I was appalled. I was still a child and my father was asking me to commit an atrocious 
act. But my father was wiser than I had taken him for. He shook his head as I stared at 
him in amazement, and took back the knife.
  "You see," he said. "You are not sure if what you say is true. In a matter of life and 
death, we must be careful. And if we are to make an error, it must be on the side of 
life. If this child turns out to be evil, then we will know as it grows up. Then we will 
have more time to decide what should be done with it." He turned back to Amba's body. 
"For now I must try to save it."
  "We may not have as much time as you think," I said as my father began to cut into 
Amba's flesh. Soon he held a bloody male infant in his hand. He gave it a gentle spank, 
and it sucked in a dry rasping breath and began to cry. Most of the men smiled and 
applauded, although I noticed the fear in their eyes. My father turned to me and asked me 
to hold it. I refused. However, I did consent to name the child.
  "It should be called Yaksha," I said. "For it has the heart of a yakshini."
  And the child's name was as I said. Most considered it an evil omen, yet none of them, 
in their darkest dreams, would realize how appropriate the name would be. But from that 
time on, the plague vanished and never returned.
  My father gave Yaksha to my aunt to raise, for she had no children of her own and 
greatly desired one. A simple but loving woman, she treated the child as if it were her 
own-certainly as if it were a human deserving of her love. Whether she felt any love in 
return from the child, I don't know. He was a beautiful baby with dark hair and pale blue 
eyes.
  Time went by, and it always does, and yet for Yaksha and for me the years took on a 
peculiar quality. For Yaksha grew faster than any child in the history of our village, 
and when I was fifteen years of age, he was already, in stature and education, my age, 
although he had been born only eight years earlier. His accelerated development brought 
to surface once again the rumors surrounding his birth. But they were rumors at best 
because the men who had been there the night Yaksha had come into the world never spoke 
about what had happened when the priest had tried to invoke the yakshini into Amba's 
corpse. They must have sworn one another to secrecy because my father occasionally took 
me aside and reminded me that I should not talk about that night. I did not, of course, 
because I did not think anyone outside of the six men would have believed me. Besides, I 
loved my father and always tried to obey him, even when I thought he was making a mistake.
  It was at about this time, when I was fifteen, that Yaksha started to go out of the way 
to talk to me. Until then I had avoided him, and even when he pursued me I tried to keep 
my distance. At least at first, but there was something about him that made him hard to 
resist. There was his great beauty, of course, his long shiny mane of black hair, his 
brilliant eyes, cool blue gems, set deep in his powerful face. His smile was also 
beguiling. How often it flashed in my direction, his two rows of perfect white teeth like 
polished pearls. Sometimes I would stop to talk to him, and he would always have a little 
gift to offer-a spoonful of sandlepaste, a stick of incense, a string of beads. I 
accepted these gifts reluctantly because I felt as if one day Yaksha would want something 
in return, something I would not want to give. But he never asked.
  But my attraction to him went deeper than his beauty. Even at eight years of age he was 
clearly the smartest person in the village, and often the adults consulted him on 
important matters: how to improve the harvest; how best to build our new temple; how to 
barter with the wandering merchants who came to buy our crops. If people had doubts about 
Yaksha's origin, they had nothing but praise for his behavior.
  I was attracted to him, but I never ceased to fear him. Occasionally I would catch a 
disturbing glimmer in his eyes, and be reminded of the sly smile the yashini had given me 
before it had supposedly vacated Amba's body.
  It was when I was sixteen that the first of the six men who had witnessed his birth 
disappeared. The man just vanished. Later that same year another of the six disappeared 
also. I asked my father about it, but he said that we could not hold Yaksha to blame. The 
boy was growing up well. But the next year, when another two of the men vanished, even my 
father began to have doubts. It was not long after that my father and I were the only 
ones left in the village who had been there that horrible night. But the fifth man did 
not just vanish. His body was found gored to death, as if by a wild animal. There was not 
a drop of blood left in his corpse. Who could doubt that the others had not ended up the 
same way?
  I begged my father to speak up about what was happening, and Yaksha's part in it. By 
then Yaksha was ten and looked twenty, and if he was not the leader of the village, few 
people doubted that he would be in charge soon. But my father was softhearted. He had 
watched Yaksha grow up with pride, no doubt feeling personally responsible for the birth 
of this wonderful young man. And his sister was still Yaksha's stepmother. He told me not 
to say anything to the others, that he would ask Yaksha to leave the village quietly and 
not come back.
  But it was my father who was not to come back, although Yaksha vanished as well. My 
father's body was never found, except for a lock of his hair, down by the river, stained 
with blood. At the ceremony honoring his death I broke down and cried out the many things 
that had happened the night Yaksha had been born. But the majority of people believed I 
was consumed with grief and didn't listen. Still, a few heard me, the families of the 
other men who had vanished.
  My grief over my lost father faded slowly. "Yet two years after his death and the 
disappearance of Yaksha, near my twentieth birthday, I met Rama, the son of a wandering 
merchant. My love for Rama was instantaneous. I saw him and knew I was supposed to be 
with him, and by the blessings of Lord Vishnu, he felt the same way. We were married 
under the full moon beside the river. The first night I slept with my husband I dreamed 
of Amba. She was as she had been when we had sung late at night together. Yet her words 
to me were dark. She told me to beware the blood of the dead, never to touch it. I woke 
up weeping and was only able to sleep by holding my husband tightly.
  Soon I was with child, and before the first year of my marriage was over, we had a 
daughter-Lalita, she who plays. Then my joy was complete and my grief over my father 
faded. Yet I was to have that joy for only a year:
  One moonless night I was awakened late by a sound. Beside me slept my husband, and on 
my other side our daughter. I do not know why the sound woke me; it was not loud. But it 
was peculiar, the sound of nails scraping over a blade. I got up and went outside my 
house and stood in the dark and looked around.
  He came from behind me, as he often used to when we were friends. But I knew he was 
there before he spoke. I sensed his proximity-his inhuman being.
  "Yaksha," I whispered.
  "Sita." His voice was very soft.
  I whirled around and started to shout, but he was on me before I could make a sound. 
For the first time I felt Yaksha's real strength, a thing he had kept hidden while he 
lived in our village. His hands, with their long nails, were like the paws of a tiger 
around my neck. A long sword banged against his knee. He choked off my air and leaned 
over and whispered in my ear. He had grown taller since I last saw him.
  "You betrayed me, my love," he said. "If I let you speak, will you scream? If you 
scream you will die. Understood?"
  I nodded and he loosened his grip, although he continued to keep me pinned. I had to