Page 45 of Tiger's Dream
“Can you find them?” she asked.
I’ll try.
It took the better part of two hours before I found a group of starving villagers. They sat near a dried-up river at least a half hour away from the village. I could tell the river had been wide and full at one time. The banks stretched far and the bed was deep. The river rocks at the bottom were covered with fish bones. It wasn’t natural.
I shivered. From what I could tell, the fish had been killed quickly. It was almost as if someone had poisoned the water. On the banks we’d passed the dried remains of hundreds of animals who had come to the river and stayed, hoping there would be water soon. A river that large should have never dried up. The mountains in the distance would feed it year round.
As a tiger, I’d instinctively migrated to steady waterways in the summers. The waterfall where I’d first met Kelsey had dried up once in three hundred years, and that had only been for a month or so. The pool had lowered considerably that summer and many animals came to drink at the edge, but when the rains came, it quickly refilled.
I had never worried much about water before, but those days had been difficult. I can’t imagine what these animals and the villagers had gone through. Even now, the people could barely rouse themselves to acknowledge our arrival. Women cried but the tears dried instantly in the heat. Men laughed but their happiness soon turned to fits of coughing.
A child sat up. I hadn’t even seen her among the press of bodies. Her poor lips were chapped and bleeding, and her limbs were so thin I was surprised they could support her weight. Other children peeped out from beneath hastily constructed tents and sheets that had been draped between trees to give them respite from the hot sun.
“What has happened here?” Anamika asked. Her voice was picked up by the wind and amplified so all the people could hear her.
“Drought,” a woman said. “The land is cursed. An evil man has set his power against us. Half of our village is dead and the other half dying.”
“Who is the man who did this to you?” Anamika demanded.
“It does not matter. He is gone now.”
“I will find him,” she promised. “He will be punished for what he has done.”
The woman laughed. “You will never find Lokesh.”
I froze and Ana jerked in the saddle. After saying his name, the woman spat into the dirt. I noticed there was no wet spot. If I were in human form, I would have spat too, just to show support.
“He is as a wolf in the night,” she added. “Not even a goddess can roust him from his den.”
Is it possible?Can he be here? Ana asked me, an edge of panic in her words.
No. Lokesh is dead, I said with certainty.
Then how?How has he done this?
I pondered for a moment and then said,We must have come to a time when he was a young man searching for the pieces of the amulet.Have you sensed the differences in the places we’ve been? We’ve moved across lands but we’ve also journeyed through time. The twisting of your stomach tells you this. The greater the pull in your belly, the farther we’ve traveled.
Are you certain? she asked.
I twitched and bit on a thorn irritating my paw.It makes sense. Even Lokesh had heard rumors of the goddess Durga. These people, as far away from India as they are, might have heard your story too. Perhaps these are the very people who told him of you. Lokesh didn’t know he was to become the demon Durga destroyed in battle. We heard their pleas, their prayers.Now we need to fix what he has done to them.
But if he is here, let us destroy him here, now, while he is weak.
Kadam tried to do that. He said the only way to defeat Lokesh was the way we did it, with you. He said it was our destiny. He died for that belief, Ana.
I understood her wanting to kill him. I’d thought many times about going back and destroying him before he killed Yesubai. It wasn’t so much that I was still in love with her, but no one deserved death at the hands of her own father. Kadam was insistent that the curse needed to happen and that Durga and her tiger needed to rise. Seeing the work we were doing cemented that idea for me, at least a bit.
Was it the future I’d imagined for myself back when I was a prince living in my father’s kingdom? No. But I’d wanted to leave my mark on the world. I shifted slightly and glanced down at my pugmark. The deep curves where the pads of my paws dug into the dirt and the grooves left by my claws were certainly a mark. Maybe this print wouldn’t last, but I absolutely knew the story of Durga and her tiger would.
We’ll speak more of this after we help these people, Kishan, Anamika said.
Ana raised her arms in the air and channeled the power of the water piece of the amulet. Overhead, the bright blue sky shimmering with heat slowly changed. At first, only wisps of white clouds gathered on the horizon. But then, they pillowed together, growing larger and darker. The wind whipped up the dry dust in clouds, bringing with it the smell of rain.
As the drops began to fall, the villagers lifted their faces, letting the cool shower stream down their cheeks, refreshing them. Ana had some kind of natural instinct about combining the powers of our various weapons, and she used them in creative ways to rebuild what had been destroyed. Not only did she refill the river but she used the Golden Fruit combined with the kamandal to heal the land and bring life back to the river.
Trees grew around the banks and spread wide canopies. She placed the trident in the river and stirred the waters. They hissed and bubbled, and fish of all kinds burst from the trident and swam away in all directions. She found a broken eggshell, and when she blew on it, a bird appeared. It flew up into a tree and then hundreds of birds erupted from it and flew away.
Taking a bone and some mud from the river, she touched the tip of an arrow to it and it became a deer. She dragged the arrow in a long furrow, and the ground opened up as dozens, no, hundreds and hundreds of creatures leapt from the breach. Lastly, she took thegadaand beat a mound of dirt. The hill melted into insects of every kind, and from the center rose reptiles of every description.
