PRINCE IN EXILE

by AKB eBOOKS Ashok K. Banker

  The mist grew denser, but glimpses of bulging iron-encircled arms, snouts, eyes, limbs, and the dull gleam of battered armour left no doubt that the horde had only retreated, not left.

  Rama spoke again, scornful. ‘Now that we are face to-face at last, you fear to test my strength. So you retreat without even attempting an assault.’

  Trisiras glared resentfully at Rama. His three pairs of eyes burned like live embers in a bed of grey ash. But he emitted no response to the mortal’s challenge.

  ‘Go then,’ Rama said disdainfully. ‘Skulk back to your lair, tail between your legs, and sip on warm breastmilk. When you have grown some courage and chest-hair, I will seek you out and end your line.’ He flicked a hand dismissively. ‘Chirra.’

  Trisiras roared, tearing a hole in the thick silence that followed that last epithet. ‘Chirra?’ he howled. ‘Chirra?’

  A thin smile curled Rama’s lips. ‘Holar chirra.’

  With a bellow that shook rainwater from leaves for a dozen yards around, Trisiras issued a single-word command to his horde, repeating it over and over. ‘Attack! Attack!’

  The rakshasa frontline surged forward, baring their tusks and fangs, and gaping wide their purple slime-strung mouths as they roared their fury. As one, they left the misty shade of the forest and thundered towards the clearing, straight at the mortals.

  The watcher in the trees stared wide-eyed as the rakshasa rank broke cover and charged into the clearing. He cringed, covering his eyes to avoid watching the slaughter that must surely follow. Was this what Rama had desired? To provoke the leader of those brutes? Why else had he stopped him in his retreat and insulted him by calling him a ‘chirra’, a hairless pre-pubescent child! And then, to add salt to the injury, by calling Trisiras ‘holar chirra’, literally, a hairless breastfeeding infant! Few insults could provoke a rakshasa more effectively.

  But still, the tree-dweller’s faith in the mortal was unshakeable. He clung excitedly to his treetop and watched as the rakshasa circle closed in upon the clearing, seeking to squeeze the life out of every last mortal trapped in that open, defenceless space. Surely Rama had some plan in mind.

  Trisiras roared with white-hot rage as his ranks charged the few dozen yards that separated them from the mortals. The humans were pitifully few compared to his numbers. And most of them appeared to be younguns and olduns. It was barely worthy of a fight, but he could not stand by and brook being insulted by the Ayodhyan. Now he was owed blood-due. Supanakha would surely get her ‘husband’, but only after Trisiras had extracted the price for calling him that name. Holar chirra indeed!

  He roared again and drove his horde onwards, only his iron sense of discipline compelling him to stand back and observe the first assault as befitted a general.

  The mortal ranks were engulfed by the very shadows of the bellowing, towering hulks bearing down upon them. Although several of them were armed with arrow-ready bows, none of them had sense enough to raise them and unloose the arrows. Instead, Trisiras observed with malicious pleasure, they merely stood and gaped with white-eyed terror at the approaching maelstrom. Even those with swords let their blades hang limply by their sides, unable to summon the strength to raise them in their own life-defence. Why, this was a slaughter fit only for cubs!

  Trisiras’s snouts twisted in a sneer. He would make Rama squeal for mercy now.

  This thought passed in the fraction of a moment, in the mere breath of time it took his rakshasas to sprint the yards to the green, grassy ground of the clearing. Even as he took in the utter unpreparedness of the mortals, a pair of his eyes swung towards the mound, to the man who was at the heart of this whole conflict.

  He was just in time to catch Rama shouting a single command, audible even above the bellowing cacophony of the rakshasa charge, and to glimpse Lakshman’s right hand falling sharply, as if fulfilling a preset signal.

  The word Rama shouted was, ‘Release!’

  And then everything was transformed to madness.

  The instant Rama yelled and Lakshman dropped his hand, a hundred pairs of human hands working in tandem let fly axes, chopping knives, swords, and every other available blade from the exiles’ meagre store of resources. The mortals were all up in the trees that rimmed the clearing, concealed from the eyes of the rakshasas whose attention had been riveted only upon the humans in the open clearing until now. Their blades cut deep and true into thick vine-made ropes, slicing through them instantly.

  The ropes swung free of the trunks of the trees to which they had been bound, their strength strained to the limit by the weight of the enormous loads that they carried. These loads were sawed-off trunks of trees, enormous chunks of oak and ash that had been cut with painstaking labour and carried down from the higher thickets on the sides of the redmist mountains, five miles distant. There were some fifty of them all round the clearing, each one raised up laboriously by rope-pulleys and secured in preparation for this exact moment. As Rama watched now with pounding heart, the rain-soaked ropes screamed as each of the halfton-heavy loads fell in a crescent arc, swinging outwards from the clearing. They swung low, to barely a foot above the ground, like battering rams at a fortress gate.

  Rama watched as one of the rams swung directly at a line of ferociously charging rakshasas, striking them with the impact of a hammer pounding nails. The rakshasas were smashed to near-pulp, launched backwards as if shot from bows, and flew crashing through the woods to land dozens of yards away, shattered to pieces. The same scene was repeated fifty times around the clearing, as each swinging ram found its mark, taking two or three, and in some cases where the charging ranks were bunched up closer, as many as a half-dozen rakshasas out of the fray. The combined sound of this onslaught echoed through the clearing like fifty hammers being pounded at once, accompanied by the wheezing, gasping sound of air being knocked out of a couple of hundred rakshasa lungs.

  But still the charge came on. As a boy, Rama had heard it said by the Purana Wafadars who were the sole surviving veterans of the last Asura Wars, that only one thing could stop a rakshasa charge—annihilation. To the rakshasas who had been untouched by the swinging oak-loads, the tactic only served to make them angrier. They roared on, snouts spewing boarish bellows and gooey effluents.

  It was exactly what Rama had counted on.

  He needed to give no command this time. For, the second line of defence he had created needed only one thing to be activated—the weight of the charging rakshasas.

  Trisiras snorted suspiciously as the gloomy mist-laden woods darkened further. His heads swung upwards just in time to see oak-loads swinging towards his ranks like malicious pendulums. He watched with roaring disbelief as the swinging hammers pounded gaping holes in his frontline, decimating scores of his warriors in the blink of an eye. But while the sheer unexpectedness and effectiveness of the tactic stunned him, it did not stop him or his charging horde.

  He ignored the bloody offal spattered across his right and centre heads and twisted his body out of reach of a swinging ram that passed a foot or two to his right. As the ram reached the end of its trajectory—and before it could start to swing backwards—Trisiras had grasped it in his powerful arms. He roared to the rakshasas around him and they joined him, adding their weight to his own. Pulling together, they ripped the length of the tree trunk out of its sling. The chunk of ashwood spattered mud upon Trisiras and he roared even louder, turning to show his horde his contempt for the mortals’ petty tactics, urging them on towards the slaughter that was still theirs for the taking. That was the essence of the rakshasa way: to turn each loss into a goad to fight back harder.

  The losses did not worry him. In a way, it was only honourable to lose some of his own in exchange for the blood-harvest they would reap here today.

  The rakshasa frontline, momentarily disoriented by the unexpected ploy, followed Trisiras’s example, tearing down the swinging rams, bringing down several humans with them as well—one unfortunate fellow fell screaming into a mass of rakshasas and wa
s torn limb to limb in an instant. Then they turned back to face the clearing and resumed their charge undeterred. As they sucked in the blood of their fellows, spattered across their snouts and visages, they roared with rage and the longing for revenge. At Trisiras’s call, they pounded forward with greater force than before. The rakshasa horde came swarming out of the misty jungle, hearts bloated with bloodlust.

  Their pounding hooves left the cloying mud of the forest and fell heavily onto the firm turf of the clearing.

  And then fell through the ground, carrying them into the earth.

  Into the five-yard-deep pit specially prepared by Rama’s people and concealed cleverly by laying carefully cut sods of turf over flimsy bamboo rigging that was sufficient to support and uphold the deception even through the rainstorm, but nowhere near sufficient to take the weight of charging rakshasas. As Trisiras watched with outraged disbelief, his entire frontline vanished in a blink of an eye and a crackling of bamboo rigging. In two beats of a pounding rakshasa heart, they were gone.

  After a moment’s pause, a subdued, ragged cheer rose from the mortals in the clearing, and in the trees.

  FIVE

  Supanakha shrieked with delight as the rakshasa frontline vanished into the cleverly concealed pits. The rakshasi leaped from the branch of the tree on which she had been perched, landing on the side of an ash-trunk battering ram that had fallen near Trisiras. The general was silent with rage, his three heads turning this way and that, eyes bulging disbelievingly as he witnessed the impossible.

  ‘My husband,’ she purred, ‘is a hard one to beat.’

  Trisiras turned one baleful set of eyes on her, his fist rising instinctively to strike. Instead, he turned and yelled an order to the mist-shrouded woods. A moment later, a clutch of rakshasas trundled out of the mistbank. Their eyes bulged with disbelief, nostrils flaring wetly.

  Trisiras cuffed them and kicked them forward. They went with resentful growls, dropping to all fours as they approached the edge of the pit into which their frontline comrades had fallen. In another moment, they returned with their report.

  ‘Stakes,’ they hissed disgustedly. ‘Skewered like bears in a pit.’ One of them added foolishly: ‘Clever mortals.’

  Trisiras flicked his axe carelessly, lopping off the head of the mortal-admirer without even a sideward glance. The rakshasa’s head splashed into a muddy puddle, his headless neck spewing dark gouts of blood before the body collapsed at Trisiras’s feet. The general kicked the body aside and issued terse commands to the growling, confused warriors. They fled back into the mists to convey his orders, issuing fearstench thick enough to make Supanakha gag.

  She leaped down from the ash trunk and lapped thirstily at the spewing arteries of the decapitated soldier. It had been awhile since she had tasted the blood of her own kind. So much richer and spicier than the pale, treacly fluid that ran through mortal veins. She wondered what the blood of Rama’s mortal mate would taste like—and his brother’s.

  Trisiras loomed over her, grabbing her furry back with his hamsized fists. He swung her high, almost to head-level, yet was wily enough to keep her at arm’s length, out of claw-reach. She flailed, slashing him a glancing swipe on his forearm. He ignored the cut, holding her easily. She was woefully lean. The past years had been hard on her, vengeance-consumed as she was. Thirteen years ago, she would have given Trisiras the fight of his life. Now, she could only dangle like a hissing, spitting cat and listen.

  ‘Heed me well, sister. I know not what other tricks your mortal has in store for me and my horde today. But whatever they may be, I will break his defences and clutch his pretty neck in my fist before the day is through. Doubt it not!’

  She giggled. ‘You stink of doubt. I can smell it on your—’

  ‘Silence, shrew! Look at you. You were once the most coveted, most feared rakshasi in all the clans. Now you are a pale, bony wreck of a creature, half out of her senses, barely aware of day or night. You have no right to judge me or my warriors. It is for your honour we fight, to restore your lost pride, and avenge your humiliation. All for a solitary mortal that you lusted for so foolishly.’

  She was silent, her lips curling. How dare he? How dare he talk to her thus? He had not followed Rama from the mangorife banks of the Sarayu through the thickets of Ananga-ashrama, observing every smooth curve of his body, every handsome line of his face, every gesture, movement, mood and expression until you felt as if you had known him all your life—nay, all your past lives. To know Rama was to desire him. But she did not tell Trisiras all these things. To him, war and vengeance were the only things that mattered. He knew nothing of the inner workings of the heart and how rage and war-lust were often merely the darker sides of desire spurned or frustrated.

  ‘All those warriors who died, the finest boar-rakshasas that ever fought,’ he went on, spattering her with his spittle, ‘died for the sake of your foolish love, sister. Remember you that.’

  She hissed, swiping at his eyes, any of them. But he was too quick for her weakened muscles, leaning back easily to avoid the ranging claws. ‘You will lose,’ she said spitefully. ‘He will crush you out of existence, every last one of you.’

  He kept all six eyes riveted to the spitting, writhing mask of hatred that was her face. ‘If you believe that to be so, then why do you tarry here still? Go! Go to the island-kingdom and seek out your great brother, lord of Lanka! Bow your head to Ravana. Ask him to avenge your honour!’

  She snarled, struggling to free herself from his vice-like grip. ‘Ravana is no more. Lanka is a burned-out husk. The alliance of asura races is ended. My husband was responsible for that as well! That is the only reason why I am forced to place my honour and vengeance in your puny hands. Do you think I would have wasted these past thirteen years waiting in this wilderness watching you and my cousins bash your blunt heads against Rama’s sharp wits if Ravana were still lord of Lanka? I would have been gone in a flash, seeking out not only justice and vengeance, but the annihilation of all of Rama’s mortal bloodline. What good are your six eyes if you cannot see that much, Trisiras!’

  Trisiras’s mouths opened, trailing lines of spittle. They snapped with a sound like the jaws of a bear-trap shutting. With a rage fuelled as much by his grief at losing half his army in one moments-long charge as by the years of frustration at hunting and being hunted by this mortal thorn in his side, Trisiras flung her away, so violently that she flew like a bird on the wing, her flight cut short by a tree trunk, with an impact hard enough to knock her unconscious.

  The watcher in the trees gibbered with joy at the results of Rama’s martial genius. He leaped and danced on a tree branch, exulting in the mortal victory. What a sight! Ah, he would have a tale to tell when he returned home to his lord. He wished again that his master was here with him, that all his brethren were here, to witness the ingenuity of the Kshatriya. They thought that mortals were all foolish, blundering beings who only knew how to use brute strength to force their will upon their own kind. Seeing this they would have to believe that mortals could be as shrewd as … well, as vanars!

  He looked down at the pit below his tree. Rakshasas writhed and struggled within it, several of them skewered on the yard-long wooden stakes set at regular intervals at the bottom, their own weight driving the stakes deeper the more they struggled. The few rakshasas who had escaped being skewered gazed up furiously at the high walls of their new prison. A pair of them made a bridge for a third one to climb up on, but the slushy rain-washed sides and bottom of the pit made it impossible to gain any kind of hold. All three rakshasas fell back into the pit, howling with frustration. All around the clearing, the flailing hands and heads of rakshasas were faintly visible reaching up to the empty air. The clearing was filled with their frustrated howls.

  Then, as he watched, Rama’s people rushed forward, bows ready. He saw young boys, girls, women, old ones, all those who had not been strong enough to climb the trees and do the heavy work, aiming their crude bows at the fallen rakshasas. T
hey began to loose arrows, finishing off the skewered rakshasas, wounding and then killing the others. The onslaught of arrows took a deadly toll. It was a slaughter, like the slaughter the rakshasas must have taken for granted when they found the mortals trapped in the apparently defenceless clearing, and for that reason, it was bearable. The mortals were outnumbered, outmatched, by any standards. They were entitled to use any means to even the odds. Still, the watcher turned his face away rather than look.

  That was when he saw what the general of the rakshasas was about to do.

  The watcher was high in the uppermost branches of a hundred-foot tree, high above even the mortals who hung from their vine cradles and rigging, so he had the best view of the battlefield. He had enough knowledge of military tactics to see and understand at once what the rakshasa general’s move meant.

  He gibbered in frustration, wanting desperately to warn Rama, but bound against doing so by his own master’s explicit orders.

  Rama needed no warning. He had already mapped out all possible courses of the battle in his mind months earlier, long before the elaborate planning and backbreaking labour had begun. This move on the part of the rakshasas was one of the first, most obvious counter-moves he had anticipated. He watched from his position on the mound as rakshasas ran about roaring and grunting in the mist-shrouded forest, blades flashed, and trees shuddered beneath their powerful blows.

  Lakshman turned to him, a broad grin on his weathered face. ‘Bhai, they’re cutting down the trees. Just as we expected.’

  Sita released a long-held breath. ‘Then all is going according to plan.’

  ‘So far,’ Rama said shortly, walking forward. ‘Bearface, get your people back.’

  Bearface was standing at the eastern rim, a spear in hand, next to a pair of grey-haired warriors with bows working furiously. A chorus of outraged howls rose from within the pit before them. As Rama watched, an arrow found its mark and the wounded rakshasi in the pit screamed shrilly. Bearface raised his spear, shouting a warning. ‘Careful, they mean to—’