Chapter 5

“I’m telling you to take it.”

The cup of broth is steaming in Ishir’s hand. Toru looks away and draws his blanket closer around himself. “The priests say – ”

“You will sully yourself and your bloodline, and calamity will befall the king. And I’m no learned man, but I’ve heard enough from wandering holy men to know that refusing food as a guest is also no way to gain release from the cycle of rebirth.” He puts the bowl next to Toru, on the ground.

Toru rubs his aching eyes. He sees the sense and kindness in Ishir’s words. But more than that, he is weak with hunger, and the food he packed will only last so long. He will need it for the journey back.

“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” says Ishir as Toru reaches for the bowl. “I’m going to do my rounds. There’s a fire going in the pit, you can warm yourself up with that. Remember to leave the door open.” He gathers up some rope-bound herbs and stoppered jars, which he places in a pinewood box and tucks under his arm.

“Are you a herbalist?” asks Toru. The broth’s flavour is nothing he would opt for, but is already feeling better after a few sips. He tries to control the queasiness that comes with eating after being hungry for several days.

“Well, I know more about herbs and roots than most elders and household ladies. And I don’t always charge, so I’m not certain I could be counted as one.” He scratches his beard. “The moment spring comes, you should go back to Satra or wherever you came from. There is nothing here for you.”

Toru does not expect a villager to understand the gravity of his duties. He only says, “I do not intend on staying that long.”

Ishir turns to him with a look like he thinks Toru is quite stupid. “There will be blizzards, and hailstorms, and avalanches, and you won’t know when they’ll hit. You will have no easy access to water or shelter, even if you have food. And you will be alone.” He opens the door. “Get some rest.”

Toru had slept most of the previous day, and is feeling the need to move his stiff chilled limbs. After he drains the broth, he treads around the house, inspecting the low table with its unlit oil lamps, the shuttered window that’s been sealed off, the pots and griddles and spoons and things hanging off the walls. The whole place is smaller than his bedchamber in Satra, and stuffy and fusty the way enclosed spaces get in winter, but clean, like everything is wiped down once every so often.

He checks his spear, swipes it with his thumb even though there isn’t a speck on it.

East across the valley, jagged mountains scrape a pallid sky. A wind comes and blows through the streets. The houses and sheds hunker like great brown beasts beneath the thick snow, composed of wood and stone and mud. They do not look steady - Toru wonders how fast they will give.

Hardly anyone spares him a glance. In Satra, people would avoid his gaze out of deference; here, he is irrelevant, just another man on his business. The thought grates at him, but as he ambles on, it starts to become exhilarating. He could cartwheel in the snow, kick stones as he walked, shout a song into the valley off-key, and no one would care. When he reaches the cow pen he is smiling. He greets Mekhala by stroking her flank and checking her for injuries or discomfort, and then goes for the bundles that Ishir had placed in a corner. “Not even worth stealing,” he thinks wryly, as he reties the strings.

He wanders the streets; people are scraping snow off roofs, building fires, churning butter, gossiping. A wave of stench from a latrine nearly overpowers him. Beneath a tree a pair of dogs tussle and yap. Red-cheeked children pelt each other with snowballs and ride wooden planks down the slopes, shrieking with laughter. He feels like he is inside a painting, and tries not to stare; he has never been permitted to walk unattended among common folk, but even if he had been, it would have been pointless, wrapped up in his silks and gold and gems with everyone bowing and simpering at him. No one just went about their day while he was within sight.

Someone is calling out, and Toru does not realise it is he who is being addressed until the person says, “The fellow in the furs! Are you going to hand me that ball or no?” Toru turns to find a man around his own age sitting on a woven cot outside a house, by a dwindling fire. His wide grin seems out of place beneath his tired eyes. A gaggle of girls huddle around him like ducklings, their eyes huge. “Well?”

Toru looks around till he finds a crude leather ball by a crumbling well, and brings it over to the man, who tosses it to one of the girls. The lot of them immediately scuttle off, chattering away. “They’re not my sisters,” says the man, without prompting, pulling his woollens closer about himself, as if against a sharp gale. “I have only one and she left for city life two summers ago.”

“I see,” says Toru, not knowing how to respond.

“Do you have siblings?”

“No.” Toru is unused to strangers speaking to him without reason. He turns to go.

“I haven’t seen you around before. Are you the thief who came here demanding to be housed?”

Toru looks back to him, irritated. “I’m not a thief.”

The man is still smiling. His eyes are catlike, a dusty gold. “Your word puts me at ease. Will you add some more logs to the fire for me?” He gestures to a pile next to the door.

“Am I your servant?”

“Need you be a servant to help out a dashing stranger?” Toru almost walks away, but there is something in the man’s thin face – something weary and dark – that makes him stay and do as he says. As he is stoking the fire one of the girls from before comes running back, grabbing the man’s heavy robes and saying, “Parth, they’re saying I cheated but I didn’t, tell them I didn’t cheat!”

Parth gets up and staggers. Toru steadies him by the elbow without thinking and says, “You might be better off inside.”

“Don’t be absurd. I said I would be their referee.”

Toru can only watch as the girl leads Parth away by the sleeve. Parth stops and turns to Toru and asks, “Not joining us?” Toru shakes his head, bewildered at the easy offer, and Parth gives a jaunty smile and says, “Another time, then.”

***

Ishir hands him a shovel the next day. “Get the snow off the roof.”

Toru stares. “This is – ”

“Say ‘beneath you’, and I’ll have you clear out the cow pen instead. If you can live under my roof, you can clean it too.” He pushes the shovel into Toru’s chest, and Toru scrambles to not drop it. “Do you need instructions?”

“It’s shovelling snow,” Toru gripes. “Why would I need instructions?”

The ladder creaks alarmingly when he clambers up, and he can feel the weight of Ishir’s sceptical gaze on him. His face burns at the prospect of doing the work of servants. Perched on the middle of the roof, he maintains his balance, and digs the shovel into the thick carpet of snow. Ishir looks unimpressed at the delicate powder Toru sends down. Toru grits his teeth and continues his task; the work is more tiresome than he had guessed, but he’d rather sleep with a sore back than tell Ishir that.

“Need help?” calls Ishir.

Toru wishes he would leave and attend to whatever work he has today. If I do jobs like this all day, I’ll forget how to fight, he thinks, surly. I shall have to make time somehow to practice.

“You’re doing it wrong.”

Toru rams the shovel into the snow in front of him. “What are you, my mother-in-law? I’ve had fewer complaints from my – ” He does not get to finish his sentence with “my weapons master”. His boot slips, and he slithers down the roof with a wailing cry, landing with a heavy whump into the snow. Stars burst across his vision.

“You’re supposed,” says Ishir, bending over him, “to leave a perimeter of snow around the edge so you don’t fall off.”

Toru groans and struggles to his hands and knees, while Ishir asks him if he’s ever worked a day in his life. “Did you break something?” he adds, almost as an afterthought, nudging Toru with the edge of his shoe.

There will be bruises along his arm and side tomorrow, and he may have sprained his wrist. “No.”

“Then get back on the roof.”

Toru gets up, ignoring the pain. This, at least, he knows how to do.

***

Toru does manage to train, in fits and starts, in between the small doings of his life here, beating snow off the roof, cooking food, and performing odd jobs for villagers on Ishir’s behalf in exchange for meat and fish and butter. His hands were always callused, but now they are becoming rough and chapped; he uses a small sharp knife to trim his nails, but it is cumbersome, and they break more often than not. Stuvan’s disapproving stare comes to mind, and he cringes.

He rips a fingernail clean off while training in a clearing in the woods. “Don’t say a word,” he tells Ishir, who sighs and hands him a jar of herbal paste.

Still he cannot deny that he would have been carrion fodder without Ishir’s hospitality. “I’ll have you paid in gold,” Toru promises, over a pot of burnt lentils, “once I take care of the vitara.”

Ishir snorts, waving the fumes away from his face. “Better that you provide for this village.”

“That’s…very noble of you.”

“There’s nothing noble about me.”

Toru feels irritated by Ishir’s stubborn loftiness. If he is not doing his rounds, he is shovelling dung from other people’s pens, mending their fences, milking their goats. There are permanent smudges beneath his eyes – the only times he rests are when he eats and sleeps, and many times, he foregoes meals.

It is unsurprising when Ishir falls sick one evening. Toru struggles to get him to eat a few spoonfuls of broth, and only just manages to grab a bucket in time for him to be sick in. “Don’t need your mothering,” Ishir babbles to him as Toru dabs the sweat off his forehead with a cloth. Toru tells him to not be a pain.

At daybreak, coughing and sneezing and dribbling mucous from his nose, he asks Toru to deliver medicines in his stead. Two of them are for Parth. Toru decides to save his for last, not willing to be sucked into his orbit so early in the day. “Don’t you dare administer the wrong dose,” Ishir rasps after him.

Save for one embarrassing instance where Toru addresses a woman by the wrong name, the task goes smoothly, and soon he finds himself standing outside Parth’s house, which stands by a narrow path towards the edge of the village. The firepit outside is cold and strewn with ash. He looks around for a pile of logs and branches and finds none. Inside, Parth is lying down, wrapped up in what seems like three blankets. He looks incongruous, not himself, alone and frowning. Against the walls piles of woollen shawls sit neatly folded – Toru catches sight of a loom in a corner.

The surprise on Parth’s face is blunted by tiredness. “Where’s Ishir?”

“Halfway to meeting his maker.”

Parth laughs quietly. It is a painful sound. “I appreciate it. Have you eaten? Let me get you some food.”

“Don’t strain yourself. Here. For your throat and fever. Do you have milk? Ishir says it’s recommended.” He remembers Ishir’s full instructions and adds awkwardly, “I can heat it up for you.”

“I don’t have milk.” The cough that follows is wet, whooping, and makes Toru cringe and offer to heat water instead. Parth nods, telling Toru to use his cooking pot. When Toru returns he finds Parth dozing, and shakes him gently. Parth sits up against the wall and takes the water and medicine, and then closes his eyes and breathes shakily. “I feel better now.” He stands up, letting one of the blankets drop, and totters to the loom. Toru is halfway out the door when Parth says, “Will you sit with me a while? You don’t have to.”

Toru hesitates, before coming to sit cross-legged a few paces away from him. Parth works the loom, and his face is serene, far from the astringent waft of medicine and the bitter little drafts slinking through the cracks around the window. He weaves the way a musician plays, elegant, loving, precise, and Toru thinks suddenly of his veena, and aches for it; he wonders if his fingers still remember how to pluck the strings.

Parth talks while he weaves. “My sister always told me I was crazy. Why would I enjoy work? That too something so tedious and repetitive? Why should I? But I did. I do. Do I need a reason?” The light from the lamp flickers against his hair, casts a soft inviting glow around it.

Toru feels dissociated and confused. He feels like they are in a puppet show and their places were meant to be switched. Parth was supposed to be Bishinya’s prince and Toru was supposed to spend a life weaving and raising goats and letting children drag him around where they pleased.

Parth stops working the loom, stands up, and stumbles. He places his hand against the wall to steady himself and gives Toru a shamefaced laugh, rubbing the back of his neck. Toru should tell him to sit down. Instead, his body does not do what he wants it to, and he stares blankly as Parth drags his feet to get another shawl to wrap himself in.