The Centre of the World [Scroll 1]
Title: The Centre of the World
Characters: India (Hindush), China (Ciin, Zhongguo), Persia, bb!Afghanistan (Khorasan), bb!Pakistan (unnamed), Mama Greece, Rome.
Rating: 12
Warnings: Present tense writing, obscure ancient history, empires, empires everywhere.
Summary: "Throughout history, there have persisted no cultures more stubborn than that of India and China." Two young nations as they grow, change, and are influenced by the world around them, bound by geography and ties deeper than any other. So basically it's my ship manifesto for these two.
For a long time it was nothing more than jungle and animals. Green, brown, blue, white, flowers of vibrant red and orange. Her world is a rainbow of beauty and nature's chaos, of rainstorms that start as quick as she blinks, of tigers tearing flesh from the limbs of prey, of trekking elephants and circling vultures. Tiny villages eventually collect into bigger groups, little towns. The most pretty buildings are always saved for the gods, evolving into shrines. Time is fluid and uncertain, and she doesn't mind, sleeps where she needs to and never finds herself unwelcome. They call her by the names of the gods, but none of them are her real name. She does know what her real name is, but she doesn't dare give it. She's only a little child, so young that she should still remember her mother but so old that she knows any parentage has long since rotted.
Her language flows, develops, and maybe she does and never notices. To her eyes, she's always been this small, this young. She knows she's not frozen; her hair grows long unless she takes a blade to it, and she still hungers and thirsts. If cut, she bleeds. Like a human, but she knows she's not one.
The first time she notices is when her best friend dies an old woman, growing so quickly that she couldn't keep up.
They all die like that. Faster than her.
She's sad the first time, and cries to Saraswati. "Why does everyone die?"
"Oh, Bharata." The goddess smiles to her in her infinite wisdom and says "To make room for the new life."
---
Empires rise, empires fall, kings and dynasties switch in and out. She watches people bend metal into more shapes than she'd thought possible, and builds statues for every god she knows, just to see them smile, or to have them bless her lands and her people with health. It doesn't always work, but when it does, she rejoices and holds festivals and paints her swastikas everywhere. The ground is fertile and her people strong, and she flourishes.
---
She couldn't tell you the time or the day when she met the Person Like Her. It was hot, and humid, but that meant little. The sun was high and hidden by clouds, and she was walking all the way along the coast line, until she found that tingly bit of land that told her to turn around, because it wasn't hers to walk on without permission.
The Person was also walking, but they were walking the other way. The Person was smaller than she was, or maybe the same age. Long dark hair caught the wind like hers, but lighter skin was flushed pink with the heat, and strange clothes flowed in the sea-breeze.
"Namaste." she greeted. The Person tilted his head in confusion.
"Ni hao."
---
The Person was strange, she'd decided, but it was a nice kind of strange. They didn't meet often; sometimes whole human lifetimes would go by and they wouldn't see each other, but when they did they always had nice conversations.
They slowly learned each other's language, and used hand signs and drawings when words didn't work how they wanted them to. It was by doing this that the two learned that neither of them had proper names. Or rather, they had a lot of names, but were only one person, so it got confusing.
"I not know who I am, sometimes." he confessed once, using her language even though his accent changed the words like ripples on a lake changed the reflection.
"Do you want a name?" she returned in his language, practicing the important stresses on various syllables. The Person nods, and she pointed at her new friend, grinning. "Then you are Ciin."
---
She receives her first name from a dark lady that appears from the north one day, with an army of men so great in number she can't count that high. In the dizzying rush that is the invasion, she finds her small form easily swept into the older woman's grasp, carried back to the north where the sand dunes climb high as mountains and move slowly as ancient waves.
"What is your name, little one?" the woman asks, golden jewelry glittering in the sun and the beads in her hair clicking against each other when she moved. "You're a pretty little thing; surely somebody's given you a name."
She mutely shook her head. The lady didn't scare her, though she was like her, and it was the first time she'd met a person like her that was this big and this powerful in person.
"Well then, I shall name you Hindush, and you are mine from this day onward."
The lady's hands were thin and elegant but rough to the touch. She had been hard at work all her life, a fierce warrior with a sword as much as a working farmer. Hindush looks up at her face, her piercing eyes and smirking mouth. "Who are you?"
She seems surprised at the question. "Why, I am Persia, of course. The Persian Empire."
---
Empires rise, and empires fall. These empires aren't of her people, like they used to be. She's a possession, to be shown off in royal courts, to wait upon her dear empire. Hindush watches and observes and absorbs, learning the battle of politics from Persia. She cares for her, but it's not the freedom she used to have. Her jungles are a thousand miles away, beyond golden sands. Her animals, the tigers, the elephants, the birds, they don't survive the desert well, and they certainly don't live long enough to be her companions in slavery.
Khorasan is very small. Barely a toddler where Hindush is a young child, maybe seven or eight. But they live next door to each other, or so Persia tells her. A baby is hardly a companion, but it's all she has.
Hindush doesn't grow, but Khorasan does. She calls Persia her mother, but Hindush does not. Her mother was darker and wilder than this, and long, long dead.
Khorasan has many sisters, some of them with the same name, but they're all so young that they have no use for it. Persia treasures every one of them, and Hindush comes to realise that even with as fearsome an army as Persia has, that every empire has a weak point.
---
Empires rise, and empires fall, and Persia is soon dead as well.
Which is fine by Hindush. Her jungles call her home, even with yet another Empire on her heels. Khorasan trips, stops, stays in her lands, and the wolves on their heels capture her. Hindush keeps running, running, over the deserts and the mountains, until the land is hers again and she can breath easier than she'd thought was possible in a long time.
At the edge of her territory, a woman on a horse stops, draped in armor and brunette hair piled in elaborate twists and braids on her head. Her skin seems bleached white to Hindush, pale and flushed red with sun and heat and exhilaration. For a moment, she wonders if it's in fact blue, and a god has visited her.
"You, India!" she calls, a wide smile on her face, friendly and inviting. Hindush doesn't trust it, and that isn't the name the gods call her by, but the one she says is far enough from her own, and sounds much nicer. She'll take it from her and nothing else, to hide behind. "Come back with me, and be a part of my empire."
"I refuse!" India replies, planting her feet in the soil she loves. "Go home!"
The pale woman laughs. "Not when the armies of great Alexander are here to fight for me. If you want to do this the hard way, we can!"
The little girl does her best to look down her nose at the woman on horseback.
"As you wish."
India is wild and bites and kicks and scratches with her nails. Elsewhere, armies clash and fight and stab and maim, until one remains a victor and another must retreat.
When the dust clears, Greece's back is far in the distance, and India's feet are still planted on the ground that is hers.
---
After that, India works hard, harder than she ever had before, to bring her country, her land under control. She knows what's hers, and she will take it. Maurya's empire, as they call it, spreads far, far beyond what Nanda had, nearly to the tip of her lands, where there is still resistance. It also reaches up, until she finds Khorasan again, as well as one of her sisters, old enough to glare at her as she takes them home with her.
India's older now. Her favourite emperor, Ashoka, says she looks nine summers old, and lavishes her in fine silks and saari and has his harem paint henna on her hands and pretend to be her brides maids whenever she wants to pretend marriage, or play princess. They handle her like fine pottery, a precious jewel, and occasionally she gets tired of it, and finds a tiger to play with. Riding on the back of one, she finds herself stepping over the invisible line, the border of her lands, and an arrow lands by the tiger's head.
"Shi!" says a voice, and the sound of a bowstring pulling back, creaking, forces her off the startled animal to stand in the way of the projectile.
"... Yindu?"
Out of the bushes steps someone familiar. Something warm blossoms in her chest and leaps out of her mouth like an excited monkey.
"Ciin!"
She dashes forward to hug him, but barely reaches his waist. He's grown, he's grown an awful lot, but it's been too long since they've seen each other and she's missed him so. His long dark hair is piled up on his head, a pony tail fit for your average merchant rather than a person like they are. In fact, he's pulling a cart along the thin jungle path, stacked high with coloured silks.
"Yindu, what are you doing here?" he asks, petting her head. His hands have become rough with work, and they're so much bigger now.
"Here? My lands reach this far now!" she tells him excitedly, bouncing on the stop and filled with energy she didn't know she had before. "I've gotten so much bigger than last time we met, but so have you!" She releases him only to grab his hand. "Come on, we have to talk, let's share what's been happening."
So they sit on the side of Ciin's cart, and tell each other everything. Ciin's lands have grown too, but now they're split, seven bickering kingdoms of which "Qin" is only one. He asks her to call him "Zhongguo", a name proposed by one emperor that wishes to unite the whole country, all of his people.
"It's a headache, aru." he sighs, and India notices the strange verbal tic he's developed. A result of the splitting people, she supposed. "I'd be happier if they all got along, aru, but sometimes it seems impossible."
He sounds so frustrated. India leans against his shoulder and breathes in through her nose. Ciin has always smelled like cotton and cooking rice.
"If I'm so small, but can unite almost all my people, I'm sure you can too." she assures, and smiles up at him. "One day, let's both get so big that our lands touch, so we can go and see each other every day."
Ciin smiles. "That would be nice, aru. Then we can spend more time together." Standing means nearly knocking India off her perch, but he steadies her with a laugh. "You can ride on the back of here, I'm going to see your emperor with these silks anyway."
And along they roll down the road.
---
There are a million different kinds of people in India's land. She's a little of all of them, of the Pandyans, Cholas, Cheras, Kadambas, Gangas, Pallavas, Chalukyas. She loses bits of territory one by one, and Khorasan and her sister leave her to start their own lands on their own. But though her empires fluctuate, rise and fall and change like the tide, she has a constant.
Ciin has unified his people, just like he said he would. India only regrets that she couldn't keep her promise to make their lands touch. Determined, she forces her way up and around the mountains, until they finally can share a border.
An accidental overstepping of boundaries, though, and Ciin stops talking to her for twenty years.
India blames herself. Oh why did she have to go so far, why. She knew that Ciin didn't like to be touched, not really, not without warning like that. She gives him space, lets him calm down, stops her advance.
And then, she goes to apologise.
It's a long way to Ciin's capital, and it's very strange to see everyone around her looking like he did, with their eyes thinner and skin lighter and clothes tied in ways India could only marvel at. Not all were so colorful as hers, but there was the reason why Ciin always bought dyes from her, in return for his beautiful materials.
His palace is made of marble and wood and beautiful stones, lanterns made of waxy paper lighting darker hallways. She's only small still, but she knows instinctively where to find him, where that tingling feeling of his energy thrums on the edge of her senses.
The door slides rather than swings, and she takes two steps in before she realises there is another in there.
A young man, skin like Greece's had been and hair curling odd ways and a lighter shade still, turns to look at her with a confused expression, a little stubble growing on his chin. Ciin has his best robes on, hair done elaborately, and looks just as surprised to see her as India is to see the other man who she's never met.
"Well hey, who's this then?" asks the man, and his attempt at Ciin's language is strained at best, strange accent marring every word. At least India tried to pronounce the syllables correctly. She's about to reply, when Ciin cuts ahead of her.
"Nobody important, just a neighbour of mine."
This hurts more than India thought it would. Nobody important. He didn't think she was important. Her shoulders slumped a little, the place where the warmth usually was when she saw her friend replaced with a heavy, painful ache. Every word he said made the feeling spread.
"Oh?" said the new man.
"You go past her on your trade route, for the silk road. I send my men to travel through her. She lets them through. She's not a threat to you."
It's hard to breathe now, and the little gasps the takes in shudder. The world's getting fuzzy and her eyes are stinging, and before she knows it hot tears run down her cheeks. She tries to stop the whimper that escapes her mouth by covering it with her hands, and prevents making any more of a scene out of herself by turning on her heel.
"See, she's only a little kid, crying. Nothing to be interested in."
She runs and runs until she reaches home, but she can still hear the words in her head.
Notes:
- Title comes from the idea that India is at the (spiritual) centre of the world, according to Buddhist beliefs. The Japanese name for India is even "Tenjiku", meaning "location of heaven".
- There's evidence of humans in India from as far back as 55,000BC. The first proper development of Indian civilisation came in about 3300BCE, when they had their own mini-iron age and bronze age and everything.
- Bharata is another name for India, straight from Sanskrit. There's all sort of connotations to this word, and it's used in so many contexts. It can mean either the Republic of India or Ancient India.
- Saraswati (pronounced Sa-rah-sva-tee) is the Hindu goddess of wisdom, money, and the arts. Hinduism itself is the oldest surviving religion in the world.
- The first name for China as a collective country of similar cultures and language was found in ancient Sanskrit scrolls in India, spelled "Ciin". I find this too adorable to pass up.
- The first recorded name for India is in the records of the Persian Empire's conquest of the region.
- Persia is a girl because there needs to be more awesome female Empires in the world. Also ganked off Cande.
- Khorasan is basically Ancient Afghanistan. Technically the name encompasses Iran and a little bit of Uzbekistan as well, but it's hard to think of like that. Funnily enough, the name means "place where the sun rises" in middle Persian. How's that for you, Japan?
- Alexander the Great's empire spread across the old Persian Empire, and didn't quite touch the borders of India. India, meanwhile, was having a good time as two different empires herself. The Nanda empire in the North successfully fended off the Greeks, preying on their tiredness from having to travel so far, and their fear of the Nanda empire itself, who were known for releasing tigers into the battlefield, not minding of their own armies, who were usually smart enough to get out of the way. Score one for bb!India, nil for Mama!Greece.
- The Maurya Empire encompassed much of modern day Afghanistan, as well as Pakistan as a whole. This was the largest Indian empire ever.
- The start of the 1st Century BC was called the "Golden age" for India. Although the Maurya empire collapsed, others took it's place, such as the Kushan empire which stretched up around the Himalayas to poke at the borders of China, who wasn't happy. It strained relations for a few years.
- China-gege why are you so oooooold. China had international relations with the Roman Empire via trade routes such as the Silk Road, which went through the northern tip of India.
- I was going to fit this whole thing in one fic post but it seems that I'll have to split this into chapters too because holy crap, why do you have such a long history, guys.
Characters: India (Hindush), China (Ciin, Zhongguo), Persia, bb!Afghanistan (Khorasan), bb!Pakistan (unnamed), Mama Greece, Rome.
Rating: 12
Warnings: Present tense writing, obscure ancient history, empires, empires everywhere.
Summary: "Throughout history, there have persisted no cultures more stubborn than that of India and China." Two young nations as they grow, change, and are influenced by the world around them, bound by geography and ties deeper than any other. So basically it's my ship manifesto for these two.
For a long time it was nothing more than jungle and animals. Green, brown, blue, white, flowers of vibrant red and orange. Her world is a rainbow of beauty and nature's chaos, of rainstorms that start as quick as she blinks, of tigers tearing flesh from the limbs of prey, of trekking elephants and circling vultures. Tiny villages eventually collect into bigger groups, little towns. The most pretty buildings are always saved for the gods, evolving into shrines. Time is fluid and uncertain, and she doesn't mind, sleeps where she needs to and never finds herself unwelcome. They call her by the names of the gods, but none of them are her real name. She does know what her real name is, but she doesn't dare give it. She's only a little child, so young that she should still remember her mother but so old that she knows any parentage has long since rotted.
Her language flows, develops, and maybe she does and never notices. To her eyes, she's always been this small, this young. She knows she's not frozen; her hair grows long unless she takes a blade to it, and she still hungers and thirsts. If cut, she bleeds. Like a human, but she knows she's not one.
The first time she notices is when her best friend dies an old woman, growing so quickly that she couldn't keep up.
They all die like that. Faster than her.
She's sad the first time, and cries to Saraswati. "Why does everyone die?"
"Oh, Bharata." The goddess smiles to her in her infinite wisdom and says "To make room for the new life."
---
Empires rise, empires fall, kings and dynasties switch in and out. She watches people bend metal into more shapes than she'd thought possible, and builds statues for every god she knows, just to see them smile, or to have them bless her lands and her people with health. It doesn't always work, but when it does, she rejoices and holds festivals and paints her swastikas everywhere. The ground is fertile and her people strong, and she flourishes.
---
She couldn't tell you the time or the day when she met the Person Like Her. It was hot, and humid, but that meant little. The sun was high and hidden by clouds, and she was walking all the way along the coast line, until she found that tingly bit of land that told her to turn around, because it wasn't hers to walk on without permission.
The Person was also walking, but they were walking the other way. The Person was smaller than she was, or maybe the same age. Long dark hair caught the wind like hers, but lighter skin was flushed pink with the heat, and strange clothes flowed in the sea-breeze.
"Namaste." she greeted. The Person tilted his head in confusion.
"Ni hao."
---
The Person was strange, she'd decided, but it was a nice kind of strange. They didn't meet often; sometimes whole human lifetimes would go by and they wouldn't see each other, but when they did they always had nice conversations.
They slowly learned each other's language, and used hand signs and drawings when words didn't work how they wanted them to. It was by doing this that the two learned that neither of them had proper names. Or rather, they had a lot of names, but were only one person, so it got confusing.
"I not know who I am, sometimes." he confessed once, using her language even though his accent changed the words like ripples on a lake changed the reflection.
"Do you want a name?" she returned in his language, practicing the important stresses on various syllables. The Person nods, and she pointed at her new friend, grinning. "Then you are Ciin."
---
She receives her first name from a dark lady that appears from the north one day, with an army of men so great in number she can't count that high. In the dizzying rush that is the invasion, she finds her small form easily swept into the older woman's grasp, carried back to the north where the sand dunes climb high as mountains and move slowly as ancient waves.
"What is your name, little one?" the woman asks, golden jewelry glittering in the sun and the beads in her hair clicking against each other when she moved. "You're a pretty little thing; surely somebody's given you a name."
She mutely shook her head. The lady didn't scare her, though she was like her, and it was the first time she'd met a person like her that was this big and this powerful in person.
"Well then, I shall name you Hindush, and you are mine from this day onward."
The lady's hands were thin and elegant but rough to the touch. She had been hard at work all her life, a fierce warrior with a sword as much as a working farmer. Hindush looks up at her face, her piercing eyes and smirking mouth. "Who are you?"
She seems surprised at the question. "Why, I am Persia, of course. The Persian Empire."
---
Empires rise, and empires fall. These empires aren't of her people, like they used to be. She's a possession, to be shown off in royal courts, to wait upon her dear empire. Hindush watches and observes and absorbs, learning the battle of politics from Persia. She cares for her, but it's not the freedom she used to have. Her jungles are a thousand miles away, beyond golden sands. Her animals, the tigers, the elephants, the birds, they don't survive the desert well, and they certainly don't live long enough to be her companions in slavery.
Khorasan is very small. Barely a toddler where Hindush is a young child, maybe seven or eight. But they live next door to each other, or so Persia tells her. A baby is hardly a companion, but it's all she has.
Hindush doesn't grow, but Khorasan does. She calls Persia her mother, but Hindush does not. Her mother was darker and wilder than this, and long, long dead.
Khorasan has many sisters, some of them with the same name, but they're all so young that they have no use for it. Persia treasures every one of them, and Hindush comes to realise that even with as fearsome an army as Persia has, that every empire has a weak point.
---
Empires rise, and empires fall, and Persia is soon dead as well.
Which is fine by Hindush. Her jungles call her home, even with yet another Empire on her heels. Khorasan trips, stops, stays in her lands, and the wolves on their heels capture her. Hindush keeps running, running, over the deserts and the mountains, until the land is hers again and she can breath easier than she'd thought was possible in a long time.
At the edge of her territory, a woman on a horse stops, draped in armor and brunette hair piled in elaborate twists and braids on her head. Her skin seems bleached white to Hindush, pale and flushed red with sun and heat and exhilaration. For a moment, she wonders if it's in fact blue, and a god has visited her.
"You, India!" she calls, a wide smile on her face, friendly and inviting. Hindush doesn't trust it, and that isn't the name the gods call her by, but the one she says is far enough from her own, and sounds much nicer. She'll take it from her and nothing else, to hide behind. "Come back with me, and be a part of my empire."
"I refuse!" India replies, planting her feet in the soil she loves. "Go home!"
The pale woman laughs. "Not when the armies of great Alexander are here to fight for me. If you want to do this the hard way, we can!"
The little girl does her best to look down her nose at the woman on horseback.
"As you wish."
India is wild and bites and kicks and scratches with her nails. Elsewhere, armies clash and fight and stab and maim, until one remains a victor and another must retreat.
When the dust clears, Greece's back is far in the distance, and India's feet are still planted on the ground that is hers.
---
After that, India works hard, harder than she ever had before, to bring her country, her land under control. She knows what's hers, and she will take it. Maurya's empire, as they call it, spreads far, far beyond what Nanda had, nearly to the tip of her lands, where there is still resistance. It also reaches up, until she finds Khorasan again, as well as one of her sisters, old enough to glare at her as she takes them home with her.
India's older now. Her favourite emperor, Ashoka, says she looks nine summers old, and lavishes her in fine silks and saari and has his harem paint henna on her hands and pretend to be her brides maids whenever she wants to pretend marriage, or play princess. They handle her like fine pottery, a precious jewel, and occasionally she gets tired of it, and finds a tiger to play with. Riding on the back of one, she finds herself stepping over the invisible line, the border of her lands, and an arrow lands by the tiger's head.
"Shi!" says a voice, and the sound of a bowstring pulling back, creaking, forces her off the startled animal to stand in the way of the projectile.
"... Yindu?"
Out of the bushes steps someone familiar. Something warm blossoms in her chest and leaps out of her mouth like an excited monkey.
"Ciin!"
She dashes forward to hug him, but barely reaches his waist. He's grown, he's grown an awful lot, but it's been too long since they've seen each other and she's missed him so. His long dark hair is piled up on his head, a pony tail fit for your average merchant rather than a person like they are. In fact, he's pulling a cart along the thin jungle path, stacked high with coloured silks.
"Yindu, what are you doing here?" he asks, petting her head. His hands have become rough with work, and they're so much bigger now.
"Here? My lands reach this far now!" she tells him excitedly, bouncing on the stop and filled with energy she didn't know she had before. "I've gotten so much bigger than last time we met, but so have you!" She releases him only to grab his hand. "Come on, we have to talk, let's share what's been happening."
So they sit on the side of Ciin's cart, and tell each other everything. Ciin's lands have grown too, but now they're split, seven bickering kingdoms of which "Qin" is only one. He asks her to call him "Zhongguo", a name proposed by one emperor that wishes to unite the whole country, all of his people.
"It's a headache, aru." he sighs, and India notices the strange verbal tic he's developed. A result of the splitting people, she supposed. "I'd be happier if they all got along, aru, but sometimes it seems impossible."
He sounds so frustrated. India leans against his shoulder and breathes in through her nose. Ciin has always smelled like cotton and cooking rice.
"If I'm so small, but can unite almost all my people, I'm sure you can too." she assures, and smiles up at him. "One day, let's both get so big that our lands touch, so we can go and see each other every day."
Ciin smiles. "That would be nice, aru. Then we can spend more time together." Standing means nearly knocking India off her perch, but he steadies her with a laugh. "You can ride on the back of here, I'm going to see your emperor with these silks anyway."
And along they roll down the road.
---
There are a million different kinds of people in India's land. She's a little of all of them, of the Pandyans, Cholas, Cheras, Kadambas, Gangas, Pallavas, Chalukyas. She loses bits of territory one by one, and Khorasan and her sister leave her to start their own lands on their own. But though her empires fluctuate, rise and fall and change like the tide, she has a constant.
Ciin has unified his people, just like he said he would. India only regrets that she couldn't keep her promise to make their lands touch. Determined, she forces her way up and around the mountains, until they finally can share a border.
An accidental overstepping of boundaries, though, and Ciin stops talking to her for twenty years.
India blames herself. Oh why did she have to go so far, why. She knew that Ciin didn't like to be touched, not really, not without warning like that. She gives him space, lets him calm down, stops her advance.
And then, she goes to apologise.
It's a long way to Ciin's capital, and it's very strange to see everyone around her looking like he did, with their eyes thinner and skin lighter and clothes tied in ways India could only marvel at. Not all were so colorful as hers, but there was the reason why Ciin always bought dyes from her, in return for his beautiful materials.
His palace is made of marble and wood and beautiful stones, lanterns made of waxy paper lighting darker hallways. She's only small still, but she knows instinctively where to find him, where that tingling feeling of his energy thrums on the edge of her senses.
The door slides rather than swings, and she takes two steps in before she realises there is another in there.
A young man, skin like Greece's had been and hair curling odd ways and a lighter shade still, turns to look at her with a confused expression, a little stubble growing on his chin. Ciin has his best robes on, hair done elaborately, and looks just as surprised to see her as India is to see the other man who she's never met.
"Well hey, who's this then?" asks the man, and his attempt at Ciin's language is strained at best, strange accent marring every word. At least India tried to pronounce the syllables correctly. She's about to reply, when Ciin cuts ahead of her.
"Nobody important, just a neighbour of mine."
This hurts more than India thought it would. Nobody important. He didn't think she was important. Her shoulders slumped a little, the place where the warmth usually was when she saw her friend replaced with a heavy, painful ache. Every word he said made the feeling spread.
"Oh?" said the new man.
"You go past her on your trade route, for the silk road. I send my men to travel through her. She lets them through. She's not a threat to you."
It's hard to breathe now, and the little gasps the takes in shudder. The world's getting fuzzy and her eyes are stinging, and before she knows it hot tears run down her cheeks. She tries to stop the whimper that escapes her mouth by covering it with her hands, and prevents making any more of a scene out of herself by turning on her heel.
"See, she's only a little kid, crying. Nothing to be interested in."
She runs and runs until she reaches home, but she can still hear the words in her head.
Notes:
- Title comes from the idea that India is at the (spiritual) centre of the world, according to Buddhist beliefs. The Japanese name for India is even "Tenjiku", meaning "location of heaven".
- There's evidence of humans in India from as far back as 55,000BC. The first proper development of Indian civilisation came in about 3300BCE, when they had their own mini-iron age and bronze age and everything.
- Bharata is another name for India, straight from Sanskrit. There's all sort of connotations to this word, and it's used in so many contexts. It can mean either the Republic of India or Ancient India.
- Saraswati (pronounced Sa-rah-sva-tee) is the Hindu goddess of wisdom, money, and the arts. Hinduism itself is the oldest surviving religion in the world.
- The first name for China as a collective country of similar cultures and language was found in ancient Sanskrit scrolls in India, spelled "Ciin". I find this too adorable to pass up.
- The first recorded name for India is in the records of the Persian Empire's conquest of the region.
- Persia is a girl because there needs to be more awesome female Empires in the world. Also ganked off Cande.
- Khorasan is basically Ancient Afghanistan. Technically the name encompasses Iran and a little bit of Uzbekistan as well, but it's hard to think of like that. Funnily enough, the name means "place where the sun rises" in middle Persian. How's that for you, Japan?
- Alexander the Great's empire spread across the old Persian Empire, and didn't quite touch the borders of India. India, meanwhile, was having a good time as two different empires herself. The Nanda empire in the North successfully fended off the Greeks, preying on their tiredness from having to travel so far, and their fear of the Nanda empire itself, who were known for releasing tigers into the battlefield, not minding of their own armies, who were usually smart enough to get out of the way. Score one for bb!India, nil for Mama!Greece.
- The Maurya Empire encompassed much of modern day Afghanistan, as well as Pakistan as a whole. This was the largest Indian empire ever.
- The start of the 1st Century BC was called the "Golden age" for India. Although the Maurya empire collapsed, others took it's place, such as the Kushan empire which stretched up around the Himalayas to poke at the borders of China, who wasn't happy. It strained relations for a few years.
- China-gege why are you so oooooold. China had international relations with the Roman Empire via trade routes such as the Silk Road, which went through the northern tip of India.
- I was going to fit this whole thing in one fic post but it seems that I'll have to split this into chapters too because holy crap, why do you have such a long history, guys.