Joseph Lewis: Chimera

Another deep boom echoed through the cave and Asha paused to listen. The water shushed quietly around her, the surface rippling, tiny waves slapping at the sides of the vast chamber. But there was another sound, a subtle sound underneath all the others. It was the sound of roots waking up and beginning to stretch and reach out through the silt.

Asha plunged ahead, willing her legs to run through the cold, sluggish water. But soon the sandy bottom angled up and the pool became shallower, making each step lighter and easier. She jogged to the edge of the tunnel where she could see a tiny disc of pale blue light in the center of the darkness ahead.

The tunnel walls groaned with the crumbling of old stone and dried earth. Dust trickled from the ceiling in steady streams, and larger clods and chunks of dirt began falling to the floor. The light at the mouth of the cave was much larger now, but the view was already partly obscured by tumbled stones and hanging roots.

Behind her, the entire the cavern hissed and slithered as the chamber amplified and echoed the sounds of the roots moving beneath the pool. The water shivered and the stone shook. Asha dashed down the tunnel, her bare feet sliding in the soft mud around the stream in the center of the floor. Something cold and wet snaked past her ankle. Then she stepped on a root that curled up sharply around her toes.

Asha tripped and fell. She crashed into the floor face-first, dropping the nun in front of her. A thick bundle of lotus tendrils whipped around her leg and yanked her back toward the pool. As she struggled to untwist the roots from her leg, Asha listened for something else behind the moaning, keening, crying of the roots. The lotus was frightened and confused, but beyond that she could hear a buzzing like the swarming of angry hornets. The sound of the ghost’s fury raced round and round the cavern, rising and falling, lashing out at everything and nothing in a whirlwind of terrified rage.

As a second and a third lotus tentacle tried to grip her arms, Asha felt the tiny claws of a young mongoose running down the length of her body and in the shadows she saw Jagdish gnaw at the roots around her leg. The roots snapped back into the darkness and Asha snatched up the little mongoose as she ran for the exit, pausing only to grab the nun under her arms and drag her the last few steps, squeezing through the narrow opening, and spilling out onto the sun-warmed grass outside.

Gasping for breath, Asha pulled the unconscious Priya to the wide stones by the water’s edge where the langur had slept the night before. From the safety of the stones, she watched the pale lotus roots creep out from the tunnel, slip around the loose rocks, and pull them back to seal the opening of the cave. The heavy thumps and crashes of falling earth and stone continued to reverberate through the ground long after the opening had been blocked and Asha sat listening to the wailing of the dead girl deep inside the mountain.

Then the voice in the cave fell silent and Asha frowned, straining to hear. For a time, there was nothing but the wind in the giant trees overhead. But then, softly, in the distant depths of the mountain, a gentle sighing rose from the stones. And then the earth wept.

It was like nothing Asha had ever heard before. It was the falling of winter snow, and the tumbling of a single leaf on an autumn breeze, and the sinking of an old stone into the soft mud. It was gentle and soft, the sound of something slowly dying unseen and unloved. It was so quiet that Asha could barely hear it, and so terrible that she felt guilty for hearing it at all.

And it went on for hours.

In her sleep, Priya’s breathing grew stronger as they rested in the warm afternoon sun. Asha inspected the thin green shoots in the nun’s arms and one by one she plucked them out. The gray woman shuddered and murmured softly. But when Asha began to tug on the longer lotus blooms on her head, Priya stiffened and gasped. Asha let go and held the woman’s hand. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right.” Priya sat up. “Are we still in the cave?”

Asha shook her head. “No. Open your eyes and you’ll see the setting sun.”

The nun touched her face and gently massaged her eyes open until she could blink them normally. She swept her colorless irises across the ledge. “I can’t see anything.”

Asha touched her hand. “Your eyes. I’m sorry. They’re dead.”

Priya nodded slowly. “I suppose that’s the price of living for two centuries in the dark.”

“Maybe if I remove the rest of the lotus, it will help.” Asha moved behind her and carefully grasped one of the long tendrils.

Priya cried out, “Please, stop!”

Asha let go, frowning. She parted the nun’s hair to examine her scalp and saw that the lotus roots snaked under her skin in long white lines. “It’s in deep. I’m not sure how to remove it without hurting you, or even killing you.”

“It’s all right.” Priya reached up to stroke the leaves and blossoms in her hair. “It’s a small sacrifice for the freedom to go back out into the world and tell people the things I’ve learned.”

“I could cut away the plant above your skin at least.”

“No, thank you. I want to keep them as a memento of my time here.”

They spent the night on the grassy ledge sleeping back to back under Asha’s wool blanket. When morning came, she saw that the stream had dried up completely and only a little water still shimmered in the deep pools farther down the mountainside.

“She did it again. That poor girl,” Priya said. Tears fell from her sightless eyes. “I had hoped I had given her the peace she needed. I thought, after all this time, she had learned to accept herself and her place in the world.”

Slowly, hand in hand, they descended the steep path beside the dry river bed. The giant trees stood in silent watch over them, the heavy vines creaking quietly in the morning breeze. At the bottom of the mountain they found only a muddy track where the river had been.

It took three long days of slow walking to return to the village where they found the people sitting along the banks of what used to be the source of their livelihoods. Asha introduced Priya to them and let them marvel at the youthful nun crowned in flowing black hair festooned with white lotus blossoms.

“When will the river come back?” Kishan asked.

“It may not,” Asha said. “Priya’s sacrifice gave your village two hundred years of life here, but that’s over now. You’ll have to find new homes somewhere else, or learn a new way to live here if you choose to stay.”

For two weeks, Asha and Priya remained in the village. Priya slowly recovered her strength while learning to walk, dress, and feed herself without the aid of her eyes, and day by day the color returned to her ageless skin. Asha took the villagers deep into the forest to help them find edible plants and to teach them how to transplant the herbs to their gardens in the village.

Then one morning Asha awoke to a familiar shushing sound, the constant white noise of water rushing over stones and down gullies, pouring through channels and crashing into pools. She stood up, her blanket still wrapped around her shoulders against the pre-dawn chill in the air, and she walked down to the river running clear and deep through the middle of the village. Small brown birds bathed in the shallows and large silver fish floated serenely in the deep shadowed pockets at the bottom. Jagdish chittered under her hair, and her dragon’s ear heard two deer grazing downstream and a pack of dogs loping through the trees far to the east.

Priya, holding her bamboo walking stick and wearing a cloth tied across her eyes, came down to stand beside her.

“The river came back,” Asha said. “Higher and stronger than before. Your ghost gave it back.”