Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana (6 page)

Someone taps me on the shoulder, and I turn
and it’s the short Russian man I saw earlier with the Nicoya Ravana. He is sans costume, dressed in black and carrying a small case.

“Can I interest you in an elixir, maybe a moment in our booth?” he asks, all business. He motions over to a private booth in the corner. I can’t see much, but I know that this might be the break I’m looking for. I nod and follow.

The booth is empty but it feels
warm and sweaty, as though it was recently evacuated. The Russian pours me a drink from the faux-bamboo carafe on the table.

“Terrible touch, the carafes. Everything should be bronze, silver or Gold,” he says, sneering mildly. “You’d think Val would have better taste.”

“Val makes mistakes,” I say.

“He certainly knew what he was doing with you,” the Russian says, finally looking slightly
lecherous—it made me relax more, the expression familiar. “You give great demonness, I hear.”

“Not hard, growing up here.”

“Ah yes, the best players bring themselves forward,” he says, looking me up and down. “My client is willing to offer you a substantial percentage to come to work for him.”

“Tell me more.”

“He’s creating his own stable of players—they would work where he requires,
but it’s worth it.”

“Space stations? West China? What are we talking about here?”

“My client has various locations. He is working on developing some frontier boutiques.”

I feel my heart thud in my chest, frontiers, that could mean space frontiers or the Border. Either way, the play would be rough and possibly deadly.

“Sounds exciting,” I say boldly. “I’ll do it for a Reverse voucher
for my mother.”

The Russian looks at me carefully. “There’s no such thing,” he says.

“Oh really? That’s too bad.” I say innocently, getting up from the booth “It was great to talk to you. Sounded like a great opportunity.”

“Wait,” the Russian says, looking around. “The voucher can probably be arranged.”

“Oh, how nice,” I reply. He hands me an encrypted chip with his information, tells
me to get in touch within the week. I get up and kiss the Russian once on each cheek. His eyes are an icy blue.

“I look forward to working together,” he says.

While I’m walking away from the table, I see Val looking down at me from his office, his arms folded across his chest. He’s just a silhouette and, for a moment, I imagine I can see all the ants behind him, burrowing into the synthetic
sand in his walls—imagining they are doing the work for a reason, protecting the queen, their own epic played out as part of our fake one. Val shakes his head at me. I smile up at him, thankful. I can’t remember the last time someone actually looked out for me. Then I turn back to the floor.

Tania glows in front of me, her costume shooting out holograms of herself reflected over the room, so
we can only see her image if we tilt our heads up. The ceiling has clouds projected over it to make it seem like we are in the jungle, that we are all dreaming the same dream somewhere. I stop and look up at her image flashing.

Suddenly, she is in front of me, her golden costume covered in tiny beads of sweat that the latex breathes out from the heat of her body. I hear the crowd stir, even
in their sluggish Lust haze, because the Deer never usually touches the floor. Tania smiles at me with her crooked incisor, mischievous, daring. She starts dancing with me and I move with her. Before the crowd swallows her up, I see the Russian out of the corner of my eye, standing with the men he works for, the men I might soon work for. I see Val above us, watching all the pieces of his universe.
And then, I just close my eyes, and dance, the glow from Tania’s costume flickering behind my eyelids. The music flowing through us, the vines of the fake trees climbing towards the sky.

Making
Aishwarya Subramanian

Months from now a god will casually touch a squirrel. A deceptively human gesture of thanks, his touch will burn through it and alter its very squirrelhood; searing the marks of his fingers onto the backs of all squirrels forever.

Mythili has been touched by a
god. He has given her no ornaments, but has traced lines around her neck that glow like chains of gold, anklets for her feet, a line of light that sweeps up into her hair. He has drawn bracelets round her wrists (his hands gripping them tightly, thumb and forefinger just about meeting at the point where she can feel her pulse). These are the marks he has made deliberately but everywhere he has touched
her she is radiant. His lightest touches have dappled her skin with brightness. Wherever she stands she will always look as she does now in this forest under these trees, patterned with leaf and sun.

Yet it is she who looks at him. Her husband’s long eyes are shaped like lotus petals. His skin is so much finer than her own that the blue tracery of his veins comes through. He is leaning against
the wall of the shelter he coaxed the trees to form in this glade where it is always breezy and mild. When he hums to himself tiny flowers spring up out of the earth in response. He smells of earth and herbs and the very trees yearn towards him,
bending their heads closer to the ground to be as near to him as possible. Mythili recognises that feeling better than anybody.

They are being watched.
Brother and sister hide in the bushes. When they leave, the grass where they stood is brown and dead.

Meenakshi in her workshop crafts a body fit for a god. Limbs long and smooth, skin petal-soft . The feet are long and narrow, the hands small but with long nails. The hair is copper (they must stay true to their roots) and as it captures the light of the forges it glows. She cannot help
but wonder what it will look like when the man in the forest has laid his light-giving hands upon it. Underneath the hair a perfect face -straight nose, wide mouth, lovely, fish-shaped eyes that slant. She lines the eyes with coal dust.

“It won’t work.” her brother Vishravan sounds almost sorry.

She plays with the hair (her hair) and runs a finger down the lovely profile that will soon be
hers.

“It will.”

His own workshop is as far away from hers as possible. Meenakshi can do a thousand things that he cannot. She can imitate the waxy texture of the surface of a leaf. She can make small birds that fly, look and sound exactly like the real thing. Only Meenakshi could make herself a body fit for a god. If he asked her to, she could fill the city’s gardens with trees and flowers
and birds, make of it the place he dreamt of when he begged for ten years for a kingdom of his own. He does not ask.

Vishravan thinks too often about the frenzied sea turned white and the huge, pliant, living rope so strange under his hands. He has brooded for so long on that ancient story of a contract that was broken that sometimes he believes he was there himself. He knows how proud the
Daityas were at being approached, how strange it was to be around these beings with whom they were
now equals. The twinge of triumph at being needed, even if only to make up the numbers. And then, when it came to the time to divide the fruits of that great labour, finding out that the decision had been made without them. He doesn’t remember how the Gods looked at him, but he remembers that they
lied.

They were promised nectar and given poison. It seeped into them and leached away what powers they had. They crept into the dark corners of the world (often forests, out of some perverse need for revenge) and nursed their wounds. Where they lived nothing would grow. Daityas turn the grass brown when they stand for too long, and animals flee from them as if their breath was toxic. But they
can still make things.

Meenakshi’s greatest creations are the ones that look the most real. Vishravan will have no truck with the real. He will let her have her workshop but everything on the surface of the city he prayed for for so long must look
made.

He is in his sister’s workshop when Meenakshi leaves. He is still there when she brings back her broken body. Even now it is so lifelike
that he can barely look at it. There is a gaping hole where the nose was; one ear still dangles on a tag of flesh and her skin is melted and corroded as if someone had thrown acid at her. His sister is shaken and hurt and also furious. As he comforts her he plays with her beautiful hair and notices how the light falls upon it. The god in the forest must have touched it. He prefers not to think about
this.

Mythili’s husband sits under a tree. When he returned from his hunting he wore smears of demon blood and an expression of distaste. Asked where he had been, all he would say was “protecting you” before cleaning himself in the river and sitting down to meditate.

The low, rumbling note that comes from his throat is the oldest thing in the universe. Every living thing in the forest
feels it stirring within them when they hear it. What must it be like to be at variance with that sound, as is the creature he has defended her against today? What must it be like to be forever, fundamentally discordant?

The thing the demon builds in his forge bears little resemblance to an actual deer. It is unashamedly fabricated (as if anyone could be taken in by a gold deer)—all polished
gears and gleaming metals. But its gait is rather lovely and the bowing of its neck as graceful as that of any real animal. It is very beautiful.

“Capture it for me”.

Mythili has never ordered her husband to do anything before. She is prepared to argue her case (it is the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen) but he is already off chasing it through the trees.

Her captor seems
strangely uninterested in her. He is a huge man dressed entirely in bronze armour. She cannot see his face. She thinks that he must be blisteringly hot in there. He speaks to her just twice on the journey south, both apologies. Once for the kidnapping, and once for the “barrenness” of his city. They arrive at night and all she can see of his home are the lights in the houses and the gleam of the
domes.

Her servants (she has had none since her marriage) are automata, and her home is pink marble. She spends most of her time in the garden outside. There is no grass in Vishravan’s city, but the ground is paved with coloured stones. There are trees of dead wood and dull iron, and the leaves and flowers (she will learn that they were made for her by her captor’s wife) are tinted glass. The
strange deer-like thing she saw in the forest is also here, though she doesn’t ask how.

Of necessity she spends a lot of time in the palace. Everyone is wary of her, all but Vishravan’s wife Mandodari. From her
she learns that her captor has many brothers (she never sees them while she’s there and all she really remembers is that one is particularly pious and one particularly sleepy), and
that the quiet, middle-aged lady who sits next to him on a throne is his sister, a widow and a clever craftswoman. She senses that Meenakshi avoids her on purpose, but even her new mentor doesn’t know why.

She learns that this palace (a wonder in crystal and coloured stone) was made by her protector’s father. In years to come he will make other celebrated palaces but this one, for his daughter,
is his masterpiece.

So thoroughly has she been taken under Mandodari’s wing that she is safer in this city than anywhere else in the world. They even hear a story about how her new protector dramatically stepped in to save her from rape by a besotted kidnapper.

In Vishravan’s city the physically strong are called upon to build. They make bridges and monuments and roads from strong blocks
of grey and pink stone. The king himself is among them, carrying massive quantities of rock effortlessly. His sister is there too, as strong as he. Mythili has grown up among farmer kings and the first sight of the vast engineering works of Vishravan’s city fills her with awe. The great turbines are constantly in motion on the shore. Water and steam power the city, and massive machines powered by
systems of toothed wheels. She will learn that Vishravan has war machines as well.

Those who do not build apply their skills elsewhere. Mandodari is teaching Mythili how to weave cloth from the thin metallic wires that she herself draws from her forge. They are so thin as to be as soft and pliant as thread. Mythili learns to make elaborate pictures in the resulting cloth, and hangs her home
with tapestries that gleam where the light touches them and make tiny chink-chink noises when the wind shifts them against the walls. Once she has become proficient their creator weaves
for herself a cloth to wear in the rich copper of Meenakshi’s beautiful hair.

She does not like the forges themselves. But the one time she enters Mandodari’s workshop she does make something—a thick ring of
pure gold. She presses her fingers into it to decorate it; the metal is still hot and it blisters her fingers but she is pleased with the result. Even when she learns (Mandodari laughs at her) that pure gold is so soft that she could have let it cool. She has had no ornaments since her marriage either.

She will give the gold ring to the first of her husband’s ambassadors along with a message:
“Can he not rescue me himself?”
By
himself, for
her,
a personal act. Not some sort of cosmic war.

Word comes that her husband’s army has reached the mainland shore.

Ridiculous to imagine that it is outraged pride that propelled the long chase southward. He is hardly a jealous local king. Yet for some reason she has never quite understood he must act out these petty human performances,
as if he could not merely
think
different circumstances into existence. So he performs rage, and standing on the edge of a sea he could part with the mere flick of a hand sends mortal creatures to do his work instead. A vanar is crushed to death when he strays into the path of a boulder that is being rolled into the sea. Her husband has already shot one vanar in the back for the sake of his story.
He reaches out a hand to stroke a passing squirrel whose only contribution to this huge enterprise is a handful of pebbles.

Everybody knows the war is coming.

It is while her husband and his motley army are throwing stones into the sea that Mandodari leads her into the forges for a second time. Around them everyone who can be spared from
their regular duties has been drafted into making
more weapons of iron and bronze; Mandodari is the only one to use gold. Mythili watches as her friend crafts first a necklace and then a thick belt of linked panels of gold.

“To remember us by,” she says, and Mythili realises that she knows how this is going to end. This is the worst moment of all.

The belt is a story. She sees the birth of Vishravan in one panel, and she sees him praying
for ten years for his city. And she learns what everyone in the city knows, no matter how hard Vishravan tries to escape it. And she learns that when he crouched in the bushes with his sister, he wasn’t looking at her.

When the city catches fire molten bronze flows through the cracks in the paving into the forges below. She does not know if her friend has escaped.

On the day that
she is to be tested Mythili arms herself in metals as an act of defiance. She wears the copper cloth that she wove for herself as a sari, and covers her head. She wears Mandodari’s necklace and belt and covers her arms in bangles.

When she moves forward the heat blisters her skin. She can feel molten copper and gold running down her arms and legs. The ground has already begun to rumble even
before she steps into the fire. And then she does, and the earth shatters.