chapter 18
There is a certain desolation to waking up alone, especially when one is emotionally vulnerable, and I wake up missing Atticus. So much has happened to me since he’s been out of touch, and I don’t think his tattoo will be finished until later today or maybe tomorrow. My father’s death replays in my head, and waves of regret and anger and helplessness rise up, crashing against the inside of my eyelids. I open them and let the sunlight streaming through the grass burn the negativity away. The waves will keep coming unless I distract myself, though, so I take action. Rolling over and pushing myself up, I find Orlaith curled next to me, and I wake her with a nuzzle and a squeeze.
Good morning, sweet hound.
"Granuaile! Hello! Happiness! Need stretch."
I’ll stretch with you. We stretch together, arms and legs, a thoroughly delicious exercise, and not for the first time I reflect on what a blessing it is to have a hound. Already she is helping me through this, showing by example that life goes on and it is a thing to be enjoyed.
"Go for a run?"
Yes. We must definitely run.
I was far too wrecked to manage it last night, but now I really need to escape this property. I was fortunate not to have run into my stepfather, and I didn’t want to risk meeting him now. I pick up my weapons, then we run the long miles back to the Osage Hills, where we can shift away. Orlaith and I are both famished by the time we get there, and I take us back through the tethers to our cabin above Ouray, where the first order of business is breakfast.
Once I sit down at the table, I see the note I wrote for Atticus before I went to pick up Fuilteach. It’s a hopeful note, so I leave it alone. Let Atticus find it and feel that hope, as I did, that all would turn out well. There is no need to burden him with worry.
I’m sure Atticus will have plenty to do with his archdruid when his tattoo’s finished, anyway. The two of us would catch up soon enough, the threads of our lives intertwined once more, and we would both be stronger for it.
In the meantime, I still need some answers regarding my dad, and perhaps I can get them. Laksha had mentioned in passing that the vessel containing the raksoyuj had come from a dig north of Thanjavur. Maybe some answers will be waiting for me—like, why was he there in the first place? He’d never been a particular expert on artifacts from the Indian subcontinent. Had he been looking for this thing intentionally, or was it an accidental find? And even if I can’t satisfy myself that this was all accidental, the very least I can do is try to help out somehow as the city recovers from what must seem like the most mysterious plague ever.
I shower and pack a small bag, including a touchpad and my passport for the Nessa Thornton identity. I throw Laksha’s necklace in there as well, even though I haven’t heard from her yet and am not sure what to do with her. With Scáthmhaide in hand and Fuilteach strapped to my left thigh, I shift with Orlaith back to that familiar banana grove outside Thanjavur.
It is strange to be back in India so soon. It is a raw wound into which I have plunged my fingernail before the scab can grow. The smell of the air is enough to bring prickly tears to the corners of my eyes. Unfortunately, the time difference means it’s already dark here; it’s the end of the day rather than the beginning of it.
I speak to the elemental Kaveri in hopes that she can tell me where the humans are digging in the earth to the north of town. After casting night vision on Orlaith and myself, I follow her directions to several sites. The first four of these are merely construction of some kind, but the fifth is an archaeological dig. Noting its location, I set off with Orlaith in search of lodging. We find a hotel, and I camouflage her through the lobby; once in my room, I flip open my laptop and start to look for news.
English newspapers report in subdued tones the miraculous overnight recovery of every ill person from what health officials had worried would be an unstoppable pathogen. Though I never saw the headlines while it was getting worse, I presume they made much more noise about people growing ill and quickly dying. Doctors are still baffled about what caused the disease and caution that it might not be over and people should continue to take basic precautions against contagion.
I do a search for my father coupled with the key word Thanjavur and discover a brief article reporting him missing a week ago. His disappearance was flagged by a couple of members of his team who were in India on a short-term visa. They were colleagues of his from the university. That might be an angle worth exploring.
More searching on the university and its archaeology faculty. It appears that the department chair—who would presumably be the one to approve such digs and perhaps help secure grant money—is still in the States, teaching classes for the fall semester. I remember the name: Michelle Liu. She’s an old friend of Dad’s who preferred the lecture hall and the cozy office to the heat and dust of digs. They often published findings together. I think they kind of had a deal: She’d minimize his teaching responsibilities and the agony of academic bureaucracy, and he’d brave the mud and the icky bugs to dig for treasure. Each thought the other one was doing all the dirty work. I’d drop her name if I had to; I figured I had enough to proceed now and a safe place to keep my stuff.
“Ready to head back out?” I ask my hound. Orlaith is curled up on top of the bed, hogging all of it.
"Nap first."
“You’ve been napping already. Come on, let’s go, unless you want me to leave you here.”
"No, go with you!" she says, and climbs down off the bed, her tail up and wagging. I leave my bag in the room and put a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door. I take my weapons, though. I’ll need Scáthmhaide to snoop around.
It’s after midnight when we return to the dig, and I approach the trailer sitting off to the side with the hope that it contains an office instead of sleeping archaeologists. I camouflage both of us, to be safe, and gently try the door. Locked.
I’ve not done it before, but Atticus told me that you can bind tumblers into the unlocked position with very little trouble. Despite his assurance, it’s quite troublesome for me; I’m not so accustomed to free-form binding as he is, and I can’t actually see the tumblers. I don’t know how to target them without visual aid, and we haven’t had time since my binding to the earth to go over Breaking and Entering for Druids. After ten frustrating minutes, I give up and unbind the entire metal doorknob and lock, letting it melt away out of the hole. Problem solved.
“Stay here and let me know if anyone comes?” I whisper to Orlaith.
"Okay. I watch."
The trailer contains three desks, a mini-fridge, and a garbage can stuffed full of empty soda bottles and sandwich wrappers. No slumbering archaeologists.
I turn on a light and dispel my night vision, figuring that Orlaith will let me know in time if anyone comes to investigate. I can’t imagine that anyone would, besides the archaeologists themselves, and they’re surely sacked out in a hotel somewhere.
It takes little time to discern which desk is Dad’s. Two are messes and one is neat. And the papers on the neat one are covered with my dad’s tight, crabbed script.
They’re not interesting to me—catalogs of artifacts found and reports on soil composition and radiocarbon dating and so on. I try the drawers of the desk, only to discover that they’re locked too. I don’t waste time but unbind the lock right away. I find what I’m looking for in the bottom drawer: Dad’s personal diary. I skip forward to the last couple of entries, beginning with one dated October 3:
I am in India now, drawn by a call from a former student about a very odd discovery. It is a sealed clay vessel with Sanskrit markings on the outside, warning that it should not be opened. We will, of course, be opening it in the interest of science. I have never seen its like before; this may turn out to be a stunning discovery. Have spent the day preparing samples for the lab. Cannot wait for the results.
I skim through the rest of that paragraph, because I know how it ends. But I do wonder who the mysterious former student is and what happened to him, because this indicates that my father didn’t find the vase himself—as Laksha told me—but rather had it given to him. I would dearly love to speak to whoever was responsible for that. In the entry of October 4 I get a clue:
Nothing new today in terms of artifacts, but Logan claims to have reliable information about location of the Lost Arrows of Vayu. He says they must be buried somewhere near here, north of Thanjavur. If I didn’t have this magnificent find sitting in front of me, I would dismiss it as the worst kind of silliness—arrows supposedly crafted by a god of the wind, imbued with magical properties? Ridiculous. And without a credible source of origin, as far as I can tell, though he tried to argue that these arrows influenced the creation of fabled weapons owned by Thor and Odin. But perhaps there are some arrowheads of historical significance buried out there, which we can creditably say were made in honor of the god rather than by the god himself. After we publish our work on this vessel—Ray has taken to calling it “the Sorcerer’s Urn”—perhaps we will get additional funding to look for them.
No entries after that. I have two names to inquire about now—Logan and Ray—and a search to run about those arrows. I take the diary with me and leave everything else untouched, though I do scan the tops of the messy desks to see if I can determine to whom they belong. Hard copies of memos and emails reveal that one belongs to Chirayu Parekh—who might be Ray—and another to Miriam Vargas. I’d come back to the dig at dawn and try to catch one or both of them before they got to the trailer and realized it had been burgled.
Okay, my favorite hound, I say as I exit the trailer. Nap time. Let’s go back and get you snuggled into bed.
"No nap for Granuaile?"
Maybe later. I need to work on a problem for a little while. Durga’s suggestion that I might have occasion to wonder at the weapons she brought two nights ago comes back to me. I think this might be the proper occasion. The mention of the arrows makes me realize that she hadn’t brought a bow with her.
When I get back to the hotel and run a quick image search of Durga, I discover that she is often depicted as having a bow, and the stories that delve into the gifts given her by the gods of the Hindu pantheon do include mention of Vayu’s arrows. However, I cannot find any specific mention of the bow in the stories, beyond a symbolic religious meaning. Vayu’s arrows, then, must be the important weapons, and she had come without them. Perhaps because they truly were buried somewhere north of Thanjavur? If so, why? And why did she not simply explain?
When I review the last entry, Dad’s journal makes another connection for me. The idea that Vedic culture influenced the Norse somehow is certainly true in my own experience: The asuras I’d seen surrounding my father were blue-skinned and four-armed, like the shape Loki had taken when he confronted us in Poland. I remember thinking at the time, what the fuck, why is he blue, but it never would have occurred to me to think it was anything but the product of his own derangement. We had the Olympians to worry about, and Loki had to be put on the back burner. And now all I can think is, what if that was my big clue—my one chance to walk the path to which Durga alluded, where none of this happened?
I hide my face in my hands and mutter, “Oh, shut up.” Orlaith hears me and raises her head from the bed.
"What? I didn’t say nothing."
I was talking to myself. And watch out for double negatives.
"I meant I didn’t say no nothings neither. Um. Yeah?"
I know it is pointless to speculate and torture myself with what might have been, but I expect I’ll take a good long while doing it. Later. To prevent a spiral of second-guessing and self-recrimination, I’d try to grab a few hours of sleep to get myself adjusted to Indian time, so I could begin again at dawn. I’d search for this Logan guy, and when I found him, I’d ask where he got that urn.
It’s an excellent plan, and the flaw doesn’t become clear until I stop Ray in the morning, before he makes it to the trailer and sees that the doorknob is gone. I am so very smooth: I tell him my name is Beverly Childress, drop Dr. Liu’s name, and say I’ve been hired by the university to investigate the disappearance of Donal MacTiernan. My American accent in this place gives me instant credibility with him.
Indian-born but educated in America, Chirayu Parekh is an adorable if slightly doughy man with glasses and a mustache imported from the seventies. Like many people from overseas who spend any time in the United States, he had grown tired of repeating his name over and over again and had hacked it down to Ray to simplify it for the ’Mericans. He carries a leather messenger bag in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, and he’s very eager to help once he checks me out and decides that he wants me to like him.
“Mr. Parekh, in my preliminary investigation we came across a student of Dr. MacTiernan’s named Logan, who was working here on site,” I say. “Can you tell me anything about him?”
“Oh, sure, that guy. Kind of tall, blond, sort of kept to himself. Or at least kept away from Miriam and me. He hung around with Dr. MacTiernan a lot.”
“Where can I find him?”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t know.”
“All right, what was his last name?”
“I don’t know that either. He was always just called Logan.”
I try to hide my irritation, but I’m uncertain that I manage it. “Will he be joining you here at the dig today?”
“No, I don’t think so. He disappeared at the same time Dr. MacTiernan did. But we couldn’t report it, you know, because we didn’t know his name.”
I frown at him. “We? You mean Miriam Vargas doesn’t know either? How do you let someone work on a university-sponsored project like this without knowing his name?”
Ray begins to panic at the implication that he screwed up somehow. “Well, Dr. MacTiernan vouched for him and he knew his stuff, so who was I to question? I mean—”
“This man may be responsible for Dr. MacTiernan’s disappearance. Can’t you think of any way to find out his name?”
I fear that the opposite might be true—that my father, once he was possessed by the raksoyuj, caused Logan to disappear—but I can’t share that with Ray.
“Well, no, I mean, I hardly even think about living people; it’s not in the job description of an archaeologist, you know—”
“Walk me through how you first met Logan, please, Mr.
Parekh.”
“Oh, well, when Miriam and I arrived, he was already here with Dr. MacTiernan, who introduced the guy as Logan, a former student of his. Hey, should we maybe talk more in the office?”
“No, I’m almost finished. You flew in from the States?”
“Yes. Dr. MacTiernan flew in from a dig he had going in the UK, so he got here first.”
“And this was on October third?”
“Right.”
“You were called in by Dr. MacTiernan?”
“Indirectly, yes. He called Dr. Liu at the university and asked her to send someone who could help with Sanskrit. She tapped us and we packed our bags. We were going to publish together.”
“There was a vessel here, wasn’t there, with Sanskrit markings on it? That’s why he needed you?”
Ray is taken aback by this. “Yes. How did you know?”
“Dr. Liu informed me,” I say. “Where is that vessel now?”
“It disappeared with Logan and Dr. MacTiernan. We think one of them took it.”
“That’s my suspicion also. Was the vessel unearthed here?”
“That’s what Logan claimed. He said he dug it up here and showed us a depression in the earth where he’d excavated it. But we just got lab results back on the soil and material samples Dr. MacTiernan sent off, and it looks like it didn’t come from here at all. The lab says it was buried originally somewhere in the west, probably in Gujarat.”
“Interesting. Thank you for your time, Ray. I’ll let you know if I find anything.”
“What? That’s it? Hey, you want some coffee?”
I wave goodbye at him without answering. With Orlaith at my side, I put some distance between us, before he can discover that the office has been invaded and remember that he really isn’t that good with people and probably should have questioned me a bit more. No doubt he’ll get some grief later from Miriam for being so trusting. Poor Ray.
As soon as I’m out of sight, I cast camouflage on the two of us and we jog down to the house south of Thanjavur in which my father—or, rather, the raksoyuj—had been staying. I’d never gone inside to check it out, and if Logan had disappeared with Dad, then maybe he had been there too. Maybe he’s still there—and dead. Or maybe I’ll find a clue to his whereabouts. It seems as good a place as any to begin.
Except it’s no longer a place. When I get down there, I can’t find it anywhere, though I’m sure I recognize the field in which it stood and where everything happened. And then I realize that Durga had probably wiped it from the earth as part of her cleansing ritual. The earth had been scoured clean. No evidence of rakshasas or asuras for humans—or even me—to find.
I don’t know what to do next. If Logan’s body had been in that house, it wasn’t there anymore. There might be an immigration officer who could tell me all the Logans that had entered India in early September or early October, but I couldn’t just smile and lie my way into accessing that information. I might be able to try approaching Dr. Liu back at Dad’s university, posing as an investigator hired by his family, but she’d be far more skeptical than Ray. Besides, even if she could access Dad’s class rosters for the past twenty years or so, privacy laws would prevent her from handing out names of former students without serious legal paperwork signed by a judge.
One thing I do know is that the “Sorcerer’s Urn” didn’t disappear with Dad or Logan. It was somehow found by Laksha, and she was still someone to whom, in theory, I could talk. She’d need a mouth for that, however, since she’s clearly not interested in jumping into my head anymore.
I return to the hotel to consult my laptop again, because it’s easier to mask than cell phones or other wireless gadgets. I grab us some lunch, and Google tells me about the Raja Mirasdar Hospital in Thanjavur and provides me with a map. After I retrieve Laksha’s necklace and stuff it into my pocket, we set out to find Laksha a new body.
We circle the hospital campus a couple of times and pick out a nice tree under which Orlaith can stretch out and take a nap. I camouflage her and then ask Kaveri if she would continue to keep Orlaith hidden while I am inside and cut off from the earth.
Using the binding carved into the length of Scáthmhaide, I melt from sight and enter the hospital in search of a suitable host for Laksha.
She hasn’t spoken to me at all since the disaster in the field, and I’m both hurt and relieved by it. She could have taken up residence in my head again but has chosen not to. I wonder if it’s because she’s too weak or if it’s because she doesn’t want to face the questions I have for her. Either way, I don’t want the responsibility for her life in my pocket anymore, and since she seemed partial to choosing a young woman’s body before, I’m hoping to find one here.
Searching the hospital for comatose patients takes me a while. I don’t understand the signs near the doors, which are only occasionally printed in English alongside other scripts. But a few floors and many dead ends later, I find some comatose patients. Two are men, one is a very old lady, but the last is a tall woman in her thirties with sallow skin and lank, stringy hair. Most of her chart is meaningless scribbling to me, but some vitals are also typed in Roman script, such as her name: Mhathini Palanichamy.
Deciding that has a nice musical ring to it and that I don’t have nearly the patience for an extended search that I had years ago when we found Selai, I pull out the ruby necklace and settle it about Mhathini’s neck. Once I remove my hand, it becomes visible and looks so very out of place against a white hospital gown.
Checking again to make sure I’m the only conscious person around, I bend lower and speak to the necklace, feeling somewhat silly even though no one can see me.
“Laksha, it’s Granuaile. You’re resting against a comatose patient who will serve as your new body. I’m going to leave the necklace here, so if you want to make sure you retain control of it, slip into this woman’s body right now and wake her up before I go.”
I wait a full minute and nothing happens, so I lean down again and say, “Right now, Laksha. You have one more minute and I’m leaving. I won’t know what will happen to the necklace then.”
With fifteen seconds left, the eyelids flutter open and the beeping of the heart-rate monitor speeds up. I drop my invisibility so that she can see me.
“Welcome back.”
“Whur … mur? Er. Nur?”
“Pardon me?”
“Cur. Tur!” Her hand rises from her side, IV and all, and points first at her mouth, then twirls around her head. Her expression twists in frustration.
“Ah. This woman must have suffered some serious brain damage to the speech centers, I’m guessing. She probably has aphasia. Can you understand me all right? Thumbs up or down.” I get a thumbs-up. “Good. Looks like your motor skills are fine. Shall I assume that you can fix the speech problem with time?”
Another affirmative. “Excellent.” I’m disappointed that we can’t speak right away, but I can hardly blame Laksha for the problem. “I will give you that time and we’ll speak later. You have ways of finding me, so I trust you will do that as soon as you are able. We need to talk.”
“Whur mur nur?”
“Your name is Mhathini Palanichamy. Is that what you were asking?” Thumbs-up. I hear footsteps approaching in the hall, which heralds the arrival of medical staff responding to a change in her vitals. “You’re still in Thanjavur. I’ll leave you to the business of starting over.” I wink out of sight just as a nurse enters and exclaims at the sight of Mhathini’s open eyes. I slide past her and sigh in relief once I get out into the hall, glad to have that burden off my back. I don’t know if Mhathini is still in there, sharing space with Laksha, or if she has moved on, but I suppose I will find out later.
I pick up Orlaith and spend the remainder of the afternoon trying to find some way to help the city recover from the rakshasa plague. The language barrier hinders me, however, and that, coupled with perhaps a dose or two of paranoia and xenophobia—or else a fear of big dogs—makes us unwelcome.
It’s been a completely frustrating day, and after a desultory dinner I curl up in bed with Orlaith and my father’s diary, working backward through the entries in case they include any mention of Logan. I don’t find anything about him, but I do find something else: an entry on my birthday.
Granuaile would be thirty-three years old today. I wonder what kind of person she would be. I wish … well, it’s far too late for wishes, isn’t it? Far too late to make anything better. There’s only time for regrets now. Lord, I miss her.
I feel as if I’ve fallen from two stories and landed gut-first on a pommel horse, the air completely gone from my lungs, and when I breathe in again, it’s so very painful that the noise wakes up Orlaith.
"Granuaile?"
It’s okay. Go back to sleep.
I trace the words with my finger, trying to contact my dad through the ink he scrawled there months ago. I know exactly how he felt, because I’m feeling it now. There’s so much time for regret ahead of me, days and months and years of it. I put the book down, turn on my side, and drape an arm across Orlaith, hoping to sleep away some of that time.
I resolve to track down a possible site north of town for the Lost Arrows of Vayu. If this Logan person is still alive, he might be attacking the earth with a shovel somewhere.
When I wake up, a gray Saturday in India, I shoot off a text to Atticus before I hop into the shower, to let him know he shouldn’t worry about me. To my surprise when I emerge, he’s answered, asking if my father is okay.
His death isn’t something I wish to consign to a text message, so I say, You don’t need to worry about him either, and then he does his Shakespeare thing, sweet man, kissing me with a line from Troilus and Cressida: The strong base and building of my love / Is as the very centre of the earth.
It is a game we play, sometimes, to answer one poet’s words with another’s, so that both the bards and we converse. The reply has to make sense in context, of course, but you score bonus points if you use a quote that contains one or more words from the previous one. I send him two lines from Whitman: Far-swooping elbow’d earth—rich apple-blossom’d earth! / Smile, for your lover comes. And then I amend that with, As soon as I can, anyway. Don’t wait up.