The Lotus Empire (The Burning Kingdoms #3)

Chapter 36 Bhumika

BHUMIKA

A single day in the village stretched into two, then three, then four. After that, Bhumika put aside counting.

“You’ll go nowhere until the floodwaters recede,” one villager had said on their arrival, rain- and river-soaked and shivering. That woman had soon been proven correct. The waters rose until the village was circled, and no one could safely leave.

Bhumika made the best of it when they first arrived, instructing the two children to help Gulnar to shelter, as Jeevan rounded up the strongest villagers to build a makeshift dam from felled trees. As the days passed she put herself to good use, stoking fires and washing flood-soiled clothes. She sat with Gulnar and hand-fed her a thin kichadi to restore her wavering strength.

When the children she’d met on that first day of flooding visited and hesitantly thanked her for helping them, she set them to work tidying and sweeping and watching over Gulnar in her stead whenever she had other tasks to tend to.

The village was small—a set of ramshackle buildings, flat-roofed and set high on a hill. Almost all its people were women or young children, many of them rot-riven. The headwoman of the village, Manjeet, had told them in her own terse but not unkind words that the men of the village had gone to war, or left in search of work, or become sick with rot and left to seek a cure. None had returned.

Gulnar’s home was farthest from the center of the village. When Bhumika questioned this, one of her new helpers told her that widows were bad luck. “Usually she wouldn’t be in the village at all, but we couldn’t leave her to drown,” the boy said, shifting uncomfortably on his feet. “Truthfully, ma’am, if you didn’t feed her I’m not sure any of the women would risk it. But maybe for outsiders there’s no ill luck?”

“I’m sure,” Bhumika agreed. “You were right to help her,” she told him, which made the boy relax. But long after he was gone she pondered the information he’d given her. On her pallet, Gulnar shifted uneasily in her sleep, her wedding quilt wrapped around her in a messy shroud of cloth.

Jeevan had claimed again that he and Bhumika were married, and they had been given a portion of a house, made private by a curtain, to share. It was warmer than Gulnar’s new abode. Too warm, perhaps, with Jeevan’s body next to hers and radiating its own heat.

She’d learned her lesson, she hoped, from her disastrous meeting with the priests of the nameless. She would speak on Gulnar’s behalf but quietly, in the privacy of the headwoman’s own abode. The headwoman Manjeet had so far proven herself to be sharp but not unreasonable. There was hope.

Bhumika walked by Jeevan and a group of younger women and boys cutting wood. He looked up at her as she passed. He nodded, his eyes soft. She nodded in return.

The headwoman wasn’t alone, to Bhumika’s dismay. Women surrounded her, kneeling on the floor and grinding grain into flour. They looked up when Bhumika entered. Some greeted her vocally, and others only nodded, still wary of this stranger in their midst.

“You shouldn’t be in here,” one woman said. She was curly-haired with rot growing visibly on her right arm. “You’re ill luck.”

“Our ways aren’t custom across Alor, Bidisha,” the headwoman said, still grinding with long sweeps of her arms. “She doesn’t know any better than to leave a widow alone. Don’t berate her.”

“She isn’t from Alor,” Bidisha replied. “I don’t know where she’s from, but I can guess. You think we don’t have enough trouble to deal with without you here?” She brandished her arm pointedly.

Manjeet lowered her pestle with a thunk and a sigh of breath.

“Is she troubling you that much? Ah, fine, fine! Leave, the lot of you,” said the headwoman to Bidisha, waving a hand irritably. “I’ll talk to the outsider alone.”

Bidisha frowned but didn’t argue. The other women filed out quickly, clearly pleased to have a break from their work.

“Sit,” Manjeet said. Bhumika sat.

The headwoman was silent for a long moment. Bhumika clasped her hands neatly in her lap and waited.

“You’re used to ordering people about,” Manjeet observed finally. “You expect to be listened to. Telling the children to save the widow’s bedding, getting your husband to order my folk to cut the rosewoods and dam the river, for what little good it will do… strange.”

“You asked the children about me,” Bhumika observed.

“I asked old Gulnar too,” said Manjeet. “Though some might say even a word from her could curse me. I asked about your husband as well, but the children had less to say about him. Gulnar told me he has lovely strong arms. Why are you here, little sister?”

“The flood—”

Manjeet clucked her tongue. “Never mind the flood. Why are you in Alor? In this forest? You’re not Aloran. You come with your foreign highborn voice and your ragged clothes, your man with his saber and the way he looks at you, like the nameless wrote loving you into his fate, and you order about my village children and stranger still—they listen to you. It’s the listening I don’t understand. The obedience. Why do they do it? What makes you, a slip of nothing, worth trusting? If I didn’t know better, I would say you were a witch, or some ancient being sent to play tricks upon our minds.”

“I am none of those things,” Bhumika said evenly.

“I said I know better, didn’t I? I traveled in my youth. I know what you are.” Manjeet leaned forward. “You’ve got no rot on you,” she said. “How did you avoid it in Ahiranya?”

There was little use lying about her origins now.

“Luck,” said Bhumika, who did not know. “But it cannot pass between people. If anyone in your village touches a crop with rot, tell them to wash their skin with salt water. It is the only thing Ahiranyi believe can help.”

Manjeet nodded, satisfied to have her suspicions proved correct.

“Salt water we can make and try,” said Manjeet. “Now tell me honestly why you’re here. Go on.”

There was something in Manjeet’s eyes that made Bhumika pause, a canniness that was not the faraway, deep dreaminess of the young priest at the monastery but was still akin to it.

“I came for the monastery,” said Bhumika. A half-truth would do, here. “I had heard the monastery holds a special magic. A way of reaching the nameless not just for moments in a pool of water—but deeply, powerfully. I hoped to find a wise person there who would listen to me.” Bhumika paused, then said carefully, “I fear that the world is in great danger. Insignificant though I am, I hope to do some good.”

“What could you hope to say to a wise priest that would make anything better?” Manjeet asked. “Well, you’ll find no listeners in that place, sister, and no lecturers either. Even when they welcomed visitors, they liked ones with more coin than you have. There are smaller, more welcoming monasteries that will take you and pray with you if you like. But that place is too grand for outsiders. Don’t bother trying.”

That warning was far too late, but there was no reason for the headwoman to know that. Bhumika nodded. “Thank you,” she said.

She could hear the children playing outside. The hiss and thud of an axe felling wood. She thought of Jeevan out there, callused hands on the axe, the way she knew—as she knew the sun would rise tomorrow and tomorrow—that when she emerged from this house he would look at her with that solemn face, those searching eyes again. The way he looks at you—

She tucked the thought away.

“Headwoman, your men are gone,” Bhumika said, quiet and even. “Many of you are likely widows like Gulnar, even if they do not know it. Why obey old traditions that no longer serve you?”

“Foolish of you to come here and judge us so,” the headwoman said. But there was no anger in her voice. She was listening.

“I mean no harm,” Bhumika said. “I want only to help. I don’t want to cause problems for you or your people. But I have been forced to change to survive. I gave up everything to flee my old home. I have changed so utterly my old self would call me a stranger. But my choices have allowed me to live, where others have died.

“Your old village is gone,” Bhumika continued. “But you are all here. Let my husband and me take Gulnar’s hut, and give her a safe bed close to your village’s heart. We are strangers, and she is one of your own. You will need to hold each other close to survive what is to come.” She gave Manjeet a smile. “I think your village’s children would support you. They’re fond of her.”

The headwoman’s look was piercing.

“I’ll consider it,” she said. “It would be better if we wait long enough for it to be my decision alone. I won’t have Bidisha harping at me.” She lifted her grinding stone again and turned to her grain in dismissal. “You and your man will want to leave when the flood ends, I expect.”

“Yes,” Bhumika said. Polite, but nonetheless a door closed. “Jeevan and I are grateful for your kindness. I promise when the waters fade and go, so will we.”