“You always were very quick,” says Batuo through gritted teeth. “As a praetorian you were unstoppable.”
The short gladius flickers out again, gleaming blackly, like a poisoned fang. Batuo retreats to the arched door of the alcove, beneath a butcher’s shop of hanging arms and legs. Talus follows without hesitation.
“This is yours, okay?” I whisper to Peter.
Sliding the necklace over my head, I hold the relic that my grandfather gave me in both hands, one last time. I press the crescent of metal into Peter’s limp hand and close his fingers over it. He looks like a man, but Peter is a machine. The avtomat operate by their own rules, and I can’t survive in this brutal world of theirs.
Unlike a machine, I bleed.
“I’m sorry, Peter,” I whisper. “You chose the wrong person.”
Gripping the bone saw in my hands, I take a last glance at my relic and tense to run. But the artifact is glowing now, energized by the electrical field of the machine. A hazy symbol is emerging, the white outline of a water droplet stained with a black eye. It’s so familiar…I try to place where I’ve seen it before—
Talus screams.
At the mouth of the alcove, Batuo and Talus stand under what look like tree branches blowing in a nonexistent wind, falling, crashing down. The writhing canopy of limbs are animating all at once, wriggling off their hooks in a squirming, clawing mass.
Talus fights desperately, overwhelmed by the gruesome waterfall of limbs.
Using the distraction, Batuo charges out and lands a kick just as Talus swings again, blindly. Knocked onto his back, Talus disappears under a swarm of scratching, kicking limbs. Batuo doubles over, hurt badly, both hands pressed to the tear in his side, trying and failing to keep his wound closed.
That was it. Batuo’s last trick. And it wasn’t enough.
Now, I’m trotting around the surgical station, heading for the demolished door. Behind me, the silver rings that circle the white table are humming. I cradle the bone saw against my chest and accelerate to a crouched sprint.
Across the room, Talus shakes off a blanket of quivering, grasping arms and legs. Eyes leveled on Batuo, he raises the gladius. One, two, three…and Talus leaps over the carpet of limbs, sword poised above his head. The monk is trying to spin away as the blade slices cleanly through his right arm. The severed limb falls to join the others. The next blow takes his leg off at the thigh, and then I don’t know what’s happening because I can’t bear to watch.
As I reach the demolished metal door, I stop. The hairs on the back of my neck are standing up. Hearing nothing, I turn to look back.
Talus stands over Batuo’s dismembered corpse, watching me, smiling with a torn upper lip.
32
INDIA, 1757
Over the next year I think often of the Indian boy, bleeding to death at the foot of a stucco wall. In my memory, his face is impossibly young, legs trampled, blood leaking into hard furrows of dried mud carved by last winter’s artillery barrages. I try to imagine the forces of destiny, great and small, that brought him to his end there and I wonder whether there was truly justice served in his death to foreign invaders, on his own soil.
The monk follows me, chattering constantly.
I agree with Batuo that a single man is short-lived, largely ignorant of the past and future, and can be trusted to make a selfish decision if no eyes are upon him. But he urges me to consider them in their multitude—in the incredible profusion of human cities and nations and languages and cultures. He claims that a precious thing emerges from that scratching, clawing horde: the thing they call civilization.
With proper culture, Batuo argues that men can be forged into something greater.
We continue the campaign across India with John Company. Our commander drives our forces against the remaining nawabs without fear or mercy. And as I am swept along, going through the motions of fighting, I find that each new engagement means less and less.
“Are you ready to leave?” Batuo asks, reappearing in the front ranks after an absence of a month.
“No,” I say.
“Stubborn,” is his usual reply.
Across the rich flank of India, I loot exotic artifacts and send them home to Elena. Cloistered on our new estate, she seems to be in high spirits. She reports the servants are dutiful in obeying her, especially via the official letters of instruction she forges in my name, under my seal. She sends me playful demands for esoteric Eastern artifacts and books, which I try to acquire. I sense Elena has found some grand intellectual quest to pursue and I am glad for it.
On the side, I receive an occasional letter from the butler, outlining the state of things and especially Elena’s activities. But as the months accumulate, letters from the estate stop reaching me. I assume that my frequent identity changes have finally made it too difficult. The bodies of my fellow soldiers provide a carousel of different personas, and though it feels macabre to stalk the battlefield like a parasite, I make a habit of taking new names.
The monk is irritating enough; I do not intend to advertise my existence to any other avtomat.
Batuo’s agenda is curious, impossible for me to guess. Once, while wandering in an imperial courtyard, the monk noticed me marveling at the golden sculpture of a peculiar fat man who sits cross-legged. I struggled to lift the valuable Buddha for packing, and Batuo scowled, taking offense.
“You never change,” he said, and those odd words echoed in my thoughts long after he uttered them.
Batuo even accompanies me, off and on, into battle. The monk fights hand to hand or with a spear, but never with a musket. If possible, he avoids fighting altogether. Where I strike without pause, he shows compassion. We choose different paths, and he says nothing of my choices. On occasion, I catch him watching me too closely, and I sense unspoken words lingering on the tip of his tongue.
“Is your Word satisfied?” he asks one day, back again from an unexplained absence. A recent slaughter has left the battlefield heaped with twisted bodies, piled like driftwood on a deserted beach. “Do these dead men satisfy you? Is this your purpose?”
I march on without responding. My Word has become a splinter in my heart. Pravda. The unity of truth and justice. Though I gorge myself, punishing our enemies in the name of my king—this hunger has only grown. The monk is like a mosquito in my ear, a constant buzzing reminder that I am failing myself.
“The world is large, my friend,” Batuo says, shaking his head. “Can you call yourself alive if you do not learn and grow?”
In this way, the monk lectures. Until one day, our time together ends.
Stopping outside the village of Plassey, the company shelters in a grove of mango trees near the broad muddy bank of the Bhagirathi River. The infantry soldiers are smoking little cigars, telling jokes in shaky voices as others prepare the cannonade. At the edge of the grove, the British sepoy troops prepare their weapons and pray.