From what I’ve heard of her, General, he said mildly, I rather think it’s the former.
They park and Pandey leads her into the headquarters, whose interiors are dank and tomb-like, yawning hallways and tiny, tunnel-like stairways. This part of Thinadeshi, she realizes, was built mere years after the Kaj took the Continent, and is so out of date it’s almost mind-boggling. As someone who’s been part of the planning and construction of multiple installations, the many glaring flaws—this staircase too tight for evacuation, those windows too large and exposed—come leaping out to her, almost causing her to cringe.
“Where are we going?” asks Mulaghesh as they climb up a winding staircase. “I thought Biswal was here.”
“He is, ma’am,” says Pandey. “He’s in the nest, just above us.”
“The what?”
“The nest. The crow’s nest, sorry. General Biswal is, as he puts it, a visual thinker, so he likes a view.”
Mulaghesh is about to ask him to please clarify his damned self when gray light comes spilling in from above, and they emerge into a rounded, glass-walled room like something you’d find at the top of a lighthouse. She glances to the side and has a moment of vertigo when she realizes how high up they are, the battlements sprawling out three hundred feet below her.
“General Biswal,” says Pandey. “General Mulaghesh.”
Mulaghesh looks around. She realizes this chamber—which must be the topmost spire of Fort Thinadeshi—has been converted into something like a makeshift office, with a small desk facing east. Stuck on the windows before the desk are numerous maps of the region, many of which she finds familiar. The wall of colors and images confounds her eyes so much that it takes her a minute to realize there’s someone seated at the desk, wearing a bright orange headcloth.
He grunts and slowly swivels in his chair, turning to look at them.
Mulaghesh’s world seems to spin around her.
He is not the man she remembers. There’s some remaining suggestion of the broad-shouldered, powerfully built man he was once, but he’s got more around the middle now, his carefully manicured beard is now bone white, and small, delicate little spectacles now balance atop his nose.
But his eyes are still the same: still pale, pale gray and somewhat deep-set, as if viewing the world from deep within himself.
General Lalith Biswal smiles—a somewhat forced gesture—and stands. “By the seas,” he says. “By all the seas, Turyin! Turyin, is it really you? How many years has it been? Are you really somewhere in that old woman’s body?”
“I could ask the same of you,” says Mulaghesh. “I remember now why I don’t catch up with my former colleagues. They remind me of how damn old I’ve gotten.”
He shakes her hand and his grip is the same, the fingers of a person meant either to build things or break them. Then, to her surprise, he gently pulls her into an embrace—a gesture of affection she’s never witnessed from him before.
“I don’t care,” says Biswal. “I wish I’d seen you more often.” He holds her by the arms and stares into her face, like a father reviewing a child home from boarding school. “It helps me fight the feeling that I’m a fiddly old man wondering if the past ever really happened.”
Mulaghesh tries to return his affection, but it’s difficult: her left arm hurts, and her right one is making a fist, something she can’t stop. He somehow smells the same: a masculine but not unpleasant musk, dashed with the scent of juniper berries and pine. Yet the faintest ghost of this aroma brings a thousand memories with it: the smell of smoke, ash, rain, animal dung, rotten food, and putrid meat, and with the scents come the sounds, the distant screaming and the mutter of the flames.
Don’t forget where you are, thinks Mulaghesh. Don’t forget where you are.
Biswal releases her. “Sergeant Major Pandey, you’re dismissed. It’s not appropriate for the young to witness the commiseration of the old.” He smiles brightly at Mulaghesh. “How about some tea? After all, up here is the farthest we can get from the problems of this unsightly shithole.”
***
“As the wise man says,” Biswal says, pouring her a cup, “when the shepherd lies down with his goats, he finds himself listening to them. And soon, who are the shepherds and who are the goats?”
The wind rattles the windows. Mulaghesh tries to tell herself that the swaying sensation she’s feeling is her imagination. She definitely doesn’t want to believe that the tower they’re in is actually moving. “You think of the Voortyashtanis as goats?” says Mulaghesh, watching steam languidly massage the brim of her cup.
“No,” says Biswal, pouring his own. “I think that’s giving them too much credit.” His voice hasn’t changed: it’s still low and husky, like the low groan of a ship’s timbers. He still talks the same way, too, like he’s reluctant to speak but determined to carefully say his piece. Having a conversation with him was always like having a conversation with a bulldozer, slow and indomitable.
“So what’s the situation?”
“It’s simple on the surface. Minister Komayd wants to build a harbor, yes? Open up the Solda, change the Continent forever, yes?”
“Yeah?”
“The problem is, this plays into local politics, if I can even use such a civilized term. Old rivalries, perhaps.” He points to the maps on the glass wall. One features color-coded regions along the Solda and up in the highlands. “There are two types of Voortyashtanis here, Turyin. Those that live in the highlands and those that live along the river. The ones along the river are rich and fat and happy. They have the best pastures and charge everyone an arm and a leg to cross the Solda. Those in the highlands, well. They have it tough, they always have, and they’ve always fought for better land.”
“So?”
“You have the reasonable response. So? So what does this backwater nonsense have to do with the harbor? Who cares about these bumpkins? Well, unfortunately, if we want the harbor to work, we’re going to have to live with these people. And if we open up the waters, who will we disturb?”
Mulaghesh grimaces and nods. “Ah.”
“Yes. The river tribes wish to acquire new lands in order to relocate their settlements and farmland. The only decent land available, however, belongs to the highland tribes—in fact, it’s the only arable land they possess. So this leaves the highland clans very upset. The sort of upset that makes you raid military rail shipments, steal a bunch of riflings and explosives, and go to war. The sort of upset that makes you pillage and burn settlements along territorial boundaries. The sort of upset that makes you put a bullet through the face of the previous commander of this damned region. That kind of upset.”