The last lines of the coded message described an air of nervous expectation among the Catholic priesthood. The professor lifted his eyes from the letter and counted days in his head, trying to guess whether the northern provinces could have already received the news of the victory. He wasn’t sure which airship routes supplied Pune, but he knew that mail from Rome bound for India would avoid flying over Afghanistan, a kingdom that hadn’t abandoned Islam, but had been turned into a vassal state of China and been forced to install hundreds of long-range anti-aircraft cannons across its deserts.
He put the letter down and looked once more at the world, neatly divided between Christian kings. One third Roman Catholic, one third Lutheran Protestant, one third Heavenly Follower. Areas under the influence of other churches weren’t even visible at that scale, but he’d heard proud missionaries proclaim in their sermons how thousands of small religions across the lands once called the Americas had been wiped out, first by the plague, then by the sword, then by the airship. The frozen north of Asia had suffered equally ferocious proselytizing by the Lutherans. As for the frozen north of Novadania… well, who knew what happened in Novadania? To top the list, the Only Son of Heaven commanded from Beijing the submission of all lands between Japan and Jerusalem, and it always gave the professor a sinister chill to consider that only the Himalayas had prevented the steaming carriages from marching down India, which had enough trouble with the Portuguese and the Danes claiming province after province like two hungry dogs chewing at the same bone.
He found the situation ridiculous; they couldn’t both eat the whole thing. What could the Pope have said about it? Iberia had won, but anyone had to see that crippling Denmark’s dominance too badly would create an opening for China. The professor remembered then that he had been meaning to write a letter to his friend Hariram, asking to be notified as soon as news arrived of the Pope’s decision.
Afternoon, April 11 (Gregorian), 1917
Mahisūru
In those first few days since the announcement of the peace, the professor had so dutifully gone on with his ordinary life, the daily lectures, the three-hour walk to and from the university and the warm homemade suppers that he’d barely kept any awareness that the world outside India had changed irreversibly. To see him stand in his classroom and enjoy the fascination in the faces of youths who were being treated to their first taste of serious thought, and then pause to let his throat rest and contemplate, out the window, the placid stillness of a sky peppered with a rainbow of birds, he could be excused for believing that for the past century the countless dying screams from fields and cities and blood-soaked oceans had been hurled at the impassive throne of heaven from another planet, not this one; from a time so afar that he committed no sin by smiling at the sun.
When he entered his house on that day and saw his wife and his daughter waiting for him, sitting next to someone he didn’t know, he had the disquieting sense that his brief window of comfort had closed.
The guest stood up with difficulty and saluted him with her hands together. “We haven’t met in person, and maybe we should have done so earlier. I am Sagunabai Kshirsagar.”
The professor saluted back. “I don’t understand. What brings you all the way here?”
It was only upon seeing Lakshmi’s hands shaking that he noticed they still held pieces of red chalk.
The door to his office was ajar.
“I’m sorry,” said his wife. “We had to make sure of what she said.”
“What did you need from my office?” Without waiting for a reply, he walked in and saw the Map of the World’s Colonies extended on the floor, marked with circles, lines and numbers. Too upset to say anything more, he returned to the living room and locked his gaze with his daughter’s.
“Rukkamma did nothing,” said Lakshmi. “Your friend has brought terrible news. She sought me at my work, and I just had to rush back here to make sense of it.”
“Sagunabai,” he managed to say in a weak voice, “can you explain?”
The old woman spoke as if the words themselves hurt her lips. “The Pope has issued his ruling. The colonial claims in India will be reorganized.” She handed him a folder of papers and he recognized the typeface as a more recent Royal Bulletin. “One of my assistants stole this from an Inquisitor who’d just landed from Krakow. This contains a transcript from the terms of the Peace of Rome, and I thank the Most Merciful that you pushed me into studying Latin. When I read this, I knew I had to come here myself to warn you. This was too serious to put in a letter.”
He stepped halfway across the door to his office and pointed at the map. “What’s the meaning of this? What’s to happen to India?”
She pointed at the text. “Read it.”
He flipped through the pages until he found the Latin transcript.
On the Iberian side, the reference point for demarcation will be the military garrison at Bombaim. His eyes were drawn toward the circle traced around that point on the map. On the Canutic side, the reference point for demarcation will be the trading post at Madras. He nodded at the other circle they’d made. For the purpose of allocating colonial rights between the interested parties, an imaginary line will be traced between both reference points. Indeed, they’d already done so, several times, making minor adjustments to take into account as much as possible the exact location of both garrison and trading post. He could tell these two women had cared very seriously about getting the procedure right. Then, locate the meridian that crosses this imaginary line at its midpoint. The many uncompleted lines across India showed that that part had been difficult to execute, since the map didn’t include the poles and thus it wasn’t obvious to a casual looker whether its meridians should be taken to be straight or curved; Hariram had explained to him that the map used straight meridians, and that seemed to have been the assumption made in the end.
The lands of the Hindustan lying west of that line shall be under Iberian dominion, and the lands of the Hindustan lying east of that line shall be under Canutic dominion.
Professor Hiriyanna felt his stomach sink.
Not since the days of Aśoka the Great had there been a unified India, and the traders who now held positions on the coasts had been trying, for the past century, to pursue mutually exclusive unification projects. Now, after a century of war between sea and sky, that bulletin announced that Pope Joseph VI, like a less wise Solomon, had swung a reckless sword through the prize most coveted by both contenders.
Trying to steady his hand, seeing already the dreadful result, the professor followed the meridian that passed over the midpoint, followed it from the Himalayas to the ocean. He hadn’t seen the global war that airships had won over submarines, but now he knew more war was coming. Towns caught in the vicinity of that artificial border would see bloodbaths for generations. India would disappear, its halves fed to hungry beasts. And in the middle, like a taxidermist’s incision on a cadaver, ran the line of the Peace of Rome, ignoring the rivers and mountains and roads that made a nation breathe.