For all the water in the ocean, can never turn
the swan’s black legs to white,
though she lave them hourly in the flood.
—Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus

I

Some ninety yojanas from the House of Matrons was located Chilika, the Maze of Harbours, at the easternmost edge of what the Vedans called civilization. If one could float in lethargic circles over the city, like the army of gulls that infested Chilika’s roofs, balconies and window sills, one would see how the dark islets gave the place its name.

Chilika sat on a cluster of islands, cutting each other at random angles to resemble a garden of divided plots, reshaped into amorphous confusion by an earthquake. The gulls hovering over the city-island found company in the greylag geese of Jade Harbour, the poor man’s port. They could even dine on crabs with a jacana from Purple Harbour, where Kalingan ships were received. If the gulls were particularly unlucky however, the white-bellied sea eagle, swooping in from Diamond Harbour, would make them his lunch. Diamond Harbour, as its name suggested, was reserved for royalty.

Enlightened Acharyas from the Meru had warned that Chilika was slowly sinking, due to erosion of its shores, and would become a lake in the future. No one paid any heed to such dire predictions, least of all the mass of humanity huddled in the Maze. They were concerned with the present. The future could take care of itself. The King of Kalinga too, seemed to share the optimism of his brave subjects, for he had set up his capital in the very centre of the prophesized lake. He believed that a thing of beauty ought to be admired while it lasted, rather than abandoned before its time. Hence, despite half of Jade Harbour having sunk below the sea waters, Chilika remained crowded with ships of all shapes and sizes. Ferrymen poled back and forth across the Tiers, trading galleys unloaded goods from Anga, Kamrup and the Golden Islands, and river runners came and went. All the while, Chilika sank a little more every day.

Just a few kos from Jade Harbour, well beyond the pull of the inland current, a galley with the green sails typical of a ship-for-hire, drifted aimlessly on the sea. Caught in the doldrums like a slow dream, the Fat Mistress had lost all power from rudder and sails alike, and had been floating ponderously for a week off the coast. But now the first fluttering among her sails promised relief to her sixty oarsmen, nine crew members and five passengers.