RAMAYANA SERIES Part 4_KING OF DHARMA

by AKB eBOOKS Ashok K. Banker

  “Milady, soldiers!” cried the voice, with rising terror. “They—”

  And then the horrible yet unmistakeable sound of a javelin punching through breastbone and flesh, and the wet splatter of bodily content out the other side, followed a moment later by the dull sound of a body falling to the ground.

  Sita dropped the veena and sprang to her feet, racing for the back of the hut, reaching for the discreet hole in the ground artfully concealed with straw and covered by a tribal shawl, where she kept her weapons. For she had known that someday this moment would come. She had not expected it to be today. But if it was to be so, then she was prepared for it.

  ***

  Kush watched in irritated amazement as Sarama and her brood, rather than viciously mauling and attacking the bearkillers, greeted them with adulation and joy instead. They ran from one to the other, wagging their tails, barking and yapping loudly. Sarama herself stood up on her hind legs and actually licked the face of the leader of the gang, who in turn rubbed her shaggy head and back affectionately and whispered sweet words to her. This went on for a few moments as Luv and he watched with growing pique and frustration. He wanted to send an arrow or three through the greasy hands patting the dogs and send the lot of them fleeing for their lives, but there was no call to do so. He loosened the pressure on the bow string, lowering the bow but keeping the arrow still in place, and glanced over at his brother. Luv rolled his eyes and shook his head in disgust, clearly as irritated as he was. They would both be having a word with Sarama about whom she lavished her affections on. Of all the aranya outlaws to befriend, she had to wag her tail at Bearkillers!

  The leader of the gang had crouched down to greet the pack. Now that their intiial excitement had subsided, he rose slowly to his feet and spoke. He pitched the words in Kush’s direction with surprising accuracy.

  “I see you,” he said in a voice loud enough to be heard by both twins, but not loud enough to carry much further. “Do not be afraid, we mean you no harm. We are friends of your Guru Ratnakaran.”

  Ratnakaran? Kush glanced at Luv again. Luv shrugged but raised his bow slowly, cocking an eyebrow to let Luv know that they were not to trust these fellows so easily.

  “Our guru’s name is Valmiki,” Kush called back in as insolent a tone as he could muster. “And bearkillers can never be friends of our’s.”

  The man chuckled, revealing two blackened teeth in the top row. He glanced back at his gang. “You hear that, people? We can never be their friends!”

  There were titters of laughter from the group.

  Kush sent an arrow past the man’s face, close enough to snip off a tiny lock of his hair and let him feel the wind of the sharpened iron blade whistle past his temple. It went home in the trunk of a teak tree with a dull thwock.

  The bearkiller lost his smile. His hand clapped to the side of his head, he said, much louder now: “Stop that! We said we’re friends, didn’t we?”

  “Go tell that to all the bears you’ve killed,” Kush replied. Luv had left his spot and was circling around behind the gang. After all, they had spotted Kush somehow and his position was confirmed by his speaking, but they might not still know where Luv had been. “Especially all the little cubs, and the mothers protecting them. Tell them you were just trying to be friends.”

  “We haven’t killed any bears,” said another voice. A woman came forward. She had a face marred by heavily pockmarked cheeks and there was something odd about her singlet and the way she held her bow that Kush could not make out right away. “We’re not really bearkillers. We’re outlaws.”

  Kush laughed. “That makes me feel much better now. You only murder men, women and children, not bears, is that right?”

  “We don’t kill anybody!” said the first bearkiller, the leader. “Unless they come around trying to kill us first!”

  “Yes, well, we have the same policy. So if you’ll take your weapons and move on, we don’t want any trouble here, if you please.” Kush considered snipping an errant lock of hair on the man’s right side, to balance the one snipped on the left, then decided against it. He was keeping them occupied while giving Luv time to circle to their rear, not aiming to provoke an all-out fight. He wasn’t scared of facing this bunch, he just didn’t think they were worth the arrows.

  “Listen, you snotty nosed little fellow—” started the leader, then stopped as the pockmarked woman raised a hand and said something in his ear. “All right, Ragini, you give it a try.” He settled for glowering in the direction that Kush’s voice was coming from.

  The woman he had called Ragini raised both her hands to show her open palms. She took several steps forward, causing Kush to immediately take aim at her: “Please, believe me. We are not bearkillers or brigands in the sense that you mean. We do not murder people to steal their belongings. We are outlaws banished a long time ago to the aranya for various offenses—some unjustly laid accusations, and some genuine crimes as well. But none of that matters now. We are here to warn you and assist you. And we must move quickly as time is scarce.”

  Kush suddenly realized what was odd about the woman’s singlet and the way she held her bow. Her chest was bumpy only on one side—it was flat on the other side, the side on which lay the arm with which she pulled her bow-string. He had heard about this from Nakhudi and seen women archers on the raj-marg who had also sliced off one side of their chests in similar fashion. It was the unmistakable sign of a true archer, one who had sacrificed a part of her own flesh in order to be able to hold and pull a bow-string as perfectly as possible. It gave him a little more respect for her.

  But he still kept the arrow pointed.

  “Whoever you are,” he called out, “we don’t need your warning or your help. Move on. This is your last warning.”

  A bird call joined the various sounds of the forest, sustained just a little longer than the gurung liked to call. That meant Luv was in position and they were ready to take on the bearkillers in a two-way crossfire. Kush’s finger ached to release the arrow, not because holding the string taut for so long was hard, which it was, but because he was suspicious of the motives of these ruffians.

  Pockmarked Ragini shook her head. “No, you don’t understand. We are the only ones who can help you now. It was Maharishi Valmiki’s last wish that we should take charge of you and raise you as best as we could in case anything should happen to him. And your mother wanted the same. Will you not heed the last words of your own mother and guru?”

  Last words? A chill blade slashed through Kush’s nether regions, forcing him to lower the bow and loosen his hold on the string. If there was anything the bearkillers could possibly say that would cause him to lower his guard, that was it. What did she mean? Surely she didn’t mean that Gurudev and Maatra were…?

  “THEY LIE, KUSH! Do not fall for their trick! Attack now!”

  The voice was Luv’s and it came from the rear of the bearkillers. Kush had never known his brother to give away his position before—nor had he himself ever done so—but he also knew from the way he felt after hearing the woman Ragini’s words that Luv was hugely upset, and angry. And that, like him, he had come to the natural conclusion.

  Wretched bearkillers attacked the ashram and killed everyone!

  He raised his bow again, pulling the arrow tighter than before, taking aim not on the pockmarked woman’s shoulder as he had earlier but at her throat now. One more incensing word from her and she would be dead before the air left her lungs.

  But before he could loose, a sound came to them from across the tree tops. A sound that he knew well, for Luv and he had often produced that same sound too, practising it until Maharishi Valmiki was satisfied that they could do so even under duress and at a sufficiently loud volume to be heard miles away from the ashram.

  It was the sound of a conch shell trumpet, issuing the call that signaled the ashram was in mortal distress.

  FIVE

  Nakhudi fought the rising sense of outrage and fury that threatened to engulf her
as she walked through the settlement. The rational part of her mind reminded her that she ought to have been more circumspect and circled the village first, making sure that none of the attackers were still around. But once she had seen and smelled the horror that was all that remained of her people, all rational thought had fled her mind.

  And if they were still around, she would dearly love to meet them face to face! And to do more than simply ask them how and why they could massacre an entire settlement—her grama, as Bejoo had aptly called it—of impoverished forest dwelling people, the majority of whom were women, children and elderly. Barely a fourth of them had been men of fighting age and fitness, and even those had been no match for the strength and weaponry of trained Ayodhyan soldiers. The hundred-odd people with whom she had resided here in this little clearing, sharing food, clothing, shelter, resources as readily as members of one large extended family, had been outcasts—some literally out-caste, forced out from Ayodhya itself following the rise of the subtle but increasingly belligerent bias against lower castes and mixed castes that had begun in recent years, others criminals and outlaws with broken bodies and battered minds who had been released from the dungeons and prisons of the great shining capital city in some generous fit of amnesty, yet were unemployable due to the years or decades of disease, privation and abuse endured in their incarceration.

  The irony of the system of justice meted out by the current regime was that while the hardened criminals stayed on in the city to pursue illicit trades, those who had had their bellyfull of crime and punishment, and were therefore rehabilitated in the truest sense of the term, preferred to leave the city that had been so harsh to them and retreated into self-imposed exile from the glories of Arya civilization. Each year, more and more severely punished people, some brutalized for the most minor of offenses, ended up in ashrams or settlements such as this one. Sometimes, a few found companionship, camaraderie, even love and kinship over time, and slowly, painfully, the wounds of their own past misdemeanours and the terrible dandas initiated, enforced and inflicted under the iron rule of the King of Dharma, healed partially. They were hardly people in the proud ‘Arya’ sense of the word, but they had been people once, and they were human still. And most of all, alive. Or at least they had been until a few days ago, when she had left this settlement, filling the crisp forest air with the spicy aroma of their cookfires, their laughter and rough talk. These had been simple people; broken people even, bent down and battered by the might and power of Rama’s rigid interpretations of dharma and the consequences of straying from that hard path, but still people.

  Now, they were just corpses. Food for the vermin and the worms.

  She walked through the smoking, scorched, broken, cracked and battered ruins of the score of humble thatch-and-mud huts that had served as the domiciles of those dregs of society. Each reluctant step took her past a new horror: children lying in one another’s arms or their mother’s embrace, eyes open and filled with blood, faces splattered with the effluents of their own or loved ones’ gaping wounds, severed limbs, speared bodies, butchered corpses…Tears slipped past her iron veil of self-control and spilled from her eyes as she recognized faces, profiles, or, in some awful cases, limbs and tattered garments. From the way the bodies were strewn and cut down, it was obvious that the attack had been sudden, brutal and swift. Many of the fatal cuts had been inflicted on the backs of the heads and torsos of the victims, suggesting that they had been turning away or running from the attackers. Around her, the looming trees and lush forest seemed to echo with the memories of screams and pitiful cries that must have rung out only hours earlier. She could almost hear familiar voices, crying out in anguish and mortal terror.

  She paused when she saw a living figure up ahead, her sword already out and ready, rising to deal out the vengeance she ached to deliver, but realized at once that it was only Bejoo. The vajra captain looked sallow faced and as grim as she felt, his grizzled jaw tight with his own anger. His eyes met her’s then cut away at once in shame. She might not think of herself as Ayodhyan, or even as “Arya” in the purest sense of the term, but he did, and she could see that it pained him greatly to witness such dishonourable butchery committed by fellow Aryas, let alone fellow Ayodhyans.

  He had circled around as instructed by her—she could see the other men holding back in the trees, probably on his orders—and was examining a dozen-odd corpes laying in a ragged line on the ground. This was the rough pathway that led eventually to the raj-marg, or Mithila Road, as it was called by her people, and it was the direction from which the attackers had surely come.

  He crouched down beside one body, which she recognized with a small shock as having been Nandu, the white-haired elder who functioned as a kind of roughshod chief of the little community. He was examining the footmarks on the ground and reading the trail. She crouched beside him, steeling herself to ignore the stench of the corpses, left out in the open for at least a day and already ripening, and read the signs as well.

  “There were a great many of them,” she said, “at least a hundred healthy heavily armed men on horseback.”

  She rose and walked further up the winding trail that led through natural gaps in the trees. Forest folk followed an unwritten covenant not to cut down healthy trees merely to make way for themselves; they respected the forest too much for that. As it was, the forest made way for them to live in it and supported their existence. The least they could do was protect and serve it as best as possible. This meant that the trail was a long winding one that did not follow any of the usual geometrical patterns of man-made roads. It also made riding along it on horseback a challenge—unless one knew the way intimately.

  “They came down the trail, riding quickly without stopping.” She glanced at Bejoo as she spoke, walking quickly as she continued to read the signs on the trees and ground—snapped branches, cracked twigs, hoofprints embedded in mulch, chipped bark on a tree trunk where the edge of a sheathed weapon had nicked it accidentally while passing, a hundred other indicators that she could read as clearly as a brahmin could interpret Sanskrit neatly printed on a scroll.

  Bejoo nodded to show he understood: for such a large group, so heavily burdened, to have come through this winding forest “path” on horseback at such a speed, meant that they had a guide who knew the way. Her grama had been betrayed. By whom? And why?

  “They were here for one reason only, to slaughter,” she said, for it was evident that the attackers had left as soon as they were done killing every last man, woman and child in the settlement. “The men of the grama tried to mount a resistance, to draw the attackers away from their families, but were encircled in a chakravyuh and slaughtered to the last man.”

  Bejoo nodded. As a veteran ex-military man, he knew that a chakravyuh—a complex encircling attack technique—was unique to Arya military forces. It confirmed that the attackers were not merely some armed gang of bandits or marauders passing by, but heavily armed and healthy soldiers on well-fed mounts come here for the express purpose of murdering the entire village.

  Nakhudi’s trail-reading had taken the better part of an hour and led her on a winding route around and to the south-west of the settlement. She was aware of Bejoo’s men following them discretely, spread out through a wide swathe of forest, the better to ensure that they were not encircled and trapped or ambushed by the same attackers. She was glad for his presence and his military acumen, for right now, her entire consciousness and being were filled with only the raging desire for vengeance.

  “And once their butchery was done,” she said, pausing beside a tree with a low-hanging branch on which several twigs had been snapped and lay, freshly broken and trampled by horse hooves on the beaten ground below, “they did not go back the way they came. Instead, they took this route, towards…”

  She broke off, her eyes widening, heart racing. Her sword hand rose, fist tightening on the pommel. She sensed Bejoo react, turning to look at her in evident alarm.

  “What?” he asked
. “Speak, woman!”

  “Guru Valmiki’s ashram,” she said. “They are headed for the ashram!”

  And then she began running.

  ***

  Sita knew better than to go running out of her hut—straight into the waiting blades of the enemy. For no matter who or why they were, the screams and unmistakeable sounds of weaponry and slaughter from outside clearly announced that enemies were in the ashram. She had faced violent opposition frequently and regularly enough in her life not to waste time questioning the how, why and wherefore of it, merely to act in a manner designed to ensure her own survival and the survival of those she loved.

  Which was why she did not run across the threshold of her hut.

  Instead, she kicked aside the earthen pot of water she used for drinking and cleaning hands and faces, shattering it with one expert blow, and pushed at the thatched panel at the bottom of the back wall. It rose up on a hinge made from two sections of half-bamboo ingeniously interlocked to allow just so much movement in one direction, opening an exit just large enough for her to crawl through – more than sufficient for her sons to slip through.

  She went through with practiced ease, her slender form in better physical condition than it had ever been in her life. Not quite the hard, overworked lithely muscular form of her days in Janasthana or Chitrakut, but nevertheless slim, fit and strong enough to fight to save her own life and the lives of her sons if they needed saving.

  Or the lives of others.