The Archer's Heart (33 page)

Keshan stretched his legs alongside Jandu’s. “I’m not taking it away, I’m just transforming it. This way Zandi can remain by your side.”

Jandu snorted. “You can’t defend a kingdom with a flute.”

“And you can’t defend a kingdom if you’re in permanent exile either,” Keshan pointed out.

Jandu conceded that this was true. “And it is a clever way to keep Zandi with me all the time,” he added. He looked at Zandi affectionately, and then nodded. “All right. Teach me how to change her.”

Keshan taught Jandu how to transform Zandi, and then forced him through scales on the flute. He taught Jandu how unique colorations could be conjured for each individual note. Keshan didn’t realize how much he enjoyed teaching flute, but he grew warm and content as he watched Jandu struggle through the lessons, his mind working on all the new information, his fingers adjusting to the feel of the instrument. Learning came easily to Jandu, aided by Zandi’s magical nature. It was almost as though Zandi was playing herself.

But, like any good teacher, Keshan had to know when enough was enough. After an hour Jandu’s eyes began to glaze over.

“Enough for today,” he stated. He took Zandi from Jandu and whispered to convert her back into a bow. As soon as she changed, Jandu immediately strung her and slung her over his back.

Jandu stretched, his arms long and sleek, a golden brown in the forest. Keshan noted that he wore no jewelry anymore. And how could he? Yudar had lost everything of value to Darvad.

Impulsively, Keshan reached up and unclasped the pearl and gold pendant he always wore. The metal was warm in Keshan’s hands, and slightly sticky with his sweat.

 “Here.” Keshan smiled. “I want you to have this.” He pressed the necklace into Jandu’s palm.

Jandu held it far from his body, as if it were volatile. “I can’t take it. It’s worth too much. It’s too expensive.”

“It’s only a pearl,” Keshan said. “You used to have dozens of them.”

“I had no idea what a pearl was worth. Now that I know, I’m sure I can’t accept such a gift,” Jandu said. “Besides, look at me! People will think I stole it.”

“Then just keep it in your pocket,” Keshan urged. He pressed his hands around Jandu’s, closing Jandu’s hand into a fist around the necklace. “Just wear it secretly, close to your body.”

Jandu’s eyes welled with tears. He finally nodded and carefully put the pendant in his pouch. He wrapped his arms around Keshan’s shoulders.

“You know, I never got my reward for being a good student,” Jandu whispered.

“A pearl isn’t enough? What sort of reward were you thinking of?”

Jandu peeled Keshan’s vest from his shoulders and dropped it to the ground.

Keshan reached down and ran his hand slowly along Jandu’s broad chest, down to the knot in Jandu’s dejaru. He slipped his hand inside and within a moment had Jandu gasping for relief. Jandu leaned back against the forest floor and winced. He sat back up, pulling a burr from his shoulder.

Keshan watched Jandu for a reaction. He had seen this moment before, ages ago. Jandu studied the burr between his fingers, and then smirked at Keshan. “Hmm.”

Keshan flicked the burr from Jandu’s fingers and pushed Jandu back against the forest floor.

Keshan kissed Jandu with exquisite softness, his tongue gently probing Jandu’s mouth, as light as a feather. He reached down into Jandu’s trousers again and Jandu’s member sprung loose. Keshan placed Jandu into his mouth, the same, excruciatingly slow and gentle teasing of his tongue now along Jandu’s shaft, the flirtation of wetness and warmth. Jandu raked the soil with his hands.

“Jandu?”

Jandu and Keshan jerked apart as they heard Suraya call out. Jandu had barely enough time to stuff himself back in his trousers before Suraya pushed her large body through the bushes, coming across the two of them on the ground.

Even with Jandu’s dejaru closed, Keshan realized they had been caught. There was no way to explain why they were doing so close together on the ground. Keshan felt a tremor of horror shake down his throat but composed himself. While Suraya’s attention was on Jandu, he ran his fingers through his hair to straighten it and unclasped his earring, tossing it aside.

Keshan made a show of feeling through the leaves around him. “You haven’t seen my earring, have you?”

 “Wh—what?” she stammered.

“My earring.” He pointed to his left earlobe, now bare. “I think I lost it around here.”

“Earring?” Suraya repeated Keshan’s word as if he was speaking a foreign language.

“It has great sentimental value,” Keshan explained. “My mother gave them to me on my sixteenth birthday.”

Jandu looked away from both of them. Keshan could see that his face was a brilliant scarlet.

Keshan watched Suraya’s gaze lingering on Keshan’s discarded vest.

“Can you help us search for it?” Keshan asked her sweetly.

“…Sure.” Suraya frowned. She started pacing the area, seeming relieved to look at nothing but the forest floor.

Jandu stood frozen, his back to both of them.

“Come on Jandu, help me,” Keshan said, searching the underbrush with energy. Keshan and Jandu made brief eye contact.

“It’s over here!” Suraya cried.

Suraya bent over with great difficulty, and triumphantly lifted the small golden ring from the forest floor.

“Thank God for your sharp eyes!” Keshan cried, running up to her.       

Suraya handed Keshan his earring and looked at him sharply. “I came to tell you that Baram is making dinner.”

“Thank you,” Keshan said.

The two of them stared at each other silently for what seemed to be a full minute before Suraya said, “You should be more careful.”

Keshan finally broke eye contact and nodded. “I will be.”

“You could lose something much more precious than gold,” Suraya said.

“I know.” All the mirth left Keshan’s heart. In its place was a heavy, dank fear.

After Jandu’s wife and brothers went to bed that evening, Jandu and Keshan sat by the glowing embers of the evening fire, poking at the charcoal with sticks, talking about foolish things that neither would ever waste paper in their letters to talk about. And in the night, with the company of the low, grumbling hoots of fish owls and the distant rustle of insects, Keshan found that peace that came with Jandu beside him. They didn’t touch, what with their close encounter that afternoon and with Yudar and Baram sleeping on the other side of the hut wall. But they sat next to each other contentedly until the last of the embers died, and they were simply shadows to each other in the humid darkness.

 “When I’m with you,” Jandu whispered, “I feel like my heart has been broken open and music has burst into the silence.” Jandu sighed. “I don’t know how those around me can’t see what you’ve done to me.”

Keshan didn’t say anything for a long time. He reached out and placed his hand on Jandu’s chest, and held it there, pulsing heat and love through his fingers, his touch sending a message far more powerful than any words.

Finally, Keshan spoke, overcome with emotion.

“There is nothing that can ever explain, ever show, ever contain the strength of the love I have for you, Jandu.”

Jandu cradled Keshan’s face in his hands, and kissed him once, a slow, lingering kiss that had the fire of all the feelings that thundered through Keshan’s body.

And then Jandu got up slowly and made his way in the darkness back to Suraya. He turned at the hut entrance and waved, and Keshan watched his shadow retreat, drawn in by the curtains of the darkness, his silhouette powerful, proud, perfect.

The next morning Keshan departed for Tiwari.

Chapter 26

A
S THEIR SECOND YEAR OF EXILE DREW TO A CLOSE
J
ANDU TOOK
Keshan’s advice and played Zandi while begging. Although it did not increase the generosity of many pilgrims, it made those who gave him something happier.

One morning, Jandu came across a magnificent black buck grazing, his twisted, striped horns and black and white body so beautiful, Jandu hesitated killing him. But he thought of Suraya, about to give birth, and how much he could sell the horns and hide for in town. Jandu reached for an arrow.

Zandi’s splendor looked out of place in the lush greens of the forest. Her shimmering gold danced in the rays of light as Jandu silently strung his bow, watching the buck carefully, his hands deft and knowledgeable upon the brace. He drew back the string to its full release and let loose the arrow, the high-pitched whistle his only warning to the deer. Jandu shot him straight in the eye, and the buck collapsed immediately, twitching for several seconds.

Jandu sighed. He unstrung his bow again and hooked it behind his quiver, and pulled out his belt knife. Jandu gutted the deer, and then grunted as he slung the heavy animal over his shoulders. In seconds, the flies found him. He made his way home, filthy, distracted by insects, and inexplicably saddened by the death of the buck.

He left the skinning and cleaning of the animal to Baram, and plunged himself into the lake to bathe. When he went into Suraya’s hut to change clothes, he noticed that she still lay in bed, unmoved since Jandu left early that morning.

“Suraya?” Jandu shook her shoulder. Her face was white. Cold fear gripped his heart.

 “Jandu…” She reached beneath their thin sheet and pulled her hands back out, smeared with blood. “Something’s wrong.”

“Baram!” Jandu bellowed at the top of his voice. Jandu searched the room for something, anything to help her, but realized he had nothing. He knew nothing.

Baram and Yudar both barged through the door, dusty hands caked in earth.

Baram rushed to her side, falling to his knees. He took her hand as she started to cry.

“She needs a midwife,” Yudar said, hovering in the doorway.

“I’ll go to the village!” Jandu ran for the pilgrim’s trail.

Jandu sped as fast as he could down the path, brushing past pilgrims without stopping to pay respects. Even running as hard as he could, it was nearly dark by the time he reached the village. The muddy main road through the center of the congregation of homes was nearly vacant, and only a few merchants still tended their booths at the market. Jandu asked one of them where the midwife lived. When he reached the midwife’s house, her husband answered the door, a stout, elderly man who glared at the intrusion.

“Please!” Jandu was out of breath, and leaned his hands against his knees. “I need the midwife. My wife… there’s a problem with her pregnancy. She’s bleeding.”

The man nodded, and shut the front door on Jandu. Jandu heard voices inside, and a moment later, the man returned with his small wife by his side.

“Where do you live?” the woman asked. She was older than Jandu imagined, and overweight. It would take her two days to get up the mountain.

“By the religious retreat,” Jandu said. He took a breath to steady his voice. “Please. You must hurry!”

The midwife looked at her husband, and then shook her head. “There is no way I can leave now. It is already dark.”

“But she could die!” Jandu’s frustration overflowed. He punched the side of their mud wall with force. The midwife backed into the house and her husband stepped forward.

“She can’t help you,” he said crossly. “Now go home.”

Jandu shook with anger. “She will help me. I order her to come help me!”

The man looked at Jandu’s clothes, took in his disheveled appearance, the rents in his dejaru, the fierce burn of Jandu’s eyes. He snarled coldly.

“You
order
her? Who the fuck do you think you are?”

It hit Jandu like a slap in the face. He was not a prince anymore. He couldn’t order anyone to do anything no matter how dire the circumstances.

“Please,” he said, lowering his voice to sound less frantic. “I’ll pay you in work. I’ll do anything for you. Please. My wife is bleeding, and she could die.”

The midwife reemerged from behind her husband, sticking her head from behind his large girth.

“I can leave in the morning,” she said quietly.      

Jandu ran his hands through his hair. “Is there anything I can do? What should I do?”

“She needs vasaka leaves to coagulate the blood,” the midwife told him. “Do you have any malabar trees that high in the mountains?”

Jandu searched his memory of the forest, but couldn’t recall seeing any. He moaned in frustration.

“You may be able to buy some from Yarain, if he is still in the market,” the midwife said. As she spoke, her husband glared down at Jandu. “You need to make a tea from the leaves. You can also give her cinnamon for her nausea, and if she starts having contractions early, give her lodhra.”

“Lodhra…cinnamon…vasaka…” Jandu struggled to remember everything in his panicked state.

“I’m sorry I can’t do anything more,” the midwife said. She smiled sympathetically as her husband shut the door on Jandu.

Jandu kicked the door in fury, and then sprinted to the end of the village road to the market.

Almost everyone had gone home. Jandu grabbed a man walking through the empty stalls and asked him where he could find Yarain. The man pointed to the end of the row.

The herbalist had already packed his wares into leather skins and was walking away from his stall.

“Wait!” Jandu chased Yarain down.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” Yarain said. He took in Jandu’s disheveled clothes and sneered.

“I need vasaka,” Jandu said. “I need lodhra, and cinnamon. Please, my wife is bleeding.”

Yarain put his leather skins down on an empty wooden table. “Vasaka flowers in the winter. I have only a few left, from the south.”

“I’ll take them,” Jandu said.

“They are very expensive,” Yarain said, raising his eyebrow at Jandu’s clothes.

Jandu froze. He didn’t have any money. What had he been thinking? He looked up at the mountain in desperation.

Suraya is dying as I stand here.

A tremor of horror shook through Jandu’s bones. He had never been so helpless, so powerless. He looked at the man, and considered just taking his bags, but he wouldn’t know which herb was what.

 “Wait! I have this!” Jandu pulled out the pearl pendant Keshan had given him.

Yarain took the pendant and studied it closely. His mouth gaped when he realized it was pure gold, with a pearl worth more than all the buildings in the entire village.

“Give me all that I need,” Jandu ordered.

Yarain scratched the gold with a dirty fingertip. “Is this real?”

Jandu slammed his fist against the wooden table so hard he splintered the end of it. “Damn it! Of course it is!”

Yarain narrowed his eyes. “You stole this.”

“It was a gift,” Jandu said, choking on his frustration. “Please hurry!”

With a dramatic sigh that obviously disguised the tremble of excitement in his hands, the merchant quickly pocketed the gem and opened up his leather skins. He took his time, sorting through endless bundles of dried and fresh leaves and roots, until he removed a small-leafed branch from a bush, dotted with small white flowers.

“This is the vasaka,” Yarain told Jandu. He handed Jandu a box of cinnamon, dried into curled sticks. “Here is the cinnamon.” He finally found the lodhra, and gave the whole lot of it to Jandu. He even wrapped up all of Jandu’s purchases in one of his small leather skins.

“A bonus,” Yarain said, smiling toothlessly, “for a good customer.”

Jandu grabbed the bundle and raced back up the mountain, knowing that he had another day of running ahead of him.

He reached Suraya and his brothers the following afternoon only to discover that Suraya’s bleeding had stopped on its own. Jandu collapsed on the floor of the hut in exhaustion, limply pointing to the herbs and explaining to Baram what the midwife had told him to do.

Suraya tried to put a pleasant face on for Jandu, saying she was fine, that she wasn’t in any pain, but Jandu knew her too well now to believe her. There was a sick sheen to her face, a pale undertone that didn’t go away regardless of how much she ate or slept. Her eyes developed heavy purple bags under them, and during the day she would pause, standing stock still and her eyes would clench shut as she held in whatever pain racked her body.

 A week later, Suraya told Jandu that a midwife she once met recommended black horehound mint for nausea and bleeding. Suraya didn’t say she was nauseous, or still bleeding, but the hairs on Jandu’s arms stood erect as she asked him to try and find some in the forest.

Baram, Yudar and Jandu all volunteered to scour the forest to find mint for her. It was ridiculous, Jandu thought to himself, this desperate need to forage—but he saw how it soothed them all, to replace uselessness with action.

It was nearly dusk by the time Jandu finally found a patch of the herb. He hurried back home along the pilgrim’s trail. Just as he was about to leave the road, he heard someone approaching on horseback. Riders rarely journeyed this far up the mountain. He stared down the hill warily.

The horse trotted up the slope at tremendous speed. Before Jandu could react, the rider was upon him, stopping his horse right in front of Jandu and dismounting.

Jandu took in the rider’s golden armor, his pink silk trousers, his arm bands and bejeweled diadem. He then looked into the man’s face.

“Jandu Paran.” Druv Majeo, lord of Pagdesh, and Darvad’s closest ally, smirked at Jandu with steely eyes. “Look at you! If it weren’t for your demonic blue eyes I would have thought you were a shit cleaner.”

Jandu glanced past Druv, looking for more riders. Druv had apparently come alone, which meant that he had not been completely sure of finding the Parans on the mountain. A tremor vibrated under Jandu’s skin. He reached for Zandi on his back.

“God, how careless can you be?” Druv reached into his pocket and pulled out the pearl that Keshan had given Jandu. “Selling Keshan’s pendant in such a backwater?” He put the pendant back in his pocket. “Looks like your three years of exile are going to begin again. Not to mention this little trinket is incontrovertible evidence that Adaru has helped you. You may be the world’s best archer, but you are dead stupid.”

Rage filled Jandu. All the humiliation, all the powerlessness of the last two years, it coalesced into something cold and sharp in his heart. He didn’t think. Jandu swung Zandi around and nocked an arrow.

“Beware,” Jandu hissed, the traditional Triya battle cry.

Druv stopped grinning. He backed up a step.

Jandu loosed the arrow. Druv choked as he fell back, the arrow lodged deeply in his throat. His hands groped at the shaft. Then he ceased to move.

Jandu had to move fast. He had just killed a lord, and Darvad’s closest friend and ally. He reshouldered Zandi and unstrapped the horse’s saddle bags. He unbridled the horse quickly and then slapped him on the rear, sending him whinnying back down the mountain in fright.

Jandu retrieved Keshan’s pendant from Druv’s pocket, and then reached down to Druv’s belt and removed his coin purse. There was enough gold inside to finance their move to Afadi at the very least. Jandu attached the purse to his own belt, and threw the saddlebags and Druv’s diadem on Druv’s stomach.

He dragged Druv’s heavy body for what felt like an hour, sweat blurring his vision. He finally reached the edge of a large gulley, filled with date palms and too steep to enter. With a grunt, he shoved Druv off the cliff. He watched the body tumble downward, breaking saplings and thumping on rocks, until it was out of sight.

Jandu stopped at the stream on his way back to his family and washed his face and hands of sweat and Druv’s blood. His mind was numb, but his hands shook uncontrollably. It was nearly sunset by the time Jandu made it home. Yudar, Baram, and Suraya were drinking tea inside the hut, and all looked up when Jandu entered. He imagined what their expressions would be when he told them what had happened. And he couldn’t do it.

“We have to leave now!”

Yudar would be furious and humiliated if he discovered that Jandu had broken the rules of their exile and murdered Druv. But Jandu also knew Yudar was too rigid to do the truly honorable thing, which was to keep them safe. It was the pragmatism of poverty. His own honor was less important than the safety of Suraya, Baram, and Yudar. It would be Jandu’s sin, this lie, but it wouldn’t matter because he knew he had done the right thing for them all.

“I ran into a soldier on the pilgrim’s trail, loyal to Yudar,” Jandu said. “He informed me that Lord Druv of Pagdesh and a contingent of his men are on their way here, right now, up the pilgrim’s trail. He gave us some money and begged us to flee immediately.”

The reaction couldn’t have been greater if Jandu had set himself on fire.

All three of them jumped up in panic. Baram immediately drenched his cooking fire. Yudar opened the fence to let their cow wander free. They threw their belongings into two traveling chests. Baram carried the heavier chest himself, and Jandu and Yudar shared the burden of carrying the other.

“We can’t risk the pilgrim’s trail,” Jandu repeated. The loose horse would summon Druv’s entourage, but hopefully nightfall would slow them.

“We can try the valley,” Yudar said. They all walked to the precipice that had formed the farthest limit of their property for two years. It was a sheer drop down over a hundred feet into the valley.

“No way,” Baram said, shaking his head.

“There may be an easier route further south,” Yudar said.

They walked along the ridge until they came across a less treacherous decline into the valley. But it was still steep and Jandu and Yudar stumbled frequently as they struggled with the chest.

“We have enough money to buy a horse and cart when we get to the village on the other side,” Jandu said.

“If we survive this short cut,” Baram grumbled. He slipped on the loose rocks but regained his balance, and then shouldered the chest and held out his hand for Suraya.