Glower.
“And another thing—”
Shakuntala spent the next hour in uncharacteristic silence, nodding her head, attending patiently to her new adviser. It was not difficult. His advice, in truth, was excellent. And she had no need to rein in her temper. Even if he had been babbling nonsense, she would have listened politely.
She had her adviser. In fact, if not yet in name.
At the end of that hour, Dadaji Holkar reined himself in. With a start of surprise.
“You are a treacherous girl,” he grumbled. Then, chuckling: “Quite well done, actually!” He gazed at her fondly, shaking his head with amusement.
“Very well, Empress,” he said. “Let us leave it so: I will send your request to Belisarius. If he agrees, I will serve you in whatever capacity you wish.”
Shakuntala nodded. “He will agree,” she said confidently. “For reasons of state, if no other. But he will want to know—what do you wish? What will you tell him?”
Holkar stared at her. “I will tell him that it is my wish, also.” Then, still seated, he bowed deeply. “You are my sovereign, Empress. Such a sovereign as any man worthy of the name would wish to serve.”
When he lifted his head, his face was calm. Shakuntala’s next words destroyed that serenity.
“What is your other purpose?” she asked.
Holkar frowned.
“You said, earlier, that the destruction of Malwa was one of your purposes. One of two. Name the other.”
Holkar’s face tightened.
Shakuntala was ruthless.
“Tell me.”
He looked away. “You know what it is,” he whispered.
That was true. She did. But she would force him to face it squarely. Lest, in the years to come, it gnawed his soul to destruction. Youth, too, has its bold wisdom.
“Say it.”
The tears began to flow.
“Say it.”
Finally, as he said the words, the slave vanished. Not into the new, shadow soul of an imperial adviser, but into what he had always been. The man, Dadaji Holkar.
In the quiet, gentle time that followed, as a low-born Maratha sobbed and sobbed, his grey head cradled in the small arms of India’s purest, most ancient, most noble line, the soul named Dadaji Holkar finished the healing which a foreign general had begun.
He would help his sovereign restore her broken people.
And he would, someday, find his broken family.
A Family and Its Resolve
Ironically, Dadaji Holkar had already found his family, without knowing it. He had even, without knowing it, helped them through their troubles.
Standing next to the stablekeeper in Kausambi, watching the rockets flaring into the sky, he had been not half a mile from his wife. She, along with the other kitchen slaves, had been watching those same rockets from the back court of her master’s mansion. Until the head cook, outraged, had driven them back to their duties.
She had gone to those duties with a lighter heart than usual. She had no idea what that catastrophe represented. But, whatever it was, it was bad news for Malwa. The thought kept her going for hours, that night; and warmed her, a bit, in countless nights that followed.
His son had actually seen him. In Bihar, rearing from his toil in the fields, his son had rested for a moment. Idly watching a nobleman’s caravan pass on the road nearby. He had caught but a glimpse of the nobleman himself, riding haughtily in his howdah on the lead elephant. The man’s face was indistinguishable, at that distance. But there was no mistaking his identity. A Malwa potentate, trampling the world.
The overseer’s angry shout sent him back to work. The shout, combined with the sight of that arrogant lord, burned through his soul. From months and months of hard labor, the boy’s body had grown tough enough to survive. But he had feared, sometimes, that he himself was too weak. Now, feeling the hardening flame, he knew otherwise.
Stooping, he cursed that unknown Malwa, and made a solemn vow. Whoever that stinking lord was, Dadaji Holkar’s son would outlive him.
Holkar had not come as close to his daughters. As planned, Shakuntala and her companions had taken a side road before reaching Pataliputra. They had no desire to risk the swarming officialdom in that huge city, and so they had bypassed it altogether.