Novel excerpt — Invisible Armies

For a moment she wonders if this is what being a movie star is like; everybody wordlessly watching you, knowing that you belong to an infinitely glamorous and more exciting world than theirs. She wishes she had brought a male companion. Not that that wouldn’t have created its own set of problems. But suddenly those problems seem better than feeling like a target. A target only of attention, right now, but such attention makes her nervous.

The empty coracle, a woven basket of thumb-thick branches lined on the outside with plastic wrap, reaches the shore. The non-paddling man steps out and motions her to get off the bike. She doesn’t want to. She suddenly wants to turn around, ride straight back to Hampi, email Keiran and tell him he can find someone else to run his international errands for him. But Danielle has spent the last few years of her life systematically forcing herself to do exactly those things that make her uncomfortable or frightened. She knows she is mostly the better for it. She wonders, though, as she stands back and allows the man to straddle her motorcycle and expertly roll it onto the coracle, whether one day this constant struggle for self-improvement will propel her into disaster.

The vessel’s interior is wet, but the motorcycle’s weight distorts the flexible hull enough that all the interior water pools beneath the bike’s tires, and Danielle stays mostly dry. She sits cross legged on the surprisingly comfortable wood, avoiding the ferrymen’s unflagging stares, and watches the unearthly landscape around her.

The wide, fast Tungabadhra River, lined by tall coconut trees, carves a path through jumbled ridges of colossal reddish boulders that somehow look both crystalline and water-warped. Roads and villages are built in the shadow of these boulders, which look like handfuls of fifty-foot pebbles dropped by the gods, balancing and leaning on one another in seemingly unnatural ways, as if child-giants had used them as playthings, piled stacks and mounds of them, then abandoned them here when they grew bored. It’s hard for Danielle to shake the notion that this place was meant for creatures of far greater scale than mere human beings.

And then there are the ruins. Most human constructions here are ancient, the bones of the Vijayanagar kingdom that ten centuries ago ruled all of south India. Half-collapsed stonework; still-intact ziggurats densely carved with Hindu gods and idols, some of their features worn away by the centuries, but still enormously imposing; high ornate walls standing forlornly in tilled fields; kilometre-long pillared colonnades. Once these were royal residences, temples, elephant stables, public plazas. To the west, Danielle can make out the the crumbling remains of a massive stone bridge that once spanned the palm-tree-lined river. This thousand-year relic doesn’t seem much more ruined than the rusted iron and cratered concrete above her.

A few squat concrete boxes have grown around the northern end of the modern bridge, and clusters of thatched huts are visible in the distance, between the hills and ridges. Dots that are men and women can be seen cultivating small oblong properties, brown fields of grain and deep green banana plantations. A large whitewashed temple to some Hindu god is visible at the top of the highest hill. But the modern buildings, roads and plantations look wildly out of place.

As they approach the northern bank Danielle winces, realizing that she forget to agree a price before embarking. She expects a demand for some outrageous amount of money, and she is not in a good position to argue; a woman on her own, on the wrong side of the river that only these men can help her cross. But the man asks her for only twenty rupees, less than fifty US cents. His accent is so thick, and the price so surprising, that he has to repeat it three times before she is certain she understood. She wonders why, unlike just about everyone else in India, these men do not see the central goal of their interaction with a foreigner to be the acquisition of as much wealth as possible by any nonviolent means available. Maybe so few tourists come here that these men have not learned how to be usurious.

Or maybe they are frightened of foreigners. If Keiran is right, they have good reason to be frightened.

She wonders what time the ferry stops. Surely she can get back before nightfall. Even if not, surely she can pay someone to paddle her back across. And even if that fails, surely some family will put her up for the night. She has money, after all, and a white woman’s glamour. Even in the worst case, it will be an adventure. Danielle kicks her engine into life, shifts into gear, and starts north.

2.
The road is old sunbaked asphalt, grooved and pitted but not bad by Indian standards, and virtually deserted. At first she is relieved by this emptiness. Her motorcycle skills are rusty, the Bajaj Pulsar’s gearing system is counterintuitive to anyone who learned to ride a motorcycle in the West, and the Indian roads she has grown accustomed to – seething, anarchic, horn-honking maelstroms of buses, cars, cattle, auto rickshaws, cyclists, pedestrians, children and dogs – are a constant threat to life and limb and sanity. But after about ten minutes Danielle begins to find the solitude eerie. This is the most alone she has been since the moment she landed in New Delhi six months ago. She is a little relieved when she passes a wheezing Tata bus going the opposite direction. She has to steer to the edge of the road to avoid it, and the stones its wake kicks up rattle against her motorcycle and her right leg, but its presence alleviates the feeling that she has left all civilization behind.