Chapter 6 - CHAPTER 06 : WHAT FIRE LEAVES

The morning was quiet in the way mornings are when something large has just ended and the world hasn't decided what to do about it yet. Shivay sat outside the cave with his back against the rock face, looking at his hands. The knuckles were split in three places. His ribs made themselves known every time he breathed in a certain way. The left side of his face had a burn mark along the cheekbone where Ugra-Damsha's (The Fierce Biter) energy-whip had grazed him. He had been sitting there for approximately one hour waiting for Agastya to say something. The old man had not said anything. He was simply sitting across from Shivay, eating something from his robe — some dried fruit or compressed grain, the kind of thing that had no flavour but kept a person alive — and staring at the treeline with the expression of someone thinking thoughts he had decided not to speak aloud. The silence was, if anything, worse than a lecture. "You are going to say something," Shivay finally said. "You have been not-saying it for an hour. Just say it." Agastya looked at him. Chewed once. Swallowed. "You went anyway," he said. "Yes." A pause long enough to contain several sentences that were not being said. "You knew you would not win cleanly.""Yes.""You knew the probability of serious injury was high.""Yes.""You went anyway.""I already said yes to that one." Agastya looked at him for a moment longer. Then he looked back at the treeline. "You are a fool," he said. Shivay said nothing. "And you are alive," Agastya said. The same tone. Exactly the same tone. As if alive and fool were equivalent pieces of information, equally important, equally neutral. Then — "Do not do it again.""I cannot promise that.""I know," Agastya said. "That is why I said do not do it. Not — you will not do it. There is a difference between instruction and prediction." He finished his food. Tucked the cloth back into his robe. Stood up. "Wash the wounds with river water. There is a specific kind of plant near the eastern bank — dark green, three leaves, smells like cold iron — press the leaves against the burns. And then come find me because we need to discuss where we go next." He walked into the trees. Shivay looked at his hands again. Then at the empty space where Agastya had been sitting. That was, he had learned, the closest the old man came to saying I was scared for you and I am glad you are not dead. He filed this information away carefully, because in five thousand years of life, Agastya had clearly developed a very specific and precise language for emotions he found inconvenient to name directly. He got up to find the plant. The river was cold and clear and entirely indifferent to what had happened the night before, which Shivay found both frustrating and comforting in equal measure. He sat on the bank pressing dark green leaves against the burn on his cheek and looking at his reflection in the water. The two lines on his forehead were visible now. Not faintly. Not only in certain lights. Just — visible. Two thin silver-cold marks, running parallel from the space between his brows toward his hairline, carrying that specific quality of deliberateness that had nothing to do with scarring and everything to do with something arriving exactly where it was always going to arrive. He touched them with two fingers. Both cold. Simultaneously. The cold of the Agaadh (The Abysm/The Void — the deep emptiness in his chest that was his unique power) and something else beneath it — something he didn't have a name for yet but that pulsed once, slow and steady, when his fingers made contact. He stared at his own reflection for a long time. "You look troubled," said a voice from directly behind him. He spun around. A man was sitting on the tree root approximately two feet away from where Shivay had been sitting alone one moment ago. He was wearing saffron-coloured robes of a quality that seemed too fine for a forest. He was holding a veena (a stringed musical instrument, like a long lute) across his lap. He had an expression of profound and delighted interest in everything that was happening. "Narada," Agastya said, from somewhere in the trees, without any inflection of surprise whatsoever. "Agastya!" The man on the root beamed. "You look exactly the same as the last time I saw you, which was four hundred years ago, which is either a testament to your discipline or your stubbornness, and I suspect both.""How did you get here?" Shivay asked. "I go everywhere," Narada said, with the air of someone explaining that water is wet. "The information (divine knowledge and news of all realms) does not find itself, young one. Someone must carry it. I have volunteered for this position since approximately the beginning of time and I can tell you it is both thankless and endlessly entertaining." He plucked one string of his veena. One note. Clear and resonant and somehow carrying the specific quality of every conversation that had ever happened being simultaneously true. "You are Shivay," he said. "Yes.""The two lines on your forehead are new.""Since last night." Narada looked at them with the particular attention of someone who recognizes a pattern they have been watching for a very long time. "Interesting," he said. Not casually. Specifically. "Very interesting.""What does that mean?""It means," Narada said, standing up and adjusting his veena strap with the ease of a man who has stood up with a veena at least a million times, "that you are proceeding at a pace that I will charitably describe as faster than expected and less charitably describe as reckless.""That sounds like the same thing Agastya said.""I am somewhat wiser than Agastya," Narada said, beginning to walk in no particular direction. "He would disagree, which only proves my point.""I would not disagree," Agastya said, from the trees, still without surprise. "I would simply be silent in a way that communicated disagreement.""He does that," Narada confided to Shivay. "He has been doing it for five thousand years. One adjusts." He stopped walking and turned. His expression shifted — not entirely, not into something heavy, but into something slightly more careful. "One thing," he said. "Before I go.""You just arrived.""I arrive and depart at different speeds depending on what needs saying. Listen carefully, Shivay." The veena went quiet beneath his hand. "Some battlefields never stopped fighting. Some arrows are still mid-flight. Some choices were made on that ground that are still being made — over and over, in karmic loops (cycles of cause and effect that repeat until resolved), by everyone who walks through it.""You are talking about Kurukshetra (the sacred battlefield of the Mahabharata war — the greatest war in Hindu mythology).""I am talking about Kurukshetra," Narada confirmed. "Be careful where you step. Be careful what you allow yourself to feel inside it. The ground there has — opinions — about people who walk on it." He looked at the forehead lines once more. "Also — it will recognize you. I am not sure how you feel about that. I thought it only fair to mention it." He plucked one more note on his veena. Then he turned the corner around a tree that should not have been large enough to turn a corner around, and was simply — gone. Shivay stared at the tree. "Does he do that often?" he asked. "Constantly," Agastya said. "For the entirety of recorded time and several thousand years before it." He emerged from the trees carrying a small bundle of supplies he had clearly been preparing while Narada was talking. "Did you listen to what he said?""About Kurukshetra.""Yes.""I listened.""Good." Agastya set the supplies down. "Because we leave for it tomorrow morning and I would prefer you to walk in with your eyes open rather than shut." They ate that evening by a fire that burned more quietly than usual, as if the forest itself had decided that tonight should be subdued. Agastya talked. Not formally — just the way he sometimes did when the mood of the evening was right for it, which Shivay had come to understand meant when something needed to be said and the formal version of saying it would ruin what made it worth saying."I have been to Kurukshetra before," he said. "When?""Long ago. Before I stopped taking students." The fire crackled. "What happened?" Shivay asked. Carefully. Because the way Agastya said before I stopped taking students carried the specific weight of a door that had been closed for a long time and was only being cracked now because the conversation had earned it. "I had a student," Agastya said. "Considerably older than you when I found him. Considerably more powerful already. He was — he had potential of a kind I had not seen in centuries. Not your kind of potential. Different. Something that consumed rather than absorbed." A pause. "What happened to him?" Shivay asked. "He made a choice," Agastya said. "Inside Kurukshetra. When the field showed him his greatest loss — his greatest failure — he did not refuse it the way you refused the Atala (Realm of Desires) illusion without having been there yet. He accepted it. He let the grief become something else. Something with edges.""What kind of edges?""The kind," Agastya said quietly, "that turn inward." He looked into the fire for a long moment. "I lost him in the end. Not to death. To a direction. He went somewhere I could not follow, not because I lacked the strength but because I lacked the right — he chose his path freely and clearly and I had taught him well enough that he knew exactly what he was choosing.""Is that why you stopped taking students?""It is why I stopped believing that students and I were a good combination," Agastya said. "I was incorrect, as it turned out. But I was incorrect for a very long time." The fire shifted. Sent one bright spark up into the dark air. "Tomorrow," Agastya said, returning to his normal tone — the one that had no feeling in it because all the feeling had already been used — "when the battlefield shows you something, Shivay — and it will show you something — remember this: the past is not a wound if you do not live inside it. It is a scar. Scars are not injuries. They are records." Shivay thought about Deva. About the cold ground and the wet face and the terrible quiet of holding someone who was no longer holding back. "What if what it shows me is something I want to stay inside?" Agastya looked at him. "Then you walk out anyway," he said simply. "Because the person you are staying for — in the version it shows you — is not real. The person you are walking for — the one you made the promise to — is." Shivay nodded slowly. The fire burned. Somewhere in the direction of the south, a bird called once and then was quiet. In the morning, a traveling merchant named Hakim passed through the forest path with a loaded cart and two hired guards and the particular expression of a man who has been successful enough that he has forgotten what it felt like not to be. He saw Agastya and Shivay preparing to leave. His eyes went to Shivay's wrist — where the cultivation indicator (a small mark on the wrist that visible shows a cultivator's stage to those who know how to read it) rested. The indicator read zero. Hakim's expression performed a small, private piece of theatre involving contempt and dismissal and the particular pleasure some people take in being able to identify someone beneath them. "Get out of the road, Zero-ranker," he said. Shivay looked at him for a moment. Then stepped to the side of the road without comment. Hakim's cart rolled past. One of his hired guards smirked in Shivay's direction. The other stared straight ahead, which was, Shivay thought, the more honest response. "You said nothing," Agastya observed, once the cart had passed. "There was nothing worth saying," Shivay said. "Some would argue that there was quite a lot worth saying.""Some people spend their whole lives arguing with carts," Shivay said. "I have somewhere to be." Agastya was quiet for a moment. "That," he said, "is the first thing you have said that sounds like something a cultivator would say, rather than something a sixteen-year-old who is very angry about the world would say." Shivay picked up his bag and started walking. "Don't get sentimental," he said. "I never do," Agastya agreed, following him. The two lines on Shivay's forehead caught the morning light and held it briefly, silver-cold, before the trees closed around them and the road fell quiet.