“Draupadi?” The smooth voice stumbled over the syllables of her name. It was the one called Lucilius. Perhaps if she pretended not to hear him, he would go away. It was not worth turning from her memories to squander an illusion on him.
She had known that her fellow students, her teacher, and she would pay a dire price for their flight. By what right did they survive their motherland?
The right of a beast, seeking to survive at all costs? If that were the reason, the price would be beyond bearing. But what if they sought to preserve wisdom against future need as they told themselves they did? How they survived their ordeal would tell them whether they spoke the truth or not.
And then it began. As the seabeds cracked and the sea itself drained away into the depths of the earth, the reckoning came due. They floated till there was no more water. Then, abandoning the ship, they set out on foot through the muck of the seabed, then through what dried into the salt and rock of a desolation such as not even Ganesha ever imagined.
“Lady? Draupadi!”
That one dared to make demands when she was meditating! She turned her shoulder on the young Roman, and then her back, sinking deeper into contemplation of her memories.
There was the night that one of the students had disappeared—he who had been their guide and watchman. Ganesha was old. She had no warrior’s training. They held the others back, but the others sustained her and Ganesha as they trudged toward the hills.
“Leave us,” she had whispered.
“We are bound.”
An old man and a weak woman, and five strong men who might have a chance to live, were they not burdened. It was not even a choice; Draupadi stripped herself of her remaining strength to cast what she hoped would be the greatest of her illusions: We are dead; go on without us; remember us gently.
And so they had, those five men. But they had been right. They had all been bound. And thus, in the twists and dances of time, they had met over and over again. As they did now. But five in one, rather than five brothers? Surely that betokened some change in the patterns of things.
“You should not be here alone.” Lucilius dared to lay a hand upon Draupadi’s shoulder. She could feel the heat of his fingers circling the joint, stroking down her arm, and pulled away.
“So your officer said,” she told him, watching him sidelong.
“That garlic-scented rustic?” Lucilius barked a laugh lacking pleasure or true mirth. “Some senator’s errand boy, rather, allowed into the Legion instead of starving like the son of a traitor that he is!”
Draupadi tossed her head. Let him see that she was displeased. It was not like the time that Dushassana had sought to enslave her and strip her, even though she had cried out that she was in the midst of her courses. Nor like the time she had served in a king’s court as a serving woman.
She had come far in time and place. She could ignore what she chose.
Ganesha and she had lain in the drying salt and grit of what had been the seabed, dying, as they thought, without hope of rebirth. Her mind had wandered far; Ganesha’s, she thought, had journeyed farther yet.
“They will survive,” he told her. “They will prevail. Do not weep, my daughter, for we shall surely meet them again.”
But her head drooped and illusions stranger than any she had seen danced before her eyes.
Then the Flame appeared. Surely it was right to hide one’s eyes from a thing that holy; surely it was right to look away lest she be blinded. Neither she nor Ganesha could do aught but kneel before it. They had feared; they had faltered; and for that, there would be payment. But where they had loved and trusted greatly, that payment would not be beyond them. And they would live.
“And I say you will look at me when I speak to you, seeress or woman or whatever you are!” Lucilius’s voice was angry, demanding now.
What did this creature of less than an instant, who dared to touch her, know of such a life?
How long it had taken her and Ganesha to make their way past the mountains and to the homes of living people! How much longer to make themselves places of respect? Illusion wrapped her about: the splendor of fabrics embroidered with gems, the scent of sandalwood and cardamom, the allure of eyes circled with kohl, and fingers tipped with red.
Old she thought she must be, and tried to dispel the illusion that created beauty of such age. And they would live. It was no illusion. The Flame had seen to that.
How Arjuna had smiled the day he had won her! Over all the princes of the earth, he had triumphed. And, as the conch shells blew, he claimed her, and she saw a man whom she remembered in his eyes, though he wore the flesh of a son of these hills. He brought her home to the Pandavas—his mother Kunti and his four brothers. She remembered them too—reborn as many times as they must have been.
In Mu, their minds had joined. Now their bodies joined, too; she had companied with them in palaces and in wilderness until that age ended. They had decided, she recalled, to leave the world, to return to the hills that Arjuna had loved. But the hills had trembled, and they had fallen, one by one.
They had fallen far. She woke in tranquility, sunlight and water playing about her. Again, she and Ganesha were alone.
“You might listen when a man talks,” said Lucilius. “I could make it worth your while.”
Finally, she turned and looked at the westerner. Fair hair, pale eyes, skin that was weathered, but that otherwise would have been pale: No, there was nothing there for her. And the look on his face—as if he needed only to put out his hand.
On the mountain heights, he could ignore her presence because of the peril of the journey. Now, once again, she saw the expression she had seen in sanctuary—a hunter sure of his prey. He put out his hand again and touched her, not as if he had a right but as if whether he had such a right or not did not matter.
Eyes and lewd hands had followed her at Virata’s court when she had been disguised as a serving girl and her husbands as a cook, a dancing teacher, a gambler … and Kitchaka the general, most of all, had pursued her. He had even caught her and held her, a knife to her throat. She had pleaded with him for a later assignation, which he had granted.
Then she had realized how, stripped of power, stripped of rank, separated from the others with whom she had come down the ages, she was powerless. Then, she had run to seek help.
Now, she cried out wordlessly in anger and slapped him.
And was surprised by the rage that flashed in his green eyes, like a predator caught in torchlight.
“You dare strike me, a patrician of the Lucilian gens…. I suppose you prefer that ploughboy who’s got the stink of the armies on top of the stink of the fields….”
Again, he had her by the arm but her own rage, just as much as his grip, was making her shake. She tried to breathe deeply, to wish calm on herself, and to look into this one’s eyes seeking understanding. ”
She saw pride of family without obligation; greed—a desire to possess, never mind how, and especially if his own possession meant that his enemies went without; anger at being checked by anyone, anything—since he truly considered only those in a position to help him or to order him to be human—whom he had not considered as more than a convenience. She saw contrivance for its own sake, with little guile and less skill; worse yet, she saw the potential that might have made him a man and a warrior, but had, for reasons she could not understand, gone sour. Worse yet, she perceived that he knew he had failed, somehow, of that considerable promise.
How could he live with the horror he was becoming? If they were in the sanctuary, she would not lack for water to form a mirror sufficient to show himself to himself. She could manage without. She raised a hand to gesture, to begin the first of the illusion spells that might tell him what he was becoming.
“You would claw my eyes, would you?” He shoved her to the ground. “I should mark you.”
It was Virata’s court all over again. Submit or be marked. Fight, or accept the self-contempt that yielding brought. Die nobly, perhaps, when every nerve in her body cried out to live until better times came.