The wind died.Little stones rolled to a crackling stop—and Valmiki realized what the Queen of Queens had taken from her brother-in-law into her keeping.
The knowledge twisted like fire in the sage’s gut.
“I will give you Lord Rama’s story, as you must tell it,” Sita commanded.
Valmiki reeled at the woman’s words.He was not a man prone to hubris—he had, after all, spent a lifetime working to shed himself of his earthly desires.But Lord Rama’s story was one of righteousness, betrayal, and wild adventure, threaded through with gods and saints, immortal monsters, and unexpected allies.To be the one chosen to record it was an honor beyond reckoning.
There were tales of ferocious battles.Of mountains moved across the night.Of the raising of the dead.
Of holy weapons of unimaginable power.
The sage’s gaze dropped to the cloth-wrapped secret the queen held in her hand—and her final words echoed uncomfortably through his mind.
“As I must write it?”he pushed back uncertainly.“Will it not be the whole story, then?”
The woman on the riverbank turned her head to look at him.
Her face was the image of perfection, black brows soaring like the wings of starlings over cheeks warm and rosy as a summer sunrise.That beauty must have made a thousand hearts burn with regret that they had not had the good fortune to be born Lord Rama and enjoy the unimaginable splendor of this woman’s favor.
Past lips like sun-ripened berries, lashes thick as the fall of evening framed eyes like those of a new-foaled fawn.But as the sage looked deeper into that still, relentless gaze, it seemed as though he saw past the flesh and blood that stood before him to a truth deeper than the reckoning of a single lifetime.
He tasted the bitter tang of copper on the back of his tongue.His ears rang with a sound like the clanging of gongs, and the shadow of another pair of arms fell over his soul.
A thought rose into his consciousness, echoing up from a place far beyond both space and time.Valmiki absorbed it with a wild sense of awe.
There have been skulls around her neck.
What had the child Iravati said when she had come up the hill to fetch him?
She is either a princess or a goddess.
The great sage, Maharishi of the Ant Hills, now knew with a trembling clarity exactly which of those stood before him on his riverbank.
“No story is ever complete,” She replied, Her words ringing with all the terrifying potential of the space between the stars.“Because every story has its secrets.”
“Shakti,” Valmiki rasped through a throat dry as dust, falling to his knees in the mud at her feet.
?
One
Late morning
Sunday July 10, 1898
India
Fields of jewel-likegreen glided past the window beneath a rich gray sky as Eleanora Mallory curled up in a wingback chair, her nose pressed to the pages of a book.
The fields were speckled with brightly colored wildflowers and grazing cattle.The chair was bolted to the floor.The book was the third volume in Manmatha Nath Dutt’s English translation of the Ramayana, an epic tale of love, exile, and war.
The landscape glided rather than staying put because Ellie was sitting in the elegantly furnished parlor of a private train car—a luxury she had never experienced before her arrival in India.
The car had been waiting for her and her companions when they had disembarked from their boat in Madras.Four servants in purple and gold livery had met them at the docks to guide them there, whisking up their luggage and carrying it the short distance to the railway station.
The servants, like the private carriage, belonged to Sir Vijayrama Chandra Devi, Maharaja of Nandapur—or Uncle Vijay, as Ellie’s friend Constance affectionately referred to him.
When she pulled her nose out of her reading long enough to notice, Ellie had to admit that a private carriage was a very comfortable way to travel.The facilities included three cabins with berths for sleeping and a well-appointed washroom.
