The Shallow Ford

Sudas is twenty-four, king of the Bharatas, and his people are starving. They have crossed two rivers to reach the grass of the Parushni, and now ten kings have gathered to finish them: Purus, Anus, Druhyus, Turvashas, the hill peoples and more, a half ring of fires closing on a camp with its back to the water.

Then the river begins to fall.

Every morning the ford is lower. His new priest, the singer in white, says Indra is answering. His old priest, the man who once talked two rivers into letting the Bharatas cross, has gone over to the kings and curses him by name across the water. His scout keeps coming back from the far bank with things a king would rather not hear. And Sudas, who was raised to believe that a king is only what is sung of him, must decide what he is willing not to know.

The Shallow Ford is the first of the Ten Kings novels, set in the war remembered in the Rig Veda, the oldest of India's sacred books. It is a story of hunger and faith, of the friend a king loses on the way to winning, and of a song that will outlast them all.