The Vishakanya's Choice (2 page)

Alexander swiped the sternum of the man wrapped in thorns, piercing his flesh. A weird smile slipped onto his face as he leaned forward and sucked the man's broken skin. For a moment, Sudha thought she was saved, but then Alexander backed away, “I have seen all the blood in a man and it weighs far less than me.”

Her heart fell as he walked towards her.

“What is my worth?”

Sudha stopped struggling against the sari and squared her shoulders. She did not want to answer him, but the question intrigued her. In the Hastinapur Harem, riddles were her only solace. She thought about the revelers outside the tent, the bones along the walls and the patient regard in his eyes. She thought about his military campaigns, conquests and inevitable end. She knew the answer, but didn't want to say it. She tried something obviously wrong, like “light” or “happiness.” But the sari wouldn't let her.

“Well?” pressed Alexander.

She fought the sari as long as she could, but in the end—

“Legends,” she gulped, her voice barely above a whisper.

“Speak up.”

Sudha swallowed. “Legends. You're worth your weight in legends.”

Alexander grinned and he clapped his hands together. “I shall interview this one personally.”

The beetle nodded, clicked its pincers and dismissed the room. Alexander leaned against his throne and rubbed his distended stomach.

“Interesting.”

“What is, my lord?”

“No need to bother with the formalities of title. But what do I call you? Do toxins even have names?”

Sudha's head snapped up. He knew what she was. Her heart fluttered.

“Monkshood, hellebore and oleander beg to differ,” she said. “Sudha also disagrees with you.”

Alexander laughed. “Very interesting.”

Her gaze darted around the room. Any minute now, someone would barrel through the room and kill her. An assassin had no place in an Emperor's company.

“No one will harm you,” said Alexander, following her gaze. “In fact, I believe your Emperor and I want the same thing.”

Alexander cleared his throat, kneading the heels of his palms into his sunken eyes.

“I'm very tired. But I want more than rest,” he said, peering at her from the lattice of his fingers. “You see, I am already a legend. Already, they call me Alexander the Great. I lived unlike any man, and I shall die unlike any man.”

He yawned, and Sudha stared at him. Alexander's body seemed engorged with other people's blood, and he pooled out of his throne of bones like thinned milk. Life clung to him in wisps.

“I was planning on framing my companion of the evening. Everybody likes a good murder,” he said with a shrug, “but this is a much better option.”

Sudha clenched her fingers. Even now, she was just a weapon. The only difference was that her task had switched allegiance. She walked in a circle around the tent, toeing its amber edges and stroking its fractured femurs and metatarsals. With each stroke, Alexander shivered. He had absorbed his conquests and sat at their core. Finally, she glanced up and what she saw rooted her to the spot.

All around Alexander, glowing Choices lined his walls. They were signs of his importance, a currency of power. They were bottled and distilled, shimmering or inky, reflecting all that he
could
do: a Choice for decisions, a Choice for food, a Choice for listening. Sudha's heart constricted in envy.

“I will not last through the night,” he said, wheezing.

Her eyes widened and a smile slipped onto her face. All she had to do was wait him out. She would never need to touch him, never need to kill.

“Then I'm not needed,” she said, speaking more to the sari than to Alexander.

“But you make all the difference.”

“How?”

Alexander gave a brittle laugh. “When this disease has its way, my bowels will spill out and stain this throne black and red with my own shit. I'll wear a death mask of constipation. Hardly fitting for a legendary conqueror. Dying in a puddle of his own shit.” He paused and stared at Sudha. “But if you would only kiss me once, my death would be different. It would have dignity. I would be frozen the way I am now. Alas, still ugly as shit, but at least not covered in it. So, poison-girl, you shall make me into myth and fuse me into legend.”

If she did nothing, the Emperor of Hastinapur could celebrate his enemy's humiliating end. If she did something, Alexander could celebrate a death with dignity. And Sudha? No matter what she did, she had no option but to return to the Hastinapur Harem, her poison intact, her sari unbroken and her deadliness tested. But what about a Choice? A real one, not the kind watered down to a word. But a glittering Choice, the kind you could hold in your hand, the kind you could taste, the kind that could free you. The kind that lined the walls of Alexander's grand tent.

“What will you give me in return?”

Alexander laughed and the silk tent trembled. “A murderess that makes bargains? I didn't count on that.”

“My-name-is-Sudha,” she bit out, her eyes narrowing to slits.

At once, Alexander stopped laughing. He braced his elbows on his knees, his chin resting on his wasted wrists.

“Vishakanyas don't have names.”

“I do.”

“Then what do you want?” he said, raising his arms. Sagging pearly skin stretched far beyond his elbows, exposing the indigo seams of his life. “Shall I make you my wife with my dying breath? Bequeath you an empire? Give you your weight in gold?”

Sudha did not want to belong to him. She did not want to govern an empire. She did not want riches. Even now, the red sari was compressing her, pulling her towards Alexander. And in that moment, Sudha knew what she wanted.

“I want a Choice,” said Sudha in a clear voice.

The amber tent shrank, as though its shoulders had fallen or its bones felt sympathy for her. Alexander considered her.

“My mother was like that too,” he said fondly. “Full of bite. She always wanted things out of her reach.”

“Why shouldn't she?” countered Sudha. “You have so many Choices, you could spare some.”

Alexander steepled his fingers. His gaze fell on his wound.

“I did not deny you.”

Sudha tried, and failed, to steady the frantic thump of her heart.
Was he considering giving one to her?

“Perhaps these—” he combed his fingers through his hair, withdrawing something glimmering and pulsing, “—cannot be bought. Perhaps Choices,” he gestured at the glittering gift in his hand, “spring up when history makes way for them. Perhaps they will grow, like legends upon dead conquerors.”

He laughed, the glowing Choice illuminating his face . “I have many, but this one is most precious. It is from my—” he stopped, swallowing his sentence, “—from a friend. He…well. We had a thousand Choices between us. But not the one we wanted.”

“And I may have it?” asked Sudha.

“It is yours in return for your services,” said Alexander heavily.

He clambered off his throne until he was kneeling before her. He bowed his head, revealing the alabaster flesh of his neck and cupped his palms, extending them to her in an invisible oblation.

“Dear Sudha, will you make me into myth? Will you fuse me into legend?”

Sudha took a deep breath, staring at his hands. It angered her that something so precious could be given away so easily.

For a moment, she didn't hear the revels. Before her was a universe, an irreversible moment of before and after. What would become of her if she took the Choice? The thought left her weightless. But what would happen if she didn't take it? That, she knew with perfect clarity: nothing. A life of stone and poison.

She reached out, fingers trembling as she stole the Choice from his palm. “Yes,” she whispered, and kissed him.

She watched his last smile ossify before pulling him onto his throne. She arranged his hands across his lap, straightened his tunic and smoothed his thin hair. She considered snatching the Choices from the walls, but in the end chose not to. The one in her hands was the one she had earned. Anything else would have been false.

Sudha stole out of the tent. Creeping past the ivory port, the emerald hippocampus and the voluptuous apsaras, she stood on the shore of the river, her hands cupped tightly around the Choice.

The makara swam into view, blinking its luminous eyes.

“Time to go back already? That was fast.”

“I'm not going back,” she breathed.

It laughed before coughing up half a fish spine.

“Silly girl, you don't have a choice.”

“I do now,” whispered Sudha.

The makara slid onto the banks, tilting its head and staring at her cupped hands. “What've you got there? Is it edible? I ate all the river fish.”

“It's a Choice.”

The makara blinked at her. “A real one?”

Sudha took off her slippers and toed the grass. Immediately, the ground became a black and acrid halo. She took one look at the charred ground before popping the Choice in her mouth. It lolled fatly on her tongue before she swallowed—honeysuckle, pomegranate and pear.

Instantly, something in the pith of red fought in a paroxysm of confusion. She could feel it extinguishing against her, lifting off her skin, plumping her cheeks, narrowing her girth and softening the unsettling black of her hair. When she touched the sari, it felt dull and inanimate beneath her fingers. She didn't feel it pulse against her, beckoning her home. It was just an ordinary skein of silk.

The makara inhaled sharply. “You took it.” His eyes widened. “What are you going to do with it?”

“Accept it,” she said with a grin.

She sucked in her breath, staring at the blackened halo around her. It was like the time she first understood the Rule. The time when she stopped being a girl and became a weapon. If she stepped out of this ring, what then? She was too old to be a girl. Too independent to be a weapon. What would she be next? What would she do next? She could lift her arms and try to scrape a star off the sky. She could luxuriate in stillness and silence and silk. She could eat things other than poison—rose petal candies rolled in silver flakes, guavas with sunset flesh. She could taste what had long been denied—monsoon rain, the soft violet of evening air, or even…a kiss.

All that mattered was that it didn't matter. Whatever she did, it would be her choice. Still holding her breath, Sudha walked out of the circle.

The Vishakanya's Choice
sprang from that idea of truly possessing choice and my own emotionally trying experiences. Around the time I started writing
The Vishakanya's Choice
, I felt stuck. After graduating college, I peddled my degree in Medieval English and got a job working as a legal assistant in a cold tax law office (read: I scanned documents). All those months spent writing, working and saving money felt fruitless. I could have constructed a tiny galaxy with all my short story and query letter rejections. My unpublished manuscripts were gathering Internet dust. Doubt and its full-mouth of needle teeth nipped at me every day. And then, tragedy struck a family friend. They lost their daughter, a young mother and physician, to cancer. That experience, though felt from afar, fueled the story. I was angry with the loss of a beautiful, talented and brilliant woman. I was angry with her powerlessness.

Sometimes decisions are made for us, and those are inevitable and unavoidable. But that power of making our own choices is often taken for granted. Those small things — where we go, how we get there, when we do it — craft the landscape of our lives. What if that power was stripped away? What if choice was a currency? What if without it, lives were static things, buffeted along with no real agency?

From there, I started thinking about the other players in the story. The ones who seemed like they had it all, wearing the world as a crown, mythic and aloof. We all know that person (or persons): the one with the perfectly coiffed hair and perpetual Instagram-filtered life; the one with more Twitter followers; the one with the pithy replies and the one who YOU KNOW WHO is following despite your attempts to coax them into friendship. I wanted to know how choice trapped them as well.

The story remains important to me because of the time in which it was written and how it forced me to grapple with my own choices. Contemplating a world where choice was a currency exposed my myopia. I saw myself as stuck, wandering and waiting. But mostly, I was whining. I felt like giving up, convinced that every cosmic machine had ground its heel on my writing dreams. But I made the choice to try harder. I read more, wrote more. Learned more. And that choice made all the difference.

Following last year's “Subversive Fairy Tales”, the thematic call for 2015 short stories was “First Contact.” Unlike the other stories on this particular roster of First Contact tales,
The Vishakanya's Choice
is outside of the realm of science fiction and more closely aligned with historical fantasy. Tell us how you envision The Vishakanya's Choice in relation to the “First Contact” theme?

I took the concept of contact at face value, as in the touch of another person or an electrifying moment of skin contact, eye contact. With the folklore of the vishakanyas, that first contact is a true test of the femme fatale. Quite literally! I loved this theme because it prompted how we interpret contact across stories and traditions. That mythos of the vishakanya and the urban legend about how Alexander the Great met his end with poison felt like a good fit.

Talk to us about the research and history that went into your short story—did you do any research into the history of the Vishakanya and the tradition of young female assassins? And why or what inspired you to focus on the death of Alexander the Great at the hands of such an assassin?

The first time I stumbled across any mention of vishakanyas was in the popular Indian comic books, Amar Chitra Katha. They were mentioned as beautiful assassins used against enemies during the Mauryan Empire. This image of the poison damsel stayed with me out of pity. That connection of intimacy would be cut off from someone like her. As for Alexander the Great, there are so many intriguing theories about how he died. Death by poison is the most popular one. But how was it administered? What were the circumstances? Given his campaigns in the Indian subcontinent and some of the artistic renderings of King Porus submitting to Alexander, I was taken by the idea of how far a conquered person's resentment would stretch. To me, it seemed more poetic and romantic that he would have died by the hands of this poison damsel and that in their shared time, perhaps they discover a kindred experience in one another.

Another favorite aspect of
The Vishakanya's Choice
is the concept of Choice itself. What inspired your interpretation of Choice as a precious item held by kings and conquerors? And what is the significance of this interpretation of Choice, given the story's ultimate ending?

I mention this in the inspirations and influences essay, but interpreting Choice as something that could be held came to mind after a family friend lost their daughter. I hated that sense of powerlessness. I hated that she had no choice. And from there, I kept thinking about the word “had” and what possession means or
could
mean. Portraying Choice as something you could literally possess is a bit of wish fulfillment, as if things can always change as long as you've got the right talisman in hand.

Tell us a bit about your experience writing short stories: what would you say are the advantages and potential pitfalls of writing short fiction?

I love the emotional impact of a short story in a short time frame. For example, Ken Liu's “The Paper Menagerie” gave me a story hangover for DAYS. I couldn't stop thinking about it. Short stories are wonderful because they can be enigmatic and remain sort of vague without detriment to the narrative. Perhaps it's just me, but I feel a compulsion to tie every loose thread when I'm working on a novel. Short fiction frees you of that expectation. The pitfalls, however, are in the same vein as the advantages. At some point you run out of space for all the glorious tangents, imagery, side characters, pithy dialogue and poignant reflections you want to include. Short fiction is a lesson in compression, and it's very difficult.

Finally, a question we ask all of our interviewees: We Book Smugglers have faced condemnation because of the sheer volume of books that we carry back home on a daily basis. As such, we have on occasion resorted to “smuggling books” home to escape judgmental, scrutinizing eyes. Have you ever had to smuggle books?

Yes? Ish? I tend to binge-buy and then pretend that all the books were just floundering in my car so I'm taking them up all at once. So, I get side-eye but it's more from “Why are you an unkempt car fiend” vs. “Shame upon thee, Book Smuggler!” Sneaky sneaky.