What Works for Anyone

3102 BCE · Kanchi · 37 days before the turn

The keepers put their torches out in the mud, one by one, hiss, hiss, hiss, and the forest went black.

Sendhan pulled Kanchi and Puram down into a hollow between the roots of a huge tree. It smelled of rot and wet bark. Nila stayed in the clearing alone, sitting on a stone, twisting her grass cord in the dark as if she were waiting for a bus.

“Draw,” Sendhan whispered. He pushed a stick into Puram’s hand.

“Now?”

“She said you would draw the houses. Draw them now. In case the commander kills you.”

“That’s very practical,” said Puram faintly.

“Draw,” said Kanchi. “You think better scared.”

He did. She watched his hand in the starlight. A square. A square inside the square. Steps going in, counted from the left. A door on the left side that went nowhere. In the top corner, a little flower, the kind he doodled on every plan he ever made. She’d asked him once why he always drew the flower. He’d said, Because nobody ever asks what the flower is for.

Sendhan stared at the lines, learning them by heart.

The hooves came into the clearing.

Kanchi counted without meaning to. Nineteen horses, twenty. Men with long spears and bows on their backs. And at the front, on a gray horse, a man in armor.

She forgot to be afraid for a second, because she was looking at the armor. Bronze scales, riveted onto leather, each scale the size of a thumbnail. She had seen armor like that once, in pieces, green, in a glass case with a card that said Rare. This was not green. It was patched at the shoulder with a square of new leather, badly stitched. It had been mended by someone who couldn’t afford a new one.

The man was old. Gray beard. His left ear had been cut, long ago, and healed ragged.

“Old mother,” he said to Nila. His voice was tired and polite. “Where is the builder?”

“There is no builder here,” said Nila. “Only frogs.”

“People say a builder is coming. People say he carries lights that need no fire.” The old man leaned on the neck of his horse. “Do you know what my bow did this morning, old mother? Nothing. I pulled it, and it was wood and string. All my life it has answered me. The words that woke it are gone out of my head. My men’s weapons are the same.” He looked around the dark clearing. “I need something that still answers.”

Nila twisted her cord.

“Mahavan,” she said, “go home.”

He almost smiled. “I have no home. We lost at the great field. You know that.” He sat up. “Search the trees.”

The riders spread out. One of them came straight toward their tree.

Kanchi felt Puram go stiff beside her. The horse stepped closer. She could smell it. She could see the rider’s foot in the stirrup, a hand’s width from her face.

Puram switched on his torch.

He pointed it straight up, into the horse’s eyes, full power. The horse screamed and reared. The rider went over backwards into the leaves. The torch went flying out of Puram’s hand, spinning, lighting up trees, sky, trees, and landed in the middle of the clearing, still on, a white circle in the mud.

“Run,” said Sendhan.

They ran. Kanchi had a spear shaft in her hands. She didn’t remember taking it. A rider came at them out of the dark and she swung it low, at the horse’s legs, not hard, just enough, and the horse shied and the rider went sideways and they were past.

Behind them, in the clearing, nobody was chasing.

She stopped at the edge of the trees and looked back. She couldn’t help it.

The old commander had got down from his horse. He was standing over the torch. He bent, slowly, the way old men bend, and picked it up.

He turned it over. He found the button with his thumb. The light went off. His face went dark. He pressed again, and the light came on, straight into his face, and he didn’t blink. He just stood there in the white light, staring into it.

Kanchi had seen that look before. On the dig in Bihar, a laborer had found a gold bead in the mud. He had looked at it exactly like that. Like a starving man looks at bread.

“It works,” Mahavan said, to no one. “It works for me.”

“Kanchi,” said Puram, pulling her arm. “Now.”

Sendhan brought them to a stream. Kanchi unwrapped the dial from the towel.

“Thirty-seven nights,” said Sendhan. “You will come back?”

“We’ll come back,” said Kanchi.

“Will we?” said Puram.

She put her hand on the dial. After a second, so did he.

2026 · Kanchipuram, the loom shed · 11:48 PM

The looms were silent. The rain had stopped. The shed was dark, except for one bulb, and under the bulb, on a plastic stool, sat Amma, with two steel tumblers of coffee on the floor beside her feet.

“Five hours,” she said. “The men went away after one.”

Kanchi sat down on the floor, hard. Her legs weren’t working. Puram stood in the middle of the shed with leaves in his hair, and his mouth open, and nothing coming out of it.

She picked up a tumbler. Her hands were shaking. The coffee was hot. Of course it was.

“We have to go back,” she said. “Thirty-seven days. We’ll need things. Proper boots. A tent. Batteries. And one of those… the…” She made a shape with her hand. A little round case. A needle inside. The needle that always knew which way was north. She knew exactly what it was. She could see it. The word wasn’t there. There was just a smooth, blank place where it should be, like a shelf in a museum after the object has gone to be cleaned.

“A compass?” said Puram.

“That. A compass.” She drank her coffee. “I’m tired.”

He looked at her a moment too long. Then he took out his green notebook and sat on the floor and began to draw. A square. A square inside the square. Steps from the left. A door that went nowhere. A little flower in the corner.

“This is what I drew for them,” he said. “In the dirt. I don’t know if it’s a vault or a joke.”

Amma set down her coffee.

She went to the back of the shed, where there was a steel trunk like the one in her house, and opened it, and took out something wrapped in three layers of newspaper. When she unwrapped it, it was the oldest cloth Kanchi had ever seen outside a museum. Brown. Brittle. A single strip of border, no wider than a hand.

Woven into it, in thread gone the color of dust, was a square. A square inside the square. Steps from the left. A door that went nowhere.

And in the top corner, a little flower.

Amma laid it next to Puram’s notebook. She looked at him, not unkindly.

“You drew this,” she said.