him to.’ There was a rustle in the shadows, and she appeared like a huurie from a dream.

"I swear to you, little master, there were gasps from many men. She stood in the clearing in a circle of light from the Blue Eye in the sky, and her face was lit like the Eye itself, just not blemished at all. She was wearing a green chaugha, the long sleeves of the robes covering her delicate arms, a cowl over her head. Her eyes stole color from the robes to shine out in the night like twin beacons in a distant temple. 

"She stepped forward. The Chief was still staring at her, then he collected himself and spoke, ‘Pray explain your presence in this wilderness, jinay. My men do not like strangers appearing in the night.’

"She looked at him, drew herself up and said, ‘I am Natasha, daughter of Binnaat. I am the princess of my clan and claim right to Changa Manga and the mountain range beyond the forest.’

" ‘And pray tell where lies Gandola then if not beyond the forest?’ The Chief had an amused look in his eyes now. 

"Her eyes bored into his. ‘There are four ways the light falls onto the forest. You think Gandola is in the direction of all four?’

"Your pater watched her. No woman talked to him like that -- not since your mater died five years ago. 

"She said, ice in her words, ‘This forest and every creature within are bound to me and I to them. One act of bloodshed is too much, but I can still forgive it. But if your men want more, I promise you they will get more.’

"The Chief looked at her, then burst into laughter. He is a handsome man, little master, and his face shone too at that moment.

" ‘I am not here to make sport of killing your creatures, jinay,’ he said. ‘I am on my way to do Our King's work. The King of Ehtashaam has entrusted me with an important mission and I am trying not to make a mess out of it.’ 

" ‘Perhaps, you should leave my animals alone, then.’

" ‘Where is the rest of your clan, or are you alone?’ The Chief slipped his sword into its sheath and the rest of the men followed suit. 

" ‘I belong to the tribe of Naqwi. We live in the mountains beyond the forest. Sometimes I come down and roam the forest.’ Natasha smiled at his expression. ‘Oh, I am always safe, the forest protects me. I am versed in the art of silence, and more.’

"The Chief shrugged his shoulders. ‘I wasn’t concerned about your safety. I have met resourceful women before. I know your kind can take care of themselves if they want.’

" ‘Really?’ Play crept into her voice. ‘And pray tell what do you know of my kind?’

"The Chief locked his eyes with hers. ‘Enough to get me by, jinay.’

"She looked away. ‘My father would have me invite the leader of a party that passes this way. We would be honored if you would be our guest in the mountains.’

“ ‘That, I am afraid, is not possible. I have less than a week to get to Soolan. Time and leisure are not on our side.’

“ ‘Well, why do you not stay at our place tonight?’ She raised her arm and gestured beyond the trees. ‘My people are barely fifty dragons away from this clearing. On horseback that wouldn’t be more than one-eighth of a Red-Sun day. You could be back before the Red-Sun rises tomorrow.’

“The Chief rapped his fingers on his sword hilt. I could see he his curiosity had been aroused. No one talked of Bedouin tribes resident in the Changa Manga area, and I conjectured he wanted to see how much truth this lovely stranger was telling him. 

“Natasha had sat down on her haunches, the slit in the skirt of her chaugha widening to reveal a gem-set dagger strapped to her thigh. Your pater must have noticed it, but he said nothing to her about removing it. Instead he gestured with his hand and one of the men strode forward and placed a longbow and a quiver full of shiny, hippogriff-feathered arrows on his palm.

“ ‘Mali!’ the Chief called out. I ran to him and bowed. ‘You will prepare a pouch of diamonds in ten moment glasses’ time. I will go with the lady to her clan and present her father with the pouch. If I am not back by midday tomorrow, three warriors are to be sent out to look for me in the mountain range beyond Changa Manga. The caravan and the rest of the Guard will move on.’

“ ‘But Ameer! Why not take three warriors with you right now?’ Arsalaan, second to your pater in command, inquired.

“ ‘The caravan needs all of the convoy. I will not risk an incomplete guard on the watch.’ Your pater paused. ‘If I do not return, Mali will tell the men about my replacement.”

“Your pater glanced at Mali, then at Moona The Saber Arm, a smile playing on his lips. Moona bowed his head slightly, acknowledging the Chief’s smile. 

Arsalan protested again, but the Chief’s mind was made. He cross strapped the bow and quiver to his back, and jumped onto his horse. He trotted the horse over to where Natasha sat watching him. Light from the Eye pooled at her feet, cuddling up to her shadow, and as he bent down to offer her his hand, she crouched and leapt up nimbly onto the horse’s back. The Chief drew his hand back, amusement making crowfeet around his eyes, and jerked the reigns. The horse lunged, leapt across an Everlasting bush, and disappeared into the dark.”

The rest, Mali said, was uneventful. My father returned from the mountains safely – and brought Natasha with him, his new bride. The men raised eyebrows but they didn’t dare question him, and my father himself did not advance information. 

They crossed Gandola in two Red-Sun days, and Mali said the new mistress must have brought the luck of the gods with her, for although the desert shrieked both nights and the sands howled and bubbled, not a single person or animal went missing. They reached Soolan a day before they were due. The Chief presented the Emperor with gifts and scripture from Our King, requesting him to send two bags of the flying powder back to Ehtashaam with the Chief.

The Emperor, Mali said, drooled over the treasures; when the time came for them to take their leave, he had one leather bag filled with the alchemist’s powder. The other, he ordered, was to be filled with a sand, which he claimed was the powder mixed with a stronger residue proven efficacious in making rugs fly and support more than ten people at one time. 

Our King’s shamaan, when they returned, just had to take a whiff of the sand bag to declare it had nothing more magical than deer dung in it.

I laughed when Mali said that. He could be very witty when he wanted to.

The laughter died on my lips when I looked back toward our hut

My stepmother was standing at the hut’s window. It was too far to make out her eyes, but I felt certain she was watching me. I sketched out her profile in the flickering light of the candles in the hut, and knew she was eating a crow pattie from the way she held something in her hand and tore at it now and then with her teeth. 

I decided I didn’t like her. I didn’t like her at all. 

Which was fine, considering I didn’t have to stay around her all day or do chores for her. That was what the slaves were for. 

But it wasn’t fine. Not fine at all.

Because that was the day I discovered that the silent, cold figure of my new mother standing at the window, whilst I sat in the Red Plains at least twenty mules away from the hut, scared the Hades out of me. Knobs of flesh had appeared on my skin on seeing her silhouette.

There was something terrifying in her shape, in her body to me.

I didn’t know what it was. Not then. 

3

I started avoiding Natasha.

It began as one act that turned into a ceremony, then a ritual.

I used to get up early in the morning long before the roosters in Murad’s coop had begun to crow. I brushed my teeth with a banyan miswaaak. After morning ablutions from the water bucket Mali placed in the hut’s sleeping quarters, I gobbled down crusted bran pieces dipped in honey and milk, put on my striped chaugha, and dashed to the Madrassah, a huge enclosure one dragon from the hut in the outskirts of the Red Plains. There I practised sword fighting, archery, and balance, with the sons of other warriors. I practised till the Red-Sun rose to a point above my head, then retired to the Teaching Hut in a corner of the enclosure, where Ramesh, the Village Master, taught us astrology, astronomy, a history of our people, and the geography of Ehtashaam.

Manda Village was located near the only river in the Red Plains, the Manda River. The Red Plains was a stretch of land draped with red dust for at least two hundred dragons in the north of Diir, the Chief City of Ehtashaam. We had cool, clean water and plenty of food from crops sown in the Red Plains throughout Our King’s Year. Cattle was numerous, deer, goats and chamielieons the primary livestock; crows, roosters, bats, larks and cooing birds comprised the poultry. I guess we were a prosperous village. My family, enjoyed a certain privilege because of my father’s work.

Leniency at the Madrassah, however, was not one of them. Ramesh made me work harder than the rest of the pupils, declaring that I needed to work up to my father’s expectations, to glorify his name. 

Previously I always tried squirming out of the extra practice sessions he assigned me.

But from the time my stepmother saw me talking to Mali ‘til the night the Misshapen’s harp sang in the Graveyard of Eternity, I didn’t miss a single session, not one.

That was the first move.

I began waking up earlier. Now, I was the first to enter the Madrassah and the last to leave. At dusk I took the long way home. 

But before I did, I’d walk around the enclosure to the frog pond at its back. The enclosure was ten dragons away from Manda River, and Ramesh had dug two narrow, deep ravines from the riverbank to the pond, one leading into it and the other away. Ramesh said it ensured a continuous supply of fresh water as needed. He had also hammered a corrugated iron sheet into each ravine, which, he said, controlled the flow of river water into the pond. Sturdy jute ropes tethered the boards to trees, looping over branches, enabling him to lift the boards when he wanted. He was quite proud of his handiwork. 

I’d sit ten mules from the pond and watched the bullfrogs of various sizes and colors leap, croak, and splash in the water. Some were black toads. Ramesh must have paid a lot to get his hands on them since a black toad was a rare animal. Some toads, moreover, were horned; tiny pointed, scaly protuberances in their heads that changed color if one attempted to walk towards them. Ramesh had warned us not to go close to the pond, or to rile them up.

“Spit poizzon,” he had once said to us, drooling the word out in a thick smack of the tongue. “The horned ones can spit deadly poizzon up to three mules from where they sit looking harmless in the pond. And don’t fool yourselves into thinking there is antidote available in the Village, or in Barsaat. The most lethal poizzon in the world. A drop on your skin and you rot to dung where you stand in half a moment glass’s time.”

He got them at Barsaat, he said, the City of Rains across Manda River beyond the Red Plains in the east. Gave several gold dinars for three pairs.

“Three pairs,” he gloated on. “Enough poizzon to kill every fish in the river and anyone who touches the water.”

I asked why keep them in a pond where they could hawk up poison and spray it on any passerby? Or, worse, what if they spat up poison into the pond, killing the other frogs, and then the poison could go into the river and—

“Hold your horses, you crazy child!” Ramesh held up one callused hand, looking disgusted. “You think I’m a fool like you, eh?” I kept my mouth shut, deeming it wise, and his voice became hard and threatening. “You cannot go very near to the pond. I have placed an invisible fence around the pond, protected by Solar Mantra. Any who tries to cross the fence will turn to stone, burn in the most severe agony for half an hour-glass’s time, and then be hurled back to the enclosure...”

There had been gasps and oohs at that. I looked away, bored. I had a decent grasp of astronomy and astrology and I knew Solar Mantra became ineffective at night. Ramesh was trying to make us stay away from his precious collection, and I did not begrudge him that. Even at twelve I understood people have strange obsessions. His was collecting weird reptiles.

“...and about the poizzon getting into the pond and the river,” he leered all around him in triumph, “I told you there was no antidote in the Village. I didn’t say there was none at all. Rest assured the poizzon can’t get into the river, ye dumbnuts.”

That there was an unseen barrier around the pond was true. Hamid, son of Moona and my best friend, had tried getting close, only to return looking disgusted and a little scared.

“Some bloody wooden thing in one’s way, Noni,” he declared, his yellow teeth floating out of his face. “It pokes one in the belly. I reckon if the invisible fence is real, so might the Mantra.”

I hadn’t told him the truth, respecting once again Ramesh’s toils to obtain the toads.

#

After most had left the Madrassah I stayed by Ramesh’s pond ‘til the last fireflies of light were smothered by imps of darkness. Only then I got up, flung my bag over my shoulder, and began trudging the long way home.

I walked to the river and strolled along the water, following its flow, until the wooden bridge came into sight. There, I turned west to reach the Black Marshes, a dense, boggy piece of land, where water from the river streamed in and died. I waded through the shallows, whacking through thorny bushes and weeds with my wooden sword, ‘til I came upon two stone pillars that marked the end of the bog ... and the beginning of the Graveyard of Eternity.

The Graveyard was thousands of years old, legend said. Our old folk didn’t talk about it much, but like any forgotten land with a strange history, the Graveyard had spawned many tall tales with the passage of years. When I was eight Barkat the Village Beggar had countless that had never failed to freeze my blood.

“There are good reasons it’s called the Graveyard of Eternity,” Barkat told Hamid and me, his one jaundiced eye staring right at us, pus drooling out from the other’s socket; he lost that one when Farmer Nadeem’s cataract-stricken, crazy bull had broken out and charged at the old Beggar snoring in the farmer’s fields. The bull had gouged out the eye with its horn even as he slept.

“Legend says the Old Masters who shaped the Red Plains in the beginning of time used to come down from the seven skies and bury their dead in this Graveyard. They were makers of space and time. It was said that any who glimpsed them climbing down the Ladder of Lomark - Lomark the Keeper of heavens - would go crazy; his limbs would turn fall out of their sockets, his face become a cobweb in which spiders would come and feed on maggots breeding in his flesh.

“The Old Masters were invincible to all enemies except Azraeil, the Angel of Death; so when one of them died, the rest would come down the Ladder, bury him in the Graveyard. They cast runes and spells plucked right out of the mosaic of time to protect the exhumation or desecration of the body ... for it is known that the body of an Old Master does not rot. It stays untouched through the course of eternity. Hence, the name of the graveyard.”

Barkat shifted on the ground - he always sat on his haunches, I could never understand why -, pulled out a pouch of niswaar, tipped some powdered tobacco on his palm, and sniffed ‘til his yellow eye turned a hideous crimson and began to water.

“Got to get more from that conniving, thieving rug rat Noori,” he muttered, replacing the pouch in his shirt. “One of these days, a banshee’s gonna get his sorry behind and I’d be none too sorry for that.” He let out a bellow of laughter and Hamid smiled politely at him. I didn’t bother.

“So that’s the story of the makers and users of the Graveyard,” he continued, occasionally wiping at the bleary eye. “Some say, though, that creatures other than the Masters also began to use the place. There are stories about misshapen hippogriffs and dragons that would crawl to the Graveyard as they neared death. They lay amidst the black stone spirals that abound in the Graveyard - mind you, each spiral marks the body of a Master – and licked them, hoping the nearness of the Master would ease the agony of dying.

“Mother of the Sacred Cow! Sometimes I go to the Graveyard, and once I saw a unicorn lying there under the tall, dark trees. Its silver horn was streaked with gore, and there were gashes around its belly like it had a fight with a dragon or something. It lay there panting and trembling, and I wanted to go in there and kill it, end its suffering you know (maybe cut off the horn; it pays handsomely in some markets), but I was too scared to go near the stone spirals that continue on and on. You know, no one's ever seen the end of the Graveyard. Folks say that it doesn’t have one ... that if you venture too deep in, cross the hundreds of tree lines and bushes and stone pillars and spiral piles, you may stumble onto the Ladder itself. And you know what happens to any who does? If you see the Ladder you must climb it and it takes you ... straight to the first sky where Israfel, the Doom Piper plays his tuneless melodies to you.” Barkat shuddered and made the sign of the Evil Eye. “So I reckon no one’s ever dared to go too deep in.

“So, I stood there, watching that dying animal thrash about in agony. Something strange happened then.” We leaned forward. “A peculiar mist rose from the ground. It began to swirl around the unicorn, moving faster and faster, and once I thought I saw a flash of red in it. Hanuman the Merciful! The mist was like a thundercloud that burst apart all of a sudden and sprayed rainbow water on the creature, which became motionless as soon as it saw the cloud. The water changed color as it snaked on the creature’s belly, ran down its head, dripped onto the ground; and it shone. It shone like the Red Sun itself ... only it had every color imaginable in it. 

“The unicorn began to shudder; it had stopped neighing. Water curled toward its horn. The animal opened its mouth a last time, then its head sank back. It was dead.”

We had been sitting outside the enclosure. Afternoon was gently putting on the robes of a somber evening. When Barkat stopped it seemed to me as if a wicked wind had sighed somewhere behind me. 

Hamid elbowed me; he had gotten bored and probably wanted to go and look for dragonflies instead of listening to the old beggar ramble. I didn’t respond. I wanted to listen to the whole story. It drew me in a way I did not understand. 

The beggar snuffed some more niswaar, cleared his throat, and continued, “As I was saying, the Graveyard is used by other creatures now. I’ve never heard of humans using it. I reckon folks are scared of what might happen to the dead buried in that graveyard. Perhaps the fear is justified. After all, there is the legend told by the Wanderer from beyond Gandola.”

Barkat finished in a whisper. I looked into his eye; it had gone dreamy.

“The stranger told the story of a Creature, of a Thing out of time, something that just happened to be, that wasn’t created nor was in any god’s plans to make. The Wanderer said It came down to us from beyond the seven skies thousands of years ago; It came down so hard on the ground that the force of Its impact killed every living thing in its vicinity for seven thousand dragons in each direction, and carried It straight through the surface into the heart of the earth. There the Thing started tunneling its way to the surface. It crawled through fourteen levels of the earth, burnt through Pataal, ‘til charred and blackened, It reached the surface ... only to find that Its fate had already been decided.” 

Barkat wiped his forehead. There had been rivulets of perspiration coiling this way and that. Then he laughed, a squeaky, rattling, unpleasant sound that made my hair prickle. Hamid edged away from him a little.

“Har har,” went the old beggar. “Seems like the gods are not without a sense of humor, eh? And perhaps there is a god that still likes us human beings ... because the Wanderer said the Thing was the Harbinger of Death, the Bearer of End Days for the earth and every creature on it. 

“Yet when It reached the surface, It couldn’t break through. 

“It couldn’t break through because it found Itself under the Graveyard of Eternity.”

“Hanuman be bathed!” I said, softly.

“Yes! The Thing couldn’t get out because of the power leaching out from the Masters’ bodies, of the ancient spells and runes that guarded them. The Master’s bodies, said the Wanderer, came alive in the earth then, grasped Its head, and fixed It into the ground, so It couldn’t get away. 

“They put it to sleep. And there It lies buried too, in the Graveyard of Eternity, and will lie there until the End Days are upon us when Israfel himself will descend the Ladder and play his tuneless tunes in the Graveyard, and the earth will remember the Ancient Words spoken by the Masters when it was made along with the skies aeons ago, Words that will release the Masters’ grip on It, waking It up, letting It loose upon the earth, bringing the Last Day.”

Barkat stopped and sighed Then he shuddered, a drawn-out, arched, reptilian movement, repulsive in the way he did it. I felt a strange sensation in my head as if I were about to float out of my body.

“But some say,” Barkat whispered, “some say that even before the Last Day, the Ancient Words can be known. There are ways of making the earth remember them, tell them, whisper them into your ears. Folks say the Wanderer himself knew a few of the Words, that he admitted he could use the Words to wake the Thing, but he said it was too dangerous. No one here knows the Words or the means to remember. The Wanderer went away after a while and far as I know, there is not a man living who remembers the Words once flung to the winds by the Master.

“So the legend of the buried Thing lives still, because of which, folks say, no living thing can hope to make a home of the Graveyard. Most of them are terrified of going there and …”

 The old beggar broke off with a gasp as he held his hand to his eye. I could see a reddish fluid beginning to leak out of the socket.

“Darned fake niswaar!” he said with a hiss. “I’m gonna rip that whore pup Noori’s head right off.”

He had begun to mumble to himself and as we watched, there was a faint pop! from his nose. Next I knew was blood spraying down his shirt, and he was cursing and slapping his nose, and we became scared and ran away.

#

The House of the Thing, the Graveyard of Eternity rose in front of me, silent, brooding, once I reached the stone pillars at the end of the Black Marshes. The place forbade noise. It was home to silence, homage to eternal death. Sound drowned in quietude here, the known prostrated before secrecy.

 I crossed the piles of ebony spiral stones inscribed with strange runes to reach a huge mound in their center. The mound rose from the earth like a blood blister on a dead jinn’s palm, grey and black and dusty. I climbed to its top and pulled out the astronomy parchment from my bag. I located different stars in the sky, matching them with the positions in the parchment. Once a week I also noted down the position of the Blue Eye and studied its movement with the help of Ramesh’s notes.

But studying was not the only thing I did there.

I had begun to map the Graveyard itself.

I had been going to the place for a month now, wandering amidst the stones that littered the earth like human skulls, layered with old dung and guano. I waded through the black rain pools that had collected in crevices and fissures in the ground. The place existed in never-ending shadow dropped by the hundreds of bargad and juniper trees that lined, encircled, and crossed the spiral stones, and the metallic, bitter taste of empty eternity spiced up by humidity from foliage and dying bark crawled into my mouth. I had come to know quite a bit of this stretch of the Graveyard.

I now planned to go beyond the line of trees that stood watching from a distance of a hundred mules from the stone pillars.

I began to mark the piles. I broke off tree branches, collected twigs from the ground, and placed them around the piles that formed a line from the pillars to the tree guard. I did that because I did not want to get lost in the immensity of this dark place, because I wanted to venture farther out in it ... and because I did not want to think about my stepmother.

Lately, there had been days. Special days.

I shuddered when I thought about them...or the nights...how often I had seen her standing in my sleeping quarter when she must have thought I was asleep. Standing there, the contours of her body traced out by the candle light, one hand to her head, massaging her temples, the other behind her, always behind her, her legs spread a little, feet turned outward slightly away from each other (oh, how I hated her feet), still in the dark, watching me. All the while I huddled in my straw bed, trying not to breathe. 

Sometimes I fancied I saw her body change in the slivers of light from the hut’s window.

The woman Mali had described to me was so different from the one who watched me so during the darkness of the night. He had said she was pretty, kind, courageous and warm.

This one turned to a cold, terrifying hag at night. She only spoke to me when my father was around. Otherwise, even when we took supper together, she just looked at me silently, and the way she looked at me, so darkly, made me want to become a shadow and disappear. 

Her green eyes...and her feet...

Therefore I wandered the Graveyard and I ventured deep in. Deeper than any one had ever before, I was sure. I stayed in the Graveyard ‘til the Blue Eye began to shine like a pale blue rose in the night sky, and only then did I go home to meet my father and her at supper.

And it was while I was exploring the Graveyard, its inner recesses, that I finally stumbled upon The Well That Never Ended.

#

I had plunged deeper into the Graveyard that evening. The Blue Eye had been especially bright, I remember, even though the Red Plains had been breathing hard all day because of which crimson dust had been rising in the wind, quivering, dissolving, frolicking; making a bloody caul of grime against the sky.

There had been a crimson storm in the Red Plains that day.

I cut through underbrush, waded through puddles, and skirted the drifts of spiral stones. A strange silence had begun to pervade the Graveyard. I stopped to look around. Darkness, foliage, and the neverending stones; but something had begun to scare me, something was wrong. 

I could feel it in the air ... a whiff of sickening sweetness like crops of sugar cane rotting in the sun. The smell mixed with the stink of time sitting stagnantly in this sepulcher of the Masters to form a charged cloud of anticipation. 

Something was about to happen. 

I thought about turning back then, just leaving this place of lost hopes and evil memories, turning and going back to my house, saying farewell to the graveyard, never to return here. I had already seen more of it than any human likely had before. I did not need to see ...

... the ladder...the ladder of Lomark...and climb it...

... any more of it.

But you do, my mind whispered. You do need see to see what’s farther in. You do, because of the woman. The hag. 

I went on.

I walked for very long that night. I walked ‘til my feet grew blisters and the inner part of my thighs became raw, began to burn with every step. Walked ‘til the Blue Eye turned dark, the ground began to shake, and the stones in the Graveyard started shrieking.

Turn back li’l boy, the stones wept and cried, turn back Warrior Blood. Turn back before it’s too late. Something comes...

No, I will not, I answered in my head, for your heart hides something warm and precious and I want to learn its secret. I want to know why the Graveyard speaks to me now while I am so tired that I feel as if I exist between worlds. I want to know whether Barkat the old Beggar told me the truth about the Old Masters. Above all, I want to know what the woman-hag wants, what does she want from me.

So I kept walking while the Graveyard moaned and rumbled ... until I stumbled hard on something and fell down.

I lay there on my back on the ground and looked at the sky. The Blue Eye stared back at me through the crisscrosses of leaves and branches that hung above me nodding their heads at my efforts. A black shadow whooshed above, screeching its bird-tongue at me.

I levered my elbows to hoist my body up. I looked at what had tripped me.

It was the edge of a rock protruding from the ground.

Slowly I got to my feet. My knees had taken a scraping and pain flared when I tried to wipe dirt off my hand on the skirt of the robes. I would need to clean the wounds when I got back. This was graveyard dirt, filthy.

I examined the rock.

It was a grey-sparrow colored boulder, at least four mules in diameter. There were dried guano splotches on it along with reddish black floral growth I did not recognize; it covered the boulder like a colony of red ants. The boulder rose out of the ground, shaped like a flat cone that tended in an apex, perhaps twice a mule-length across. The surface of the apex was graven with twisted lines and markings, symbols and circles some of which I recognized from my astrology notes. Black runes. The texture of the runes was different from the rest of the boulder, rugged, more weatherworn... and warmer when I lay my hand on them.

Likely from sunlight falling on it all day, I told myself. It did not ring true however.

I put my bag down and placed both hands on the boulder.

The runes were actually hot. I could feel heat waves coursing up from the stone, trembling feverishly against my palms, making the apex shudder a little. 

It struck me then that the apex was a stone cap. 

This was not a boulder. It was a well.

I dug my feet in the ground and gave the cap a tentative shove. It did not budge. I leaned forward on and pushed with all of my weight behind my arms. There was a slight tremor in the cap; some of the red-black growth between the cap and the lip of the well came off and fell twisting to the ground. 

I shoved again, throwing myself against the stone ... and with a cracking, grating sound, the cap slipped - in the darkness, some of the runes seemed to change patterns, uncoiling, unfurling - then the cap was careening to a side, flipping over, as it tumbled to the ground with a booming metallic crash. 

A stream of heat rushed out of the well’s mouth and enveloped me. I felt it sear my face, char some of my hair... then it was gone.

I stared into black eternity bottled up in a minuscule spot of existence.

There was absolute darkness in the well.

I leaned in. There was no hint of light crossing into the well. The Blue Eye failed even though it illuminated most of the Graveyard. It was as if the well sucked in any vestige of brightness, absorbed it the moment it fell through its mouth.

I picked up a pebble and dropped it into the well. I waited. 

There was no sound, no splash, no thud, no clunk.

A limbo of eternity trapped in the earth.

I decided to return here when the Red Sun shone down the next day.

Even then I knew daylight would not affect the blackness in the well ... that infinity doesn’t get dispelled ... that The Well Never Ended.

My instinct proved to be correct.

#

I began coming down to the well in the morning before I was due at the madrassah, then late at night. For that I had to wake up a bit earlier than I normally would. I did not mind.

I had The Well That Never Ended to look forward too. 

That it did not end, ever, was a doubtless truth in my mind now. For I had tried everything to gauge its depth and had failed

It repelled daylight. The interior was as dark during the day as at night. A black hole gaping in the ground, a wound that bore right through the earth’s body and out to some unknown land an infinity away. I had hesitantly lowered my arm into the well. When it went through into darkness I shuddered; it was like pushing through a gossamer substance, not solid, not liquid, not air; a tangible drifting ether that would cling in droplets to my arm.

I lowered a forty-snake jute rope in, which I borrowed from Hamid, and the rope kept going down, down. I watched it twist into the darkness, disappear, as snake after snake of its length crawled in, and a sense of unreality washed over me. By the time the last snake was left in my hands, I was feeling nauseated from vertigo. 

I pulled the rope up: Not an iota of dust or wetness throughout its length. 

The Well That Never Ended.

It did become my friend.

I began spending all of my free time here. I drew circles in the dust around it, tied a piece of red cloth to its lip, making it mine. I would call down it, my words echoing, mixing, the syllables melting together, garbling; sometimes it felt as if the well were answering me back in its hollow stone tongue. My words spiraled back to me and comforted me. Wrapped around me. Made me feel secure. Perhaps some echo of the Masters’ existence had survived in the well. I loved it.

At times I tied the rope to a juniper tree that stooped close to the well; fastened the other end to a bamboo bucket I had built, place the bucket on the well’s edge, climb into it ... and push the bucket off.

The bucket would drop with me inside it. Drop like a pellet of dragon dung from the sky, picking up speed, strands and ropes and vapors of darkness sliding across my face, catching in my nose and eyes, wriggling through my hair; while I held onto the edges of the bucket, whooping and screaming. Down I went, spinning and bumping into one wall, then the other; until the rope came to an end and the bucket jerked to a stop and swung in the darkness at least a dragon below the surface of the earth. I would then stand and climb the rope, wrapping myself around it. Upon reaching the surface, I would draw the bucket up. The long climb up would not take me more than perhaps an hour-glass’s time and that was fine. I had been climbing and clinging to ropes in the madrassah for a long time now.

That the bottom of the bucket might gave way or the rope snap were thoughts that simply didn’t occur to me then.

Sometimes I stayed in the well at night. I would sit in the bucket, hanging over this abyss of forever, separated from limbo by a board of bamboo wood. Sit quietly and listen for any sounds from Below ... any words.

Ancient words.

For I understood now why I lingered in the Graveyard and by the well. I was looking for the Masters’ magic.

I just did not understand why.

Be patient, Warrior Blood. The well would roll up my whispers and cries and send them echoing back to me. The Masters have their reasons for calling you. No one knows about the deity or the devil, but darkness crouches everywhere, fluttering black wings, and sometimes it clutches corpses in form of answers. So be patient. Wait.

So I waited, and did not tell any one about the Well. Not even Hamid.   

4 

The children began to disappear as the time of the Red-Sun neared its end, calling the White-Sun of winter to take its place.

The first vanished at dusk, wailed his weeping mother to the warriors. His father had sent him to the fields to fetch a bale of hay. The boy, eleven King-years old and brown-pated, had taken his dog with him. The fields were five dragons away from the Village. 

Only the mongrel made its way back, its tongue drooling, and eyes rolled up. 

The warriors organized a search party that set off to comb the fields. They returned with the boy’s shirt. It was crumpled, torn, and red with blood.

They said they had found it in the newly planted sugar cane fields. A scarecrow stuffed with watermelon husks had been wearing it. They also brought back something else they had spotted in the scarecrow’s shadow. They refused to show it to the boy’s parents and took it to the High Priest.

Mali told me the Priest glanced at the ragged stump, mumbled something under his breath, and threw powder on the tendons.

One of the fingers wiggled, bent, and swept the palm clean again.

The priest turned absolutely white.

“Save us, Hanuman. Have mercy.” He massaged his shaved head. “It is no wild animal. Something else has come to live in the Red Plains. Something that has no right to be here!”

“What do you mean?” The warrior who had been holding the hand wiped his palm on his chaugha.

 “I mean, you stupid dragon fart,” said the priest, “that something not human has come to the Plains. Now go and fetch the Chief. We have to spread word. Tell him to meet me in the Enclosure.”

The warrior abided. Panchayat, a High Meeting of the village heads was held that night and a curfew at dusk was agreed upon. No child was to be sent to the fields at any time without a full-grown man. No adults would be allowed to roam the Village at dusk. A night watch was set up, armed with clubs, swords and longbows, who would watch the Village from dusk to dawn.

No precaution was to any avail.

The children continued to go missing days after days, weeks after weeks. Unlike the first, these happened at night.

In daytime we were allowed to go to the madrassah as long as we returned before the first tendrils of dusk wormed across the sky. Therefore I could only visit the well in the early morning now. We continued our lessons, and the children kept vanishing. It got so that some people began to talk about leaving the Village. A veil of fear had fallen on Manda. No one knew where the creature, whatever it was, had come from or how it slipped into the huts through locked doors.

I watched my Village crumble under the mountain of terror...

...and I watched my stepmother stand over the its mounting ruin.

Things had been happier before she had come to us. 

I remembered the special nights... and days.

She would glide into my room, wearing her chaugha, that accursed green chaugha, its soft bottoms whisking against the hardwood floor of the hut. Her eyes of emerald fire, her lips like petals of chrysanthemums trembling in the wind. She didn’t say much to me during the day, just showed those lovely teeth clinging to her jaws like pearl leaches. Once or twice she spoke in my father’s presence, her horrible booming voice hurting my ears.

“You are such a handsome young boy, Noni.” She laughed, the sound like a pack of hyenas snapping at each other. “You should follow in your father’s footsteps. Become a warrior. Perhaps find a woman even more beautiful than me.”

My father grunted approvingly at this remark and went back to sharpening his sword against the grindstone.

Once, I woke up a little later than usual. My father had left the hut. I yawned, got out of bed, bent over the pail of water Mali had left for me.

I jerked back with a cry.

Her reflection stared up from the water, the witch-grass eyes swimming out at me.

I spun around. No one was there. 

There was no doubt she terrified me.

Perhaps that is why I did not tell my father or even Hamid about the day she had come close to me, while I sat writing on the history parchment after breakfast, and put her bare arm around me.

“Look at my fingernails, Noni!” she whispered, her lips brushing against my earlobe. I dropped the quill, which smudged the letters on the parchment.

“Look at them,” she said again, her voice grating against my brain. “Are they not beautiful? Notice how the pink merges with the natural shade of my skin. I paint them myself with juices I extract from herbs. It’s a gift I have.”

I began to tremble, the slightest of movements I desperately struggled to mask. 

“See my arms? Here, feel them!” She took my hand and caressed her arm with it. “Can you appreciate how soft and silky and spotless my skin is? I work on that.” Those gleaming pointed teeth appeared in the fissure of her mouth. I saw a sheen of spit on the upper row. “I can do wonders with flesh. I can stay eternally beautiful. Would you like to see more of my beauty, perhaps of the areas of a woman’s body you have never seen before?”

Fear erupted in my head, a fountain of mindlessness, as she slowly began edging my hand to her bosom. I shoved her back, leapt to my feet, grabbed my parchment, and fled the hut.

I heard her laugh behind me, and suddenly I wanted to turn back, grab my father’s sword, and plunge the blade into her neck.

Yesss, do that, a dark corner of my mind whispered, and the hag-woman will be back. She will be there sooner than you could pick up the scimitar. And once she does, well, sometimes children disappear ... and sometimes darkness clutches bloody corpses in form of answers.

I kept running.

But not confronting her did not mean I didn’t notice that she vanished during the night sometimes.

My father was a heavy sleeper but I wasn’t; not after I had seen her by my bedside. I often heard the door creak open at night while my father snored in his quarter. I heard a soft, thin wail outside our hut after she left and a low growl when she returned.

Hanuman! Mute and alone, I watched my father’s wife Natasha stand over the slow death of my village. Too afraid to tell any one what I suspected, and terrified not to. Later, how I would wish I had.

All the other children who disappeared were between ten and thirteen years of age.

I was twelve King-years myself.

#

Natasha went to Hamid’s house right after he was wrenched away by the darkness.

His parents grieved, his brothers shed tears, his sisters howled as only blood sisters can howl, but all of that was humankind weeping over memories and drifting bone dust. My best friend was gone and no amount of tears or wailing could bring him back.

My father sent Natasha with me to their house for Hamid’s last ceremonies. She wailed with his family, beating her breasts, tearing at her hair, bemoaning him as if he were her own. Hamid’s family looked at her with gratitude when Natasha fell in prostration before the God of Death, banging her head against the feet of the statue.

Me, I was reminded of something Barkat had said once, “When a child vanishes, it’s the cannibal witch who mourns him the loudest in public.”

I shed no tears. A river of ice had begun to meander through my being, turning every whisper of sentiment into the breath of the winter wind. 

I understood its purpose. I was being prepared for something.

Later Natasha took my arm and said she would drop me at the madrassah.

I said no.

She held my arm and looked into my eyes. I turned them vacant. I willed all thought away, because if she got a single whiff of what I knew, I might not live to take another...

...glance at the well...

breath.

Her grip relaxed. She beamed at me with those leach teeth.

I grinned back. It felt like a smile borrowed from one of the dead children.

Three nights later I went with Ramesh and the rest of the warrior children to visit Barsaat, the City of Rains, across Manda River.

Mela, The Great Fair, had come to the city. 

5

We crossed the bridge that arched over Manda River like a serpent. It was hardly ten dragons away from the field where The Great Fair had camped outside the gates of Barsaat. Raveel, the Governor of Barsaat was one of Our King’s advisors. Therefore, the city was well guarded, every trespasser checked for weapons. The merchants and the performers from The Great fair were not allowed into the city without an Ingress Pass stamped by a High Official.

I had never been to the Mela before. Riots and brawls often broke out at the Fair, so warrior children less than twelve King-years were not allowed. This year would be my first visit. Hamid’s disappearance had dampened my spirits, but I had been looking forward to this for some time. The Great Fair came to Barsaat every two years and I had heard much about the Fair’s wonders from Hamid who had been, as he was two year older than I.

“There are headless parrots that squawk from their bellies, I lie not, Noni!” Hamid would jump up and down in excitement. “And a boy that walks a huge wooden ball they call The Globe of Death. He walks it blindfolded, and the globe keeps rolling over a large pit of fire. Oh, it is amazing. And the sly fortune-tellers. Ah, they wear many-colored robes and turbans, and look into huge glass bowls, misty and cracked with the markings of fate, and they tell you your destiny. It has been said it was the Great Seer Meedaan of the Mela who wavered her fingers over her magic orb and told Our King’s brother Kahn about the Temple of the Eleven Eyes, and how it was his fate to rescue Princess Beenish from the dark pit under the temple. I tell you it’s one’s dream come true, it is, going to the Mela.”

But the boy who once fulfilled his dreams at the Fair was dead.

I walked with the others, staying close to Ramesh, as our little party reached the fairground and began to file in through the bat-wing entrance gates. The rest of the field was fenced off; armed guards attired in sharp blue walked the length of the fences, their tiny, suspicious eyes scanning the fairgoers for signs of mischief. There would be no rogue entrance at The Great Fair.

I passed through the swinging gates, last in line ... and entered a mythical land the like of which I had never seen. Not even in my dreams.

#

The fairground was a huge square, squirming with bits and pieces of very odd humanity, Hamid would have said. There were Barsaat soldiers, scabbards dangling from their cowhide belts, strutting about the field, fingers tapping sword hilts, eagerly waiting for a brawl with a vagabond. Hundreds of the said vagabonds consisted mainly of Barsaat citizens, Villagers, warriors, minstrels, performers, and peddlers pushing vending carts through the throng. Stall keepers screamed, cajoled, and enticed fairgoers with shiny ornaments, dull antiques, ‘dee-lee-cious, ixxawtic foods brought together from all the known lands’. Acrobats hopped up and down, somersaulting, cartwheeling, walking on their hands; their dirty, fungus-worn toes waved in the air for dinars, grabbing and saluting if any were flung their way. 

I saw two robed women slip through a row of carts laden with ripe, fly-covered fruits and vegetables. One’s cowl lifted a little, and a thick, green, pus-covered tongue darted out and scooped up a fat fruit fly. Shocked, I stared at them, but Ramesh grabbed my arm and pushed me on roughly.

“Do not look directly at them, boy!” he whispered. “They are churails. Do not look back. Glimpse their faces, and you’ll turn to Magma Stone.”

“Doesn’t any one else see them?” I sputtered, but he pretended to watch a minstrel play a golden flute on his left.

I swallowed and looked away.

Up ahead a thick jute rope bound off a large pit. Ramesh veered and we followed, but not before I had the chance to glance at what was inside the pit. It blazed with fire. I stopped and edged closer to the rope. A sickening-sweet smell of melting fat and roasting flesh wafted into my nose. I leaned in a little; shadows squirmed inside the fire....

... And a huge black serpent, head still ablaze, burst out of the fire and lunged at my face.

I screamed and leapt back. My arm struck a seething cauldron on a sweet-maker’s stall and overturned it, spilling boiling lard and crackling jalebis all over the ground.

The burning cobra waved in the air, its ebony body jerking amidst the wrappings of fire. A fang dropped from its mouth to the ground, then he fell, twisting, back into the pit.

“You damned beetle-licker!” screamed the midget vendor, rushing out of his stall. He stooped to pick up jalebis from the ground with a dirty, oil-stained rag, blowing at the fried dough crisscrosses filled with sugar-syrup to clear away dust. “You bloody dung sniffer! I’m going to wring your...”

“You are going to do no such thing.” Ramesh stood above the vendor who jerked his head up and, on seeing Ramesh, paled a little. “The boy is the son of Our King’s Chief Guard. I should cut your head off for speaking to him that way.”

“My Lord!” blabbered the vendor, grabbing Ramesh’s feet and licking his boots. “Have mercy. I did not know...”

“Silence, fool!” Ramesh said. His eyes twinkled with amusement. “Get your sorry behind off the ground, go back to work...and for Hanuman’s sake, remove your filthy tongue from my boots.”

The vendor jumped up so quickly he almost fell, then tottered back to his stall, mumbling apologies.

“And you, boy,” Ramesh looked at me, “will explain what the Hades you were doing so close to the snake broth pit?”

“Snake broth?” I gaped at him. 

“Yes, you foolish lad,” He gestured at the pit. “Some of these vendors sell freshly prepared snake broth. It’s one of the strongest aphrodisiacs in the world; but since they cook them alive occasionally a serpent tends to get vicious. Why do you think they’ve roped the pit off?”

What rope would keep a burning snake from slithering out? I wanted to ask, but then I also wanted to know what an aphrodisiac was.

Ramesh shot me one last admonitory glance before striding away. 

I walked after him, gawking at one novelty or another, and since the wonders were aplenty, I had only a few moments to consider just how closely death had brushed past me.

An omen, was it? The black snake might have been a message from some...

“Augur! Augur!” some one yelled in my ears. “Come have your fate told. Come to The Amazing Augur from Soolan to hear what your stars are whispering today, tonight, or this week. Augur! Augur!”

 I eyed the tent beyond the screaming wench standing on top of a scaffold. The edges of the black tent were laced by red cloth; a fiery dragon stretched across the fabric, tongue darting out in an eternal hiss. A word was written on the belly of the dragon. As I looked at it, it seemed to squirm on the cloth, roiling like a dragon itself. One word. My heart hammered like a horseshoe maker, as I stared at it, my eyes riveted to the letters:

 KISMET

Kismet. Fate. Destiny. What do you want from me, mother? What fate is mine in the gaze of your dark, hungry eyes?

I trembled.

Who are you, hag-woman? What are you, cannibal witch? 

The dragon fluttered once as if in reply, then stilled.

“Come close, little boy!” said an old woman squatting on the ground near me, her teeth grimy with decay. “Come see the glass orb of impossible sights that only Israfel’s Flute could conjure up in the first heaven. Come to Mama Zakiya’s Ball of Wonders.”

“No, thank you,” I said, quickening my pace. I could see the sharp point of a dagger under the cloth of her skirt.

“Young master doesn’t want a glimpse in the charlatan gypsy’s bowl.” A tall man dressed in a blue tunic, holding a tray of clattering flagons and bottles, hurried alongside me. A mountebank. “Perhaps he’d like a bottle of Tarot Juice, or a whiff from the jeweled Holder of Haroon – named after his father -- to see what his future hold?”

“No, thank you,” I said, without looking back, and began to run now to catch up with the rest—

I jerked to a stop so violently that a hawker carrying a cage of headless parrots ran into me and fell sprawling to the ground.

“Watch where you stop, you filthy fly-popper!” He glared at me from the ground, and the headless parrots began to screech. 

“Fly-popper! Bloody, filthy fly-popper!” The headless parrots screeched. The shrill noise came from slits in their bellies. “Dirty, filthy fly-popper! Off with his head.”

“Sorry, sir!” I mumbled to the cursing hawker, glanced at the riled fantastic birds, and turned to talk to the mountebank...

He was gone with the river of the crowd.

The Jeweled Holder of Haroon – named after his father.

How did the mountebank know my father’s name was Haroon?

I combed the throng with my eyes. 

“Tarot Juice! Tarot Juice!” A loud voice shouted from somewhere behind a row of dancing white horses. Six young equestrian performers rode them, whooping, as the horses bopped and skittered in front of a small crowd. “Tarot juice for the soul. One drop, and the future unfolds before you like a magic rug.”

I began running to the voice, dodging hooves, ignoring furious shouts.

“Magic Potions to make silky hair cover your pate! Snake broth to stir the serpent in your loins. Tarot juice! Tarot juice.” The voice was fading away. Desperately I leapt over a barrel of ale beneath a wine maker’s stall, scanning the crowd for some sign of the mountebank.

I saw him.

He was hurrying away twenty mules ahead of me. His blue tunic flapped at his knees as he made his way through the fairgoers, the platter held high in front of him, like an offering to an unseen god.

I opened my mouth to yell at him, but he turned a corner at a lion-exhibitor’s booth and disappeared from sight. 

I reached the stall -- a part of me registered the golden lion swiping his paws familiarly at three lambs inside a cage – and raced around it.

A cavern gaped in front of me in a steep hill. This was the back of the fairground, where the camping field ended. The mountebank must have gone inside.

A headless parrot fluttered in a cage hung from planks by the mouth of the cavern. The bird’s green torso jerked. It flapped its wings and a minuscule eye-shaped slit suddenly opened up in its feathered belly, and the bird began to scream.

“THE CAVERN OF THE MISSHAPEN!” the headless parrot squawked. “COME SEE THE HUMAN MONSTROSITIES GATHERED FROM THE KNOWN LANDS! THE CROCODILE BOY FROM SOOLAN ... THE FEATHERED BABY FROM TOORKEY ... THE ARMLESS PAINTER FROM ARABIA .... THE HUMAN TOAD FROM THE VALLEY OF FIVE RIVERS! THEY’RE VICIOUS, BUT WE HAVE TETHERED THEM FOR YOU. COME SEE ‘EM ALL IN THE CAVERN OF THE MISSHAPEN! COME SEE THE HUMAN MONSTROSITIES.”

I shivered. The parrot squawked, fluttered once, and stilled. 

A wisp of smoke crawled out of the cavern, squirmed, and faded away

The cavern of the Misshapen. You sure you want to go in there, Noni lad?

I rubbed a thumb against my chaugha and entered. 

Behind me the feathered monstrosity began screaming again.

#

The cavern stank.

That was the first thing I noticed ... or gagged on.

It was a dank place with a low-hanging ceiling from which sharp rock fingers reached down to slice off a scalp or two. The ground was stony, but beds of straw had been spread on it, the moist stalks squishing under my sandal. The wetness added to the pungent odor of feces, sweat, and alienness.

Whatever the Misshapen were, humanity had seeped out of them a long time ago. I could both smell and feel it.

Lamplight from the walls showed me shallow pits and metal cages on both sides of the walkway in the center of the cavern. The cages were barred with sturdy wooden planks and the pits encircled by thick ropes.

They’re vicious, but we have tethered them for you.

What if the tethers broke? Were the ropes and cages spirited for any such contingency.

I glanced inside a pit on my right.

A baby crawled inside the pit. It crept on the wet mud on all fours; waved a tiny fist in the air, fell over one of the numerous tiny bushes planted in the pit. It cawed in surprise, and the skin of its back began to squirm. A huge serrated green feather burst out of its flesh and began to whip the air rapidly.

The baby rose in the air, a mule from the ground; flew across the bush and dropped down. It cooed with satisfaction.

I felt a bit nauseated. I moved on.

As I walked on, other things began to call out from the pits in all manner of tongues. Some monstrosities were visible, their strange, corrupted flesh crawling, hovering, flowing in the pits; others whispered from darkness never penetrated by light. They begged me for food and water. For flesh and blood.

I did not heed their calls. They were the Misshapen and were as such doomed to exist in the shadow of their masters’ wills.

A long, tattered arm, pockets of flesh bulging from it, shot out from a pit and snatched at my leg. I cried out and jumped back.

“Yessss!” something gurgled from the pit, from a throat long gutted. “We’re doomed to exist in that shadow. We the changed whom you fear and cage. But by all the gods that ever eyed the Red Plains, Noni lad, your Village has been caught by an eye that has gazed on the destruction of a thousand lands. Dharo, andharay ke basiyo. Is des mai who agyi haiiii!”

At that all the Misshapen began to shriek. Their dead, meaty voices rang in the cavern like wailing spirits hammering on stony walls. The walkway trembled; the mud in the pits boiled. Lamps fell clattering from the walls and went out; the dark crowded in, sharpening the odor of gangrenous flesh and bones.

I stood frozen, my vision crumbling, turning, fluttering like a pack of fortune cards in an evil wind. The darkness was in my head, it was the void of the well all over again ... but I was not alone. This time there were bleeding, living corpses around me, laughing hideously, clawing at the walls of their pits and their cages, rattling the bars, throwing themselves at ropes; and as I watched, terror whip-lashing my heartbeats faster, the ropes began to sizzle and smoke. The Misshapen’s screams turned to yowls of agony and rage as flames sprouted up from their skins and hides, licking their bloated bellies, climbing up their torsos gleefully.

The musical notes of a harp cut through the chaos; and every motion in the world ceased.

I still remember it, that sweet, sonorous tinkling, which might have dropped from the hands of a maiden peeking from the heavens. The music spilled and scattered everywhere, transforming bedlam into a heaven of birds and trees and beauty. I saw unicorns traipsing in a distant forest; fae-folk flying, circling and alighting on golden leaves. Bells rang in a distant temple; drums beat to the rhythm of life and wishful fantasies. Unimaginable, that such feeling could enter the hearts of mere humans; and I forgot everything, my terror, my doubts, my mother, and the Misshapen. Only love and unison existed. I forgot what fear was.

I forgot myself.

I have no idea how long it lasted. Perhaps a lifetime, in which I died and cried and lived and slumbered. When it was over I swooned to the ground and lay in a daze. I was born again in that moment, I think, and born perhaps to myself.

Later, when I felt I had the strength, I got onto my knees and then my feet. The cavern was lamp-lit again, other fairgoers plodding about, goggling at the Misshapen. I saw the monstrosities lumbering in their prisons, slow and peaceful. Their flesh was uncharred. The ropes held firm. The lamps were intact. 

I lurched on, holding my head. Had I a vision then, the thin sooty mist in the cavern having affected my brain? I knew that many fairgoers had been lighting up mudweed all around me -- it was a favorite with the Barsaat bunch -- and the smoke could have muddled up my head. Was that why the Misshapen did not look as threatening as before? For now I saw that none’s flesh crept or flowed. At worst they resembled animals; like the one which nestled in a huge bed of boughs and leaves and stared at me with watchful eyes ... or the one which hunkered low in its pit, cuddling a small harp to its chest.

I stared at the Misshapen with the harp, and a few phantom musical notes glimmered in my mind like lost jewels.

That had been no vision, but magic showered by this ugly creature that looked like a cross between a warebear and a dwarf. It grasped the harp in twig-like fingers, the littlest widdling with the strings. I stepped forward and paused at the edge of its pit. 

“Would you speak to me if I were to ask you something?” I spoke, a little haughtily, unsure if it would reply.

It did, and in a voice that shook me. There was love there, not hatred, the words gentle, falling off its tongue and wrapping around me the way...the way the echoes in the Well had, and that made me trust him.

“I would, little master. Whatever I can speak about,” he said, a smile spreading his animal lips apart.

I considered his words. His furry body was covered in hair, long strands of it falling into his eyes, such blue eyes shining above a brown snout and sharp tusks. It was disconcerting, the contrast. The harp shimmered on his chest like a fallen dream from a sleeping god’s eyelids. It was silver, crafted into the likeness of a pixie hardly bigger than the Misshapen’s forearm, sheep gut strings wrought tight across the pixie’s body from chin to its pointed shoes. It was a magnificent piece of workmanship. I wondered why the Misshapen’s masters had not taken it away.

“They cannot,” the Misshapen said. He had read my mind, just like the other one had. “I keep my brothers peaceful with the harp’s magic, or they would tear this place down.”

“Have you all been here long then?” I asked.

“We travel with the Fair, but I have come to them recently,” he answered, eyes downcast. “My brothers have been here for a long time, and before me, they were tamed with the worst of dark magic by their masters.”

“You speak as if they’re not your masters,” I said, marveling at his words. Brave, or foolhardy. The Misshapen’s masters could have him boiled in a snake broth pit if they so wanted.

“I have known greater masters,” he said, smiling.

The cavern was cold now, perhaps with the advance of evening outside for I could feel my vision turn shadowy. I had to get home before dusk...before the darkness was rent by…

... the hag-woman ...

… the unknown creature. 

I rose to leave. 

"At the least, one thing my brother said was true," he spoke, the unselfconsciousness of perhaps a thousand years’ making apotheosizing his words. "She is here. She who has poisoned countless lands will roost on your Village’s carcass too."

I sank back, then leaned forward. I touched the rope around his pit, feeling the power writhe in the fibers, the binding magic of the fair folk pulsing and hissing, pulling taut the scant hair on my hand.

"The hag-woman!" I whispered. "The cannibal witch! How can you know—"

"Ask what must be asked. Not what matters not." The Misshapen closed his eyes, and loops of flesh dripped from his eyelids onto the ground. 

All I had seen and known and become insensitive to whirled in my head like dust motes in a shaft of Red-Sunlight. The questions, the Old Masters, the Thing, the Well that bore through infinity. 

"Who ... who is she? What is my stepmother?" I said. Somewhere in the darkness, a Misshapen howled, coughed, and fell silent.

The Misshapen trembled. His limbs danced a jerky, twitching rhythm; his eyelids fluttered incessantly.

"Time!" he said, his voice hard like stone. “Time, the Whore of the Worlds, the Keep of Eternity…her seduction and her prowess, her secrets and her darkness, her beauty and her ugliness…the way she throws her head back and laughs at the living. 

“The Hag-Woman Was, Is and Will Be. She’s the mistress of Time and the eater of it. She steals strands of it from the past, present and future; spins a cocoon around herself, the beauty of the prettiest maiden in the moment-glass conjoined with the seduction of the deadliest siren, creating a waterfall of beauty and enchantment that washes over her forever, stupefying a human watcher, so they fall in love with her; helplessly, fatally.

“It’s the feet that give her away. Her feet. For that is what the Old Masters cursed her with. They turned her feet around, so at certain angles of light and space, the torrent of Time’s cunning misses her feet, and one can see what they are…what she is. Her feet turn and point backwards; and such is the power of the Old Masters that she can do nothing but wrap Time around her more firmly, so the person who gazes at her is all but blinded. Yet, there are those who can still see her true form, and they have named her kind pichal pairi, She of the Backward Feet!

“Where she comes from is a place near Gandola … or what at least is the glamor of that desert. Before the desert comes the forest and the mountain range which humans don’t cross any more. And behind those mountains is the Sea of the Dead the Bahr-e-Murdaar. The sea splashes the cliffs and mountain rocks, and it is at the feet of those mountains that the pichal pairi first touched land.

“The story has been handed down through the eons. No one knows where she first entered existence, only that it was in the depths of the Bahr ... and she was not alone. It was a tribe, a plague that rose from the sea and swarmed over the earth, devouring the powerful ancient civilizations of men and mages, damning the vast gardens and orchards of great kings, bringing down with sky-rending clamor the Towers of Golgotha, the ancient pillars of the heavens.

“I shall not tell the complete tale of how their curse was lifted off creation, but that the Old Masters themselves had to intervene. They came down the four heavenly Ladders placed in the earth’s corners. Thereafter followed such a battle that the sky wept bloody tears for a year and a day. The earth dried and curled on itself at the battleground, all life dispelled from the place by godly and ungodly flesh rotting to the skies. The pichal pairi fell from the Masters’ strikes like lizards from hut walls, but some Masters, despite their immortality, were grievously wounded as well. The sands of Time, the pichal pairi’s weapon, loosened from their frame and tumbled to the ground; and hence there came to be on earth the accursed desert Gandola.  

“The pichal pairi were banished from land, forced back into the sea, and thus the earth was freed from their fury and hunger; life once again allowed to prosper into peoples and civilizations.”

The Misshapen fell silent. Somewhere in the cavern I heard the feathered baby squeal and begin to cry.

I looked at him, this monstrosity with beautiful eyes and the kindest voice. His snout trembled; the nostrils flared open and closed. His eyes were still shut as if he were remembering old, forgotten truths.

Then something happened, which turned my blood cold.

He began to speak, his lips twisting, a black cracked, forked tongue shooting out and sliding over his jowls like a woken serpent.

“Look to the west, Hamza!” he snarled, and thick grey saliva drooled from the corner of his lips to the ground. “That’s where Afrasyab’s army of darkness will cross over with his Dyos. Keep the mountains behind you, and do not forget Amar’s Zanbeel...”

He began to sputter and choke, his hands shooting to his throat and gripping it. I scrabbled back, slipping on the wet mud, my eyes wide open. He writhed, face bulging, and, Hanuman help me, his shadow was rising from the ground, covering his body like a swarm of ants.

 “Run, run, little master,” The Misshapen thrashed his head. Strands of blackness wrapped around his neck, flying into his mouth as he struggled to speak. “I change now, and if you don’t run, so will you. Light turns on itself and space burns. The ... the pichal pairi were banished ... all but one. And she has lived down time, she has spat venom wherever she has gone. I can’t help you more than this, but ... take my harp. It will play for you when you need it to. Now run. RUNNN!”

As he yelled an arm shot out from the darkness around his body and clawed at my chaugha for purchase. I fell back, and the arm flailed and disappeared into the whorl. The pixie-harp glimmered near the Misshapen’s contorting body. He rolled on the ground and his foot struck the harp, making it squeal in protest.

I lunged forward, grabbed the harp, and turned to run.

“There’s poison within them but a blessing without,” the Misshapen growled his last nonsensical words to my back, and then I was running. 

I ran like a devil myself.

#

Twilight was deepening as I made my way back to the Village. Overhead the night opened its single Blue Eye and yawned, flashing innumerable golden teeth at me. 

The pixie-harp lay nestled under my chaugha, the sheep gut strings rough against my bare skin. As I walked, the strings jangled and twanged, whispering secrets inside my head all the way home.

Forge the way, Warrior Blood! They spoke to my heart. There is only one way, for the hag-woman will not die of mortal hands. Darkness is her cloak, fear her fodder. The Village is her stronghold now, where she’s at her most powerful. So forge the way, grind the brambles into dust, lead her to....

I listened and pondered. 

I slept a dreamless sleep that night.

It was the last undisturbed slumber I ever had.

6

My father left the Village on Our King’s next mission three days after I visited The Great Fair. I was at the madrassah parrying with a mate when Mali came running to the enclosure.

“Little master! Your pater...” he gasped and huffed. “He’s leaving in half an hour-glass’s time, and wants to talk to you before he goes.”

I glanced at Ramesh who sat on his charpoy under a date tree, puffing at a hookah. He nodded, his lips sucking at the metal pipe, smoke drifting about his head like a crown. I gritted my teeth. I would surely have to make up for the lost time practicing late into the night, which meant I would not be able to visit the Graveyard as I had planned.

“Lead the way, Mali.” I slipped the sword into its scabbard and looped it through my belt.

We hurried to the outskirts of the Village. From afar I spotted my stepmother in the Red Plains. She had draped her green shawl over her head.

Why always green, mother? I thought, and a shiver arched up my neck. Why the color of nature when you are the most unnatural thing on gods’ land?

“Noni, lad,” said my father once I was within earshot. His voice was strained. “I am leaving on a journey for Our King.”

“I know, pater,” I said quietly, looking into his eyes. My stepmother loomed in the corner of my vision. “Mali told me.”

“It is no ordinary journey, son.” He was talking quickly now, the words falling over themselves. “Panjoo’s armies have laid siege on Sakkar, one of the major outposts of Ehtashaam, and all the warrior clans have been brought together to march to the outpost and fend off the enemy. I tell you this,” he said, “because there’s going to be a battle, and I might not be back for a while.”

He reached out and placed a hand on my head. His hair hung loose in his eyes. He had not worn the traditional warrior’s head cloth; and I began to get frightened. He looked old, my father the Chief Guard. His face was haggard, I saw. How long, for how long had he been wasting away? 

“Baba, how long ... for how long will you be gone?” My voice shook. In my head the hag-woman cackled.

He did not reply. I grabbed the hilt of his sword.

“How long, Baba?” I squeezed the hilt, my knuckles turning white. 

His eyes were dull.

What have you been doing to him, cannibal witch?

Father gently removed my hand from the sword.

I let my arm fall, a strange lethargy creeping over my body.

“So be it then,” I said under my breath, so my voice would be audible only to him. “You will not answer me, but I will answer your call, for mayhap there’s something you ought to have done, but has fallen to me now to complete.”

His eyes widened. A glint of understanding? Haunting notes of music floated into my thoughts like a barely remembered song from a dream. My father shuddered, and his eyes flickered to Natasha for a moment. She gazed back at him, a smile crawling on her lips, and mouthed something.

Now go.

The banshee whisper rose and scattered on the winds of my mind. I started, and glanced at the witch. Her eyes had rolled up, the white crowding out the green. My gaze fell to her feet, and for a moment I saw the marble skin crack at the ankle, the tendons lashing out, the bone melting and reforming as her feet began to turn.

“Boy,” my father’s voice cut in. “Are you feeling sick in the head?”

I stared at him, my vision re-focusing on his eyes.

“No, pater.” my voice rang out strong. My heart wailed in my chest.

“I’ll be leaving, then,” he said gently. Then he leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “Take good care of your mater, son. She’s been a bit ill lately.”

“I will, pater. I promise.” One way or another.

He brushed my hair, plucked one out. I felt the sting as if from a distance.

“For love, boy.” He smiled sweetly and wrapped the golden hair around his finger.

I closed my eyes, saving his smile.

“For love,” I groped for his chaugha and found his sword. 

You are not coming back, are you, father?

The robes whisked against my hand. There was the sound of heavy boots on gravel. A thump against flesh, the neighing of a horse; then hooves fading into the distance.

“Do not be so sad, bache,” a voice rumbled into my ears; warm breath tickled my cheek. “He’s gone on a noble mission. Instead of tears we will make merriment of the little time he is away from us.” A click: teeth on teeth. 

I opened my eyes and grinned at her. “We will, won’t we now?”

The smile on my stepmother’s face spread like molten rock over fissured ground.

#

Night fell on the madrassah like a wounded warrior, spilling dark blood everywhere. I rolled up the parchment, tied thread around it, and put it in my bag. I had been memorizing swordplay from Ramesh’s diagrams for more than two hour-glasses: new stances, lunges and shields. 

Now I had other work.

I shouldered the bag and walked to the frog pond at the back of the enclosure. I could hear croaks and splashes even fifteen mules from the pond. The Blue Eye soared out of the clouds and the pond lit up. A black horned toad sat on a gnarled, rugged nose of rock jutting from the water. Its eyes gleamed in the dark. As I settled on a dry patch of weeds, it leapt in the air and opened its mouth: A shiny long, worm-like tongue shot out, and wrapped around a night fly. I watched the drama, my fingers tapping the frame of the pixie-harp in the bag. The Misshapen’s gift. The strings of the instrument squeaked as they cooled in the night air.

Grind the brambles into dust.

King Toad munched the fly. Its horn quivered. The wind groaned and a cloud burst open above us: A thin sheet of water began to sizzle in my ears and soak my robes. There should not have been any rain today. The day had not darkened enough, the heat waves not piled one over the other. 

Spill their blood if you must.

I took out the pixie-harp. Lightning applauded in the sky, and the pixie’s silver eyes flashed. Raindrops pattered on its body and licked its cheeks. The wind rose again.

Pick up the fattest.

I began to hum an old tune, a song Barkat the Village Beggar had aught me. I touched the fattest string of the harp.

Give it a clout.

I trailed my hand over the harp, startling the strings. Malformed, clanging notes shot out into the night. King Toad stopped munching, stared at me, and began to bloat.

There’s poison within them . . . 

The Toad swelled. Its horn changed colors rapidly: black to red to orange to yellow, flamingo, then white. Its head jerked suddenly and it deflated with a soft hooting cry. Drops of black goop flew from its mouth and spattered over the ground five mules from me. A field rat scurried across the liquid, and began to squeak. Its tiny furry body writhed in agony; it turned onto its back, and started rotting in front of my eyes.

... but a blessing without.

I watched the other toads and the frogs in the pond. Not a one had a scratch on its scales.

King Toad watched me back, eyes spitting dark embers.

I saw it all with strange eyes, mayhap not mine . . . and understood the path the Misshapen had laid out for me 

I gripped my bag, rose to my feet, and walked to the pond.

#

My stepmother was gone when I reached the hut. The door swung in the wind. Rainfall had stopped some quarter of an hour-glass ago and I could see a trail of footsteps leading to the door on the wet mud outside. 

Leading away, I corrected myself. Remember her feet, remember they turn.

I stepped over the threshold, my gaze falling on my father’s robes flung over the wicker chair. He might not need them ever again. The thought washed a wave of sadness over me. The battle would happen, the enemy would fall; but so might my father. 

No number of tears could decimate that possibility.

I took the bag off my shoulder and placed it on the floor. I slipped a hand in, caressed the harp. Something squirmed against my fingers. I rolled the pouch away and pulled the harp out.

It glinted in the light from the window. The pixie stared at me with dead sculpted eyes, the strings under its chin quivering. The pillar of the harp rose from the pixie’s shoes and curved up to his face, meeting the pixie’s smile. I flicked at a string; the smile trembled, and widened. I counted the strings, plucking each in turn. Twenty-six.

I fondle you like a plaything, harp-pixie, yet you do not take offence. 

Grinning, the pixie watched me, like a demented child.

The witch needs to be sent to her doom, and I do not know how to play you. You speak to me, yet I do not know how. What magic makes you, what magic breaks you?

The silver pegs on the smile squeaked. I shook the frame.

She will return soon when her killing for tonight is done, and I have a paltry weapon. Swords and sabers, arrows and bows, will be no good, you told me that. So how do I kill her if this fails? 

The curves of its lips were still. The eyes bored into mine.

Play for me now if you ever will; play before she returns. Talk to me on my command.

It did neither.

I gritted my teeth and lifted it in the air. Starlight from the open door glittered on the strings. A sigh came in with the wind, then footsteps on the threshold.

I looked at the door through the harp’s strings. It opened to the night like a dragon’s maw. A shadow slithered in. All light disappeared.

I blinked twice and squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them, I gazed upon my stepmother’s face.

7

She was sitting on my bed, legs crossed, the skirt of her chaugha riding up on her thighs. Her eyes shone. She was wearing black tonight, the first time I had seen her dressed in another color than green.

“You look at me as if seeing me for the first time, bache.” Her voice was soft and tender like a woman’s, and my eyes widened.

Is that the voice every one hears, mother?

Her gaze was not on me but the harp, moving up and down the pixie’s body. “That is a fine instrument. Where did you find it?”

Slowly I lowered the harp. “Pater gave it to me a long time ago. It belonged to my mater.”

Her eyes didn’t leave the harp. “Curious. I have never seen it before in the hut, and how long have I been with your pater, more than one a cycle of the seasons?”

“I keep it in the madrassah,” I said. My heart raced. “Ramesh likes to play it in the evening, and he has been teaching me to play a few tunes too.”

“Then I reckon Master Ramesh would not mind my having a look at it, will he?” She stretched out her arm. “I might know a few old songs myself.”

I did not move.

“How did you get inside the hut?” I said softly. “I did not hear you enter, nor did I see you.”

Surprise floated through her eyes, then amusement. Her hand stayed in the air. “I move softly. You know that, child. You have heard me before ... in the night.”

I stepped back. “I don’t know what you mean.”

She rose. The bed sheet slid off and crumpled to the floor. Twists of hair curled into her green eyes as she moved a step closer. “Oh, you do. I have heard your heart flutter like a trapped bird whenever I have returned from the fields. Seen the knowing light shine in your orbs. You do not like me, little boy, little bache, do you? You fear me for reasons I do not understand.”

Blood pounded in my ears. She stood still; and now she looked innocent, helpless, her lips trembling. There was a sheen on her lips, a glisten in her eyes; they whispered to my heart to run to her, hug her, tell her that I loved and trusted her. I felt my arm come up to show her the harp, the beauty of it, mayhap give it to her as a token of my affection.

An homage to her evil ways, Warrior Blood?

I halted. Outside in the distance I heard the squawking of a bird, mayhap a parrot. A crack of thunder followed.

Trembling, I sat on my haunches and placed the harp on my lap. “I do not fear you, Natasha. I fear only the plague you bring with you.”

In the doorway, night wind moaned. My stepmother’s face contorted with fury, her lips drawing back as she hissed, “Speak my name like a a slave’s, will you? I am your mater, you whore pup.”

Play for me now, harp. Play.

But the instrument was silent.

My head was heavy, the beat of my heart unbearable in my chest. I bit my lip to keep from screaming, as her voice began to change, becoming guttural, toneless, into the one I had always heard before. She laughed at the terror she saw in my face, the sound a deep rumble that hurt my ears. “So you can hear through the glamor. I thought you could. The question is how... but that doesn’t matter any more, does it?”

My hand stole to my bag. I thrust the harp in and groped; drew my hand out close-fisted. 

She walked toward me, still grinning. “Your pater left for Sakkar earlier than he wanted. I can be very persuasive if I need to, but I figure you know that by now. A pity it took you so long to find out. I used to dream about your young flesh, so soft, so yielding ... but even I am bound by the ways of my kind. I cannot touch my host’s spawn till the nestling discovers for itself who I am.”

She winked. Her hand shot out and gripped my hair.

“The host though — I can feed on him from dawn unto dusk.” She traced her fingers down my forehead; leaned in and kissed my cheek, her lips like earthworms on my skin. “Your pater is sweet.” 

“I know you did, Natasha,” I whispered, and pulled away. “How you and the rest of your kind swarmed over the earth like a disease. How you fed on the great civilizations. What does my pater compare with what your multitude really did? Do I speak true ... pichal pairi?”

Natasha flinched. The wind gasped and rushed into the hut hollering like a wild beast. Bits of straw, my father’s robes, and Natasha’s hair, swirled in the air, a poisonous cloud. 

Natasha’s eyes were wide. Her arms came up in the air as if trying to ward off something. Her lips moved. 

“My naam . . . who told you the buried name?” She looked at me, and I screamed. Her face was twisting on itself, darkening. Her teeth gnashed. Never had I seen such rage on a human face. Her neck arched at an unnatural angle, and she stretched out an arm tome, fingers coiling and clawing. “Tell me, you dung-sniffing harlot’s seed, or I will peel your skin from your face so quickly you will not even have time to curse your gods.”

Despite the nausea and vertigo I stepped forward. It would have to be now, before she realized what I was going to do.

“Someone a lot stronger than your kind will ever be,” I said.

She growled and lunged at me.

I dropped to the ground, shoved my fist forward and, mustering all my strength, I squeezed King Toad in the hag-woman’s face.

The night cracked like a clay bowl as the toad exploded in my fist. Black blood splattered everywhere, spraying me and the witch, flying into her nostrils and mouth. Natasha howled, hands clapping to her eyes, clawing at her cheek. She staggered back, overturning the pail of ablution water. The water and King Toad’s blood wormed together and spread across the floor. 

Through her fingers I saw the toad venom, the poizzon, eat through her flesh; a glimpse of white bone. The witch bellowed, slapped at her face, and bellowed some more.

“That was for my pater and Hamid, cannibal witch!” I shouted. The poison burnt, oh it burnt me too; but the pain was going, cooling. I winced; rushed forward, and hurled the remains of the toad in her face. “Die, you unnatural abomination.”

She shrieked as the carcass flew at her lips and snatched blindly at the air, her fingers squirming for my flesh. I darted back. She tottered forward, sniffing the air, arms held out. Her eyes were closed, but a black pupil stared unseeingly at me through a hole in the eyelid. Her cries had stopped. As I watched, her ears began to undulate.  

The witch emitted a thundering roar into the night. I froze. Her ears melted like wax that snaked forward, covering her eyes like curtains. She shuffled forward, this creature with a raw maw, her features beginning to run together and turn muddy. She stepped on the dead toad and gave a cry of rage. The toad’s flesh stuck to her backward feet, then the scales spread out and dispersed like smoke. 

I turned and scooted to the door. Behind me a sound, like hooves squelching in a puddle of mud. I plunged into the night with my leather bag bumping against my shoulders. 

The dust from the Red Plains whirling about me, I fled under the midnight sky like a goblin. 

#

  The wind tugged at my chaugha and grappled with my hair as I thrashed my way through the weeds and undergrowth of the Black Marshes. Nocturnal creatures floated in the water; something flicked past my leg. Darkness crouched on the marshes like a demon with pale eyes. My mind roared in a whirlpool of cold, senseless thoughts. I splashed and slipped. The water hissed at me, as I wept with fear and bewilderment. I was benighted, She the rustle in the black.

Ahead of me loomed the silent twin pillars of the Graveyard of Eternity. I gasped and scrambled through these ancient gates onto the Masters’ grounds. For a moment I felt that the moss-covered pillars softened and arched behind me, blocking any chance of return; but when I turned they still pointed up like horns on a jinn’s head.

I drew the harp from the bag. The inevitable storm turned in the sky, eyed me with its cloudy eyes, and dove to the earth, hollering in my ears. Trodden, guano-covered leaves lunged from the spiral stones and danced in the air. Soon the heavens would explode into cold, stinging showers.

I flung the pixie-harp down. I scratched at the frame with my nails.

“Why, all gods curse you, did your magic desert me at the hut?” I screamed.

The pixie leered at me with its silver pegs. I shook it, and the strings chattered together like teeth. Wind gusted through the strings, and the music woke up. 

Your gods may not curse me, said the tune, for I do not come from them.

“Why convince me to goad the witch into manifesting her true form? The venom didn’t kill her and now she rushes after me with the fury of the devils.”

You weren’t killed by the venom either, whispered the music. So I didn’t lie about the antidote, did I?

“You didn’t tell me about the antidote. All you gave me were riddles. I broke them,” I said, fists clenched. “Poison within ‘em and a blessing without. Took all of my wits to discern the antidote was in the toad’s skin.”

Your wits were ashes scattered on the wind, the harp sang, laughing. It was I that brought them together into a whole. Now shut your trap, and listen before she makes mincemeat of you. 

I quieted down, and the pixie-harp began to whisper.

We set off for the well. 

I followed the trail of branches I had made in the Graveyard — a thousand years ago, it seemed The vegetation felt thicker tonight; trees and brambles closed about me like a womb. Clouds rolled above me, lightning cracked; and rain came down like music. It poured through the thicket, played on the boughs, dripped from the leaves like the trees’ own sap, soaking through my chaugha. I shivered and pulled the robes tighter around me.

Thunder groaned. With it came a shriek, then the distant blood-curdling howl of the hag-woman. I ducked, and ran, low to the ground. It would not take her long to find me in for the dark was her very own cloak. 

I saw the stone lips of the well. They gleamed like bones under the Blue Eye’s gaze. 

I raced to the well, slapping aside a storm of night flies that had reared from the ground. They whirred around me, buzzing in my ears, getting into my eyes. Three more strides and I reached the well. I peered into its never-ending depth, groped for the bamboo basket, which I once used to ride eternity on. 

It wasn’t there. 

Hanuman help me, I prayed, scanning the night for any signs of it. 

My plea went unanswered. The well gaped at me with an empty mouth.

“Noni,” someone called from afar. It was the voice of my father. “Where are you, lad? And in such darkness too.”

“Pater?” I whispered in bewilderment. Could it be true? My father had come back, come back alive from the battle!

“Where in gods’ names are you, boy? I have been looking everywhere for you.” The voice was muffled, still distant. “Speak up, lad.”

“I am here, pater. I am right here, Baba!” I jumped up and yelled, hopping onto the well with excitement. Oh Hanuman and dear sweet Mother of the Cow, my father was here. Everything would be all right now. He would deal with the hag.

“I thought I heard something. Is that you, lad? Where are you, shout out loud?” A thud in the thicket. I turned round, happiness and relief well nigh bursting my heart apart, and opened my mouth to shout.

Lightning whiplashed in the sky, lighting up the well. The foliage froze like a dusky sculpture: I saw a bat trapped in a flutter; thousands of water drops hanging from tree leaves like diamonds, the branches bent wearily with their weight. But I also saw a shadow in the weeds, and it was not my pater. 

It was the crouching, misshapen body of the hag-woman. She had been wearing my father’s voice.

I fell off the edge of the well on the bone-littered earth, huddled against the stones, pressed the harp against my bosom. 

“Noniii,” the voice rang out again. It was closer. I kept silent, trying to stop my breath wheezing in and out of my mouth. It sounded horribly loud in my head. “Noni, lad, speak up, what the Hades is the matter with you?”

I clutched the harp and wiped a veil of sweat from my forehead.

“Noni, you miserable brat, I’ll skin you alive.” Dear Hanuman! Her voice came from just above my head. I mashed my lips together, the rush of my blood thumping in my ear. Any moment now I would scream, and it would be over for good.

“Beta, bachey, dung-sniffer, you skinny lizard turd, come on out!” said the hag in her growling voice. She had dropped all pretenses. She knew I was close.

With a cry of terror and rage, I jumped up, whirled, and faced her.

I faced it, for she was not human anymore. She was a sexless, faceless, wrinkled creature that loomed across the well, barely five mules away from me. Her body was covered in a perpetual haze of grey and purple; mist boiled from her pores and enveloped her body so I could see nothing of her features. Blood-red streaks ran through the fog like veins, pulsing and brightening.

“Here we are, little boy,” said the woman/creature softly. The toneless quality of her voice gave me a headache. “I couldn’t let you get away, could I? You;’re the first creature to have resisted me in a thousand years.”

“And wounded you too,” I said.

The mist swirled faster; the red streaks darkened. She stepped forward, and I shrank back, a part of me whimpering like a cornered pup. 

Play me.

The whisper was in my head. I jerked, and felt the woman-creature hesitate. The haze slowed, specks of red dancing and dangling in it like bloody beads.

Play me, before she understands what you are about to do. Do it now if you want to see the Red Sun again.

The pixie-harp seemed to move in my hands. I caressed it, raised it in my hands — I could see the hag through its strings— and began playing it.

The music rose in the storm like a flight of golden birds that swept over the Graveyard and carpeted it.

It was the loveliest music ever played. The notes soared and dove, ebbed and rose, until the very earth seemed to sing them. Trees and bushes swayed to the rhythm of the music, the wind rolled and thrashed with it. The melody roared, laughed and cried, a thousand angels gathered to shower roses over us. Visions twirled in the air; fairies hovered and darted. Everywhere was laughter, gaiety; and in this heaven the woman/ creature screamed. 

She screamed to wake the dead.

“Band kar isay, haramzaday,” she shrieked, arms flailing in the air. A pair of baby centaurs galloped over her head, and she hissed at them. “Stop it, you shit-stained mongrel. NOW!”

I looked at her, and I smiled. For the first time since I had set eyes on her, I smiled with my heart at my stepmother. It was wonderful. I felt my smile lighten up the night, sprinkling tiny jewels everywhere. A flock of butterflies fluttered over and alighted on my face; their touch was like a kiss.

“No, Natasha,” I said, a grin stretching from one ear to my other. “It’s your turn to stop, for the world has suffered you long enough.”

She roared and rushed forward, claws outstretched. I stood my ground, and the pichal pairi sprang the well, uttering animal noises. I grinned and lifted the harp up in the air, my fingers still moving on the strings. The storm danced in the Graveyard; and rumbling and crumbling, the earth spat the Ancient Words out.

The woman/creature froze in mid-air, arms outstretched, her facelessness caught in a swirl of red-grey snarl. Her claws and hooves tread the air.

Then the storm imploded with me its center. 

#

I stood on a towering cliff, looking down on a vast expanse of shoreline. It was twilight, and birds roamed the sky, their huge wings sweeping the clouds into fluffy piles. Some of the birds — they resembled eagles and ravens— roosted on rocks in front of me, staring at me with obsidian eyes. 

I stepped forward, taking in the sights. I understood this was the Eye of the Harp’s Storm. I peered over the lip of the mountain.

 The shore spread below me, unending, in either direction, the sand white and bleached like a cataract in a dead man’s eye. The sea crashed on the rocks at the bottom of the cliffs, receded, then thundered back, pummeling the boulders. Giant waves loomed, covered with black froth. I saw it all with strange eyes, mayhap not mine; and it did not matter. The shadows beneath the waves, the mouths opening and, fists thrusting through the water’s surface, and slipping back — none of them mattered in the least.

 What mattered were the countless shapes strewn about the shore, from one limit of my inhuman vision to the other. The very air seemed to turn misty above them. As I looked at this nightscape, one of the shapes stirred, raised a strand of blackness, and began crawling to the rocks.

 “That’s the battle end,” said someone behind me.

I turned around, but no one was there except the birds perched on the boulders, watching me with their expressionless eyes.

 ‘And now it’s time for the choice,” said the voice. “Say the Words and save the world from the last one. Or return, wake up in bed, and forget what happened. You’ve made it this far and you will survive.”

 “Who are you and where the Hades are you hiding?” I looked around, feeling a dreadful weight descend on me. It was bad, so bad that I wanted to weep. I had seen evil, but something else was about to come, something that was more wicked than anything I had ever known.

 “Ask me what must be asked. Not what matters not,” came the bodiless whisper. A raven-eagle rubbed its beak on its black leathery wings, then plucked at the air with its claws.

 At last, the serpent -- the unwelcome serpent of understanding -- burrowed up through my heart’s earth, and sat on its surface, looking at me with empty eyes. I began to cry.

 “Please, no.” I wept, tears streaming off my face into the mountain before the Sea of the Dead. “I don’t want to. This was not what I came here for. I did not choose—”

 “Some choices are black and white. Other fall gray and dead. You may choose to say the Words, or you may not. You will survive either way. But your people will not. The fall,” said the voice, “is dead and long.”

 I hung my head. The sea raged on, the mountains shook. The birds sat silent, clawing the dark air. In a few moments the cliff would begin to crack, the mountains tumble and sink. Soon the nightscape would tear up, the pieces float on the winds of oblivion, the choices bow into inevitability.

 I let a last tear shimmer in my eye and ripple my vision.

 Then I jumped off the cliff and opened my mouth.

 “Jaag, O . . . “

#

”Jaag, O Dhartee ki tabahi. Jaag apni neend se,” I screamed, and hurled the harp at the hag. Spinning, it shot across the well, and hit the woman/creature in the torso. She writhed mid-air, eyes widened. Her momentum broken, she fell short of her lunge and plunged into the well, the harp following her like a reluctant pet. She screamed all the way down to where eternity would eat her and spit the bones out with impunity. Her screams faded away.

The Graveyard was silent now, the music dead. The visions had fled like guilty children. In their wake loomed quietude. I shuffled to the mouth of the well. It was cold and empty. 

The wind picked up then and the trees began to gossip. I felt the tremble in my bones before the ground shook. The earth heaved up and down like a camel’s humps. The black stone spirals scattered into unknown shapes; graveyard dust lifted up in gritty clouds. The bushes fell over each other in their scramble to get away. Night flies exploded into every which direction. 

And still the earth shook like a giant palsied hand.

I heard a rumble. It was distant, deep. It billowed the wind into nooks and corners of the Graveyard. It went through my body, my teeth. Frightened, I turned to run.

A curtain seemed to flash across the well mouth; and out of the black rose a jet of yellow-blue fire. It shot up in the air like a pillar of lava, rearing on and on, ‘til it scorched the clouds and misted the rain, making fog rings sizzle through the night. Color erupted in this pillar of fire, until I could see every rainbow ever formed in the worlds. Dazzling azure, and shocking flamingo, and dewy grass, and midnight black, and waterfall white. They twirled around like pretty spells on a mage’s finger. 

The burnt, blackened heap of my stepmother shimmered briefly in the pillar. She seemed to twist one last time; then a shadowy arm rose through the fire, and pulled her back in. 

I walked toward the fire, touched it. Something watched me, silent, from the tower of flames. I sensed hatred and distaste; then my eyes widened.

Bewildered, filled with horror, I cried, “It’s the Thing, the Well is Its Eye, Eternity Its mistress!” and suddenly I was crashing, falling to the ground, all sense and feeling and thought cast aside, nothingness creeping over me.

I got lost in Death ... and came back home again.

8 

On a bright spring day the Man in Blue came to the Village. He had been around, he had travelled far, and he came to our cotton fields, jingling a silver bell in his hands. He wore strange skirts. I’d heard that sailors in foreign lands wear similar clothing; they called them ‘trousers’. His, however, were blue, gritty, and rough; they lay taut across his thighs. He had long hair and a dusty beard and when he sang his voice was sweet and loud. His fingers hopped on a wooden flute.

“Good day, young sire!” He raised the flute in salute to me. “I say, is there a place here for me to rest and grab a bite before I travel on?”

I lowered the shovel in my callused, muddy hands, and shaded my eyes against the Red-Sun’s glare. 

“There might if you tell me who you are, sir.” I looked at him, at his eyes. They were a warm bright blue.

He laughed and slipped the flute into a pocket in his trousers.

“What’s in a name, lad, what’s in a name?” He heaved his knapsack, and swung it onto the ground, crushing cotton stalks. He gazed at me with mirth. “So sorry about that, young fellow. I hope you can forgive a tired traveler’s ill manners.”

He dragged the sack to the cool shade of an oak standing in the middle of the field and plopped down. I followed him.

“So here I am in the Red Plains again. It’s been a while since I last passed this way.” He took out an iron flagon from the sack and tilted it over his mouth. “Ah, cool, refreshing sherbet from Arbab. Blows your mind away.”

“You speak strangely.” I sat next to him, pulling out my own bottle of water. “Where are you from?”

“I repeat, what’s in a name, young sire?” said he, grinning. His face was etched with sun lines. Crowfeet planted like imprints of adventure on his flesh. “A thousand years from now, a hundred worlds from here, a man will ask entire peoples the same question. But if you really wish to know, some have called me the Wanderer.”

The sky darkened above me; then the rogue cloud passed, and the Red-Sunlight poured back in.

“You ... you are the one who...” I whispered. “You wandered a long time back too, didn’t you?”

“Oh, I have walked strange paths, gotten off, come back on,” he smiled at me, “but mostly I show the way to those who are lost.”

Something trembled inside me. It was in a basket that had been sewn shut and thrown in swirling dark waters. It was many dragons long, it had teeth, and it snarled in its prison. Its name was Fear, and Rage was its twin.

The news of my father’s death had come, the Villagers told me, the very next day after my stepmother’s disappearance. I slumped and wept at the edge of the Village, my tears falling on the dust of the Red Plains.

The Wanderer regarded me, all trace of humor gone from those blue eyes. He leaned in and placed a broad, ageless hand on my shoulders.

“I am sorry,” he said. “But what was said was true. The utterance of the Ancient Words has consequences. It has always been that way and will be, and well... sometimes there is no black and white, just the fall ... gray and dead. I wish you could understand that.”

I said nothing.

The oak hung its thick head above us. The wind soughed off. Afternoon smudged into evening, and the Wanderer talked. He taught me things that I would never forget. Finally he took his flute out.

“I used to know the Words by heart, could say them whenever I wanted.” He wavered the flute up and down, and smiled. “But since I lost a certain harp of mine, the Words seem to have gone out of my head. Perhaps it’s for the best. Now I will sing you a song sung by a goddess in another world of dreams and hopes. Her name is Anu~shree, and she’s the Goddess of Innocence.”

He raised the flute to his lips, blew once, and began to play.

Field and tree and loss and memory began to blur and fade. So did the face of The Wanderer and the fluid movement of his fingers; as he sang in a clear and soft voice to beauty and love and simpler times, in a tongue I had never heard before and never would again; of things I had never heard of and never would again. He sang to a golden afternoon and turned it to blue dusk.

He sang of a Pierian dream; and I sang with him. 

****************************************

"Great world," Maya says. "And pulpy fun adventure. But no food."

"Actually there was lots of food, it was just mostly pretty disgusting. I got some roast chamieleon," he says, offering her a slice of rainbow coloured roast meat that changed shape while she looked at it.

"Ew, no thanks! Would you eat that?" 

He frowns down at it, "Maybe not, actually." He offers it to the cat, who sniffs at it and then snatches it and runs off with it under one of the chairs.

"He defeated his stepmother," Maya says, thoughtfully.

"At some cost, but yes,"

"In stories people always seem to be able to, but in real life it's more difficult, when they're the adults and they have all the power and nobody will listen to you."

"Yes, that's very hard. That's the worst thing about being a kid, the thing a lot of adults seem to forget, the helplessness of being in someone else's power." he says. 

"Let's read something about grown ups next," Maya says, decisively.

"We have the first chapter of a novel by last year's Best Novel Hugo and Nebula award winner Mary Robinette Kowal," he says. "I think you'll like it. It's called The Children of Nebuchenezzer. I hope it has food. She normally has food."

Maya takes the book, and they read.