Rhana was bathing in a pool deep within the forest, in the heavy shadows of the canopy, when she saw a man walk out from under the trees. He stared at her. He was filthy, covered with dust, and wore no clothes. Rhana, standing naked in the pool, read in his eyes the madness of the forest.
The stranger came to a stop ten paces from her. Water lapped at his feet. He said, in a voice that still rang with the cries of the birds under the trees, “They cast me out.”
His eyes were the green of forest leaves, the same color as the light around them. Looking into them, and seeing nothing but the madness, Rhana felt a pity that crushed her ribs.
“They cast me out with nothing, not even the clothes on my back, not even a name.”
She spoke at last. “Who…?”
He did not answer. His eyes did not see her nakedness either. They stood for a while staring at each other, without a word, in the shimmering green light.
“You have no name,” she whispered. Without a name, how would the Protector tell him from the multitude after He had withdrawn His hands from the world at the end of time? It was unfair, Rhana thought, looking into eyes that had forgotten what it was to be moving within the mortal world. And the pity that had risen in her heart gave way at last to a name.
“Elyasa,” she said. “If you have no name, take this for your own.” It was the only thing that came into her mind: Elyasa was a hermit who had lived centuries earlier, and who had been a king before he renounced the world.
The man she had just named said nothing. Through the drops of water falling from her damp hair into her eyes she saw him blink once, but he did not speak. Nevertheless, Rhana felt that something had changed, as if by naming him she had brought him away from the madness of the forest. She then remembered that she stood naked in a pool with a man she did not know gaping at her. She shivered, and waded through the water to recover her yellow tunic, which she hastily put on. It clung to her damp chest like a leech.
“Elyasa,” the man said, behind her, as she stepped out of the pool. It sounded as though he were tasting each syllable. “Elyasa. It is a good name.”
Rhana saw his eyes as he spoke those words. Something as dark as the shadows around them moved behind the green irises, and then sank out of sight. She shivered again. “Come,” she said.
She brought him home. He trailed after her like a second shadow. He reminded her of something her father had said, before he died: “Whatever the forest gives you has an edge to cut you to the heart.” She wondered about the wisdom of what she had done. No, she thought. I could not have left him alone in the forest. She knew what kind of beings walked the paths at night: apsaras, the nymphs descended from heaven who led travelers astray, and rakshasas, the demons who ate human flesh. In his state, he would have been an easy prey for both of them.
But, when they reached the outskirts of the village in the light of late afternoon, Rhana realized, frightened, that she had taken responsibility for everything he would do by naming him. Cernandos, her wise friend, had told her more than once that to give a name to something nameless was to be forever its master. And to be master of a thing meant much. Too much.
The door to her house was ajar; but then it always was. Who would have wanted to rob her, given the little she had? Her father, a potter, had died of a lingering illness, and had left her the house and her trade. The only things of value—her potter’s wheel and her pots—were in the back room.
She put her hand on the doorknob, pushed it. The hinges creaked as she opened the door completely and entered the shadows of the house. Elyasa stood still outside, looking at her.
“Come in,” Rhana said, and watched him cross the threshold.
She washed him and anointed him with oils of sandalwood and cedar, and garbed him in a red tunic that had belonged to her father. Only when he stood before her, his hair combed, fully dressed, did she see that he had left his madness in the world of the forest and come into the world of men.
The eyes looked at Rhana for a while, and closed. A sound that might have been a word escaped his lips.
“I didn’t hear,” Rhana said. “Dekshmi.” Elyasa extended a hand as if to touch her, and snatched it back.
Rhana felt fear. Dekshmi was dead. She had been, or so the old tale went, Elyasa’s lover, and had followed him into the forest when he had decided to withdraw from the world.
“No,” she said, more firmly than she had intended to. “Dekshmi died a long time ago. My name is Rhana.”
“Rhana,” Elyasa said.
She stood for a while, trying to guess what lay behind the cool, green eyes that were the shade of the forest leaves, and gave up. “I’ll find you a place to sleep,” she said.
When Elyasa woke up that first morning, he asked her a riddle to which she did not know the answer. The riddle game was as old as the world itself, and the priests told that the Creator, the Protector, and the Destroyer had played riddles with each other to decide who would descend in human shape to save the world.
Rhana had put Elyasa in her father’s room, and when she came to see him with a plate of cardamom rice, she found him awake, the sleeping mat rolled up against the wall. Elyasa himself was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room, staring at her.
“Good morning,” she said, laying the plate on the ground beside him. She was kneeling next to him, and so she heard him speak clearly.
“Tell me, Rhana,” he said—and it seemed to her that his tongue stumbled on her name—, “if you should know: what must be lost to enter the forest, yet is the most valuable possession?”
She stared at him. It took her a while to realize that he expected a serious answer. Riddles games were not played in the village. They belonged in palaces, in places where you could play for power, for land, not in a remote enclave at the edge of the forest.
“I don’t know the answer,” she said.
He took her hand. His skin was dry, and his green eyes were trained on her. In the end she stammered, to keep him from doing more, “We don’t play the game here.”
Elyasa withdrew his hand. “It is not a game. It is—something more.”
It was something more. After all, the riddle game had once been played by the gods. “A test of worthiness,” she said. “You play for power in this world. If you win, you prove that you have the wisdom to rule.” Cities had been lost and won because of the game.
Elyasa’s eyes shone with an eldritch light reminiscent of the forest. “Power. Win the game, and you win the ruler’s life and land.”
“What would you do with a kingdom?” Rhana asked.
“Rule it. Play other games with other rulers. I could be someone who mattered in the world. Not someone you can cast into the forest with nothing that he can call his.”
Rhana, now truly frightened by his words, said at last, “It will not make you happy.”
He smiled, and did not answer.
Rhana rose, feeling stiffness in all her muscles. She tried not to show her fear. Yesterday you did not know how to speak, she thought. And now you speak of riddle games, and of playing for power. I should not have named you.
I should not… But she knew that were she to go back to that pool, and see him again, she would do exactly the same things. For he had looked as though he belonged fully within the forest, and she had known that something needed to be done to tear him from that communion. And so she had named him.
“Do you remember who you were, before the forest?” she asked, and saw his eyes darken.
“No,” Elyasa said. “It does not matter. I was a king, once, I think, or perhaps this is a delusion born in the forest.”
“I don’t know enough about the forest,” Rhana said. “And there’s no one in the village who does.”
“It does not matter.” Elyasa’s speech and accent were clearly that of a nobleman and jarred with the humble surroundings. Rhana wondered why he had been driven into the forest.
“I thank you for rescuing me, though,” Elyasa added.
“I couldn’t have left you there.”
Elyasa said nothing in answer to that. As Rhana went to sit before her potter’s wheel, she felt his presence, like a chain around her neck.
It was not long before Cernandos heard of the mysterious stranger staying at her house, and not long either before he came knocking at her door. He was the only friend Rhana had; he had helped her after the death of her father, and had never asked for anything in return. He was as old as she, perhaps twenty-four, twenty-six years of age, but his skin was darker, his eyes more piercing. His mentor had died the previous summer, leaving Cernandos as the closest thing to a wise man the village had. These days he made her ill at ease; he seemed to be taunting her with knowledge that she did not have.
Elyasa was sleeping, and so Rhana was the one who opened the door. Outside, it was dark, and insects sang into the night. A swarm of flies and mosquitoes danced around the lighted frame of the door.
“Rhana,” Cernandos said. In the darkness she could not see his face.
“Cernandos. You walked all this way without a lamp?” she asked, standing on her own threshold, unmoving. The thought that she ought to invite him inside rose, but it could not connect with anything.
She guessed more than saw him shrug. “Darkness holds no fear for me.”
“You haven’t had your vision?” she asked, knowing he would not have. Visions of the Triad came only in the forest, and seeing all three gods turned a man’s hair permanently white.
“No. Rhana, can I come in?”
“Of course,” she said, startled to realize that she had been worrying about what Elyasa would think if he saw Cernandos with her.
In the patio, they sat cross-legged on mats, staring at each other in the pungent smoke that was meant to keep insects at bay. Cernandos did not speak.
“You’ve come a long way,” she said, at last.
Cernandos shrugged. “No. I wanted to see whether what they said was true.”
“I don’t lie.”
“Others do.”
“He’s here. He’s sleeping now,” Rhana said at last. Smoke gathered in her nostrils, filled her mouth with its acrid taste.
“I see,” Cernandos said. “What happened?”
She said nothing for a while, and then the story came tumbling out of her lips. Cernandos watched her the whole time. She could not read his expression.
“You should have left him in the forest,” he commented, when she was done with her tale. “And has he spoken since?”
“A riddle.”
He froze. “A riddle? I feared so.”
“What is it?”
“You named him, Rhana. In the forest. Do you know the power names have?”
“I don’t know much about that sort of thing,” she lied.
Cernandos smiled a bitter smile. “Not much? In a village, names are commonplace. But under the canopy it is a different matter. Names are a human thing. They hold memories, Rhana. Thoughts. And you named him, who had no memory of his own, after someone who had given everything to the forest. Elyasa.”
“What do you fear?” Rhana asked.
“I do not fear. I know. You have given him a true name, Rhana, and the forest knows it. He was communing with it at the time you spoke his name. All the knowledge attached to the name Elyasa was given to him.”
“Riddles? What use are riddles here?”
“Not here, no. I did not mean the riddles were dangerous. I meant that Elyasa—the man you rescued—was someone who was thought dangerous enough to be exiled.
No matter how much he lost in the forest, he remains that man. And now you gave him knowledge that the gods only grant to the worthy.”
“You frighten me,” Rhana said.
“I mean to,” Cernandos said somberly. “Beware of him, Rhana. We do not know what he is capable of.”
Rhana remembered the darkness that she had seen in Elyasa’s eyes after she had named him. “Thank you for the warning,” she said at last.
“Do not thank me,” Cernandos said, rising. “Watch him.”
Whatever his intentions, Cernandos had succeeded into making her jump at the smallest shadows. It was a wonder that Elyasa did not realize that she took pains to be as far away from him as she could. She retreated into her workshop where she produced pot after pot, every one of them twisted out of shape, because she had been too busy thinking about who Elyasa really was to watch her hands.
At night Elyasa told her riddle after riddle to which she listened mutely, and he unraveled the answers to her. She would never have guessed what to answer. The riddle game was played by wise men, but she was not wise, she did not know that sort of thing. The answers she thought of would never have been accepted by the priests who arbitrated the game.
He seemed to delight in the riddles, but there was something unhealthy in the way he kept showering her with them, as if he were testing his knowledge on her.
Once she ventured to ask him, “What do you mean with the riddles?”
She had been sitting by his side, their hands almost touching but not quite, and she looked into his eyes and saw the shadows of the forest. “Mean? They mean everything, Rhana. Can’t you understand? Without them I will have nothing of what I yearn for.”
“Yearn for?”
He frowned. “You know what I need. I have nothing that truly belongs to me. If I play the game…”
Her heart missed a beat. She forced her lips to remain still, her throat to clamp down on the words she wanted to utter. She waited for him to speak.
“I will have something of mine. And it is all so easy, to devise the riddles. I am worthy,” he said, quietly. “Wiser than many who rule. I will prove it.”
To whom? Rhana thought, but did not speak. She felt ill at ease in his presence, ill at ease when he spoke of things that had no meaning in the village. Briefly, she toyed with the idea of knocking at Cernandos’s door and telling him everything that weighed on her heart.
No, she thought. She had enough problems without that one.
The villagers gossiped about the stranger at her house, but she let them speak. They had gossiped enough in the days she had refused every man who had proposed to her, so that she might take care of her sick father. They had had enough nights wondering what hidden deformity she had, that she should refuse so many fine men.Compassion, she thought. Duty to my ancestors. That is what deforms me.
Rhana had little time to worry about Elyasa. Exactly twelve days after he had entered her life, he left it. Forever, it seemed. She waited for him all night, and at last, fearful that something had happened to him, ventured into his room.
The sleeping mat was rolled in a corner, and a note had been left on top of it. Since she had never learned how to read, she had to ask Cernandos to know what Elyasa had written.
“Rhana, I thank you for the gift of my name. I owe you a debt, which I shall repay in time. But now I must go into the world and make sure that this name will be remembered in the centuries to come. I will make myself worthy of it.” The last word had been something else before Elyasa had crossed it out, Cernandos said.
“Well, at least he’s out of my life,” Rhana said.
“Do you really believe that?” Cernandos asked, and she did not answer, only walked away from him, leaving him to stand in sunlight with the meaningless paper in his hand.
The moon waxed and waned over the village before Cernandos, who lived nearest to the eastern edge of the forest, came and knocked at Rhana’s door late one night. She let him in.
They sat, facing each other, in the patio, as on the night he had come to warn her about Elyasa. A copper bowl of tea was between them; Rhana drank from it first, as befitted the mistress of the house, and handed it to Cernandos. He inhaled the fragrant steam, and took a sip before putting it back.
“So?” Rhana asked, taking the cup again. Her hands smarted with the heat of the metal. “I imagine you didn’t come to check on me this time.”
Cernandos shook his head. “I would have liked to.”
“I know. What is it?”
“News from Masara.” Her friend smelled of incense, and of ashes. “A priest carried the tale to me.”
She waited for him to collect his thoughts. He went on, “The city has a new ruler.”
Masara, city of the Three Temples, was also the one to whom the elders of the village owed allegiance. “So soon?” she asked. “Jashan was near thirty. He could have gone on ruling for years.”
“He is dead. A stranger came into the city by the main road, dressed in a red tunic, and challenged Jashan to the oldest game. Jashan laughed—he had been educated by the wisest men from the city, and had even spent a month in the forest with a hermit. He thought it would be an easy matter to answer the riddles.”
Riddles. Rhana knew already where the story was going, but she was caught in it, unable to say a word, for fear that she would find out too soon what it was really about.
“Jashan’s riddles were all solved, but he could answer none of the stranger’s. And so he lost his kingdom and his life in the same hour,” Cernandos said.
“And the stranger?” she asked.
“The stranger. You know him.”
“Yes.” Yes, I know him. I am guilty. ”Elyasa,” she said, and, through the smoke from the torches, she saw Cernandos nod.
She remembered what he had said to her, in earnest: that he would play the game, and other games, until he had enough power to satisfy him. What he had implied: that he would not stop before many rulers had died to satisfy his lust for something he could call his. I am worthy, he had said. More than many who rule. He would not stop. Would never stop playing riddle games unless he realized that he was not the strongest. That he could be beaten.
And she knew what she had to do.
It took her little time to pack everything she would need on her journey. Surprising, really, to find out that after a lifetime in the same place, all that mattered most to you could be wrapped in a bundle of cloth three handspans across.
Her father’s soul-ring, glowing with a soft light whenever she touched it, and which she did not want to leave at his grave; she would need his support where she was going. An ivory comb Cernandos had given her when they were both children. Some flatbread for the journey, some water, and a blanket for the chilly nights.
She crossed the village with her things slung over her shoulders early one morning in the grey light before sunrise. She had hoped to avoid Cernandos, but he was an early riser. As she walked past his house she saw him sitting cross-legged on his threshold, and when he saw her he unfolded his body and ran to her.
“Rhana!” he called, and she did not turn back. “Rhana!”
She waited for him at the entrance to the forest. The path she would take lay straight in front of her, with its dappled shadows that seemed to twist before her eyes.
“Rhana,” Cernandos said. “Where are you going?”
“To Masara. He needs to be stopped before he gets the urge to play one more game, and another, and another, until all the cities belong to him. He needs to be defeated.”
He shook his head, angrily, as if to dislodge a fly. “Masara? You want to play the riddle game? It is hopeless. The real Elyasa was a master at this game, Rhana. He invented thousands of riddles, and even today priests still try to see what he might have meant with most of them. You cannot hope to beat him.”
“I have to try,” Rhana said, not looking at him, for fear that she would see what he told her, the foolishness of her endeavor, the hopelessness of it all. “You told me yourself. I’m responsible for everything he does.”
“Not for that!” Cernandos snapped. “You gave him the knowledge, but—”
“But what? Where does my involvement stop? He killed Jashan because of what I did. I can’t wait until another story of another dead king comes to my door. I have to go.”
“And what will you do if you defeat him?” The accent he put on the “if” made it clear enough that he didn’t believe she ever would defeat him.
“I don’t know. Come back here, I suppose.”
“With the city of Masara yours to rule? Rhana, you know that if you win the riddle game, you will have shown to the gods that you have the wisdom needed to rule. And you will win the kingdom and the ruler’s life. They cannot be relinquished that easily.”
“I’ll think of something,” she said.
“Rhana, you cannot leave.”
“I can,” she said, and began running away from him. She heard him call, angrily, but he did not try to stop her, and she knew then that she had been right and that Cernandos knew it as well. Someone had to stop Elyasa, and she was the one who had taken him from the forest and made him into what he was now. It was her responsibility.
The path she walked on soon became invisible within the shadows of the forest. The canopy over her cut off most of the light.
The forest tended to blur everything, and so it was hard to tell what time it was when Rhana reached a pool similar to the one she had used to bathe in. A cascade disgorged a roar of muddy water into it at the far end. There were no animals, no noises of any kind. She knelt by the side of the pool, stared at her wavering reflection amidst the lotus flowers, one hand going out as if to erase her face from the surface of the water.
“A riddle game,” she said. She wondered at her own presumption.
“Riddles can be deadly,” a voice said.
Startled, Rhana half-rose, stared to her right. An old man was sitting by the pool, his legs trailing in the water. At first she was reassured, but then she saw that his shape would not stop flickering between a human aspect and a huge, shaggy silhouette with the suggestion of horns. “I-” She fought the word that came to her lips.
Rakshasa. Demon. Eater of men. Cernandos would have warned her, had she listened for long enough, that demons walked in daylight if you went deep enough into the forest. But she had forgotten that.
“Is that not so, child of man?” the man who was no man asked, oblivious to her distress.
“Because of a riddle, I left my home,” Rhana said at last. Her voice was shaking. Strangely, the thought of dying here held less fear than that of failing at the riddle game. She remembered something, an old tale. “Can you help me?”
She saw the rakshasa raise its eyebrows. “Few dare to ask for something from my kind.”
“I dare. I have need.”
The rakshasa rose, and stared at her. The demon’s eyes were the benign ones of the old man, but beneath these there were others, blood-shot and burning with an endless flame. “What is your need?” it asked.
“I would play the riddle game with the ruler of Masara.”
“Elyasa,” the rakshasa said. It smiled, and that smile was a terrible thing to behold, shining with a joy that had nothing human. Its teeth were pure white; it smelled of things hidden deep within the forest, of moldy secrets beneath the ground. “He has taken much from the forest, that one.”
“I know.” Rhana kept her voice steady, but it cost her. “I named him.”
“And you would play the oldest game with him? You will lose, child. You do not have his knowledge of the sacred texts, nor his wisdom.”
“I must—”
The rakshasa came closer to her. “I can help you, but there is a price.”
“Name it, and I’ll pay it.”
“Will you?” the rakshasa asked. “I ask for your name, and for everything that it holds, in exchange for the knowledge that will defeat Elyasa.”
“I will not be able to go to Masara. In the mortal world people always have names.”
“You will have a name,” the rakshasa said. “One that has as much significance as the one you gave him. Indeed, you could say that it is a stronger name, for she was always better than he was at riddles.”
And she knew, then, what was asked of her. “Dekshmi.” She remembered whom Elyasa had mistaken her for, from another lifetime. The one who had come into the forest out of love, and died beneath the canopy, and who had known every secret of her onetime lover.”And what do you gain?” she asked.
The rakshasa’s sharp teeth glowed in the light beneath the canopy. The only sound was that of the water cascading into the pool, endlessly, as if the sky itself were weeping above their heads. “All that you have been,” it said. “All that you might have become, given time. Your shape to wear. And it will be as if I had consumed your soul.”
What choice did she have? I am deformed. By compassion, by duty. What choice was there ever for me on the path that led me here?
“I accept your bargain.” And her voice was firm.
A girl named Dekshmi woke up under the canopy of the forest, clutching a bundle of things that no longer meant anything to her. She learned things fast, under the gaze of her mentor, who wore the shape of an old man, and who, sometimes, disconcertingly, took on the appearance of a dark-haired woman who looked like an older version of Dekshmi.
Dekshmi herself was untroubled by those things, which seemed natural to her. However, sometimes she would catch odd images: a pool bathed in light, a bed-ridden, dying old man, a wheel endlessly spinning and disgorging clay on the floor. She said nothing of these to her mentor. He in turn did not speak much. He listened to the riddles that came to her lips with a faraway look, answered—and somehow the answer seemed wrong, but it would bring a new riddle to Dekshmi’s mind.
Riddles. The most valuable of all possessions, which must be relinquished to enter the forest, is knowledge. Knowledge of who you are. Knowledge of the mortal world.
It meant nothing. It was a game to be played in the green light, with the cool shadows tracing patterns on her skin, her nostrils filled with the pungent smell of the earth. It meant nothing.
A game.
More than a game, a man whispered in her mind, but she did not know who spoke. I knew him, Dekshmi thought. I—
Her mentor was distant, shifting between shapes, as if preoccupied by something.
They were sitting beneath the branches of the tree at the heart of the forest. Although its existence was known to every priest and wise man in the land, it could be seen only by those who had given everything to the forest, and who had gone past the madness. The tree had its roots in the primeval ocean, where the lotus flower that had contained the Triad had opened at the beginning of the world.
The branches reached into heaven itself and could not be climbed by mortals or demons. From time to time an apsara, a nymph from heaven, would glide down the trunk, and hover over Dekshmi and her mentor, puzzled that two humans should have chosen this place to rest.
Her mentor said at last, “I cannot teach you more. I have taught you human speech anew, and the wordings of riddles. I have shown you what lies at the heart of the forest, and how to see the paths hidden from mortals. I can do nothing more for you. You must leave.”
“Leave?” She had never known anything other than the forest. The thought of going into a world she did not know—a world she somehow felt she had rejected—repulsed her.
“Yes,” her mentor sighed. He wore the woman shape again. It seemed to please him for some obscure reason. Perhaps he sought to teach her something with it. “I dealt fairly with you, child of man. Too fairly. I took everything from you, and now you no longer remember why you are Dekshmi.”
“I have always been Dekshmi.” She frowned. She could not remember anything before the forest, as if she had sprung from the ground fully grown.
“No,” her mentor said, engulfing her hands in his. They did not feel like a woman’s hands, but like the paws of some huge animal. “Your true name belongs to me, and even if I spoke it now you would think it a stranger’s. But you drove a bargain with me. You wanted to play the riddle game with Elyasa.”
“I have heard that name.”
“He rules in Masara by right of conquest, for Jashan would not answer his riddles. And you must topple him.”
“He has done nothing to me.”
“You made him what he is.” Her mentor’s shape shifted wildly, and for a second she had a glimpse of a fearsome beast behind the face of the woman. “You gave him his name, just as I gave you yours. Listen, Dekshmi. The woman you were—she felt responsible for what had happened. She swore to defeat him at his own game. She gave away everything so that you could be born.”
“I do not want to leave the forest,” Dekshmi said.
“You trusted me. Do this last thing for me. Play the riddle game, and if you win, you can try to come back into the forest—if it will have you.”
Dekshmi felt, without seeing her, the presence of that other woman who had thought such different things from her. Who had wanted to play a game. Which was all that riddles amounted to in the end, was it not? She could pretend to leave, and come back without ever having set a foot out of the forest, but there was the name. Elyasa. It raised faint, translucent memories, like a reflection on the surface of a pool, and spoke to her of another time. Of another man, who might have known a different Dekshmi.
Elyasa. “I will go to Masara and play the riddle game,” she said. She saw her mentor smile. “May the Triad smile on you, child.” Dekshmi did not answer, seized with the fear that this was the last time she would ever see the old man, the last time she would sit on the roots of that tree at the heart of the forest. She could only think of question after question, of riddles without end: what is the meaning of the world? How do I listen to the voice of the gods?
Where does the game start, and where does it become something else?
And the wind, whispering beneath the canopy of the forest, answered her: There is no game. Everything is in earnest, child of man.
Dekshmi left the forest late one night, with a bundle of odd things her mentor said had belonged to her. Unpacking them, she had found an old ring that glowed when she touched it and an ivory comb in the shape of a crane. She had put the comb in her hair and the ring on her finger, feeling the coolness of both things, the alienness settling on her. Human things. She did not feel human. She had been born in the forest, had seen its heart, and had looked upon the tree the branches of which led into heaven.
She had wanted to leave the comb to her mentor as a gift, but the old man had said he had no use for material things. He had seemed impatient to see her on her way, and she had wondered what had kept him so long beside her. A bargain, he had said. She remembered nothing.
Her feet found paths that her mentor had showed her, paths that stood over arcing roots holding huge trees, handspans away from a tiger resting in the shade, or from a snake slithering from branch to branch. She never hesitated. In the darkness of the forest at night she made her way past the cold radiance of the apsaras, the heavenly nymphs who had discarded their clothes at the poolside to bathe out of sight from men. She did not stop.
She reached Masara near midday, with the sun over her head as she took the final step out of the forest. The city walls were of sandstone, with huge statues reaching out of them, as if to grab her before she could bring harm into Masara. She stopped then, feeling alone for the first time. The awareness of the forest had receded from her. A dreadful silence had filled her mind, and all that remained were riddles which meant nothing.
Dekshmi moved at last, and with each step the name of Elyasa echoed in the emptiness of her skull. Elyasa. The riddle game. Play it, and perhaps you will know who you are. Who you were. That had not been said, but she tried to believe it.
At the entrance to the city, a guard with a spear stood watching her. Dekshmi was wearing a red tunic that her mentor had given her, but it had become torn and muddied when she had walked through fields of thorny bushes at the edge of the forest, and before that, when she had crossed streams in the dead of the night, never fearing that she would drown.
“What’s your business here?” he asked.
She looked at him uncomprehendingly, before the syllables re-assembled themselves into human words. “I have come,” she said, haltingly, “to play the riddle game with the lord Elyasa.”
The guard looked at her as if she were mad. “The riddle game? A girl like you? You don’t even know what the stakes are.”
“My life against his.” Dekshmi slipped into the formal words her mentor had taught her. “My possessions against his.”
The guard leant on his spear, watching her as if she would uncoil and bite. “So you know the rules? It won’t be enough, girl.”
“I do not care. I have come for the oldest game, and in the name of the Triad who once played it for our salvation, I beseech you to let me pass.”
Dekshmi saw the guard blanch, and then shrug. “It’s your life, I suppose.” And he took her through the stone streets to the hill where the palace of the Three Temples stood in all its splendor.
She had never entered a dwelling of man. Everything caught her gaze and held it: fragile arches leaping from column to column in vast halls, wooden panels with paintings of flowers and trees, painted statues of gods and demons staring at her from every wall.
The smell of water was everywhere. Dekshmi walked after the guard in room after room; and in each of them, the gurgle of a fountain, and the voices of tame birds hanging in the air.
They reached at last a courtyard which opened into the gardens. Here, trees grew wild. It might have seemed a re-creation of the forest, except for the throng of people in ornate clothes who watched her walk past them.
In the center of the garden a huge banyan tree served as a gathering point for the crowd. Its branches, drinking all the moisture in the air, were those of a monster: thicker than the legs of an elephant, and sturdier than the arms of a god. Under the wide foliage a figure sat cross-legged, and listened to music played on harps.
Dekshmi felt her breath catch in her throat. She barely heard the guard say, “My lord, there is one here who would play the riddle game with you.”
He laughed. He was rising, slowly unfolding. His eyes were the green of shadows under the canopy of the forest, and his hair was dark. He was looking at her, his laughter still in the irises, when he truly saw her face, and something died inside him.
“Rhana?” he asked, and the word meant nothing to her. “Rhana?” When he saw that she had not reacted, Elyasa asked, in the growing silence, “Who are you?”
“I am Dekshmi,” she said, and heard the ripple of surprise that passed through the crowd. “I have come for the game.”
“No. I knew you when you were Rhana, and when you gave me my name. You cannot have come to harm me now.”
“Rhana is dead,” Dekshmi said. “I have come for the game.” It was all that mattered now. She was tired, frightened of those men milling around her. She wanted to go back into the forest. “Will you refuse to play with me?”
She saw the thought cross his mind, and then he said, “Clever of you. I cannot without losing face. That I should bow down before a mere girl in a stained tunic would destroy me.”
“Then you accept.”
Elyasa bent his head. “Yes. Three riddles of mine, three riddles of yours. Whoever fails to answer even one of them is forfeit.”
“I know the rules,” she said.
They hastily cleared a space beneath the banyan tree, and sent for a priest of the Triad to act as the arbiter to the game. The priest, when he came, was a wizened old man, with a boy beside him to carry the three sacred books. He wore red, the color of the Destroyer, for it had been that god who had won the game in times since long past, and who had descended to the world of men.
Dekshmi sat facing Elyasa, cross-legged, scarcely aware that she had just put her fate in the balance. Rhana, she thought. The name meant nothing to her. Who was she, to have agreed to a fate equal to death, all that for the sake of a faraway kingdom? A different kind of woman, no doubt. Dekshmi did not feel capable of such feats.
I am doing them now, she thought. Playing a game with my life at stake for a kingdom I do not care about. She is within me, whoever she was, deep within I am she. You cannot lay aside who you were.
“It is not too late to renounce this foolishness,” Elyasa said, but she shook her head.
“Very well,” he said. He did not stop looking at her while the priest swore to uphold the rules of the game, and to favor no one.
“Tell me, Rh— Dekshmi, if you should know: what thing comes back as itself after death has taken it whole?”
We are all reborn after we die, she thought, but that had not been the question. Words from the sacred texts flowed through her mind, merged into one another. The answer seemed to come from a distant place, and she spoke the words as if in a trance, “The moon is always reborn after its death.”
She saw Elyasa frown, and she quoted, “‘And the first of the gods said, “There will be in the sky something to remind mortals of the cycle of lives. Let the moon be reborn after the night has swallowed it, as men shall be reborn on this earth when it is time for them to leave the city of heaven.” And so it was done.’”
The priest’s hand hovered over the book of the Creator, before he snatched it back. “That is an acceptable answer.”
“I know,” Elyasa said, curtly.
He asked, again, “What is fleeter than the wind, yet can build and destroy palaces in a day?”
“The mind. Our thoughts move faster than the wind, and do much more harm than it ever does. In our minds we move mountains, burn forests, and destroy the buildings of men in the time it takes for a crow to cry.”
“That is an acceptable answer.”
Elyasa was no longer smiling. “Tell me this, then, if you should know: who is the night-guest in all households, who must be fed lest it perishes, and who, if fed too much, can cast down the walls?”
She did not know the answer. She waited for it to come, slowly. Thoughts moved, sluggishly, held out the answer. “Fire is the guest in all hearths. Feed it not, and it falters. Feed it too much, and the walls burn in the night.”
“That is an acceptable answer,” the priest said, without looking in his books.
And now the court held its breath, for she had answered all three riddles, and if she now posed one which Elyasa could not solve, she would have won.
He knew it, too. “Rhana,” he said, but Dekshmi looked at him and said nothing.
“When may a kingdom be considered dead, although there still be people walking the streets of its cities, and rice aplenty in the warehouses?” she asked, and saw him smile.
“When no king sits on the throne, then a kingdom is dead, for its soul has gone,” Elyasa said, and as she listened to the priest’s approval of his answer, she knew that every riddle she had thought of he would know, for the knowledge they drew on was the same.
Nevertheless she asked, again, “What is the most precious thing in the world, both a blessing and a curse, and not thought of until it departs?”
Elyasa’s elegant eyebrows arched. He pondered the answer for a while; she heard him breathe evenly. He was not afraid. “One’s health,” he said. “A healthy man is truly blessed by the Triad, for health is the most precious thing in the world, and yet never thought of until the day it falters. But health is a curse, for a healthy man cannot imagine that others are ever sick, and thus does he grow intolerant of their failings.”
Dekshmi saw the priest smile at that, as if admiring the cleverness of the answer. “That is acceptable.”
Dekshmi heard someone gasp, in the other world, the world of courtiers and silk clothes, the world of men. A draw, then, it was to be. She knew what happened when all the riddles had been answered.
They both knew what the other knew. Except that…
He had wandered far from the forest, had moved into the world of mortals, had stayed in their houses for a long time. She was Dekshmi, and she still knew how to see the hidden paths through the trees, still knew the languages of birds and snakes, still remembered the song of the apsaras by the pool as the nymphs removed their clothes and leapt into the water.
“Tell me this.” Her voice was shaking. “I take my birth in the greatest of all births. What my arms hold may not be reached in this world. I hold beauty but am not beautiful. What am I?”
“That is no riddle,” Elyasa said.
“It is.” She looked at the priest, prayed that he would know the answer to it, that he would accept it. The priest in turn said nothing. He was frowning, no doubt seeking something that would fit her strictures.
“There is no answer.”
“Is that your final answer?” Dekshmi asked, and she saw the fear in his eyes.
“No.” He bit his lip. The court had fallen silent. Beyond the riddle game, the sun had started slanting down towards the horizon, and its rays threw into sharp relief the figure of Elyasa sitting opposite her, contrasting shadowed areas with the pallor of his skin.
Elyasa said at last, “I cannot find an answer that would fit every word of that riddle.” He bowed his head, but his voice was firm as he concluded the game with the ritual admission of defeat. “Tell me, o wise one, that which eluded me.”
Dekshmi inhaled. “The tree at the heart of the forest.” She felt a curious elation, a bittersweet feeling mixed with something close to fear, squeezing her ribs. “Its roots reach into the primeval ocean below us, where the Triad was born in ages past. Its branches end in the city of heaven. Apsaras, shining with beauty, fly down the trunk to bathe themselves in the pools of the forest. No mortal may climb its branches.” She was shaking uncontrollably. With every word she said she realized that she was far removed from the forest, and that now that the game had been won she knew nothing of who she had been, and neither was she able to return to the forest. She had nothing, she was nothing.
The priest did not speak for a while. He had opened the Book of the Protector, and was reading from a passage near the beginning. At length he looked at both of them, and nodded. “That is an acceptable answer.”
“You are wiser than me indeed,” Elyasa said, rising, his eyes pleading. “I give my life and my possessions into worthier hands.” He did not move when the guards who had been his came to encircle him. “Rhana,” his lips shaped, but she could not hear him speak.
Rising, too, Dekshmi watched the guards take him away, and wept, although she did not know why. The game was over.
The former ruler of Masara, Jashan, had had no sons. There was no one she could give the kingdom that she had just won. So that night Dekshmi slept in the palace suite befitting the ruler of the city, in a canopied bed with silk cushions.
She dreamt of her mentor. He was standing by the tree at the heart of the forest, watching the apsaras. He wore the woman’s shape, the one who looked so much like her, but when she called to him he moved away, leaving her standing under the branches heavy with rain, all alone, with nothing that she could call her own.
She woke up, her heart hammering against her ribs, and stared at the ceiling for a long while. She remembered the forest, and the riddle game. She had won. She was sleeping in a bed that had been Elyasa’s, between sheets. There were guards at the door, and the city of Masara awaited her first act as a ruler.
Dekshmi rose at last, feeling stiffness in every muscle, and gasped when her feet left the woven carpet and stepped on the warm stone floor. The air was moist, heavy with the promise of rain. The monsoon would not be long in coming.
Dekshmi looked at her hand, where the ring glowed faintly. She reached from the canopied bed, and picked up the ivory comb that she had taken away from her hair before going to bed.
It had been carved by hand in the shape of a crane.A painstaking job—she could almost imagine the wings beating. It had been hers. Someone, she thought, carved this for Rhana. Someone loved her enough to give her that.
She stared at the comb for a long while. Then she opened the door, and asked a guard to bring Elyasa to her.
He stood before her, quietly, looking the same as he had when he still ruled the palace.
“You wanted to see me,” he said.
Dekshmi nodded. I do not remember why, she thought. “Tell me about Rhana.”
“You do not remember anything?” Elyasa asked.
“No. I am Dekshmi. I was born in the forest.”
“She named me,” Elyasa said. “This is the first thing that I remember. Before that there is only darkness, and I recall nothing of who I was before the forest took me.”
So you have no past either, Dekshmi thought, but she did not say that. “Where did she live?”
“Rhana? You—she lived in a village on the eastern edge of the forest. She took me into her house. I saw little of her life. She was a potter, and she had few friends. A dark-haired man, Cernandos, came to see her from time to time, and spoke to her. Warning her.” He spread his hands, helplessly. “I cannot give you your memories back. Can you not remember why you did that, Rhana? Why you gave everything away?”
I do not remember, Dekshmi thought, hovering on the edge of an abyss. She fell back on the only thing that came to her mind. “I—I was told that since she named you, she felt responsible for all you did.”
“I was a fool. But once Masara was in my grip, I would have done nothing more. I would only have sent something to her as thanks. You have to believe me.”
Dekshmi did, and that was the most terrible thing: the knowledge that she had come into being for nothing. “You had to be taught a lesson,” she said. “To be taught that however strong you are at the riddle game, there will always be someone stronger than you.”
“Now I know that,” Elyasa said quietly. “If there is anything of Rhana left in you, you should know that I realize the price she has paid for taking pity on me.”
She looked at him, feeling more and more of a stranger in this palace. She wanted to go back to—where? She no longer belonged in the forest, and the world of men repulsed her. “If you swear that you will hold only Masara, I will give your kingdom back to you.”
“Why?” he asked.
“There is nothing for me here. What could I do? Jashan is dead, and he had no sons. To whom would I give this kingdom that I cannot hold?
“It was all a game,” she said. “Do you not see? Everything was a game.” And, frightened, she thought she saw the true meaning of the game: that to play it meant setting a foot on the path leading away from power. The more riddles you learnt, the more you realized that power was not worth holding, that nothing was true or lasted long enough. I will not last, Dekshmi thought. Rhana died. ”Nothing matters. We will all die, and no one will remember who we were.”
“They remember my namesake,” Elyasa said, quietly. “For his wisdom.”
She hadn’t known the other Elyasa. But she could gather enough from he had said. “He set power aside and entered the forest to gain his wisdom. Do you not see?” she asked, and there was within her a yearning for the forest that tightened her throat and made a shiver run through every muscle. “Only what lies outside of the cities matters. The world is the greatest illusion,” she said, and it sounded like the answer to a riddle. “The riddle game is a game because power does not matter.”
“This I do not believe,” Elyasa said.
“It does not matter. Rule Masara. I care nothing about the winning or the losing of a game.”
“But we both lost something. Rhana died,” Elyasa said, and she saw something in his eyes which had not been there before. Pity, perhaps? Here he stood a prisoner in her rooms, but still he knew what he wanted, what he could have. “I will make the promise you wanted,” he said, and his mouth tightened around some unseen obstacle. His eyes were dark, as if they held the shadow of what she had told him. “Thank you.”
And so she had lost the game, after all.
She left the palace as she had come into it, with nothing but her tunic, the ring on her finger and the comb in her hair. She was alone. Elyasa had been proclaimed ruler of the city again, and was no doubt busy thinking of what he would do with Masara. He would rule wisely. No; she could not know that. It seemed to Dekshmi that he could be trusted, and yet Rhana had given away her memories to stop him. All of it meant little now to Dekshmi: she had made her choice.
When she reached the path leading into the forest, she turned, and looked at the city for the last time. Then she wheeled round, and took her first step away from the world of man.
As Dekshmi walked under the canopy, she felt—out of place. Everything was known to her, but nothing was the same. Nothing that she could cling to. No paths that she could see, no languages that she could understand, no clear way to the heart of the forest.
Dekshmi stopped at the first crossroads, before an altar to the Triad, and knew the truth: she had relinquished the forest. She asked, aloud, “What, rooted in something lasting as long as heaven, is weightier than the earth?” and there was no answer, save that a flock of birds was startled from the trees they were sleeping in. With raucous cries they flew out under the canopy, swirling around her in an explosion of colors before they were gone.
She had nowhere to go. She took the comb out of her hair, and stared at it. She could try to find whoever had given it to her, true. But she knew that even should such a miracle occur, she would recognize nothing, would feel as alien as she did now. The only true home is the one you make, Dekshmi thought.
She did not speak aloud again, but set out deeper into the forest.
In the end, she found near a pool an abandoned house which had belonged to a hermit, and cleaned it thoroughly before settling within. It was little more than a wooden frame with a roof of woven leaves, but it was enough for her.
The days flowed by in a routine, and from time to time there was the elusive touch on her thoughts which told her that the forest was slowly reclaiming her. Knowledge she had believed lost came back to her.
Dekshmi gradually remembered the language of the birds, and late one night she found herself setting foot on a path no city man could have found. Her clothes lost the sheen of Masara and her hair flew wild around her, even as all the riddles she had learned flowed back into her mind.
She still wore the ring and the comb, as relics of days that she had forgotten. Masara was far away, a world that she had never belonged in, a world where only the illusion of power held sway. She never thought much about it. But, sometimes, as she sat by the poolside, she would remember the riddle game, and Elyasa’s eyes, and an unexpected shiver would run through her.
And then she woke up one morning and knew that someone was coming.
She rose, wordlessly walked down to the pool, and saw him on the other side, looking at her.
“Dekshmi,” he said, and her name echoed under the canopy. It felt strange to hear human lips speak it aloud.
“Elyasa.”
He wore new robes with an elaborate pattern, but he was alone, and she could not see his eyes. She waited for him to circle the pool.
“I had not thought you would go that far,” he said.
Dekshmi did not ask how he had found her. She knew the forest would have guided his steps.
Elyasa was scrutinizing her face carefully. “You have changed.”
She nodded. You have not, she thought, and then she saw that the fine robes were torn, and that he carried a simple wooden staff.
“I have had time to think upon what you said,” Elyasa said at last.
“You have left Masara,” she said.
“I have learned much. I remember, too, what Rhana told me once. I have not been happy. In Masara there was always a shadow across my days reminding me that I was mortal, and that I was wasting my time here.”
Dekshmi nodded. She answered nothing, and waited.
“I once gave everything to the forest,” Elyasa said, leaning on his staff. “Unwittingly. I will not do that again. But I have shed the outer world, and if you will have me, I will stay by your side.”
“As my husband?” she asked, and she felt the forest around her awaken, as if some old tale had sprung to life, but then Elyasa shook his head.
“I would not want to force you. I am offering you only friendship.” And again the forest quivered.
“Why?”
“Perhaps because you are the one who taught me something about riddles. Or because you are the only one like me in the world. Because I owed Rhana a debt I swore I would repay. Any reason.”
She thought of the comb, of the one who had carved it for her, and whom she no longer remembered. She thought of Rhana. Of her sense of not belonging anywhere save in the forest. “I do not care,” she said at last. “You are welcome here, if the forest will have you.”
She saw him smile. “Thank you,” he answered. “Dekshmi.”
“Come.” And she led him into the shadows of the trees. Around them, the forest settled once more in its quiescent sleep.