A little farther in she found enough space to sit up properly and she leaned against the wall to catch her breath and listen to the bear grunting and sniffing outside. The rock wall pressing against her back was dry but cold and soon a shiver ran through her arms and legs. She pulled her bag off her shoulder and gently tugged out her wool blanket to wrap around her shoulders.
The sounds of the bear faded, but Asha knew it was still nearby. She couldn’t hear it moving or breathing, but her right ear could still catch the beating of its heart, quick and desperate and angry. The bear was starving. It wasn’t going to leave any time soon.
Asha pulled her flowery tree branch closer into the light. She saw rough brown bark like dry cracked skin, green leaves the size and shape of her flattened hand, and pale yellow flowers. “Mahua. Well, that figures.”
“What figures?”
Asha spun to see a faint white figure crouched in the back of the cave behind her. It looked like an elderly man with rounded shoulders, a hollowed out chest, and a hairless head, but it was a figure of shadows drawn in white misty lines. Out of the corner of her eye, he seemed almost human, almost solid. She felt certain he had a careworn face with sagging cheeks and a large nose. But when she turned to study him properly, all the details vanished behind the wavering, smoky lines of the aether. Had it been colder and darker, the man might have appeared more clearly. But given the circumstances, Asha was content that he didn’t.
She blinked. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“What figures? About the mahua?” The ghost nodded at the little branch in her hand.
“Oh. It’s just the bear. I thought that it was strange that the bear was staying here where there’s no food for it. But this explains it. The bear is eating the mahua flowers.”
“Yes.” The frail image of the man hunched down even smaller in the darkness. “When the bear came last year, I thought it was a gift from the gods sent to punish Chandra. But it never went up the trail. It just stays here, eating the flowers. Season after season. It never leaves.”
“To punish Chandra? So you know what he did?”
“What he did?” The man’s reedy voice shook with rage. “He did nothing! He stood up there, looking down on us, listening to us dying, watching the village burn. You think it was luck that he took his boy hunting on the same day the Persians came? He knew. He knew they were coming. Perhaps he heard of them from some travelers, or perhaps he saw them on the road. But instead of warning us, he took his boy into the forest and left us all here to die. He let the Persians butcher us just so he could get his boy back from his wife.”
Asha opened her bag again and carefully removed her old mortar and cracked pestle and then several thin copper tubes with cork stoppers in each end. “I don’t think you have the whole story. I think Chandra still loved his wife, even though they were apart, and I doubt he wanted her to die, let alone the whole village. But what do I know?” She began plucking the mahua flowers from the branch, gently tearing them apart, and placing them neatly in the bottom of her mortar.
“You know nothing.” The old ghost bared his hazy teeth.
“I know the ghosts of the villagers are clinging to that little boy right now. Dozens of them at least.”
“Why not? They still want to live. They want to feel and breathe and see and taste. It’s all so dim now. Living beyond death. Cold and dark and still. So little color, so little light. Everything that was rich and wonderful is lost to us now. So they’re angry.”
“You seem pretty angry yourself,” Asha said. “Why aren’t you with them?” She picked up her pestle and began to grind the mahua flowers, slowly turning and crushing them over and over in the mortar.
The man turned aside. “I lived my life. I’m done with this world.”
“If that were true, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.” As the mahua powder and oil began to collect in the mortar, Asha lifted the mashed petals away.
The ghost shivered as a light breeze rippled through the cave, troubling the thin lines of aether around his face. “Where else can I go?”
Asha frowned up from her work. “You don’t need to go anywhere. You’re dead.”
“What would you know about it?”
“More than you, evidently.”
6
Asha sniffed the amber paste in her mortar. “I studied plants and medicines at a temple for several years. It was a very different place from the city where I was raised. Quieter, smaller, and cleaner. But it was also much colder. It felt like winter year round, even in the summer when the forests were green and the flowers were in bloom.
“The doctor who trained me often took me with him to visit patients. I think he wanted me to be a doctor like him, but I really didn’t have the talent for it. Or maybe I did, but I didn’t try very hard because I didn’t want to be like him. I don’t really remember now. I just liked picking the flowers and mixing the oils. I liked how they smelled,” Asha said.
“And?” The ghost scowled.
Asha resumed her work. She opened one of her copper vials and tapped out a few pale grains into the mahua extract. “One day I went with the doctor to visit an old man who lived on a mountain near the temple. His wife had died the year before and his children had moved away a long time ago, so it was just him alone in the house. He had a cough, I think. Or maybe a tremor or chest pains. I don’t remember. The doctor went inside to examine the old man while I wandered around outside looking for flowers.
“I followed an old path up the hill behind the house to a small garden where I found the wife’s grave. There were peonies there. Beautiful peonies. Huge dark pink blossoms, petals strewn across the ground, petals drifting on the wind around me. I sat there for a long time, just staring at the flowers and playing with the petals. I didn’t see or hear the snake until it was just a few paces away from me. It was very long, with a light brown body and dark brown spots down its back. And a wide triangular head.”
“A viper,” the old ghost whispered. “A very deadly one.”
Asha nodded. “I didn’t know what to do. Do you stay still? Do you run away? As I sat there, the viper crept toward me and curled its body into a handful of swirling loops, tighter and tighter. It hissed at me. It was so loud, louder than any snake I had ever heard before. I was staring straight at it when it struck. I saw its jaws open. I saw its fangs reaching out toward me, already gleaming with drops of venom, its tiny black eyes gazing up at me. And then it froze.
“It hung there in the air for a moment, mouth open, fangs dripping on the grass by my knee. Then it closed its jaws, lowered its head, and slithered away into the rocks.” Asha paused her grinding to pull out a large steel needle from her bag. She spat on the tip of the needle and began gently rolling its point through the mixture in the mortar. The dark coppery syrup clung to the cool metal, and when she lifted the needle up the liquid slid ever so slowly down toward her fingers. She tilted the needle back to keep the fluid from touching her. “After a moment, I stopped panicking and realized that I wasn’t going to die. So I stood up and turned to leave, and that’s when I saw the ghost. It wasn’t my first, but it still surprised me. It was hard to see her clearly. At first I thought there was smoke rising from the old woman’s grave, but then I saw her face, or the shape of a face in the aether.”
“It was the old man’s dead wife? Did she speak to you?”
“Yes.” Asha watched the syrup curing on her needle. The bright golden gleams in the fluid faded to blood red. “She pointed at the rocks where the viper had gone and said, ‘I never liked that snake, but it keeps the rats away from my peonies.’ Then she told me to take care going down the path and she disappeared.”