The Builder

3102 BCE · Kanchi · 37 days before the turn

They came out of the trees with spears.

Not soldiers. Puram could see that even in the torchlight. Soldiers stand in a line. These people stood in a loose ring, eight or nine of them, men and women in rough cotton, barefoot, with their spears held the way you hold a broom when you’ve heard a noise downstairs. At the front was a boy of maybe fourteen, who looked more excited than scared. Behind him, an old woman was twisting a piece of dry grass into a cord, round and round, and watching.

“Stay down,” Puram said to Kanchi.

She was already down. She was humming again, very quietly, the rain song. He had heard it a hundred times on a hundred jobs. He had never asked about it. He had always thought that if he asked, she might stop.

The boy stepped closer. His torch dripped fire onto the leaves. “Which of you is the builder?”

“Nobody,” said Puram. “We’re lost. We’re going. We’re going right now.”

“He is,” said Kanchi.

Puram turned his head and stared at her.

“He builds things,” she said to the boy. “Ask him. He built a whole plan with forty-seven steps.”

“Kanchi.”

“What? They’ve got spears. You’re the builder.”

The spears came up, points to the sky, and the people holding them looked at each other, and something went through the ring like wind through grass. The old woman stopped twisting her cord.

And then the forest went quiet.

The frogs stopped, every one of them at once. Nothing froze this time. The torches still flickered. The boy still breathed. But the air had gone soft and warm, like a blanket someone had put over his shoulders without waking him, and the fear Puram had been holding in his stomach since the loom shed simply wasn’t there anymore. He looked for it and couldn’t find it.

Beside him, Kanchi had stopped humming.

It lasted perhaps ten seconds. Then the frogs started again, one, then ten, then thousands, and the night was an ordinary night.

The old woman came forward. She was barefoot and bent and her eyes were very bright. She looked Puram up and down, the way you’d check a horse before you bought it.

“I am Nila,” she said. “This is Sendhan. We keep this ground.” She tucked the grass cord into her waist. “We were told a builder would come before the end. A builder who knows how this age ends.”

“I don’t know how anything ends,” said Puram. “I don’t even know where I am.”

“You are at Kanchi.”

Kanchi made a sound beside him. He didn’t look at her.

“You know,” said Nila, “the age is ending.”

“Which age?”

She looked at him as if he had asked which sky.

“The old one,” said the boy, Sendhan, helpfully. “It has thirty-seven nights left. Then the new one begins. Everybody knows that.” He looked at Puram’s hand. “What is that?”

Puram looked down. He was still holding his phone. The screen had gone dark. He pressed it and it lit up, and every person in the ring stepped back, and Sendhan stepped forward.

“It’s a phone,” said Puram.

“What does it do?”

“Right now? Nothing. There’s no signal. It can’t call anyone. It can’t find where we are. All it’s got is…”

He stopped.

All it had was what he had put on it. Maps. Manuals. Four hundred PDFs, because Puram downloaded everything, because you never knew. Kanchi used to laugh at him for it. Who reads a microwave manual? He did. And one night, two years ago, after a job at a museum in Pune, he had downloaded something else, because she wouldn’t stop talking about it.

He opened the files. He scrolled. His thumb shook a little.

The Mahabharata. Complete. English translation. 18 books.

“Puram?” said Kanchi.

He opened the sixteenth book and found the place. He read, standing in a forest five thousand years before anyone had written it down, with a boy reading the glowing letters upside down over his arm.

Rats swarmed the streets and gnawed the hair and nails of men as they slept. Pots cracked for no reason. Cranes cried like owls.

“How many nights did you say?” he asked.

“Thirty-seven,” said Sendhan.

Puram looked up at Nila. She was waiting. She had been waiting, he thought, for a very long time, and she was not surprised by anything.

“I know how it ends,” he said. His voice didn’t sound like his. “I’ve got it right here. I know how it ends.”

“Then you can build,” said Nila. “We have five things that must be kept. Five warm things. When the age turns, they must be where no one will look for them. Where even the new age will not look. The new age will want them, and it will not deserve them. We need five houses for them. You will draw them.”

“Five vaults.”

“If that is your word.”

“Five vaults, in thirty-seven days, with…” He looked at the spears, the cotton, the bare feet. “With what?”

Nila smiled for the first time. Most of her teeth were gone.

“With us,” she said. “And with her.”

She was looking at Kanchi, who had stood up and was brushing leaves off her jacket and looking back at the old woman with a face Puram had never seen on her before. As if someone had finally asked her the right question.

Then Sendhan’s head turned sharply. So did Nila’s.

Puram heard it a moment later, under the frogs: a deep, uneven drumming, coming from the north through the trees. Getting louder.

Hooves. Many of them.

“The commander,” said Sendhan. His excitement was gone. “He has been looking for the builder too.”