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The braided leather was stiff in Ram’s sweat-slicked palm. He clenched his fist tighter, willing the whip to stay in place, to strike true. Missing with a plain whip was dangerous enough. Missing with this, with its metal spikes, could tear open the artery in Ahk—Bheem’s throat. It could rake across his eyes and steal his vision from him. It could bury itself so deeply in Bheem’s flesh that the only way to remove it would be to tear more skin from his body. It could incapacitate him. To take his ability to fight would be the greatest crime of all. If Bheem died here, he would die trying to claw Malli from the hands of the British. If he left here maimed, he would die anyway, slowly. A caged tiger that Ram himself had captured and locked away.
The sound of that first lash would never leave him. It whistled through the air and sank into Bheem’s skin with a wet slick. It was all he could hear. The governor, his wife, and Jenny were all too high up, the soldiers and police were trained to silence, and the crowd was too horrified to make a noise. It was only him and Bheem. The horrible, slithering noise of those spikes cutting through flesh and fabric alike as Ram dragged the lash free.
There was blood on his face and he was crying and Bheem was calling to him.
“Anna. Anna, listen.”
Ram tried to fight free of the hands on his shoulders, but whoever it was was too strong.
“I can’t do it,” Ram cried. The hands were dragging him back across that horrible stage, back to where Bheem stood, blood pooling at his feet, pouring into the sand. It was too much blood. “I can’t do it.”
“Anna, Ram, listen to me.”
Large hands gripped his face, and Ram fought to free himself, but he was held too tight, pinned in place by a heavy weight.
“He’ll die. I’ll kill him. I can’t live—”
Bheem’s voice was softer suddenly, shushing him with a gentleness Ram hadn’t expected of a man who thought him a traitor.
“It’s okay, Rama. Breathe, bangaram. Just breathe. I’m going to let you go, but stop trying to hit me.”
The pressure on his body eased and Ram reached out toward the man chained in front of him. Phantom fingers closed on his hand, and for a moment Ram was afraid that this was Bheem’s spirit taunting him as it exited Bheem’s body and left him without breath or life.
Ram opened his eyes into a room lit primarily by the moon shining in through an open window, although he could see the flashing oranges of a fire from outside casting a glow on one wall. And Bheem lay beside him.
“There,” Bheem said. “There, bangaram. You’re awake now.”
Ram scrambled gracelessly from the bed they shared in this village to the door in time to drop to his knees and vomit on the forest floor. Gentle fingers carded through his hair, sectioning it and braiding it out of the way. While Ram threw up everything in his stomach and more bile besides, Bheem crouched at his side and rubbed his back. He didn’t speak until Ram finally leaned back and wiped at his mouth with a grimace Bheem surely couldn’t see in the dark.
“A dream?”
The answer was obvious, but Ram gave it anyway. “Yes.”
Bheem pulled him to his feet and kissed his forehead.
“Clean your mouth and come to bed.”
It was a mindless order, one Ram could follow while his stomach settled.
Bheem was already lying in bed when Ram returned, and something in Ram’s chest seized. He staggered to the edge of their bed and tumbled into it, tugging and moving Bheem with a sudden urgency he couldn’t even comprehend. This man was a mountain, but he was a mountain that went where Ram wanted him, into the pool of silver moonlight so the bare skin of his torso glowed even at night.
They both had their share of scars, but Ram cared only for the ones he had given. They were no longer fresh and new, but Ram remembered what they’d looked like. He’d been there the morning they’d stripped his blood-soaked clothes from him and dressed him in prisoners’ rags. He’d seen the raw flesh, the meat of Bheem’s arm exposed from the cruelty of the whip. He’d seen the bruises, but the deep, bleeding wounds had been etched so deeply in his memory that Ram could see them now as they had been. He could reach out and feel the slip of hot, sticky blood on Bheem’s skin.
He did reach out and his fingers did slip, but they slipped in the sweat of a hot night. The gashes Ram had left in his skin, the gouged-out flesh, were there, but they were rough with healed skin, not smooth with fresh blood.
Most importantly, Bheem was looking at him without any of the rage-betrayal-loss that Ram had seen in his dream and held in his memory. His gaze was soft and he lay loose and still, aside from the deep, steady breaths that felt like the earth moving beneath him when Ram slept at his side.
“You’re shaking,” Bheem said. “Can I touch you?”
Ram could still see the open, gaping wounds on Bheem’s arm and across his chest.
“Yes.”
Bheem rolled up on one arm just enough to reach Ram’s cheek. Despite having given permission, Ram flinched, that part of him still locked in one of the two worst moments of his life expecting a strike rather than a caress.
“Bangaram, see me.”
Ram didn’t understand what he meant. He did see him. It was Bheem’s body before him.
Bheem removed his hand from Ram’s cheek and used it to flatten the palm of Ram’s hand against the scar tissue on his shoulder. Ram shuddered, still expecting the slick wet of exposed muscle. Again, the skin was rough and whole beneath his hand.
“See me.”
This time the emphasis was enough. Ram blinked hard and shook his head, trying to force the shadows out from his eyes. Slowly, like water draining through foliage or smoke in the wind, his vision cleared. The blood was gone from Bheem’s skin, which was whole, truly whole, and not just a double-exposed image like he’d seen occasionally as a fantastic picture of impossible things in British homes.
“I’m sorry,” Ram said, and he wasn’t sure if he was apologizing for his nightmare, waking Bheem, causing him such pain, or everything that happened in Delhi, all the lies and the hurt and the fear. Maybe it was mostly the last one. Maybe it was everything. “I’m sorry.”
“Come here.”
Ram let Bheem lead him down onto the bed, onto his chest. Bheem’s arms folded around him, tucking Ram safely away from the horrors of the world and his nightmare.
Bheem, too, dreamed of the day in the square, on a stage, when he thought he would be bled dry in front of these British monsters and he would fail. Malli would be held captive until she faded away, the songbird in captivity. Her mother would never know what had become of her daughter who had only the misfortune of being too skilled, too beautiful, too close to the British.
He remembered the acrid taste of his fear. He had been afraid, despite what Ram had said to the governor that next morning. It was impossible not to be. He knew pain and understood it. There was nothing that could be done to his body that Bheem could not handle, up until the moment of his death.
He had not anticipated the pain of Ram. Not the physical punishment he could mete out but the deathly stillness of his face.
Bheem’s dreams were a river tumbling through rapids. One rock was the British have taken a child. The one next to that was the British have taken everyone. He’d lived one of those and feared the other in the quiet darkness of the night. One rock was I’m arresting you for rebelling against the English government, and the one next to that was let us hang him in front of Malli.
The source of many of the dreams that woke Bheem at night was the flogging. It was the memory of burning, tearing pain in his skin, yes, and the brutality of their fight in the courtyard of the mansion, but it was also the memory of his Ram’s face. Not his yet, but in his dreams Ram was both his and not his.
Sometimes in his dreams, Ram’s face was so cold that Bheem had to trace his features with his thumb when he woke just to assure himself that he could both see and feel the curve of Ram’s cheek as he smiled. At the time, he’d thought Ram had been that cold and unfeeling, but in the snatches of dreams that were true memories and not twisted by nightmares, Bheem thought he caught Ram’s fear in his eyes. Somehow those nights were worse.
The dreams that really broke him open were the ones that splintered from the rock of let us hang him in front of Malli. The ones where Ram’s uncle did not give him the razor blade. The ones where Ram had not intended for Bheem to escape. The ones where Ram held Malli cruelly by the arm as she wept and screamed and Bheem’s last sight before everything went dark was the little sister of his tribe reaching for him.
Bheem could wrench himself awake from most nightmares, but he had to watch those play through from beginning to end, unless Ram woke him.
They started alike, those dreams. He hung, half-suspended from the ceiling of that British jail cell. His body ached from the beating, burned from the whipping, and strained from the chains holding him up. He drifted somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness, never far enough to be free of either the pain in his body or the agony in his soul that Ram—Ram—had done most of this to him and had allowed the rest. A conversation Bheem couldn’t understand in English, and one he may not have been able to understand anyway at the roaring in his ears when he saw Ram in that red uniform, wearing it as naturally as his own skin.
Then the conversation he could understand. Ram descending into cruelty Bheem had not thought him capable of, even after what he’d just done. A long day of panic and a hazy night of exhaustion. Ram standing at the door to his cell in the pre-dawn darkness while other Indian policemen strip the bloodied clothes from Bheem’s body and put him in a prisoner’s uniform—the British wouldn’t demean themselves so far as to touch him without a weapon or violence in their hands.
“Raju, please,” Bheem said. He couldn’t bring himself to call him Ram. He would use the name he’d heard the other policemen call him because the Ram Bheem knew was as much of a lie as the Akhtar Ram knew. “Please, not Malli. If there was ever anything—”
One of the policemen struck him in the face. Ram had focused his eyes on the wall behind Bheem, but at Bheem’s surprised grunt, his eyes flicked Bheem’s direction, then away again.
“Please, Raju, I’ll—” Bheem was almost glad for the pain of his leg being wrenched up to shove the pant leg on. It stopped him from speaking while he regained his breath. The words were there on the tip of his tongue: Please, Raju, I’ll kneel. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. Not for his life.
Ram did look at him then, but when their eyes met, Bheem found nothing of Ram in there. They were cold and dark and lifeless. Ram looked Bheem up and down, emotionless, and then turned to walk away.
“Bind him well. If he escapes, it will be you hanging today.”
They did. The ropes cut into his already raw wrists, but he walked as proudly has he could to the truck, then to the gallows, where he watched the ponderous approach of the train of vehicles coming to watch him die.
Bheem held onto one, slim hope. If he could escape, if he could slip from these ropes, maybe he could grab Malli. Maybe he could free her. Even if they killed him then, maybe she could run far enough and fast enough and she would be alone and so far from home, but she would be free. Bheem would have completed half of his task.
These policemen, these soldiers, had done their task too well. No matter how Bheem twisted his wrists, the rope stayed firm. The vehicles arrived. People flooded out, and Ram stood just there, directly in front of Bheem, holding Malli’s arm so tightly that the girl was crying out in pain. She stopped when they slipped the rope over Bheem’s head.
“Anna!”
“Malli, Malli, close your eyes, chhoti bahan. Don’t watch. Don’t listen.”
Malli shook her head, pulling again against Ram’s grip, but this time she strained toward Bheem.
They gave him no warning, or if they did, Bheem missed it. He was looking at Malli, at her arm stretched out toward him. He saw Ram wrap an arm around her shoulders and pull her back against him and he looked like he was cradling her, turning her head away, and then the ground fell away under Bheem’s feet.
Bheem woke, gasping for air that he was sure wouldn’t come, only to feel it filling his lungs so deeply he coughed. Ram woke beside him, reaching for the gun he kept at their bedside until he realized there was no danger, then he took Bheem in his arms, holding him much the way he had held Malli just before the dream ended.
“Was it Malli?” Ram asked. When Bheem nodded, he exhaled slowly. “She is safe. You are safe.”
“You are safe,” Bheem added. His voice was muffled by Ram’s chest, but Ram must have heard him clearly enough because he laughed once.
“Yes.”
Bheem didn’t think about the upcoming days. He didn’t think of the upcoming days, Ram’s looming absence as he went to further their battle. He wrapped his arms around Ram as tightly as he could, earning a quiet oof, Bheem! in return.
Ram stroked his hair and kissed the top of his head. He wiped away tears Bheem hadn’t realized he was shedding. They must have fallen to Ram’s bare skin.
“I’m sorry to be the cause of so many of your sleepless nights,” Ram said when Bheem finally felt able to ease his grip on Ram’s ribs.
There was a joke to be made about the cause of some of their sleepless nights, but Bheem didn’t quite feel like making it. They’d had this discussion before. Dozens of times at least. Ram wouldn’t accept that Bheem no longer blamed him. Bheem tried endlessly, in every way he knew how, to convince him otherwise.
“I dream of things that didn’t happen, bangaram, and of a man you are not.”
Ram huffed out a quiet sound of annoyance, but he didn’t argue further. “What do you need?”
“What would you have done?” Bheem asked.
“Done when?”
“If they had killed me that day.”
“I don’t know.” Ram tugged at Bheem, resettling him so they were more of a height, and pressed their foreheads together. His eyes were closed, giving Bheem a chance to examine the brush of his eyelashes across his skin and the curve of his cheek as he spoke. Their lips nearly touched. “I don’t know because I’d have died first. There would have been no reason for my life if they had taken you. I’d already thrown away my chance at the guns. You were the only other thing I had left that could benefit our country.”
They had talked about this in the full light of day before, but Ram had been cold and clinical about the details. He hadn’t talked about the what ifs of his plans, since the rescue had gone nearly as badly as it was possible to go, short of any or all of them dying.
Bheem kissed him then, sinking his fingers into the soft waves of his hair, pulling him close. Ram made a startled sound, then caught on.
“Promise me—promise me—you don’t think that way anymore.”
Ram kissed his temple, then his cheek, then his lips, then his forehead. “You and I are both important, but if you asked me which of us I’d rather let die, my answer hasn’t changed.” Bheem drew in a breath but Ram covered his mouth with a hand. “Nothing you say will change my mind. Try to sleep. We only have a few hours before we have to leave and we need all the rest we can get.”
Bheem relented and lay back down in the safety of Ram’s arms while the earliest morning birds began their calls.