In person, he looked nothing like the face on those coins. In fact, I would have been hard-pressed to find anything exceptional about the physicality of the man standing before Arjun and me. He wasn’t tall or broad like his men. He was slight and carried his body as though entirely aware (and dismayed) that he had somehow been assigned the wrong one.
I carefully studied his face. It was creased with deep lines, his hair almost completely gray. He looked much, much older than my father even though I knew they were about the same age. His face looked weathered, severe, humorless. There was no evidence of all those victories. Or maybe it was evidence of what a lifetime of military victories can do to a person.
I was still watching him when the music stopped. For a moment there was silence.
It was Sikander who broke it.
“Chandradev.” He greeted my father by his first name. His voice was a jeer, or maybe it was just the Macedonian dialect.
I turned to see my father, descending the grand stairway. His uniform contrasted sharply with Sikander’s. My father was dressed in a simple raw-silk tunic, the only ornament on him the wedding ring he always wore.
He smiled. “Sikander,” he said, walking past me and Arjun so he was standing face-to-face with the man who, it was rumored, had stoned his father’s entire council to death.
Tension gripped my shoulders as I watched Sikander’s visage unexpectedly open into a smile. I noticed that his front teeth were broken and that they had been capped in gold. I caught my father’s expression as he took note of Sikander’s teeth. For a moment, he looked taken aback by the sight, but he recovered quickly as Sikander reached to embrace him.
When they stepped back from each other, Sikander softly said, “It’s been a very long time.”
He was standing a mere half pace from my father. I tried not to think of how many people he must have killed in his life, how many people had died in battles he had waged.
“It’s been far too long. It’s an honor to welcome you to my home, Sikander,” my father said. He hesitated before he said, “Meet my daughter, Princess Amrita.”
“Your daughter—” Sikander’s eyes caught mine. He looked startled for a moment before he spoke. “Ah yes, the last time I saw her, she was but a baby.”
“Welcome, Your Majesty.” I bowed before him, and he laughed. It was a short, staccato sound, not a real laugh.
“No need for that,” he said, touching my bare shoulder. His hands were ice cold, making me flinch. He quickly stepped back, his head tilted to the side.
“She looks just like her mother,” he said. My father opened his mouth.
“You knew my mother?” I interjected, before my father had a chance to speak.
“I did, little one. A very long time ago. She was quite a force to be reckoned with,” he said, his eyes manically bright.
I turned away from him and caught my father’s eye, waiting for him to say something, anything. But my father was impossible to read, his eyes flitting quickly away from mine. Perhaps my interruption had forced him to reconsider his words, or maybe he hadn’t anticipated the mention of my mother.
But shouldn’t he have? I wondered to myself.
I wanted him to take charge of the situation. I wanted him to deliver a response that would quell my curiosity, shift the axis of power that Sikander had somehow managed to capture the moment he mentioned my mother.
But he didn’t. Or he couldn’t.
Instead, it was Sikander who turned to my father, narrowing his eyes. “Surely your father has told you about her?”
Three
MY EYES SCANNED the Great Hall. Orange trees grew from large blue-lacquered pots around the edges of the space. On their branches hung brightly colored gold lanterns, imparting a warm, golden glow in the large, stately room.
The dining table was decorated with copper platters covered with figs and pomegranates, rose and marigold petals scattered across their surfaces.
There was always beauty here. Shabahaat. It was one of my favorite Shalingarsh words. It meant beauty, grace. Our language had nearly fifty words for the different varieties of beauty, but Shabahaat also included a certain subtext; it alluded to how beauty made one feel: full, whole, transformed. And I desperately needed to feel whole rather than the fractured emotions I was currently experiencing.
A thick, discomfiting tension hung over us, as though we were enclosed in a hut made of kindling on the hottest of days.
“Don’t you want to be a part of civilization, Chandradev? It’s certainly charming, this . . . kingdom of yours. Very quaint. But I know how we can bring the grand avenues and lofty stadiums of my kingdom to yours. Consider it a gift. A gift that comes at a price, of course.”
“Typically, things that come at a price are by definition not a gift,” my father intoned, his finger resting on the sharp, golden edge of his thali, the platter filled with mounds of sumptuous food.
I glanced at the immense spread of food before us: spicy prawn curry dotted with cashews and pomegranate, black lentils in cream with wild greens, roasted brinjal with ginger and tomato, raita frothy with fresh green flecks of coriander and cucumber, tomato-raisin chutney, tiny orbs of lemon pickled in sugar syrup, glass after glass of ruby-colored wine.
But Papa had barely eaten a thing. So had I. I couldn’t stop thinking about what Sikander had said about my mother, and I didn’t doubt that it had thrown my father off too. He wasn’t his usual self. He was distant, irritable in a way I had never seen him before.
I could barely concentrate on the conversation transpiring before me. Why hadn’t my father mentioned anything about my mother in all these years? Why had he always cut me off or changed the subject when I attempted to inquire about her? What was he keeping from me? And to what end?
I looked across the table at Arjun, who smiled at me before he glanced at my ring. Just looking at him flooded my heart with affection. I caught myself staring as the lanterns lit up the golden planes of his face, the angle of his cheekbones, and forced myself to look away.
“I’m going to get right to the point, Chandradev,” Sikander said. “It’s taken me fifteen years to establish trade between the east and the west.”
“And it’s been very good . . . for Macedon.”
“Not just Macedon, Chandradev. The Silk Road has been good for everyone.”
The Silk Road: When I first heard of it as a child, I imagined a path made of reams and reams of gold silk. I imagined traders, monks, entire clans of Bedouins traveling along it, barefoot so as not to mar the pristine fabric under their feet. It took me years to understand that the Silk Road of my imaginings was nothing like the real thing, even if I had never seen the real thing with my own eyes.