His knees struck the damp rock of the Valley of Echo with a dry crack. The body followed what the mind had already admitted. The man who once puffed out his chest and pointed at the Sun with unshakable conviction and dramatic poses shrank, crushed by the immensity of his own failure.
— The entire calculation... — whispered Bhāskara, his voice hoarse and stripped of any trace of his former theatricality.
He lowered his face, staring at the rope firmly stretched between his ankles—the brilliant invention that had guaranteed the mechanical constancy of the journey, now transformed into a useless shackle.
— The shadow...
He turned his face toward the jagged rock where the last fragments of his parchment lay torn, his quadratic precision swept away by the inclement wind.
— The angles...
With a painful effort, he raised his chin, fixing his gaze on the dark outline of the southern horizon. Suryashan remained far beyond those rocks, awaiting the blinding light of a solstice they could no longer translate into numbers.
— The days...
The weight of the arid plains, the closed forests, and the thin mountain air collapsed upon his shoulders all at once. The astronomer bent forward, bracing both hands on the cold earth, surrendering to the void of a once-exact mind.
— All lost.
While the two men crumbled under the weight of failure, swallowed by the oppressive silence that followed the sonic chaos, Alaya remained strangely calm. Her figure stood out against the dark walls of the gorge, imperturbable before the collapse of science and matter. She did not look at the kneeling astronomer, nor at the paralyzed Son of the Earth. Her eyes were lowered. Completely oblivious to the despair around her.
Bhāskara, even sunk in the abyss of his own defeat, was betrayed by his observant nature. His geometric mind, addicted to seeking patterns in disorder, caught the minute movement of Alaya's fingers. She held a small piece of polished wood and slid her thumb over it with attention. The astronomer blinked, sweat burning in his exhausted eyes, and forced his hoarse voice to break through the emptiness of his throat.
— What are you doing?
Alaya raised her face slowly. Her countenance smooth and placid as the surface of an untouched lake.
— Nothing.
But Bhāskara looked again. His vision focused on the piece of wood in her hands. There were marks there. Not accidental scratches or broken splinters, but deep carvings, intentional and perfectly organized. Parallel lines grouped with irrefutable logic. There were many. Countless.
Before he could formulate the confusion that assailed his mind, Alaya brought her hand to the small leather pouch tied at her waist. With fluid movements and without any haste, she opened the binding. From within the satchel, Alaya withdrew several other pieces of wood. A thick handful of them. Each shard displayed columns upon columns of grouped marks, read and stored with frightening rigor.
The astronomer became absolutely motionless. His breath caught in his chest. Despair gave way to a paralyzing shock that froze every muscle in his body.
— What is this? — whispered Bhāskara, his wide eyes darting frantically between the woman's face and the marked pieces of bark.
Alaya held the sage's gaze.
— The walk.
The silence that descended upon the gorge was absolute.
The weight of those two words crushed any trace of reverberation in the rocks. Bhāskara looked at Tribal, who was also staring at the guide with mute, luminous astonishment. The astronomer turned his eyes, now trembling, back to the wood in her hands.
— All of it?
Bhāskara's voice barely rose above an incredulous breath, begging for an anchor in reality. Alaya did not smile. She assumed no theatrical poses nor delivered speeches about the grandeur of her own method. She simply confirmed, with a slow and silent nod of her head. The faint light that managed to penetrate the crevices of the Valley of Echo illuminated the guide's steady hands.
Alaya slid her thumb over the wood, revealing the unbreakable logic her mind had forged in absolute secrecy. There were no complex equations or grandiose speeches, but a rustic, elementary, and purely mechanical system, immune to the fury of the winds that tore parchments and the acoustic illusion that devoured sanity. Every ten fine carvings etched into the bark corresponded to ten exact strides limited by the rope. Ten of those groups formed a hundred, sealed by a transverse line. Ten of those sets, carved with a deep groove at the base, symbolized a thousand. And for each great interval of tens of thousands, a different angular mark crowned the wooden shard. She had cataloged the entire march, transferring the count that Bhāskara once bellowed to the winds into the unalterable safety of matter, in the same continuous manner with which she had been filling the notes of her journey over the months. She had not done this out of doubt for the astronomer's extraordinary intelligence, nor to question the inexhaustible endurance of the Son of the Earth.
Alaya's motivation was born of something far deeper: she knew the nature of men. Having walked the world and watched kingdoms rise and crumble under the weight of their own choices, Alaya knew that the brightest minds still inhabited shells of flesh, fallible before fatigue, despair, and the anomalies of the physical world. A count sustained solely by human conviction was always one breath away from being lost.
Bhāskara remained on his knees on the damp rocks. The intellectual titan, who had recently sworn to imprison the cosmos on paper, faced the simplicity of those pieces of wood. His ego had been shattered by the physics of sound, but the great calculation of the world's circumference was saved. And it had not been rescued by a superior mind or by brute force, but by the virtue most underestimated by men: prudence.
The astronomer swallowed hard. His voice came out rough and choked, completely stripped of his typical poses or theatricality, as he gazed at the woman with a reverence he had never dedicated to any other being.
— Since when?
Alaya tucked the first shard back into the satchel. Her gaze remained calm, serene, and without a drop of arrogance.
— Since the first step.
The reverence lasted the exact time of a heartbeat.