Pataliputra in the full morning was a different creature from the city Eshaan had walked yesterday with his father. Yesterday he had been managing the shock of it - the density, the noise, the sensory overload of a medieval city experienced from inside rather than the books.
He walked the route to the north gate slowly, taking twice as long as necessary, while he looked at everything.
The grain market first - three streets of merchants with sacks open for inspection, weights and measures changing hands with the speed of people who did this every day and trusted nothing about it. He watched a transaction from across the lane, noting the specific way the merchant's thumb pressed down on the scale when the buyer wasn't watching, the fractional addition to every measurement that would compound across a hundred sales into a significant theft. He took note of everything, Not because it was relevant to anything yet. Because everything was relevant to something eventually.
The mood of the city was a specific texture Eshaan was trying to read. Cities had moods the way weather had moods - they could be felt before they could be named. This one had an undercurrent of something that wasn't quite fear but its relative: Caution. Men at the grain market talked slightly faster than they needed to. Women at the well collected their water and moved on without the usual clustering. The guards at the corner of the processional road stood differently from how they had stood yesterday, they were more conscious.
"Ballal Sen," Eshaan thought. "Word travels faster than official correspondence. The city already knows something is coming even if it doesn't know what."
Eshaan found the Senapati's quarters without difficulty - the carved stone horse above the entrance was weathered but unmistakable, a thick-necked war stallion with its head turned slightly as if looking for something that hadn't arrived yet. Two guards were stationed outside. Eshaan went to them and told his name and his father's name and his purpose, and they looked at a boy of ten with a sealed letter and went through the brief internal calculation of whether this was worth interrupting the Senapati for.
Eshaan waited patiently.
Senapati Indrajit came out himself rather than sending an attendant, which told Eshaan that the letter had been expected. He was a broad man in his forties, his moustache was thick, he was bearing military in the specific way of men who had spent decades making their bodies into tools. He broke the seal, read quickly, read again more slowly, and then looked at Eshaan with an expression that suggested he was used to receiving correspondence from Mahesh Shrivastava but not used to receiving it via a child.
"You are Mahesh-ji's son," he inquired.
"Yes, Senapati-ji."
"Tell your father I have received it and I will send my response before the fourth prahar bell." He paused, still looking at Eshaan with that assessing expression. "You understand what you carried?"
"My father said my job was to deliver it, not to read it," Eshaan said.
Something shifted in Indrajit's expression - amusement which he quickly controlled.
"Good answer," he said. "Go."
Eshaan was heading back south along the river road, the Ganga visible between the buildings to his right, when he heard the argument.
It was coming from the fish market - a cluster of stalls lined at the edge of the ghat where the morning's catch came in off the boats and was sold before the sun climbed high enough to dip the freshness of the fishes. The noise of the argument was particularly too crowded and felt like it had been going on for some time now where either a resolution or a physical altercation became inevitable.
Eshaan stopped at the edge of the market and located the source.
A boy who was roughly his own apparent age, though considerably larger in the way of children who had grown up doing physical work - was standing across a low table from a merchant with the fixed expression of someone who had been wronged and knew it but lacked the precise vocabulary to prove it. The merchant was a heavyset man with oil on his fingers and had the aura of someone who had accustomed himself to winning these arguments.
On the table between them sat a set of bronze weights and a basket of fish.
"Your father caught twelve seers," the merchant was saying, in the tone of someone repeating something for the fourth time. "I have weighed them and it came out to be Eleven and a half. So, I'd pay for eleven and a half."
"He caught twelve," the boy said. His voice was steady in the way of someone controlling anger rather than not feeling it. "And he counted them off the boat himself and it weighed exactly Twelve fishes. Not more. Not less."
"The scale says eleven and a half and a boy like you'd lie but the scale does not lie."
"The scale is wrong. You are wrong."
The merchant spread his hands with an air of great patient suffering. "Boy. I have used this scale for eleven years. It has never been wrong."
Eshaan looked at the scale. It was a simple balance - a central pivot, two hanging pans, the bronze weights stacked on one side. He looked at the merchant's hands, resting on the table edge. He looked at the angle of the table.
Then he saw it.
The table was not levelled correctly. The side where the fish sat was fractionally lower than the side with the weights - the table leg on that side worn shorter by years of use on an uneven ghat floor.
Eshaan walked forward.
Both the boy and the merchant looked at him - the merchant with the weary contempt of someone who did not need a second child in this conversation, and the boy with confusion.
Eshaan pointed at the table leg without any explanation. "Your table is tilted from the fish weighing side and your scale is reading light on everything you weigh from that side."
A silence followed by his revelation and the merchant bent down to look at the table leg, then he looked at the scale and a muscle moved in his jaw.
"You owe him the money for twelve fishes." Eshaan said.
The merchant immediately reached for his money pouch and paid for twelve fishes. He didn't do it graciously, but it was a bargain against the fact that he has been caught in a heinous act and if it stretched for long, he might get fined or even get jailed for the crime.
"Wait." The bigger boy caught up with him in two strides. He was looking at Eshaan with the expression Eshaan had predicted - strange and interested, like a person who had encountered a new species and was trying to decide if it was dangerous. "How did you see that?"
"The table was uneven. But It wasn't difficult to notice something that basic."
"I didn't see it."
"You were busy looking at the merchant," Eshaan said. "You should have been looking at the table. instead"
The boy had a broad face, an open expression, and the particular physical ease of someone who had never had reason to be self-conscious about taking up space. He shifted the small bundle of coins in his hand - twelve fishes paid for in full, and seemed to come to some internal decision.
"I'm Vasudev Naik, but you can call me Vasu," he said. "My father is a fisherman, and we row our boats in the river Ganga for two decades."
"Eshaan Shrivastava. My father is Mahesh the chief scribe under the Samanta of Pataliputra."
Vasu nodded at this information as though it confirmed something. "A scribe's son who looks at tables," he said, not mockingly - just noting that it was "Strange."
"Useful for a scribe's son as we have to calculate everything" Eshaan said.
Vasu considered this too and nodded while he suddenly grinned widely as it was something which he found funny. They kept walking in a companionable silence for a while, with the Ganga moving broad and unhurried to their right.
"Does your father's boat land here every morning?" Eshaan asked.
"Most mornings. When the catch is good, he's back before the temple bell. When it isn't..." Vasu shrugged philosophically. "He's back whenever he's back."
"That merchant from before, has he been shorting the weight before?"
Vasu's jaw tightened briefly. "Probably. My father never argued. He says arguing with merchants is like arguing with rain." He paused. "I am not my father."
No, Eshaan thought, looking at the broad set of Vasu's shoulders, the directness of his gaze. You are certainly not.
They parted at the lane that turned towards the Shrivastava house - Vasu continuing south towards the fishermen's quarter, while Eshaan turned west. Vasu raised his hand once without looking back, the gesture of someone who considered the matter of friendship settled and didn't require ceremony about it.
Eshaan watched him go for a moment.
"Good," he thought, and went home.
Eshaan laid on his mat that night after dinner, the courtyard outside his window turned dark and quiet and the sounds of his parents moving through the end of their evening filtered across from the main house.
He turned the day over in his mind the way he had always turned things over before sleep -methodically, without hurry, looking for what he had missed. He might be in a child's body but again by heart, he was an Archaeologist.
His mother's hand on his forehead. The way she had said "you are different" but accepted his non-answer with a patience that was not incuriosity but trust. He thought about that. He thought about what it meant to be trusted by someone who had no reason yet to know whether he was trustworthy.
His father watching him in the courtyard from the doorway. Saying "good" in that way that meant more than the word.
Senapati Indrajit's assessing eyes. The sealed letter. The preparation orders inside it that he had not read and didn't need to because he knew what they contained well enough from the historical record, and the historical record of this specific moment was not encouraging.
"But not yet," he reminded himself keeping a mental note of everything.
The whole incident with the Merchant and his reaction. Vasu's unguarded grin.
"You should have looked at the table."
Eshaan smiled slightly at the ceiling in the dark.
He made his first friend in 1178 CE who was a fisherman's son. His body had done seven pushups in the morning and would do eight tomorrow. His mother was alive and warm and three buildings away across a courtyard, and that fact sat in his chest like something too large to fully examine yet, so he was leaving it there, present but not grasped, for when he was ready.
Eshaan was one day old in this life and had a long way to go.
The mark on his forearm was warm and steady, and outside the window Pataliputra breathed its slow medieval breath, and Eshaan Shrivastava closed his eyes and for the first time in what felt like several lifetimes, slept without dreaming.