Asha had never noticed the scent of cedars before. Now she couldn’t escape the strange sweetness of them. It was their fifth day hiking along the old dirt path beyond the ruins of a city the locals had called Tesiphon. And it was their third day alone in the cedar forest.
“Asha?”
The herbalist glanced back. The nun stood at the bottom of the gentle slope leaning on her bamboo rod, her slender chest rising and falling visibly, the lotus blossoms in her hair shivering in the cool morning breeze.
Priya lifted her head. “Can we rest a moment?”
“All right.” Asha sat down in the middle of the path and leaned back against a mound of mossy earth. Her burning right ear brought her the sounds of the forest, its true sounds. The plant-souls of the cedars creaked like a sea of cicadas, droning softly in every direction. Ants and termites marched through the undergrowth, what little there was. And more than a few squirrels raced through the branches overhead. They were all unseen and far away from the two women on the path, and yet all perfectly clear to Asha’s golden ear.
After a moment, Priya said, “It doesn’t seem so very different from home.”
“I never thought it would be.” Asha glanced up. “Although I hadn’t expected so many cedars.”
“I’m serious.” The nun smiled. “At the monastery, I heard so many stories about the Ming Empire and Nippon, and the Isle of Lanka, the snow fields of Rus, and of course, Eran. Each of them always sounded so unique, so different from Kolkata. The weather, the food, the trees, and the flowers. I had always imagined that if I ever traveled the world, it would be an ever changing tapestry of shapes and smells and sounds.”
“But?” Asha felt through her bag for a sliver of ginger, but found none. She’d chewed the last of them over a week ago, but the habit kept her reaching for one more.
“But here we are, half way around the world, and it’s all still the same. The same earth and stones, the same trees and people and animals. Only the bread changes. And the music, sometimes.”
“We’re not half way around the world,” Asha said. “Not even close. Not yet.”
“I suppose there should be something comforting about the sameness. Everywhere you go, the world is still the same home you left behind. And yet, there is a corner of my heart that desires some newness, and is disappointed.”
Asha shook her head. “You should know better than to go desiring things. Suffering, and whatnot.”
“I know, I know.” Priya reached up to her shoulder and stroked the mongoose sleeping under her hair. “Sometimes I think little Jagdish here is the only person I’ve ever met who truly has the world figured out.”
Asha was about to agree with her when a sound drew her attention skyward. She scanned the leaves overhead. It was a distant sound, muted and faded by the winds and trees, but still a harsh and strident noise. A shout. A roar.
“I think I…” Asha trailed off as she stood up, straining to hear and wondering for a moment which ear she was hearing it in.
“I heard it too.” Priya stood up as well, her covered eyes directed at nothing in particular. “It sounded like the cry of someone in pain, someone in trouble.”
“But where?”
Asha stood very still, waiting to hear it again.
A high-pitched shriek split the silence as a small shard of metal plummeted out of the sky, sliced through the canopy, and impaled itself in the brown earth just a few paces from where Asha stood. The herbalist frowned and was about to go closer to it when a deep roar suddenly bellowed down from above, and she looked up again.
Through the leaves, she saw a huge shining beast race across the sky, gliding and falling and spewing black smoke in its wake. It passed from south to north, flashing across the dirt path where the two women stood and vanishing beyond the wall of cedars. A moment later, a new rumble of thunder echoed across the deep blue sky, followed by the cackling of stones tumbling down a mountainside.
“What was it?” Priya asked.
“A machine.” Asha grimaced. “Another machine, one that can fly. Or could fly. That didn’t sound like a gentle landing.”
“It fell out of the sky?” Priya frowned. “Which way? We should go, quickly. There may be people injured.”
Asha nodded silently. “Probably.”
Together they turned off the path and began climbing the steeper, rockier slopes through the cedar forest. Their progress was slow as Asha carefully picked their way around towering boulders and fallen trees, and often hiked along at Priya’s elbow, ready to catch the nun should the slope prove too steep or the earth too loose. The sun reached its zenith and began drifting into the west.
A thin scrawl of black smoke drew a faint line down from the heavens to a cleft in the mountainside above them. Asha watched the smoke twist and writhe in the wind, and listened to the low hums in her right ear that told her there were two human souls somewhere in that cleft. She paused once to look back down the mountain behind her. There was a third hum out in the forest, one faint and uneven.
“What is it?” Priya asked.
Asha shook her head. “Maybe a wolf.”
They pressed on and reached the mouth of the cleft in the mountainside just as the sun kissed the western edge of the world and the sky flushed orange and violet.
Asha paused to stare across a vast ledge of tumbled stone with the mountain peak rising to her left and the broken cliff wall of the cleft spearing up to her right.
“Are we there?” Priya asked. “Can you see the flying machine?”
Asha blinked. “Oh, I can see it all right.”
2
As they walked into the shadows of the cleft in the mountain, Asha described to Priya the object before them.
The bulk of the machine towered over them, an elegantly rounded mass of shining steel like an enormous silver melon so large and so high that they were soon walking in its shadow, though it was far too high above them to touch. Ahead, Asha could see the underbelly of the machine sloping down to meet the earth and where the two met another smaller steel object was lodged. Thin trails of black smoke snaked up from this smaller chamber, rising up both sides of the great steel mass above it.
Moments later they stood beside a small steel cabin with long glass windows and many steel rods bolting the chamber to the enormous melon. One of the windows had shattered and the smoke spilled upward from it. There was a metal door in the center of the cabin and Asha reached for the handle.
“I’d wait if I were you.”
Asha spun to see a man sitting back in a sheltered cave just behind her. He was young-faced and smiling with thin black hair hanging in his eyes, and when he stood he towered over Asha by more than a head. He wore dust-streaked tan trousers that plunged into bronze greaves over black leather boots. His brown jacket was open to reveal a wrinkled white shirt, but it was the device on his right arm that caught Asha’s eye. His jacket sleeve was rolled up to the elbow, where the device began and continued down to his wrist, wrapping his arm in bright brass plates and rods and wheels, with a wide flat box on the outside of his forearm. A thick leather glove covered his right hand.
“I saw this machine fall out of the sky,” Asha said. “Is it yours?”
“I don’t own it, but I was riding in it,” he said. “Have you ever seen an airship before?”
“No. My name is Asha, and this is Priya. I’m an herbalist. Are you injured?”
His smile was quickly replaced by a look of earnest concern. “No, but the pilot was. She’s back here. Can you help her?”
Asha nodded and followed him back into the cave, leaving Priya to find her own way with her bamboo rod. In the shadows there was a young woman lying on a level bed of dry earth and small stones with a bundle of cloth under her head. Asha set her bag aside and inspected her patient.
“I’m Gideon, by the way,” the young man said. “And she’s Kahina.”