Chapter 5

Gods and Kings

I woke up and Tara was gone. She left a bowl of rice and dahl and a note saying, "Tea in thermos." I picked it up and poured myself a cup. There were no windows carved into this mountain, so it could have been night outside. But it felt like morning. She was probably at… work. I laughed to myself thinking of being an Arena Guard "work." But I guess that's what it was. She was in a position of power and authority, and was, ironically, respected.

After eating and drinking the tea, I felt a lot better. I hoped she was feeling pretty good after last night. I took the note and tea as a good sign. The last thing I wanted was to have some kind of rebound in my motherland and leave on an awkward sex note.

I walked out the hall and into the sunlight. I was a bit surprised that there were no stragglers outside the Arena's side entrance. I guess Noore probably had the place pretty locked down. I would have to ask Tara if any of the guards had a side-gig. Looking back, the place reminded me of a dominatrix studio.

I was happy to find out that most of the people near the Shanath Arena were calm. It was still early by the looks of it. There weren't any drunk assholes having a much smaller stakes Arena. In fact there was a small circle that had sat down to breakfast. A couple of them called me over and offered me a cup of tea.

I sat down and was handed a cup of hot liquid. The Kyratis, three men and four women, asked me about Pagan Min. I was reluctant to talk about shooting him, but they did ask where, and I told them "In the fact."

"Kyrat Zindabad." A woman in a green shirt said without emphasis.

The men lifted their cups of tea into the air and said, with varying degrees of happiness, "Kyrat Zindabad!"

Long live Kyrat, indeed.

As the conversation progressed, they were talking about the Golden Path, about the Royal Army, and about Kyrat's future. I mildly regretted joining them. I didn't want to think about politics, but here I was.

"Amita is in charge now. If she can defeat what's left of Pagan's Army, she'll be… what, Queen?"

"No," someone said, "Kyrat will not accept Amita as Queen."

"Why not?"

"She's not a member of the Royal family."

"Well neither was Pagan."

"Exactly, and the people didn't accept him, either."

"The people will support whoever has a decent claim to the throne."

"Which is no one. Every one of the king's family is dead."

"Pagan didn't have a family."

"Not him, sahib, old King."

"Oh, right. Old King."

"I think it will be Sabal."

"Sabal is dead."

"Not what I heard."

My ears picked up. Did… did people know? Last I saw Sabal, he dropped his khukri onto a floor with scattered pecha. Gone, brother, he said, gone.

"What did you hear?" I asked.

"I heard that Sabal was alive."

"Ah, I heard Amita killed him."

"Honestly, Ajay," someone said, "I heard you killed him." Two others nodded along to having heard that.

I didn't know if a refusal would have any traction with them, but I figured I might as well tell the truth, "I didn't actually."

"Really?"

"Really."

"Well, I heard it was Amita."

"You heard he was alive?" I asked the person who first mentioned it, "What did you hear?"

"I heard," she said, "that he was going to attempt to bring Kyrati refugees back. Monks, nuns, sadhus, and sannyasins. All the religious folk that Pagan banned."

"Good," one of them said, "Pagan that heretic cost us so much good karma."

"Bah, we work all day to feed their precious stomachs. They should be paying us."

"Huh..." I tried to think.

"That means he's going to try to start a holy war. He'll bring them here, the Lamas, the Gurus, they'll be fought by Amita's Golden Path, and Sabal will be hailed the country's hero. If Amita doesn't declare herself Queen, Sabal is going to claim to be King as protector of the Dharma in Kyrat."

There was a round of either quiet nodding and agreement with the statement or sounds of coughed up disagreement.

I stood and walked over to Tara. She was back at her post, leaning with her arms by her colorful breasts, the colored dust reapplied and looking new, and was greeting newcomers to the fighting pits, "Hey," I said, "You look nice."

"Eyes up here, Ajay." She smiled.

"Have you heard rumors about Sabal?" I asked.

She nodded, "Of course. I've heard rumors about everyone."

"I mean, in the past couple of days."

"About Sabal? Yeah I heard that he's dead. I heard that he's alive."

"If he's dead, I didn't kill him."

"Um..."

"Amita ordered me to. But I let him go."

"Oh… really?"

"Yes. I… I almost did it. But I let him pass and he walked away."

"Where did he go?"

"I don't know."

She put her hand to her chin as if in thought, "Have you tried Jalendu Temple?"

"No. Should I?"

"He was pretty upset when you blew it up."

Yeah, he was.

"Try there. I bet he's doing some serious soul searching. Especially if he was left out of the big fight up there at the fortress."

It was a good plan. And if he wasn't there, I'd have to try Chal Jama. But for some reason, I thought Tara had the right idea

"Are you going to go to Jalendu?" she asked.

I nodded, "Yeah." I was about to lean forward and give her a kiss… like I was some lovestruck fifteen year old in an American high school. She put her hand on my lips. Her body language said back off, creep, but her face and eyes were a lot softer.

"Save it," she said and with a wink, "Later."

I let her continue her work and ran off to the main road.

I avoided patrols. I couldn't trust the Royal Army nor the Golden Path. With the power struggles erupting all over Kyrat, I imagined that there were few I could trust. Shanath was a nice and quiet piece of ironic serenity, and my parents' house was too far to be of much notice (though it did cross my mind that the place might get torched by some Royalists out of pure revenge while I was gone), but be that as it may, I thought that if I actually got to Jalendu, I might come across some Golden Path guys who were loyal to Amita and knew what I did, or maybe some loyal to Sabal, who either aware or unaware that I didn't kill him, might be protective of him or his memory. So I stayed low, only revealing myself if I knew for certain that I knew who I was coming across.

Then I saw it: the ruins of Jalendu. Ruined because I literally let in the demolition team and set up the bombs. It was the place that secured Amita's victory in the Golden Path's power struggle. To leave it standing would open the door for Sabal to enthrone Bhadra as Tarun Matara and continue Kyrat's constellation of medieval traditions. To destroy it was to announce a new era, one not linked to the past except by geography, one not driven in the name of a vanity project by a Cantonese drag queen. All for naught, I guess.

There was a boat with a single paddle sitting below the rock I stood on. I hopped in and pushed it off. As I got closer to the ruins, I could see someone there among the rubble. It was a single man, shirtlessly moving with purpose around the center of the island. Of course, as I got closer, the harder it got to see as the island's topography moved up above my field of vision. I pulled the boat ashore and tapped the khukri on my side. Worst case scenario already popping into my head.

I walked up to the plaza in front of what was once the temple's main gates and saw clearly here. The shirtless figure was Sabal. I could tell by the way he moved that he noticed me, but he tried not to let it deter him. He was moving boxes and stones. He picked up small things and set them down inside crates. As I moved closer it was clear that he was trying to set some order to chaos. Rocks and stones went in a pile according to relative size. Smaller pieces, especially ritual objects that had scattered across the island, went into boxes.

He turned around when we were a house's length apart and said, "Hello, brother." A lot more cheery than usual. Given the circumstances.

"Hey there, Sabal."

"It's good to see you."

"Is it?"

"It is." he said, sitting down.

"I'm sorry, I only have water to offer you."

"That's fine. I'm… I heard a rumor that you were here."

"The rumor was correct." He indicated the open sky, "As you can see, I don't try to hide it."

"What are you doing?"

"Rebuilding." he said.

"The whole temple? By yourself?"

"Not quite yet. Building up some karma. For my trip to Nepal and India."

"What are you going to do there?"

"Talk to Kyrati refugees. Hopefully convince some monks and sannyasins to come back. Pagan drove them all out, as you know. But now, now that we can rebuild, I hope they'll come back. I was just hoping to do a bit of work before I left."

"How long do you think you'll be gone?"

"A year, maybe. Ideally I can come back in between. Do one trip to Nepal, and one to India, maybe."

"It's a good idea. It'd be nice to have a new temple here. Along with all of the… other places destroyed."

Sabal smiled, "We rebuild. It's all we can do."

"You know, there's another rumor going around."

"That I'm going to start an insurgency?"

"Yeah."

"I'm not. Pagan was a bastard who had no problem killing… well anyone. If Amita wants to kill me, well she's proved she's perfectly capable at this point. So I'll accept it when it comes. I've chosen a peaceful path."

I… wasn't totally convinced of that part, "Amita won't be coming after you, Sabal."

"Why not?"

I'm not sure if this was the right thing to tell him, "Amita's dead."

"She…" and he saw the look in my eyes that I couldn't stop, "You killed her?"

I nodded, "Yeah. You were right."

He smiled, then, betraying his new peaceful path. He must have realized it, because he immediately changed his face, "Her Karma came back to her." He reached down and took a long drink of water.

"I killed her because you were right. She's no better than Pagan."

"No." Sabal said, "She was not."

"But I didn't kill her so you could reign like an old style King. One of the Kyrarajas."

"Is that what you think? That I want to be King?"

"Pagan Min is dead. Amita is dead."

"And?"

"And you had ambitions to rule Kyrat."

"The Golden Path. I had ambitions to rule the Golden Path. Look what it got me." He smiled as if he knew a secret I didn't. He stood and wandered over to a box, rummaging through it.

"I'm just telling you… you were right about Amita. About the drug fields. The suicide nets and the factory towns. More than that, she was… she was recruiting child soldiers."

"And if I had my way, I'd slaughter every one of her followers. They saw her example. They saw this path forward." He pulled something out of the box. It was a sheet of paper. A pecha page like those of a Tibetan religious text, "Brother, the challenge of Tradition vs. Modernity is a theme in these mountains. In Nepal. In Bhutan. In Tibet. We've all had to face our challenges. I'm under no illusions that I am a Traditionalist. A hardline traditionalist. It's because tradition is what we have to cling to, when the diseases of modernity knock at the door, coming in with all of the so-called blessings of it."

"Now wait..."

"No, you wait," Sabal said, "Because you're American. Everything needs to be big and shiny and new, but look." He held out the paper and handed it to me.

The text was written in both Tibetan and Devanagari script. My Tibetan was rudimentary and my Kyrati at a fourth-grade level. But I could make out my mother's name, my father's name, and my name, "What's this?"

"That's your pedigree."

"My… pedigree?" Was I a show pony?

"Modernity must come to Kyrat. But it must come in a way that benefits Kyratis. Think about what megacorporations could do to Utkarsh. Or what Nestle would do to our tea and rice by poisoning our irrigation fields. Or what Hilton Hotels would do to Banapur. What could a roving train of tourists would do to the Sleeping Sisters and Chal Jama? That's not a Kyrat worth fighting for. Nevermind the dictatorial madness that Amita wanted us to stay in."

"I'm agreeing with you. You don't need to convince me," I said.

"Yes. And yet, all of those things are at some degree inevitable. And so we must cling to the pillars of tradition." He pointed to the paper, "That is tradition."

"My pedigree?"

"Yes." He said, "During the First Civil War between the Kyrati Revolutionary Congress and the Royal family, the we had King Avinash V. He had two sons. One died fighting the nationalists and the other was educated in Berlin and decided to stay there with his boyfriend."

"Never came back?"

"Nope. Smart guy. It was thought that the throne would pass to King Avinash's only daughter Karpuradevi, but then a Hong Kong Triad boss showed up to reinvigorate the Royal Army with his money, and guns, and drugs, and he had one more thing up his sleeve: a fourteen-year-old named Prithviraj. Kyrat has only had four Queens in its history, and that's including Kyra. So when the choice came down to Karpuradevi vs. Prithviraj, everyone went with Prithviraj. Well the old King died and Karpuradevi quickly went into exile in Bhutan. I hear she did quite well for herself marrying into a rich family. And Pagan Min quickly enthroned Prithviraj I, until he, too, died. And the royal line ended, Pagan Min declared himself Kyraraja."

"I'm aware of the history."

"Well, for the longest time we assumed Prithviraj was a Kyrati orphan that Pagan Min happened upon in his drug empire. A sex slave or something else with a propped up pedigree. At our most charitable, we thought maybe he was the son of a rich Kyrati who lived in India that had crossed Pagan and now ended up with his son. Either way, the Golden Path operated for decades under the assumption that Prithviraj was not a member of the Royal family." And he pointed at the sheet in my hands, "That document says otherwise."

I scanned the letters. Prithviraj's name was not on it. But my name was.

"What are you talking about? What does this have to do with me?"

"It has to do with you because Prithviraj claimed his father was a Prince Someshvara. There was a Prince Someshvara. But he had gone to India in the early '80s because of 'differences' in the royal family. He earned a degree as a nuclear physicist and died in 1999 from throat cancer. Turns out he very much was the son of King Gotama II. Gotama II's daughter, so Someshvara's sister, was Princess Ishwari."

"Ishwari?"

"Your mother."

I turned my face to the page once more.

"That document is a part of your mother's initiation record as Tarun Matara."

I knew she was a Tarun Matara, but that was an incarnate lineage. And it passed as soon as my mother entered womanhood. What did…

"Ajay, according to that document, you are the last living heir of the Kyrati royal family. The main line of King Avinash V is gone. The line of Prince Someshvara and his son Prithviraj is extinguished. By Gotama II, and through your mother the Tarun Matara, Princess Ishwari, you are the rightful King of Kyrat."