Chapter 154 A New Era I

Chapter 154 A New Era I


The tent was full with the table set yet, nobody was eating.

Five commanders sat around the long table with enough food in front of them to feed thrice their number, roasted meat piled on wooden boards, fruits arranged in clusters, bread still warm from wherever it had been made, and not one of them had touched anything. The feast was ready. The Raja was not here yet. And the atmosphere in the tent had the vibe of a room full of people who were waiting for something they were not sure they wanted to arrive. 

In other words, they were sitting with an elephant in the room. Or waiting for the said elephant to arrive…

The candles along the centre of the table threw uneven light across their faces.

One of the commanders who's named Rudra, leaned toward the man beside him and kept his voice low. "Mujhe darr lag raha hai." (I am afraid.) He said it plainly, without embarrassment. "Jab se Silena gayi, Raja ne ek bhi bura shabd nahi kaha." (Since Silena left, the Raja has not said a single harsh word.)

The man beside him, the second commander, turned his cup slowly in his hands. "Haan." (Yes.) "Yeh chup hi mujhe zyada dara rahi hai." (This silence frightens me more than anger would.)

Across the table, a third commander named Arjun kept his eyes on the tent entrance and spoke without looking at either of them. "Usne kaha jashn hoga, chahe dulhan ho ya na ho." (He said the feast would go ahead regardless of whether the bride was present.) He shook his head slightly. "Koi bhi aadmi apni patni ke bhaag jaane ke baad khush nahi rehta. Koi bhi nahi." (No man stays cheerful after his wife runs. No man.)

The second commander set his cup down. "Toh phir yeh khushi kyun?" (Then what is this happiness?)

Nobody answered that.

The silence stretched long enough to become uncomfortable and then stretched further, the food sat on the table not getting warmer, and the candles moved in the draft from the tent entrance, while the five men around the table looked at each other with troubled expressions.

Khan, the head commander, sat at the far end of the table, he had been quiet through all of it. He sat with his arms on the table and his eyes on the middle distance and let the conversation go past him without engaging. He had his own thoughts about the Raja's mood and his own reasons for not sharing them, and both of those things were staying right in his head.

He had known about Silena leaving before anyone else did. He had not stopped her. Had lain in his own tent in the dark and heard her footsteps pass but had made the decision not to move. It was the right decision and it was also not something he could explain to anyone in this tent, so he said nothing about it.

"Bas karo," (Enough,) he said finally, when the fourth commander opened his mouth to add something else. His voice came out low but it carried. "Raja aayenge aur khud batayenge." (The Raja will come and speak for himself.) He looked around the table. "Tab tak, chup raho." (Until then, be quiet.)

The tent went silent.

It stayed silent for perhaps another ten minutes, and then the entrance opened.

Vikram stepped in.

He was dressed well, as he always was when he wasn't fucking some random woman, the black fur robe, the ankle beads, the crown sitting on Maddox's head above the crescent moon birthmark, and he moved through the tent entrance with the unhurried ease of someone who had never once in five hundred years felt the need to hurry for anyone. He looked around the table at the five men sitting in their collective tension and his expression was open and warm, he looked completely at ease in a way that made the tension in the room worse rather than better.

He took his seat at the head of the table.

He looked at the food arranged in front of him with the appreciation of someone encountering a meal they had been looking forward to, and picked up a piece of meat with his hand and looked at the assembled commanders.

"Eat," he said, smiling. "My bride is not here but we are already married. The food does not need her to taste good."

Nobody moved immediately.

He looked around the table with an expression that was patient and slightly amused and waited.

Hands went to food as he broke the first bread as tradition implied. Slowly, with the reluctance of people eating because they had been told to rather than because they wanted to.

Vikram ate with the ease of a man who was genuinely enjoying himself. He tore the meat with his hands and chewed, he looked around the table and appeared to find everything he saw pleasing.

After a while, he reached forward and lifted his cup of red wine.

"A toast," he said, and his voice carried the warmth of someone proposing something genuinely felt. "To my darling Silena."

He raised the cup.

Around the table, five cups came up. They had no choice about raising them, and they all knew it, they raised them and looked at Vikram, waiting.

He drank first. Tipped the cup back and drained it then set it down with satisfaction. The commanders followed, draining their own cups, the toast was complete and Vikram was already reaching for more meat.

"Eat," he ordered again. "All of it. We must celebrate."

The eating resumed, more genuinely this time, because hunger was hunger regardless of atmosphere, and the food was good, and a man who had been nervous for several hours was still a man who had a stomach.

Vikram ate in silence, his eyes moving slowly around the table. For a while, he said nothing, and the commanders began to feel the weight of it without quite knowing why. It wasn't the silence of someone who had nothing to say, nor was he distracted. He was listening. Present, yet letting the conversation continue around him as though it were serving a purpose he had no intention of explaining yet.

He reached forward at some point and picked up a fork.

Nobody had been using the cutlery. They were not Islander implements. They had come from somewhere else, from the humans who had been forced to prepare the feast. They had been approached with work, given a task that sounded ordinary enough, and brought in to prepare a meal for people they believed were simply trying to camp out. They had no idea they would never leave with their lives.

Now the forks sat at the edge of the boards as decoration more than function. Vikram picked one up and held it, turning it between his fingers with the curiosity of someone encountering an object from a culture that was not his own and finding it interesting.

He held it up to the candlelight and looked at the tines.

"I heard something earlier," he started conversationally, still looking at the fork. "A conversation among friends." He turned the fork slowly. "About why I am in such a good mood."

The tent went quiet.

"I thought I would explain," he grinned, set the fork down on the table, looked around at the faces of the men assembled there, and smiled. "It is because this is the beginning of something new. A new era. The old ways are finished. What comes next will be built differently and it will last differently and the people who build it, will be different too." Vikram picked up a piece of fruit and bit into it. "The weak do not survive the transition to new eras. That is simply how eras work."

He was still smiling when he picked the fork back up and looked at it for a moment.

Then he threw it.

The movement was so fast it barely played as a movement, more like the fork was simply in one place and then in another place, and that other place was the skull of the man sitting two seats to his left. 

It was the second commander. The fork went through him with the force of something that should not have been possible from a thrown fork, and he did not make a sound. He simply stopped, stayed sitting upright for a moment from the sheer physics of it, and then fell sideways.

The tent erupted into panic.