Nurbayn of Thankar was born twice. Once of the womb, and once of a tree that had been struck by lightning a century before.

Thankar was a small village outlying swamp marshes. Here, the wild and the humans coexisted with one another — they had learned to respect each other’s boundaries. For if they did not, the wilderness retaliated — dangerous and unknown, it would ripple out its tendrils from within and breach their boundaries, encroaching upon their home. But as the earth shifted, its atmospheres and its storms changing, both the wild and the human inhabitants were at the mercy of man’s work of devastation.

Nurbayn hummed a song long memorized from her mother, holding her youngest child in one arm against her hip as with the other hand, she put up fresh laundry on the clothesline to dry in the sun.

Sweetheart, write my name in the temple of your heart

Love me quietly.

Let your anklets dance

To the rhythm of my song.

In your palace garden-

Hold my singing bird in a fond embrace.

Do remember to

Wrap my thread of love

Around the golden bangles on your arms

And wear my flower buds in your hair

A Rabindra-sangeet, one of her favorites. Nurbayn sang as she touched her forehead to her daughter’s and whirled her around, and the cotton shirts, muslin dresses and the children’s frocks drifted this way and that in the breeze.

When she sang the last note, a shout rang in the air. It was followed by a single plume of smoke rising in the distance, and it rose until she saw it touch the sky. She should not have gone to help the sound of the screams, she thought after. She should have stayed behind, with her own children. But she didn’t, for she thought she could help someone.

As she ran through the roads with her daughter in her arms, she realized the screams were all around her, spreading. There was no one to help, for whoever it was must have been dead by now, and everyone was running. She glimpsed a young boy in the harried rush of people, glancing around, lost. It was Aran, who had been born blind and could not distinguish the sounds between the chaos. At the door to his house, Nurbayn saw his father lying on the ground, bleeding, his blank eyes facing the skies. Nurbayn ran to Aran and grabbed his hand, and her heart was beating, because she needed to return to her house. She had to return to her babies. But it was difficult to hold Aran and her daughter at the same time. Her hands gripped them so tightly and she ran so hard that she thought her bones would shatter from the noise and the fear, the fear of a mother. Her daughter began to cry.

Around them, soldiers in uniform moved, breaking down each door, rushing inside.

The fires grew all around them. Nurbayn reached her house and even as she screamed, she could not hear herself. She could only hear the roaring flames that slowly surrounded the house, and the screams of her own children inside. She let go of Aran’s hand and set down the baby, and launched herself forward into the house, but the heat was so scorching she could not move. She ran outside to find pails of water. As soon as her feet hit the road, something hard collided against her head. It was one of the soldiers. She picked up a piece of firewood from the side of the house and swung hard at the man. But he lunged at her and her head struck the ground, and all was black.

When she came to, Aran was gone; her daughter lay on the ground, her small head having hit the ground hard. The flames still blazed in the house, and she could not hear her children’s screams any longer. She picked up the girl and stumbled out, away from the flames and the madness.

She ran and ran, far away.

Into the marshes she went. Through the bogs, silent birds of the water waded around her, uncaring, and there was the fluttering of jeweled green kingfisher birds, yellow wagtails and lemon-rumped warblers above her and upon the trees — colors and songs that did not make sense to her.

But it was quiet here, in the wild, it embraced her like a friend hiding her in its shade. The canopy of trees above rustled slowly in the wind, a conversation among each other, above and below, along branches and roots. Through the brackish water, she carried her child.

On the other side of the marshwater, a spotted chital deer among the trees watched her. It was a female, for it did not have antlers, with white spots upon a velvet coat. Its liquid eyes locked with hers; and even if Nurbayn was certain of nothing else, in that moment she was certain that the creature understood her grief, and knew her struggle to save her child. For it, too, had lost children to hunters who thrived in the amusement of killing; it had lost brethren to extinction, for its relatives were a threatened species across the earth. It let out an alarmed cry, and scampered off into the forest.

Nurbayn reached stable ground deep inside the trees in the direction the deer pointed her to; she kept going, stumbling forward, one foot in front of the other.

She reached a clearing of reeds and grass. In the center rose a massive, wide swamp cypress. Its base rose up in thick knots, opening to a hollowed trunk.

Nurbayn cradled her child and entered the hollow of the tree, burrowing deep inside as if it was her new home, her new place of rest. Cypress trees were known to heal, it was supposed to be a heavenly tree, perhaps it could heal her only remaining child.

Moss and damp overgrown vines surrounded her in its an earthy scent. Two mynah birds peered down at her from up inside the hollow of the tree.

Nurbayn gripped her daughter and prayed, murmuring words she knew, the words coming up in her mind scrambling over each other. Her tears fell on her daughter’s cheeks; for a moment, the child stirred, but soon it fell still again. Nurbayn cried, but her screams were trapped inside the hollow. The birds above fluttered away.

Her grief surged through the tree. The cypress felt her grief, and as her singed burnt body nearly separated from her soul, a vessel within the cypress’ cells came alive. The hollow in which the dying woman now lay was a scar — a symbol of the tree’s survival of a great lightning strike a century before. Over years, the wood decayed behind the wound, deepening into a hollow even as the trunk broadened, strengthened. Now as Nurbayn lay dying, the cypress sent the lightning energy it had stored within surging through its cells to her.

And all the birds and creatures around for miles sensed something awry and fluttered away, as a brilliant energy of light radiated from the tree, volatile.

Then everything in the forest was silent as if it had shrouded the entire wilderness.

Near dusk, from the tree emerged Nurbayn, radiating the same light, flickering with the same thunderous energy.

She was alone. She looked down at her fingertips and saw that the current of light that rippled through them did not burn her.

***

Nurbayn had always been a proper wife.

She never said one word back to her husband when he raised his hand, nor to his family. She was obedient, shy, smiled when they spoke to her.

She sacrificed herself for his family, for that was a woman’s purpose, her mother told her. It was what everyone had told her all her life. She was groomed, prepared, trained for this very role: Every step she took, the way she moved, the length of her shawl, the tone of her voice, the pitch of her laugh, the strength of her opinion — needed to be tamed. “Remember, no one likes a woman with an opinion,” her aunts told her. “And if they say they do, they will like it only while it lies within their own convenience. They will tell you they support your freedom — until it is inconvenient for them.”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

Nurbayn learned to blunt her mind, lower her body so that she did not take up space, did not appear to think too much of herself; it was unattractive of a woman to behave as if she was their equal, to raise her head high. She learned very quickly to muffle her laughter. She suppressed her thoughts before they reached her tongue.

When the men would speak of the matters in the council at their house, of what to do with the arriving monsoons and the changing soil, she was once on the verge of speaking, until she remembered she shouldn’t.

Yet — after she was married, her husband said, “This is my problem with women — you can’t find a woman with opinions. You all have no mind of your own. No personalities.”

She thought perhaps she had judged him — perhaps he was different. So after some time, she began to be free with him, she showed him glimpses into her mind.

Once, she told him what she thought when the town faced a problem with the animals from the border encroaching on the land. She said, “Its because we are interfering with their land, Hirsan. The animals respect our boundaries only if we respect theirs. If you men didn’t go out there competing amongst yourselves about who is the better hunter, this would not be happening.”

“What do you know, woman?” He said. “Leave these matters to us. It is not your place.”

He said her opinions were too strong-willed for his taste, she needed to tone it down.

So she stopped. She moved, spiritless, thoughtless, because that was the only way to live.

Once, when his friends visited, Hirsan said to one of them laughingly: “Ah, what are you, a woman, you don’t have an opinion?” To be a woman: the greatest dehumanizing insult you could give a man.

Nurbayn would listen to it all, and a hazy memory of herself as a young child would appear in her mind: the girl who used to voice her thoughts freely until it was cut out of her head, over and over again. It was a very methodical procedure, an operation, these cuts.

It was a surgical wound opened up until it remained that way. But there was a part of her, a part that remained from her earlier self, that felt the urge to speak, to say something, to counter his words, but she could not. She had learned to suppress it for so long that it was as if she did not know how to voice it any longer.

To exert the effort to dredge it out of herself now was like pulling out her insides, her guts, onto the cold stone floor. There it would lie, this thing that she dared to expose, dared to reveal its existence. Gleaming with blood and bile, viscous fluid: a triumph.

But she could not do it: not in this life. Yet it resided within her, and it would take her a long time to find it again.

***

After Nurbayn emerged from the swamp-cypress tree, she roamed for days through vast empty fields owned by no one and belonging to no territory.

She could not go home, for when she did, what she found turned her stomach. And she did not want anyone who remained to see the current surging through her skin. When some of them saw her, they could not recognize her.

She went on across the wilderness, plains and mountains, climbed trees at night to sleep high in the trunks, moving on in the mornings. She did not want to touch any living thing: One time, she caught a rabbit in a trap she set up, but when she went to get the rabbit, her fingers burned the animal to ash. It yelped out a short cry before the current of light fried its heart. It was a good thing it died so quickly, because Nurbayn could not have watched it struggle in pain. But the rabbit’s strangled yelp lodged itself in her head and she would hear it when she glimpsed another animal, so she kept her hands away from them. Another time, she reached out with her fingers in the waters to catch fish, but the current ran from her fingers through the water, fried the creatures all along the river yards down, a massacre.

So she ate wild mangoes found in groves, survived off date-palms and strangely colored pine nuts. Sometimes she found bizarre fruits she had never seen before, growing along the grounds or among thickets of vines.

She did not know where she was going, and she had no plans. In the nights and through the days, she dreamed of her four children strolling across valleys or through the roads of Thankar until fire consumed them.

Other times, she dreamt of the cypress tree and breathed the same pace of its lungs. It was in her blood, she was certain of it, its memories etched into her cells: she could swear that at times she glimpsed another time long before the arrival of men and their settlements nearby; a time when the earth was still shifting; she felt it speaking to the birds, drinking in the reserves of rainwater, fortifying itself against storms.

The loneliness reached her sometimes, choking her when she thought of the children. She sang Rabindra-sangeets to herself, but she could not sing the last one that had ever escaped her lips as she held her daughter outside the house. That one, she would slowly forget — willfully or unconsciously, she did not know, for the memory of pain works in strange ways long after — excising things out of your head as if it never happened, as if you never knew it, simply so that you could keep going. Sometimes it was the body’s way of protecting you from darknesses that could otherwise consume you whole. But she would not know this until long after. She had not realized that she was losing the song slowly from her mind.

The sun was angled high, the heat of summer wavering. Somewhere near the north, Nurbayn reached a creek. It wound its way ahead through shrubbery and pine needles. The heat was beginning to be scorching, and she ran through the field to the cool water.

She washed her face, poured the water across her head, her arms. It was the most soothing feeling she had felt in all this time since Thankar. She sat by the creek, feeling the breeze against the water on her skin. She closed her eyes, and the creek rumbled louder, tumbling the rocks just ever so slightly, erosion at work. Then, among the steady rhythm of sounds around her, something disrupted it. She opened her eyes.

From the other side of the trees came a low growl, a soft whine. Nurbayn grabbed the stick she had been using for walking, and holding it ahead of her, she moved aside the leaves. Nothing appeared. She pushed past the trees and found a thicket of sharp brambles.

A red fox lay on its side, its breathing shallow, its leg caught in the brambles. In its attempt to escape, it had torn its skin. In the hot sun, it lay there panting.

It was a cruel way to die, she thought. For a few moments, she stood there, the stick in her hand against the ground, the fox staring back at her, its deep black eyes looming large in its seemingly gaunt face.

Nurbayn turned away. There was nothing for her to do. The last time she had tried to help something, she had lost her children and her home, and nearly herself.

She returned to the creek to drink her fill. It parched her throat, and the water ran down her arms, her skin. She drank, as the fox lay yards away from her dying in the hot sun.

She sighed and made a bowl out of a hollow broken log, dipping it into the creek. With it, she made her way back through the trees.

Keeping her distance, she knelt low to the ground a yard away from the animal. This time, the fox did not growl. It was silent, its eyes closing.

“I won’t approach any closer,” Nurbayn called to the animal. She slid the half-log of water along the grass. “But I’m going to get you out of there.”

The fox opened its eyes. It had stopped panting.

With the long stick, Nurbayn reached out and pulled at the thorny brambles, untangling them with difficulty. One of the thorns had speared into the fox’s skin, and it yelped as she pulled it out of the animal.

Wounded but free, the fox leaped away from the site of its entrapment, and towards the water. But it not drink. As Nurbayn pulled back her stick, the fox stood over the water, staring at her with wide, liquid brown globes of eyes. As she returned its gaze, it launched its face into the water, drinking heartily.

Nurbayn went on her way.

Around mid-day when the sun was beginning to cool, nearing evening, Nurbayn reached a hill of craggy cliffs and rocks. In a stretch of open land that looked out to a vista of a city in the distance, Nurbayn climbed the trunk of a tall alder tree overlooking the cliff. From it, she could see out towards the eastern lands towards Arassan, and the closer horizon of Ifsharan to the north.

Perhaps she could go there. But how could she navigate her way through a city crowded with people without once striking them with her touch? No, it would be impossible. She was fated to spend this second life, this rebirth, alone: wandering aimlessly, a hermit, a danger, a monster killing living things in its path.

What then, was the purpose? She thought of leaping into the air, over this beautiful vista, this great cliff. It would be an elegant death overlooking a majestic scenery. It would be like floating, for just a moment.

A rustling below distracted her, and she looked below to find a flash of red among the greenery. It was the fox. It looked up at her, letting out a howling cry.

“What are you doing here?” Nurbayn called down. “You following me, red?”

She shooed it, but it remained. Climbing back down, she whisked her stick at it, and it ran off back into the trees.

Nurbayn made her way down the hill, climbing across craggy rocks and dirt, finding her footing along the stones. Her sandals, torn and burned half away from the fire since she had left home, provided no protection for her feet, and no grounding. She slipped, falling along the cliff.

As she tumbled down, her fingers grappled for something to hold on to.

Then as abruptly as she had fallen, she stopped, her clothes caught on something. She looked up. It was caught in the mouth of the red fox, who held on tightly, pulling her back up. She clambered her way up the rocks back to level ground. The fox jumped happily at her, but she backed away. “I can’t touch you, don’t you understand, you poor creature?” she shouted at it.

She walked off again, but the fox followed her. At the edge of a boulder rock, she stopped. The fox faced her, happily panting.

She did not want to kill this animal. She could control it, she would have to control it — she would have to find a way. She closed her eyes kneeling down to meet its face. She willed back the surge of current flowing through her veins, willed it back until it no longer flickered at the edges of her fingers, her limbs. She felt it receding into a safe reservoir at the base of her neck, her chest. After a long moment when she thought the flickering was gone, she reached out slowly and her fingers touched the fox’s fur. It was smooth, sleek. The animal lapped at her, its tail wagging back and forth. It jumped into her arms, and she held it, the first living creature she had touched in a long time.