Chapter 10: Rao

RAO

Rao didn’t know when the imperial soldiers began marching through Hiranaprastha. He was in a brothel, his back to the wall and a half-empty bottle of arrack in his fist. There was a courtesan twirling at the center of the room as men watched in semi-inebriated rapture. The courtesan was dancing beautifully, every turn of her belled ankles a bright, melodious chime. But this was a small and decrepit pleasure house that had barely anything in common with the large pink and turquoise palaces lining the city’s glittering river. It was painfully cramped, the alcohol cheap and the hall so crowded that men were packed shoulder to shoulder. It was so crowded, in fact, that the man to Rao’s left had lodged his elbow into Rao’s side and kept it there for the last half hour. Rao’s ribs ached.

He wished he’d been drinking the arrack and not simply emptying it out piecemeal into his sharp-elbowed neighbor’s cup. He wished the dancer would finish and the poet would hurry up and begin his salon. But although the poet had entered some time ago, his acolytes had been arriving in straggling batches, their expressions hunted.

The three women who usually attended him had crept by, ushered through the room by a man who glared at anyone who gave them too long a glance. A few men in heavy shawls, dripping from rain, had turned up and pushed through the crowd to the corridor that led to the cramped back rooms of the brothel. But there were no young scribes yet—no men with tonsured hair and bound manuscripts under their arms, fingers stained with ink, ready to copy the poet’s words.

The poet wouldn’t begin until they were all here. He never did.

So Rao waited. And pretended to drink. And watched the courtesan spin.

Rao only knew something was amiss when the brothel madam entered the hall and waved one bracelet-laden arm at the musicians, ordering them silent. The music ended in an abrupt, discordant stumble of reed flutes and cymbals, as one musician after the other raised his hands awkwardly before him at her urging.

The courtesan whirled to a stop with a smooth turn of her heels against the emerald-tiled floor. The folds of her skirt rustled to stillness. Her braid looped itself artfully around her throat. Without missing a beat—even though there was no longer any rhythm to guide her—she clasped her hands before her and bowed, ending the dance.

Rao could only be quietly impressed. To perform with grace before a crowd of drunk old lechers was a hard enough task. To end a six-stage Ahiranyi traditional dance in its third step was even harder, for a woman who valued her art. And this woman—who had danced in the hall three nights in a row, each night swirling her way through a blatantly seditious piece intended to venerate the yaksa spirits seasoned with just enough flashes of hip and ankle to please the customers—clearly valued her art very highly indeed.

“I’m afraid that is all for tonight, my lords,” the madam said apologetically, as her girls crossed the room and drew heavy brocade curtains across the perforated screen walls of the hall. The sounds of the city were immediately blotted out. The faint sweetness of the night breeze was replaced by the scent of sweating men, pipe smoke, perfumed oil, and lantern fumes. “The soldiers are walking again tonight.”

There was a startled murmur from the crowd. The soldiers never closed the brothels. The pleasure houses were the reason Parijatdvipans came to Ahiranya at all. It had always been considered more licentious than any other part of the empire. The Ahiranyi did not guard their women’s purity as carefully. In the past they had even allowed their men to marry men, and their women to marry women. When Rao had still been a boy, he and his friends—other young nobles of Parijatdvipa’s city-states, all of them—had managed to get hold of a contraband copy of the banned Ahiranyi religious poetry, the Birch Bark Mantras. They’d laughed and joked, mocking the text and each other to hide their embarrassment as they read explicit tales of lewdness alongside tracts where the yaksa conquered nation after nation, bathing them in blood.

It was only since his arrival in Ahiranya, where passages from the Birch Bark Mantras were painted on walls and recited by poets who used the brothels as cover to disseminate their politics, that he had come to understand that what he and his friends had blushed over as lewdness was a source of faith and defiance to the Ahiranyi, who joined stories of seductive beings of flower and flesh, of two men lying together, and of world-conquering glory on the same lyrical breath.

The rumblings of discontent that had started to echo through the crowd died quickly, as confusion gave way to caution and fear. Men clambered to their feet. Began to leave. If the brothel was closing, then something terrible had happened. Better to be somewhere safe than wait to hear from the soldiers directly what had occurred.

Rao remained where he was for a moment. The brothel madam stood, watching the men go. She looked calm enough, but as the curtains were closing he’d seen the tightness around her eyes. The sweat dotting her upper lip.

She was afraid.

Maybe the fact that she allowed her girls to dance subversively and rented her rooms to Ahiranyi poets was enough of a reason for her to be frightened. But Rao had a feeling that the fear on her face was too real, too immediate to simply be abstract.

He should have left then. But Rao was one of the nameless faith, and he understood the sacred power of instinct—the way a body’s knowing could be a gift from the nameless, a prophecy written in the thud of the heart or the ice of fear winding down a spine. He felt it then: a kind of foreboding. Not quite fear. Not quite curiosity.

There was knowledge here, if he was willing to take it.

He stood. Instead of leaving the brothel, he crossed the room and entered the corridor leading to the poet’s salon.

There was no one else in the corridor to watch him, but he made a point of swaying as he walked anyway. An ungainly, drunken sway. He knew he smelled of tobacco and the opium pipe, of wine—his jacket was open, his hair loose. He had no marks of status: no chakrams like bracelets on his arms or necklaces of pearl around his throat, no fine blue Aloran turban, no brace of daggers on a belt at his hips. He wore instead a plain necklace of prayer stones, fruit pits polished and joined with darts of silver, the kind all Parijati men wore. And that was what he was. Not a nameless prince of Alor, prophecy-born, but a Parijati highborn, rich and doltish and deep into his cups.

He stopped, slumping to the ground. Closed his eyes.

Listened.

Soldiers in the room, and women weeping, and men murmuring in low voices. The soldiers were asking questions and one of the men—not the poet, Rao knew his voice—was arguing. “We’re scholars, sirs, and artists. We’re not rebels, we only discuss ideas.”

“No one said you were rebels,” the soldier replied, which made one of the women start weeping more fiercely.

The poet and his followers were rebels, though, of a kind. In this room, he’d heard them speak of secession and resistance through the medium of Parijati poetry—the metaphor of rose and thorn, of poisonous oleander, of fires and honey, turning Parijat’s own language against itself.

He thought of the lies—and truths—he’d had to pay to learn their secrets. The discontent among Ahiranya’s highborn. The threads of unease that united them, and their merchants and warriors and potters and healers. The way the mishandling of the rot, the deaths of farmers, the banning and debasement of Ahiranyi language and literature, had all culminated in the work of an unknown number of masked, armed rebels who murdered Parijatdvipan officials and merchants with pointed viciousness, and a much vaster number of poets and singers who spread the image of a free Ahiranya.

The poet and his followers were not the masked rebels of Ahiranya’s forest. But they were part of the soul of the resistance against Parijatdvipa, bound to highborn funders, and Rao had hoped they would have use to him.

Now, unfortunately, their use was gone.

A noise. Rao raised his head.

“You there,” said the soldier. He wore Parijat’s white and gold, with the regent’s mark on his turban. His booted footsteps were heavy. “What are you doing here?”

Rao hadn’t heard him approach. Perhaps he’d drunk slightly more of the arrack than he thought he had.

“L-looking for the way out,” Rao slurred. “Sir.”

He could see the soldier weighing up his options: leave the drunken sot he’d found in the hallway to be thrown out by one of the brothel’s capable guards, or drag him into the salon to be interrogated alongside the poet and his acolytes? Rao saw the soldier’s interest in him waver. Rao was a drunk fool, there was nothing of note about him—he’d made sure of that—and how likely was a Parijati man to be involved in the Ahiranyi resistance? He would vomit, perhaps, or cry. Much better to leave him.

Rao gave a drunken hiccup and tried to straighten up. The soldier rolled his eyes, muttered something unsavory under his breath, and turned to go.

Behind them, in the salon, a woman screamed. One of the men began to shout, then went abruptly silent, as a thud echoed down the corridor. Thud of flesh, of metal, of blood.

The soldier reached reflexively for his own sword. He looked at Rao once more. The shock of the noise had made Rao straighten up, his spine iron, his eyes wide. He was holding himself far too steady.

The soldier’s eyes narrowed.

“You,” he said. “Get up.”

Rao swallowed. Searched for the slur his voice needed. “What—”

He had no more time to dissemble. The soldier grabbed him by his arm, wrenching him up so suddenly that if Rao hadn’t been naturally light on his feet the movement would have dislocated his shoulder. The soldier dragged him through the corridor and into the salon.

He was flung to the floor. He just about managed to get his hands under him before his nose cracked down on stone. Scrambling up, he was shoved back down by the boot of the same soldier who’d found him.

A dozen sets of eyes turned on him: a handful of the regent’s imperial soldiers, dressed in Parijatdvipan white and gold, sabers at their belts; a huddle of terrified women, holding one another; a few men still in their shawls, one slumped to the ground, his throat cut, his blood pooling on the floor.

And the poet, Baldev. He was an older man, heavyset as only the wealthy could afford to be, with a square jaw and nose that was a firm, aquiline blade. That noble face of his was a rictus of fury, and of fear.

“I found this one outside,” the soldier who’d dragged Rao in said gruffly.

“One of yours, is he?” This was asked of Baldev, by another soldier.

Baldev looked at Rao.

Rao thought of the way he had eked a space out for himself at these salons, slowly coaxing one of Baldev’s followers into extending him an invitation. He thought of the questions he’d asked Baldev, once the poet’s mistrust had thawed somewhat and he’d begrudgingly come to believe that Rao was not a man with ill intentions and was merely what he’d claimed to be: a Parijati man with a scholar’s bent, high ideals, and a desire to see Ahiranya free.

He thought of what Baldev had revealed to him. The secret half shared after the last salon.

I know someone who may be able to help you.

“I do not know this man,” Baldev said, looking Rao up and down with visible scorn.

“Are you sure of that?”

“I do not consort with men who are not of my own people,” said Baldev. His voice was sonorous, a rumbling velvet made for poetry and politics. Now, it was weighty with deliberate distaste for the drunk Parijati man sprawled upon the floor—and for the soldiers surrounding him. “This house is full of depraved Parijati lechers like him. By all means, arrest them all. I would be glad to see my land free of them. He is no acolyte of mine.”

The women, the men, all studiously avoided looking his way. He returned the favor and stared at the floor.

“Fine,” said another soldier. He spoke softly, but the cuff of silver on his upper arm marked him as the commander. His eyes were unblinking. “I have a few simple questions for you, poet. Answer with innocence, and you may go.”

“A riddle, is it?” Rao glanced up and saw that Baldev’s smile was mirthless. It was only the puckered tightness of that smile that told Rao he was afraid at all.

As he should have been. Beneath the knife edge of adrenaline, beneath the watchful patience that long years of court and weapons training had inculcated into him, Rao was afraid too.

“Did you have any involvement with the attack on the regent’s mahal?” the commander asked.

“No,” said Baldev.

“The night the conch sounded—you were here?” The commander’s voice was mild.

Silence. Perhaps the reality of what lay before Baldev was sinking in.

“Yes,” Baldev said finally. “We were here. My acolytes and I.”

“Preaching a rebel political ideology,” the soldier prompted.

Baldev said nothing.

The commander took a single step forward, hands clasped behind him.

“Do you have many women come to your… lectures?” The commander’s gaze slid to the women huddled together, shaking faintly with fear. “Speak. Or I’ll gut another man.”

“No. Not many women.”

“Are you sure, poet?”

“Women of repute don’t often enter pleasure houses.”

“We hear Ahiranyi women don’t worry much for their reputation,” said one of the other soldiers. Another next to him laughed. Those two, Rao noticed, did not wear exactly the same uniforms as the rest. They did not have the regent’s mark on their turbans, and the man’s common-speech Zaban did not have the lilting Ahiranyi accent. “What are these women, then? Whores?”

“Hold your tongue,” their commander said evenly.

“Sorry, Commander Jeevan,” the man said. He did not sound particularly repentant.

“Speak,” the commander said to the poet.

“Maidservants,” the poet said stiffly. “Nursemaids. Respectable enough.”

“You’ll have no trouble remembering one particular woman, then: small, young. No taller than that one over there.” He gestured at one of the women, who let out a small exhale—of terror and anger both—without raising her gaze. “Dark skin. You know her?”

“That could be any number of women.”

“She called herself Meena.”

“No,” said Baldev. “I don’t know this woman.”

“Until recently,” the commander continued, “she was a maid at the regent’s mahal. She tried to kill his guest. A messy business. Luckily she was stopped.” A pause. “We wondered,” he said, “where a woman may go to learn such things. A maid. And here you are, poet.”

Rao could almost hear the argument forming on Baldev’s lips: What use could it be, to a man like him, to attack a guest of the regent?

Then Baldev remembered that the emperor’s sister was prisoner in the regent’s care. Rao could see him remembering it: the sudden grayness that came over the poet’s face.

Nothing he said would save him.

“We found a few scribes writing material they shouldn’t have,” the commander continued. “Outright heresy, hidden in Ahiranyi script.”

“Where are they?” one bold woman asked. Her voice shook.

“They’ve been taken to the execution grounds already.”

“Spare the women, at least,” Baldev whispered. In all his evening lectures, his recitations, his voice had never sounded so small.

“The women are the problem,” the commander drawled.

“What will you do to them?” the poet asked. His voice shook. Then firmed. “We have heard what Emperor Chandra does to women. Please—”

“A better death than unclean women deserve,” one of the two Parijati soldiers said loudly. “You Ahiranyi don’t know how lucky you are.”

The commander’s mouth thinned. Then he turned his attention to his men. Made a gesture.

Round them up.

It was too much. One of the Ahiranyi men who’d been kneeling in the blood of his compatriot gave a yell and threw himself forward. There was a hiss of steel, shouting—a burst of fresh blood, as chaos descended and the women shot for the door.

There seemed, in that moment, no reason not to intervene. Whatever the soldiers believed Rao to be, they were going to kill him too. So he turned, shoving one of the soldiers off-balance with an apparently careless scramble of his own hands and knees against the stone. In the tumult of bodies and weapons, it was a miracle that Rao was not crushed or stabbed. When he felt a boot in his ribs he took it as his due. His head met the floor. Stars burst behind his eyes.

Without a weapon, there was nothing to be done but to allow his weight to roll, and to grab another soldier’s leg. He groaned. Behind him, around him, the men were yelling. One threw a book. Sheaves of poetry burst against the floor.

One of the women was out the door and down the hall, a soldier running after her. Rao remained where he was on the floor.

He bit out a curse when a knife landed in the ground by his head. He looked up and saw the poet Baldev staring down at him, face bloodied, a bruise blooming over his eye.

Baldev spat in his face.

“Parijati scum,” he snarled. It was an ugly expression, entirely at odds with the reasoned, intellectual manner he’d taken in the past. “You’re all Parijati scum!”

Baldev punched wildly at the nearest guard—and then he was flung to the floor, pinned, and Rao was left where he was.

The soldier above him—one of the men not wearing the regent’s mark who had stared at his commander with barely concealed disdain—looked down at Rao, for the first time with a sense of kinship.

“He shouldn’t have done that,” the soldier said gruffly. “Once you get under the surface, they’re all brutes.”

Rao said nothing. His ribs hurt. His face was hot with blood.

If he’d had a sword, he could have taken the man’s head.

The soldier offered his hand. Rao took it.

“Sir,” said the soldier to his commander.

“Let him go, then,” the commander said, in that same bored drawl. “I think we can agree he’s only what he seems to be.”

Still, the soldier hesitated.

“I—I can pay,” Rao stammered out, hating himself a little for the ruse of it. He fumbled. Dragged the Parijati prayer stones, those piths joined by links of silver, from the neck of his tunic. “I—I can—”

Finally, that seemed to be enough.

“Go,” said the soldier. “Run, you drunken bastard. You’ll know better than to interfere with imperial business next time, won’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” said Rao.

A better man would have fought valiantly for those weeping women, those men. The poet. A better man would not have been in this room—in this brothel at all.

But Rao was not a better man. He was only a man with a purpose, and his work was not yet done.

He stumbled to the door.

The poet was not looking at him. The poet had saved his life.

Rao left him to his death.

He woke to the sight of Lata leaning over him, her forehead creased into a fan of lines. Above her the ceiling was covered in carvings of roses and iris blossoms. He was back in the palace of illusions, then. Distantly, he could hear faint strains of music. But the rooms he’d rented in this fine pleasure house, an establishment with pink lanterns at the door, were as large as a king’s, and well-insulated from the noise below.

“Stay still,” Lata said. “I’m cleaning your wounds. Your ribs are bruised.”

“At least tell me you didn’t take off my dhoti,” Rao said thinly.

He meant it as a joke, but Lata said, “No. I let Prem do it. Stop trying to raise your head.”

Rao ignored her and looked up. Prem, low prince of Saketa, stood at the end of the divan. He smiled, his eyes crinkling.

“Hello, Rao,” Prem said. “You’re a mess.”

Rao huffed out a weak laugh and lowered himself back down.

“I don’t suppose you had any luck convincing the regent to help us, then,” said Rao.

“You’re lucky I didn’t,” said Prem. “If I hadn’t returned early, you’d be dead on the street.”

“I told your men where I’d gone for a reason.”

“You should have taken them with you.”

“That would have made me a little too conspicuous, I think.”

“You’re right,” said Prem. “You shouldn’t have gone out at all.”

“It was important,” Rao said. And not the first time, he added silently. If Prem’s men hadn’t told him what Rao had been up to, then Rao wasn’t going to.

Prem reached leisurely for his pipe, which had been hidden under the folds of his voluminous shawl: a wool thing of deep, deep blue that draped over his fingers and was tightly knotted around his throat.

“We’re staying in a perfectly good brothel, and you go to a cheap shack instead. Sometimes I don’t understand you, Rao.”

“I went for the poet. A man named Baldev.”

“What did he have that you needed?”

“Information about Ahiranya’s rebels,” Rao admitted.

“I don’t see why rebels would want to help our cause,” Prem said. But he was listening, his eyes a faint glitter in the lantern light.

“They wouldn’t. I didn’t tell him our cause. I told him a lie. I told him I wanted knowledge.” He took a slow, shallow breath, feeling the ache of his own ribs, his own lungs. “And I gained it.”

Prem puffed his pipe.

“The poet,” Rao said after a moment, “the last time I went to his salon, he admitted to me that he and his sympathizers have the support and protection of a powerful figure in Ahiranya. He told me…”

I cannot give you a name. Some things are too precious. And some things, I am not privy to.

Are you not?

A faint smile.

I am not an important man.

The poet had hesitated. Had met Rao’s eyes as the two of them sat in the back room of the brothel, dawn light creeping in through the window. And Rao had stared back, earnest, wide-eyed, a rich and foolish man with a good heart. Those were always the best lies, the ones set over real bones.

Come back and we’ll talk, boy.

“There are sympathizers to Ahiranyi secession from the empire at every echelon of the country’s government,” Rao said eventually. “I didn’t have a chance to obtain a name. The soldiers came before I’d finished with him.”

“Oh, the soldiers. That, I know.”

“The poet saved me,” murmured Rao, thinking of Baldev’s fury. The knife that hadn’t even grazed him, for all the anger with which it had been slammed into the floor. “He didn’t have to.”

“Ah.” Prem took another puff of his pipe. Released a breath of smoke. “And why did he do that?”

Rao rose to a seated position with difficulty. “I earned his trust.”

“How?”

“I told him I’d read the teachings of Sunata.” There was a pause, a silence that stretched until Rao said ruefully, “You don’t know who Sunata is.”

“Not all of us like books as much as you.”

“Sunata was a sage.” Sages were wise men and women with no affiliation to any faith or creed. “Sunata’s teachings underpin—never mind.” Rao shook his head. Winced. He’d forgotten for a moment that his body was a pummeled bag of bruises. “He wrote that there is no meaning in the universe: no fate, no high blood, no rights of kings over land. Everything is emptiness. The world only has meaning when we give it meaning.”

“He sounds astute,” murmured Lata, still applying a paste of spices with unnecessary firmness to Rao’s bruised ribs.

“I don’t understand,” said Prem. “Make it simpler, Rao, there’s a friend.”

“People who follow his teachings reject all kings, all royalty, all empires. They believe in… self-determinism. I suppose that’s the closest explanation.”

“Ah,” said Prem again. “I expect his teachings aren’t popular with kings, then? The high prince wouldn’t much approve of that.”

“His books were burned in Parijat,” said Rao. “And in Alor. In Saketa—”

“So, everywhere,” said Prem.

“Not among sages,” said Lata. But of course, Lata was a sage herself, and they would never burn books. It was anathema to their calling.

“Have you read him, then?”

“No,” said Lata. “I don’t care for that brand of philosophy, particularly.”

“I’d hoped that we could use what the rebels have,” said Rao. “I hoped… well. It doesn’t matter now.”

“The rebels are masked brutes,” Prem said. “They want to tear down Parijatdvipan rule, Rao. They want the good old days of the Age of Flowers back.” His lip curled, a little. No scion of a city-state of Parijatdvipa thought of the Age of Flowers, the era before the mothers defeated the yaksa, with anything resembling nostalgia. “Even if the rebels have the support of highborn Ahiranyi in kicking the rest of us out—what did you want to achieve? We’re hardly here to help the Ahiranyi get their freedom from imperial rule.”

“A way to get her out.”

Prem exhaled again. “Always that.”

“Of course,” said Rao. “Of course.”

Prem did not call Rao a fool. Not over this. Perhaps he pitied Rao too much to do it. Instead he said, “I’m sorry. I know how much she means to you.”

As always, embarrassment curdled in Rao’s stomach at the thought that Prem—that anyone—misunderstood the situation.

“But you’ve done all you can,” Prem was saying. “And so have I. The regent won’t see me again.” Another curl of smoke. “A shame, really. Emperor Chandra will replace that one soon enough. And Lord Santosh is a damn idiot. He’ll just be Chandra’s puppet—setting a new bunch of poor girls on fire and harping on about the purity of Parijati culture, as if the rest of us are as low as the Ahiranyi and need to be led.”

But there were other people in Ahiranya who could prove useful, Rao thought. Nobility who were not as likely to lose their positions as the regent. Ahiranyi highborn, who were perhaps funding rebels—rebels who could be utilized to support a coup against Chandra and see Princess Malini freed.

“You shouldn’t smoke in here,” Lata said, the familiar disapproval of her voice almost a balm. “Go outside, Prem.”

“Is he such an invalid?”

“No,” said Lata. “But I don’t like the scent of it. Go.”

“As the sage orders,” Prem said, inclining his head with a smile. He turned to go, wreathed in smoke. He lowered the pipe. Looked back.

“Rao,” he said. “You know Aditya needs us. You know Parijatdvipa needs us to make sure the right brother sits on the throne. Emperor Aditya. Imagine that.”

Rao said nothing. He had imagined it. But it was Aditya’s fault that that vision hadn’t yet come to pass.

“Just…” Prem exhaled. “I’m going to him. As soon as the festival falls. You should come with me. He’ll need you. You’ve done all you can to save her. And so have I.”

“Have we?” Rao said.

“Yes,” Prem said. He smiled again, something sad in the uptick of his mouth. “We have.”

Rao wanted to argue, and he knew Prem was ready to respond in kind, but Lata interjected.

“Prince Prem,” she said. “Let my patient rest.”

Silence. Then, “I’ll be back later, Rao.”

Rao lay back and closed his eyes as Lata moved around the room, murmuring to herself about clean linens and boiled water.

He thought of Malini, up in that prison. So close, but too far for any of them to reach her.

He thought of the letter she’d written to him. A hasty, tear-stained scrawl, not in court Dvipan, not even in the shared common Parijatdvipan tongue of Zaban, but in the modern, city Aloran his sister had taught her. The letter had been delivered by a handmaiden with haunted eyes. She’d been bribed with Malini’s last scrap of gold. Her mother’s wedding bangles.

The letter had ash upon it. Salt and ash.

Chandra is sending me to Ahiranya.

And there, underlined, a quiet desperation in the curve of every letter:

Save me.

Lata kneeled down beside him. He opened his eyes. She looked pinched and tired.

“Will you leave, then?” Lata asked quietly.

“What do you think?”

She said nothing for a moment.

“I think we need to bandage your ribs,” she said finally. “Hold still. This will hurt.”

“Don’t worry,” Rao said, swallowing. The roses stared back down at him, so red upon the ceiling that they resembled spatters of blood. “I’m very good at following orders.”