Tooth and Nail, Fur and Scale Read online

  It was a lonely, thankless job, if you ask me. It’s a good thing Akupara had the elephants for company.

  MOTHER LODE

  The very first time she had seen the outsiders’ faces, flickering bright and black by firelight in the village square, Channi had been seized with a sense of unease.

  She had been at home, sifting the sand that had arrived that afternoon, when her mother burst in and frantically began putting everything away. The unfiltered sand was swept back into the sack it had come in, which then went into a cabinet in the pantry. The nuggets Channi had picked out from it went into a tiny pouch that was slipped inside her mother’s blouse. The sand that had been filtered out was sprinkled in their backyard and then the house was padlocked.

  ‘Follow me,’ her mother had said, and rushed away.

  She had led Channi to the square, where it seemed like everyone from the village had gathered. They picked up the news from the ambient chatter: two men from the plains had ridden up on staggering mules, wearing finery that had been ripped to shreds by hard travel.

  They had come all the way from Ujjaini, she had heard them tell the headman. They spoke haltingly, searching for words, and when they’d find them, they’d pronounce them badly. They were merchants—trading mainly in jewellery and gemstones. Long ago, they had come by some exquisite gold filigree—the finest they had ever seen. Even the dealer who had brought it to the city hadn’t known whence it came, but had heard that it had been crafted in a remote mountain village. The merchants had spent half their adult lives looking for it, and now, finally, here they were.

  It was the skinny one who did most of the talking, while the big man looked around, staring down those who would dare meet his eyes.

  The headman had listened without interrupting. Finally, when the speech had ended, he told them that they looked very tired, and that he would talk to them the next morning, once they were rested. Channi had felt a tiny jolt in her chest as her mother’s name was called.

  ‘Take their mules to the stables,’ the headman had told her. ‘They’ll be staying at your inn tonight.’

  The village had no inn, but Channi’s mother’s house—being larger than most others’—doubled as one when they had the occasional visitor. The stables, which were shared by the whole community, were not too far from the square. Channi had led the mules by the reins. When she pushed the stable doors open, the foreign beasts had smelled the other animals tethered within and, despite their exhaustion, found the energy to resist. She had had a hard time dragging them over to an empty stall, with the camels showering them with spittle and the horses snorting listlessly.

  The men had turned in by the time she got home.

  ‘Off to bed, now,’ her mother had said. ‘Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.’

  The next time she saw the outsiders’ faces, they were grey in the moonlight. Channi tried to scream, but a bony hand was wrapped around her mouth and a weight bore down on her chest.

  ‘Say not!’ said the skinny man, and Channi noticed the six inches of bright steel flashing at her throat. ‘Keep down!’

  She stopped struggling, and the force on her chest gradually lifted. The big man backed away, the knife receding into the darkness with him. Channi gagged on the iron-and-sweat smell of the hand that was still clapped over her mouth.

  ‘Mother,’ said her captor, jerking his head in the direction of her mother’s room, towards which the other man had disappeared. ‘Imprisoned! Rope! Mouth closed!’

  They had her mother bound and gagged, Channi understood. She noticed, for the first time, the white line of a scar that ran diagonally down the man’s crooked nose.

  She remained silent and fought the impulse to struggle, so the man slowly released her jaw and put a long, skeletal finger to his lips. ‘You say loud,’ he said, ‘mother kill.’

  Channi eased herself up into sitting position, holding the thin man’s gaze. ‘What . . .’ she said, and noticed that her lips were trembling. She touched her cheek and it was wet. ‘Wh-what do you want?’

  ‘We know. Of gold,’ he said, his eyes wild, excited.

  ‘The filigree . . . yes . . . they might have a shipment ready at the worksho—’

  The man’s hand snapped around Channi’s throat. ‘Filigree? Hah! Filigree WASTE! Gold from anthill! Gold from ants!’

  ‘Hkkk!’ Channi clawed at the man’s spindly hand, which loosened its grip. ‘Okay!’ she sputtered. If somehow these men knew the secret of the gold, there was nothing to be done about it. ‘Fine! What do you want from me?’

  ‘You take us! You take us to ants!’

  A ball of fear lodged itself in her throat. She swallowed. ‘Collecting the sand is a job for experts! I’m just a girl!’

  ‘Lies!’ said the man. He caught her behind her neck and jerked her head towards the bottom of the bed, where she was faced with the sack of unsifted sand that remained from the night’s stalled work. ‘You have sand,’ he said.

  So they had gone through the cabinets. Fortunately, there hadn’t been more. Or perhaps it was unfortunate—if they had found enough, maybe they’d have sneaked away into the night without bothering Channi and her mother.

  ‘I—I’m just a sifter,’ she said. ‘The older men bring the sand. I just sift it for them—separate the gold from it! I’m not allowed to go out to the anthills alone!’

  The man’s hand snapped back over Channi’s mouth. She had been too loud in her protests. The big man came back inside, panting slightly, and Channi stared at him with her eyes wide, trying to gauge from his face whether her mother was safe.

  ‘What is your name?’ the skinny man asked.

  ‘Channising.’

  ‘You not go alone, Channising,’ he said, sneering at her. ‘We come with you!’

  She heard herself sobbing and tears blurred her vision.

  ‘And when you back home, you—’ he searched for the words, ‘you not imprison mother. But if you try to tricks . . .’

  He motioned for the big man to come towards him, grabbed the knife and pressed its edge to her neck. Channi stopped sobbing and bit down on her lower lip to keep it from trembling.

  When they got to the stables, Channi found that her assailants had already done away with the two guards posted there. She eased the door open, and they navigated the stalls by the moonlight.

  The two men went straight for the horses.

  ‘No!’ said Channi. ‘We have to take the camels. The ant fields are sandy. Horses don’t do well there.’

  The men studied the camels, conferred in whispers and picked two hardy bulls. The camels spat at them, but didn’t make a ruckus. As they drew the beasts out, Channi made her way deeper into the dark recesses of the stables.

  ‘Oye!’ the skinny man hissed when he noticed that she had disappeared into the shadows. She heard his footsteps rapping on the packed mud as well as his companion’s heavier tread.

  She ducked under the rope that cordoned off the stall abutting the far wall of the stable, and knelt beside the slender female camel that rested therein. She began stroking its neck, and it bowed under her caress, grunting with pleasure. The two calves sleeping beside its belly woke up and began suckling.

  ‘What you doing?’ asked the skinny man, skidding to a halt behind her.

  ‘Shh,’ said Channi, and prised the calves off their mother’s teats. ‘I’m taking this one.’

  ‘Why you want this? It just had babies!’

  ‘She’s my favourite. She’s quick.’

  ‘She will be weak!’

  ‘I’m not heavy,’ said Channi. ‘And I don’t want to bring back any of the gold. I don’t need a male to carry me.’

  The calves were determined to continue suckling, but Channi held them at bay with a firm hand. All the while, she stroked the mother’s flank and cajoled it, making it known that she meant well.

  The big man spat and said something to his partner in their rough lowland tongue.

  ‘Your way, you do,’ said the thin
one, sneering at her.

  The camel protested a little at being torn away from its young, but it knew Channi and had been trained well. The three made their way out of the stable in silence, and led their beasts out of the village by the reins, only mounting them once they were safely out of earshot.

  ‘You said five miles,’ said the thin man. ‘We want get there by sun—’ he struggled. ‘ . . . Sun up.’

  ‘We should take it easy,’ said Channi. ‘You don’t want the camels to get tired, and you want it to be sultry when you get there. The ants stay below when it’s hot.’

  The rode at a steady pace. The horizon was red by the time they were halfway there, and when Channi sighted the sparkling sands of the ant fields, the sky was a clear blue and beads of sweat dotted her forehead.

  Before they left for the stables, the two men had taken her to see her mother, whom they’d locked up in one of the cabinets in the pantry. They’d bound her tightly with ropes of silk, and had gagged and blindfolded her with strips of torn bedsheet. They had used clever knots, and Channi’s mother was utterly constricted, unable to make a noise or move a finger. Channi had hugged her, whispering reassurances, and kissed her tear-stained cheek.

  If she took the men to the anthills and helped them fill their sacks with gold, they would let her ride back and release her mother, they’d said. If she tried tricking them, they would kill her and her mother would be left to her fate.

  Channi had thought about this carefully. If all the men wanted was gold enough to make their journey worth it, they could’ve got it from the workshop, or ransacked other houses. Going to get it from the ants was riskier by far, and they knew it. The only reason they would want to go to the source was to get proof—proof that such a place existed. So that they could get a bigger expedition up here—perhaps one with soldiers at its head.

  As the camels stepped from firm ground on to the mustard sand, their gait changed, becoming erratic.

  ‘What problem?’ the thin man asked, gripping the reins tighter. ‘What problem with camels?’

  ‘They’ve been trained to walk on the ant fields,’ said Channi. ‘Walk without a set rhythm.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The ants are beneath the ground we walk on,’ she said. ‘They prefer to stay under while the sun is high in the sky, but rhythmic beats on the surface will draw them out. And if they catch our scent . . .’ She left the statement hanging and it seemed to unnerve the men, who straightened up on their saddles and were suddenly grateful for their steeds’ ungainly walk.

  They kept looking at the sand, which sparkled from time to time—usually due to the quartz crystals, but occasionally because of something more valuable.

  ‘Why can’t take sand from here?’ asked the thin man.

  ‘This is mostly dust,’ said Channi. ‘The bigger nuggets are near the anthills—in the freshly thrown-up sand.’

  The men weren’t prepared for the sight of the anthills in the distance—which are much larger than you’d expect, even if you know that the ants you’re dealing with are bigger than foxes. They rise red and jagged from the yellow sand, a final warning to those who wander near them unknowingly.

  They reminded Channi of blood and bones, and they weighed her heart down with dread. They smelled of rust and sweat. The same smell that the skinny man already had on his knobbly hands. One of open wounds and butchers’ knives.

  But once they were closer, the men only had eyes for the sand itself, which glistened with nuggets of gold—pieces large enough to be discerned clearly from camelback. The land below the sand was hard rock. Long ago, one of Channi’s ancestors had tried to mine it and failed. Perhaps because of the ants, or maybe because he hadn’t been able to dig deep enough. No one had tried to mine this land in decades—even though they knew it was thick with veins of gold.

  Instead, they let the ants dig for them, and learnt to take the gold that the creatures brought up as they excavated their underground tunnels and built their hills. Channi’s people had nugget-harvesting down to a science now, and though the ants were still as bloodthirsty as they had ever been, the villagers had minimized the dangers to almost nothing.

  ‘Stop here?’ said the skinny man.

  Channi shook her head, putting a finger to her lips, and kept a watch on the mouths of the low anthills they were crossing. Her brow was damp, her stomach knotted with fear.

  The two men watched the sand with her, in which they were now spying nuggets the size of lychee seeds. The camels weaved around the shorter hills, towards the red monolith that rose at their centre—an ancient edifice, sandblasted to an uncanny smoothness over the ages. The camels walked true. The smell did not make them skittish—they had been exposed to it since birth—and if they sensed the ants swarming beneath them—with their swift jointed legs, vice-like mandibles and abdomens full of venom—they did not show it.

  Channi pulled on the reins of her camel when they were about a hundred yards away from the red spire, bringing it to a halt. The men overshot her, then brought their steeds around to face hers.

  ‘Here we stop?’ whispered the thin man. No wind blew between the anthills. The silence held them in a tenuous embrace.

  Channi nodded. ‘Dismount softly,’ she said. ‘Don’t go too far from your beasts. Don’t run, whatever you do. No matter what happens. The ants are all around us, and they are faster—much faster—than we are on our two feet.’

  The men looked at each other and raised their chins in determination. They shook out large jute sacks from their packs and lowered themselves to the ground.

  They were cautious at first, scooping up the sand in slow, deliberate arcs, letting it spill into their sacks, furtively looking up at the anthills every few seconds. But as they worked, their heads lowered, their eyes began looking not for danger but for the prize.

  Channi watched them stretch for nuggets that were out of their reach and then edge forward, their knees dragging on the sand. The big man grew clumsy with his scooping and the skinny one became reckless, moving his arm in time with his racing heart.

  She sensed the rumbling before she heard it, and said from her saddle, ‘The collectors always bring three camels for every man.’

  They turned around and stared at her, surprised by how loudly she had spoken.

  ‘Three camels?’ asked the thin man. ‘To carry more load?’

  ‘No. The collector carries the load on the one he rides. A small load. Too much will slow him down.’

  The men drew themselves up and swung their sacks over their shoulders. Even the burly man grunted with the effort. They were yards away from their steeds by now.

  ‘What the other two camels are for?’

  ‘To sacrifice,’ said Channi, turning her beast around, pointing it the way they had come. ‘To slow the ants down.’

  The rumbling was suddenly all around them. The sound of swarming. The men stood still as statues for just a moment, hoping it would subside, before they screamed and scrambled for their rides.

  ‘You didn’t say!’ said the thin man. ‘Many were in your stable! Enough! We could brought three for each!’

  As her camel sped up to a steady canter, Channi shrugged and shouted over her shoulder, ‘I brought mine.’

  She didn’t dare look back until she had cleared the anthills. When she did, she was surprised to see that one of the men—probably the big one—was still astride his beast, riding ahead of what looked like a massive cloud of roiling dust. From time to time, she thought she saw a flash of furry red carapace. She couldn’t make it out from the distance, but she knew that the bull the man rode had to be flagging—its sinews aflame and its sight fogging up. She knew the beast wouldn’t last.

  Not as long as her camel would. The cow’s flanks were lathered, and it was heaving with every breath. But it ran with a mad fervour. Its eyeballs weren’t rolling up in their sockets—they were looking homeward. It ran for its life, yes. But it also ran for its young, who would die without the milk in its bosom.
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  Channi bent low on the camel’s back, dug her heels into its flanks and refused to look back. She thought about how the men had treated her mother and the way they’d held the knife to her throat, and she tried to hate them enough.

  GOLD-DIGGING ANTS

  Herodotus, the Greek writer known as the father of history, wrote about a lot of weird monsters too. One of these is the Myrmekes Indikoi or the Indian ant. According to him, ants in India are as big as foxes and they live in this hot sandy desert where the earth is rich with gold. The ants burrow underground and, in doing so, throw up a lot of gold dust, which humans then collect.

  The ants are supposed to be superfast and super-deadly, and you couldn’t escape them on camelback without getting a head start. So the people who went to collect the gold apparently took three camels per person, so they could distract the ants with the two slower ones and escape on the fastest ride. Seems like a pretty wasteful exercise, if you ask me.

  The funny part about Herodotus’s story is that the ants aren’t the oddest animals in it. ‘As the Greeks are well-acquainted with the shape of the camel, I shall not trouble to describe it,’ he wrote, ‘but I shall mention what seems to have escaped their notice. The camel has in its hind legs four thigh-bones and four knee-joints.’1

  If you say so, Herodotus!

  THE WARDEN’S DAY OFF

  Airavata watched the clouds drifting by beneath him and winked sleep away. What started as a wistful sigh turned into a swelling yawn.

  ‘Hnnnnnshh!’ he exhaled with all seven trunks and licked his lips.

  ‘Feeling a bit drowsy, old friend?’ The voice seemed to come from right under him, and Airavata jumped to full alertness.

  ‘My lord!’ he said, blinking furiously, a tremor in his voice. ‘I-I’m awake, my lord! Fully alert! Battle-ready!’

  Indra laughed and patted Airavata’s knee. ‘It’s all right, buddy,’ he said. ‘I know the feeling! Sometimes I’m sitting on my throne, watching the apsaras do the same dance routine for the twenty zillionth time—and I find myself drifting away too! Can you believe it? The most beautiful women in the universe dancing before me, and all I can think about is curling up under my blanket and taking a loooong nap!’