He was almost at the end of the line when he heard the sound. It had escaped his attention the first time because it had blended in with the usual forest sounds and he hadn’t known what to listen for. Now that he knew, it was distinct, if faint. It rose as the threat approached, and he wheeled about yet again, falling silent. He had already yelled to his men that the attack would come from the sky, but he saw now that the warning was of no use whatsoever. The missile that came arcing over the tops of the trees came into sight only a fraction of an instant before it fell sharply to earth, landing on the back of one horse and the front of another, striking a glancing blow to a third horseman a good five yards away—the thing was enormous, at least ten yards across—and the sound of its impact really was like an elephant thumping its foot on the ground. Except that this was no elephant foot, it was a giant pile of animal manure, packed tightly into a ball and flung at them from over the tops of the hundred-yard-tall trees with deadly accuracy.
But flung by what?
There was no time to think. He spurred his mount on with another mantra, riding to the aid of the fallen horseman, trapped beneath his own mount, its head hacked off and pumping gouts of dark blood, everything coated with a thick layer of brownish-black manure streaked with patches of mucousy slime. He leaped off his horse and began putting his shoulder to the fallen horse, which was still jerking spasmodically in its death throes, the gaping neck notwithstanding.
The stench was nauseating and it took all his self-will to avoid turning aside and retching. The man’s leg was crushed, he was saying, and Bejoo was bending over to pull him free, helped now by another half-dozen horsemen who had dismounted and come to their aid, when he heard the sound again.
He raised his head, following the sound. It was a faint whistling, like the burring a wasp might make if flying quickly past one’s ear. But it was much louder this time.
He stood, staring at the sky above the forest, and his blood ran cold.
The sky was filled with the dark disgusting missiles, all headed directly for the clearing in which his Vajra milled about. He counted three, four, five, then blinked as a sixth one followed its predecessors belatedly.
We’re all going to die, smashed to pieces by asura manure!
NINETEEN
‘Rama?’
Lakshman stared at his brother uncertainly. Rama was still in his drawing stance, down on one knee, his bow in his hands, an arrow in its cord. His back was still to Lakshman. But even so, his brother knew that something was wrong, something was terribly wrong here.
Did he really do all this?
The thought came to Lakshman not as a flash of jealousy. There had never really been envy between him and his oldest sibling, at least not the competitive urge to outdo which he felt when racing or competing against Bharat, or even Shatrugan. Only a desire to emulate; to do as Rama did. Or as his mother always put it: he wants to be Rama, he only settles for being Rama’s brother. So his first thought when he saw what Rama had wrought was not envy but desire. I wish I could have done that!
The pile of corpses Lakshman had left strewn across his side was perhaps three deep and ten wide. Thirty, mayhap three dozen corpses in all. He had felt immensely proud when he had risen, heart still pounding with blood-lust, and seen how many of the foe he had brought down single-handed. Thirty bestial attackers! In perhaps as many seconds! With only a shortbow and no place to retreat. Yet he had come off with no wounds—except a scratch or two where a flailing beast had succeeded in pawing or clawing him as it went down in a dead heap—and the enemy had been daunted enough to retreat. It was a victory that bards in winehouses would fight for the right to compose ballads about; a heroic victory.
Or so he’d thought.
The pile before Rama was at least seven or eight deep and perhaps twenty wide. It looked like a small hillock of corpses, piled by some marauding demon in his lair for future consumption. Like the piles of venison, goat and other corpses the royal huntsmen piled up before the kitchens for a royal banquet.
There must have been a hundred and twenty, even a hundred and fifty dead lying there.
The implication was staggering. For every arrow Lakshman had loosed, Rama had loosed five.
But that’s physically impossible! I was drawing so fast, my arm and my cord were a blur. How could anyone draw faster, let alone five times as fast?
Lakshman took a step towards Rama, coming into the periphery of his half-circle sightline, and instantly found Rama’s bow turned to greet him, the notched arrow aimed directly at his throat.
He moved like a hummingbird’s wing! Nobody can move that fast!
The sight of his brother’s face was more shocking than the piles of enemy mounted before him.
Rama was covered with the same gore and gristle that he himself was coated with, the inevitable spatters of animal blood and other bodily fluids. But there was so much more of it that for a moment all Lakshman saw was a gore-painted face with two bright eyes shining in the unnatural dimness of the jungle light.
Those eyes didn’t look like Rama’s. They didn’t even look human. Lakshman blinked, wondering if he was still intoxicated with the battle-lust, or whether the sight of so many monstrous aberrations and mutations had driven his imagination over the edge. Rama’s eyes seemed almost to glow blue. And in that distinct deep bluish glow, there seemed to float motes of golden light, like tiny shimmering stars suspended in a milky blue substance. As he peered at his brother, the golden motes seemed to be alive, moving with a precision and purpose that was alien, unlike anything he’d ever seen. Suddenly, the pile of corpses, the impossibility of Rama’s kills, was forgotten. All he cared about was Rama himself. And he could see that there was something wrong with him. He was about to take a step towards his brother when the seer’s voice cut through the deathly silence.
‘Stop where you are, Lakshman. He will not hesitate to shoot you down as he shot down all those monsters.’
Rama, shoot me down? Impossible! Yet he could see that it was possible. There was no hint of warmth in his brother’s eyes, no sign that he recognised him or cared for him in any way. And that arrow was still pointed at his throat, following his every movement, however tiny, as precisely as if a metal wire connected his jugular vein to the tip of the arrow.
‘Rama?’ he said uncertainly. ‘Put your bow aside. I want to examine you. I fear you may be wounded.’
There was no reply from Rama. The eyes remained fixed, unblinking, their bluish glow unmistakable now. The gold motes swam in their alien patterns, celestial fish in a cosmic emptiness. A statue would have been as responsive.
‘He will not answer you, Lakshman,’ the seer’s voice said. ‘He is caught in the battle fever of Bala and Atibala. You felt some vestige of it too when you fought. The maha-mantras take you over at the moment of crisis and turn you into a perfectly efficient fighting engine. That is what Rama is now, a perfect weapon. Fixed in a state of stasis that will pass once the crisis is truly past. The only reason he does not shoot at you is because he senses your own Brahman flow and essential goodness.’
But he’s a man, a boy really, not a weapon. This is unnatural.
Aloud Lakshman said: ‘But then why am I not in the same state? Why can I think and move freely while he sits there like a bowman’s dummy, aiming at me as if I am one of Tataka’s miscreations?’
The seer sighed. ‘The maha-mantras affect each individual differently. In Rama’s case, they have taken strong root. Fear not, young prince. He will be as you knew him once the danger is over.’
Lakshman looked around at the silent jungle, the masses of dead corpses. ‘But it is over, isn’t it? They attacked and we slaughtered them. There were no more left.’
Vishwamitra shook his head. ‘Sadly, rajkumar, you are wrong. These were only the weakest and least effective of Tataka’s clutch. She sent them first to test your strengths and weaknesses. It is a common battle tactic used when facing a new enemy. The next wave will comprise her best warriors and th
ey will not be as easy to slaughter, nor will they attack in any way you may foresee. Look for yourself. These are mere cubs, not fully mature even by their misshapen standards.’
Lakshman looked and realised that the seer was right. The deformities and bizarre combinations of species had distracted him from seeing this himself; now that he looked closely, he could recognise that the corpses strewn around resembled young beasts. By their colours, their stippling, their only partially formed talons and tusks and horns, he confirmed the truth of the seer’s observation.
‘You said there were no more than half a thousand of them,’ he said, glancing around cautiously now. ‘We faced and killed close to two hundred in that first attack. Almost half of their total numbers.’
The seer had seated himself for a while upon his mandala. Now, he rose to his feet, using his staff for support. ‘Numbers are not always a true indication of an enemy’s strength, rajkumar. These beasts you felled were immature and the weakest of the litter. Also, they were the lesser miscreations of Tataka’s unholy experiments. The berserkers that will attack you in this next wave will be more powerful than anything you have faced or heard of before. These will be mixes of the larger, more lethal predators. Elephant and hawk, lion and rhino, shark and falcon, panther and scorpion, piranha and tiger, vulture and hippo. And besides these hybrids, there will be tribrids and quatribrids and even pentabrids too, the engineering so complex and mangled that Tataka herself barely knows the full capability of those new breeds, and keeps them caged. Even as we speak, they are being freed.’
Lakshman swallowed. ‘Parantu, mahadev, we do not have that many arrows in our quivers! How will we face such vast numbers?’
Vishwamitra gestured impatiently. ‘Arrows? Do not concern yourself with such trivial matters, Rajkumar Lakshman. I have seen to it that your quivers shall never go empty. This is the advantage of being in a place where the laws of nature are so disrupted. Even as it makes it possible for Ravana to work his vile sorcery, it also makes it easier to channel the flow of Brahman. I have used a mantra that ensures that your arrows are replaced faster than you can loose them.’
The sage fell silent for a moment, his eyes shut, listening intently although Lakshman could hear nothing. He saw Rama’s eyes turn sideways for an instant, as if sensing something approaching from that direction. Lakshman looked too, but saw nothing. The jungle stretched yojanas in every direction, seemingly devoid of life. Not even insects or birds stirred. At the very edges of his hearing, he thought he heard something, a very faint sound, like an intensely high-pitched drone. It was more an auditory disturbance than a sound.
Rama’s bow turned away from Lakshman, aimed now towards the south-west. He hears it clearly, while I can barely sense anything. The motes in Rama’s eyes increased their pattern of motion, swirling faster. His eyes glowed bluer, seeming to send out twin searchlights into the gloom of the thick jungle. His lips parted, revealing blood-smeared teeth in a snarl that was so wholly un-Rama-like that Lakshman wondered for a moment what creature this was that had replaced his brother.
The seer opened his eyes and spread his arms wide, crying out. Lakshman saw that Vishwamitra’s eyes were bright blinding blue now, like Rama’s, and flecked with those same swirling golden motes. The motes rose into the air, in the pillar of sunlight that encased the seer’s mandala, spiralling towards the top of the towering trees, reaching for the sky. The sage began reciting a mantra in a piercing tone, shattering the silence of the forest.
||Andh tam pravishanti yeh avidyam upaste||
||Tatho bhuya eeva tey tamo ya u vidyayam ratah||
As the last syllables of the mantra faded away, travelling with shrieking penetration into the depths of the jungle, Lakshman heard the ground-shaking thunder of the next wave approaching.
He fell to his knee, bow in hand, arrow ready, and refocussed his attention on the battle at hand.
***
The screams of dying men almost drowned out the screams of their horses. Almost. Bejoo saw horses and riders go down beneath the descending missiles, smashed into ragged fragments of bone, flesh and gore. Chariots shattered. A chariot struck at the back was upended like a child’s seesaw, the horses thrown backwards into the air, their rigging snapping like cheap thread. They landed with a ripping sound in a thicket of thornbush, impaled on a thousand needle-sharp thorns, and lay screaming and flailing wretchedly, their skin hanging in flaps, crimson flesh bared and bristling with snapped-off thorns. Everywhere lay the stench of manure, the inhuman fetor of waste matter like nothing Bejoo had ever smelt before.
He had his sword in hand, unaware of when he had drawn it. He almost tossed it away in angry despair: how could you fight missiles from the sky with a sword? Even Kosala steel was useless against this onslaught.
Shaneshwara-deva, he cried silently, praying to his patron deity, the god of chariot and vehicle, ship and wagon, He whom the Greeks named Saturn after the great planet ringed by the dust of a thousand shattered worlds. Mighty Shani-deva, grant me a chance to fight the craven perpetrators of this onslaught. Give me death if you will, but a Kshatriya’s death. Not this defenceless butchery.
As if in response to his plea, he heard a new sound from behind, accompanied by a trembling sensation in the ground. It was the trumpeting of elephants.
He turned and saw Bheriya riding hard at the head of the elephant squad. The young lieutenant’s face was dark with fury as he surveyed the ruins of their proud Vajra. Behind him, the bigfoot squad’s lead elephant mahout spurred his beast on with a vigour rarely seen.
Now we have a fighting chance! Thank you, Shani-deva!
Bejoo leaped back on to his horse and raised his sword high, pointing it at the dense woods, shouting to be heard over the noise and confusion.
‘Bigfoot! Into the jungle!’
The lead bigfoot thundered past his horse, its eyes rolling, trunk swirling from side to side. It led its fellows in a headlong charge at the trees. The sound of it striking the first tree-trunk was almost drowned out by the crashing of a new wave of missiles. A razor-sharp fragment of a shield from some unfortunate charioteer whisked past Bejoo’s ear, nicking off the lobe. He wasn’t even aware of the blood pouring down the side of his head. He only had eyes for the elephants’ charge.
Let it work, Shani-deva. Let the bigfoot break through. Much as I hate to die this way, yet I will choose to die here beneath this assault than retreat and leave my duty unfulfilled.
The lead elephant struck the first trunk with a loud crack like a twig breaking, or a spine snapping. The tree keeled over easily, bringing down a ragged line of its fellows with it, raising a cloud of dust and leaves that enveloped the animal. Missiles continued to rain down, claiming more lives and limbs. Without waiting for the dust to clear, Bejoo raised his sword again and repeated his cry, this time for his horsemen and charioteers.
‘Into the woods! With me, into the woods!’
He rode into the cloud of dust after the bigfoot, into the Bhayanak-van.
***
They came slowly this time, seething like a living, writhing carpet across the jungle floor. Lakshman saw how easily they clung to the soft rotting soil, their jagged claws and talons digging deeply without effort. They could have burrowed under like their siblings had done in the first wave, tunnelling down and then upwards again until they exploded from the surface.
But they chose to show themselves, seeping across the forest like a plague of termites. The seer had spoken truly: compared to these ones, the earlier beasts had been balaks, mere babes. These were much bigger, some towering three and four yards high at the head, their snouted grey heads reflecting their elephantine parentage. Even the smaller ones moved with powerful ease, their actions and features more mature, more sure. They seemed unafraid of his arrows, and even though he sent a flurry into their midst, most only snarled and kept on coming. He pierced both eyes of a beast that was part-stoat part-gharial, but it continued to writhe silently towards him, flicking its leathery tail
from side to side, yellow pus-like emissions seeping from around the arrows embedded deep within its sockets. He downed a couple or three, aided more by blind luck than skill. But the wave of furred and carapaced monstrosities seethed on relentlessly, coming closer by the yard.
He took a moment to glance over his shoulder at Rama. His brother was firing with deceptive calm, each arrow carefully aimed. His bolts unerringly found the vital spot in their targets, making the animals turn belly up and bleating, or fall gasping in their tracks. Every arrow ended a life. Rama shot with a patience that was marvellous to watch; as if the oncoming beasts were merely straw dummies on which to practise his aim. He seemed not to care or fear how little his accuracy was thinning their numbers.
Lakshman glanced at the seer. The brahmarishi was silent now, as if waiting for something, his eyes staring at a point above the heads of the approaching beasts.
PRINCE OF DHARMA Page 42