PRINCE OF DHARMA

by AKB eBOOKS Ashok K. Banker

  He saw now that the rajkumar was no longer just hacking down creatures methodically as he had been doing before. He was aiming to inflict the most pain possible. Bejoo watched as Rama cut down two creatures in quick succession, leaving both with terrible mortal injuries, then moving on to other prey. Bejoo dispatched both beasts, wincing as one actually bared its pale white belly to allow him to finish it off. He’s not himself. This is not Prince Rama fighting beside me. This is a creation of the sage, a man possessed by some Brahmanical sorcery.

  The battle raged on around them. His horsemen and chariots had ridden into the thick of it and were happy to be able to have an enemy they could fight face to face. Bejoo caught glimpses of spears and maces working, smashing bones and piercing hides. Cries of ‘Jai Shaneshwara!’ rang out each time a Vajra Kshatriya downed a monster. The creatures took some lives too, their bizarre anatomies momentarily catching his men unawares.

  In sheer numbers, the animals outnumbered the humans, but Rama’s relentless jagganath-like slaughter rate was fast equalling the odds. What had seemed at first sight an impossible scenario now seemed a winnable battle. And the elephants were joining in now as well. They had balked at first, seeing their own species and their cousin-species among the mutated beasts, but their mahouts had used mantras to calm and convince the bigfoot and they were rallying now. As Bejoo glanced back in a respite between opponents, he saw the lead bigfoot smash his way into the thick of the fight, crushing beasts underfoot and wielding a specially designed weapon attached to his trunk: a lightning-shaped length of metal that sliced without snagging or sticking, identical to the vajra on their banner. Everywhere he looked, the asura monstrosities were being cut down and slaughtered. Rama was no longer the only one wreaking a savage toll.

  As if sensing their imminent defeat, the beasts had begun turning tail, cut down as they retreated step by step into the forest. Some were agile enough to dance back and lead their pursuers on individual chases, screeching in frustration when the Vajra horsemen or chariot caught up with them. They’re falling back. It’s over. Bejoo fought harder than ever, the wall of fur and claws breaking before him. Beside him, Rama blazed on remorselessly, chasing down and maiming and mutilating the unfortunate beasts that tried to flee. The creatures raised a volley of heart-rending cries, dying slow, agonising deaths.

  Bejoo followed in Rama’s wake, slaying as many as he could reach. More creatures were turning now, the line moving back in a unanimous retreat. His men began to raise victory cries as they saw the foe leaving the field. He rested his sword hand a moment, secretly relieved.

  He had no stomach for this kind of fight. He was about to call to his men to fall back to the riverbank—they had drifted several dozen yards into the jungle—when he heard the booming.

  The next thing he knew, the ground shuddered with an impact so mighty he was thrown off balance. He slipped and fell in the slimy remains of some grotesque monstrosity, cutting the back of his sword hand on a protruding row of spine-knives on the back of the corpse. But he was hardly aware of the pain. His attention was riveted on the shadow that had appeared in the sky.

  Hai, Shani-deva. Save and protect us from all evil. What manner of asura have you sent against us now?

  Beside him, the slaying-machine that was Rama Chandra raised his head to glare at the thing that approached.

  ‘Tataka!’ cried the prince gleefully. ‘At last you show yourself!’

  TWENTY-ONE

  Bejoo lay where he had fallen, staring up in stunned dismay. The ground shuddered and shook beneath him, tilting him this way, then that. He could feel tiny fissures opening and spreading like spidercracks in the forest floor with each impact. He forgot that he lay in the spilled ichor of the corpse, his sword hand bleeding from the accidental slash. All he could do was lie there and stare up at the apparition in the sky.

  He had heard the whispered legends of the Yaksi demoness Tataka, and the tales of the horrors that befell those foolish enough to venture into the Bhayanak-van. But no witness had faced the demoness and lived to describe her. Bejoo himself had always harboured a faint suspicion that Tataka might simply be some insane dasya woman, one of those cannibalistic thugs who had taken to waylaying travellers. Like the highway thugs who claimed to be acting on orders from the goddess Kali herself. He had held an image in his mind of a black-skinned tribal woman in a leaf skirt, body pierced in numerous places by carved bone jewellery, a stout nail-studded club in one hand, a necklace of infant skulls dangling over her naked pendulous breasts, roaring curses in her primitive tribal tongue, her rotted teeth easily mistaken for rakshasi fangs.

  But the being that bore down on them now was no dasya, highway thug or cannibal tribal. What was she? The human vocabulary had few words for something of such proportions. The term giant seemed laughably inadequate. Words like gargantuan, mammoth, titanic, mountainous came to mind. Surely the apparition before him was the result of some asura sorcery? Maya. Illusion. A trick of the light. Anything but what his eyes claimed they saw.

  But there was no denying it. The creature that approached, making a path of her own through the Bhayanak-van, was all too real. Her head, shoulders and waist rose well above the tops of the highest trees, which were at least a hundred yards high. She towered above the whole forest, her immense bulk blocking out what little light managed to creep through the dense overgrowth. The sun was almost directly overhead, and when her head passed before it, it was eclipsed as effectively as a snuffed-out mashaal. Her shadow was dark and unimaginably huge even in the near-noon light, racing across the forest floor, casting them all into twilight darkness. She was still several miles distant, he realised. She strode through the Southwoods like a Nandi bull moving through a wheat field. The dense woods parted before her like wheatstalks, entire tracts collapsing beneath her strides. The dust of her wake rose like a cloud into the sky, and would probably be visible for a dozen yojanas in every direction.

  In fact, Bejoo thought, it was a wonder she had never been spotted from the raj-marg or from any place north of the Sarayu before.

  He watched her stride through the forest and suddenly felt foolish: the virgin denseness of this part of the woods was evidence she hadn’t been here before. The forest would have been reduced to splinters if she had.

  The battle around them had ceased. The surviving beasts had fled into the jungle, and his men had stopped to stare up at the new threat that approached.

  Bheriya called out excitedly to Bejoo: ‘It was no siege-machine! It was her!’

  It took Bejoo a moment to understand that he was referring to the manure-boulders that had rained down on them on the outskirts of the forest. Silently, he agreed. This giantess could easily have thrown hillocks at them if she felt like it. Even a small mountain or two. Yes, there was no doubt that it had been she who had flung the balls, shaped by her own enormous hands.

  Tataka came to a halt, peering down at them. The cloud of dust created by her passage rose above her head, glittering in the sunlight like a corona of smoke. Her face and body were silhouetted by the bright sun directly above her, and although Bejoo squinted hard, he could only make out her features dimly.

  Tataka bent over, reaching down with hands as thick and long as wheelhouses—it was the only comparison Bejoo could summon to mind—and for a heart-stopping moment he thought she was reaching for him. But she stopped at the top of a cluster of trees, and parted them like a monkey parting the hair of a relative in search of ticks. She riffled through the trees carefully until she found what she was seeking. Bright sunlight shone down on Bejoo and his men as the giant exposed their part of the jungle. The Vajra’s horses reared and screamed in response, terrified by the appearance of the Yaksi. What did the bigfoot make of her, he wondered.

  Seeing the commotion caused by her appearance, Tataka emitted a grunt-like sound that Bejoo thought indicated satisfaction. Or hunger. Maybe she sees us as a tasty snack. Grasping hold of a clump of trees, she pulled them up with little effort, uprooting
and tossing them aside like a handful of straw.

  An elephant was caught between the uprooted trunks like an insect tangled in the rakes of a jhadoo broom, and squealed as its feet left the ground. Thick grey legs dangling, it exploded into terrified screams that faded as it was tossed aside with the handful of trees, flying miles away before falling to earth again. When the roots of a tree were yanked out of the ground, two horses were knocked down bodily, their riders violently unseated. Another warrior was killed when his chariot was upturned. An elephant panicked and broke into a headlong run back towards the river.

  With startling suddenness, the gloom of the dense jungle was dispelled and Bejoo and his men found themselves in a brand-new clearing, a circular open space about a hundred yards in diameter. The Yaksi peered down, appearing satisfied. The mortals were all exposed to her view, as puny as ants and just as helpless before her prodigious size and strength.

  She bent down, her teeth flashing white in her shadowed face. We’re lost, Bejoo thought, scrambling to get to his feet. There was no conceivable way he could lead his men to kill such a creature. His only prayer was that he be allowed to die on his feet, fighting. He struggled to an upright posture, his sword clutched in his injured hand, feeling impotent as he stared up at the giant Yaksi.

  Tataka took a single step into her newly created clearing. Her foot came down yards away from an elephant. The impact shook the earth hard enough to rattle Bejoo’s teeth. The bigfoot was thrown several feet into the air, and landed on its side, screaming, but it struggled up at once, both beast and mahout dazed but apparently unhurt.

  Horses reared and wheeled, white-eyed. The surviving Vajra Kshatriyas stared up open-mouthed.

  The Yaksi bent again, and this time Bejoo was certain that his time on Prithvi was ended. He had no means of defending himself and his men against this mountain of an asura. He clenched his jaw and stood ramrod steady, legs spaced apart to prevent himself from being knocked on his back again, prepared for Tataka’s attack and his own death.

  The Yaksi turned her head from side to side, seeking out something. Or someone.

  ‘Rama,’ she said, parting lips large enough to swallow a pair of elephants whole. And still leave room for celery, Bejoo thought with dazed bemusement.

  Even though spoken from a hundred or more yards high, her breath was strong enough to reach Bejoo. He braced himself, expecting a stench a hundred times as foul as that which emanated from the grotesque hybrids of her creation.

  But as the giantess’s breath wafted across his face, he blinked in disbelief. She smells wonderful. The Yaksi’s breath carried the fragrances of a dozen pleasant things. Definitely clover. And mint. And honeysuckle maybe. More than the individual perfumes was an odour that he couldn’t begin to describe except to say that he knew it all too well. She smells feminine, like a woman. Like his wife even, although it felt insane to relate his wife to this towering mountain of an asura.

  Tataka leaned down, her face looming above the clearing. As she came lower, her features grew more clearly visible, illuminated by the reflected sunlight from the ground. She crouched only a few dozen yards above the ground, her face as broad as the diameter of the clearing itself.

  ‘By the red tongue of Kali,’ Bejoo muttered to himself, sword clenched in his fist, the hilt slippery with his own blood.

  But it wasn’t just her smell. It was the Yaksi herself. Despite her size, despite the legends, despite everything he had heard about asuras in his forty-seven years on Prithvi, Bejoo couldn’t deny the evidence of his eyes.

  The Yaksi was neither ugly nor malformed. On the contrary, she was …

  ‘Atee sundar,’ he whispered aloud, as if speaking the words could help him believe the fact.

  Beautiful beyond comparison. So beautiful that it took an effort to wrench his eyes away and glance around the clearing. His men were as baffled as he was. Their weapons were raised and ready for battle, every last one of them willing to fight the asura to the death, however impossible or futile. But what they were not prepared for was this unexpected reversal. How could an evil demoness be as stunningly beautiful as one of Indra’s apsaras?

  To confound them further, she was making no hostile actions or gestures. If anything, Bejoo realised, she was being as gentle and careful as she could. If she chose, the Yaksi could simply raise a foot and stamp them down like splayed beetles, reducing them to crushed and mangled corpses. Yet even when she had uprooted the trees and foliage to make the clearing, she had done so without directly inflicting any violence on them. All the injuries were accidental. After all, she can’t help her size.

  The thought made him aware of the absurdity of his situation: I’m justifying an asura’s actions!

  But the fact was as plain as the perfectly proportioned features of the Yaksi’s face and body.

  This was no hideous demoness with crooked fangs dripping infants’ blood, clad in human hides.

  In fact, the giantess wasn’t clad in anything. Her enormous body was completely naked of any clothing, apart from a small crown of mogra nightqueen flowers, so redolent they could only be fresh, placed on her bright red hair. This last touch was particularly unsettling. Even Bejoo’s wife put mogra in her hair, especially on nights when she knew he was in a particularly amorous mood. It made the Yaksi seem like nothing more than a very, very large and beautiful woman.

  ‘Rama,’ she said again, softer this time, her breath as fragrant as a spring field in bloom, her voice as delicate and feminine as a trained gayaka in Maharaja Dasaratha’s court. Her bright green eyes were perfectly proportioned, two almond-shaped pools of light and colour. A delicately shaped nose, long ears with pointy tips, a neck as graceful as a swan’s, and a body so slender—if that was the right word for a woman three hundred yards tall, and forty or fifty yards wide—that she could have driven any concubine in the maharaja’s palace to blazing envy.

  Bejoo lowered his glance to her more private assets, and was shocked to find himself aroused by the beauty and perfection of her form. Gandharvas created to seduce the devas would have wept for such a body. He glanced around at his men and wasn’t surprised to see that several had lowered their swords and spears. But their level of arousal is rising fast. He shook his head, trying to clear his mind, and glanced away for an instant, unable to believe the stirring in his groin. This is impossible. There must be sorcery at work here. How can this … this … being possibly be Tataka?

  ***

  Rama came to his senses in stages, the shakti of the mahamantras reducing in intensity from a raging glacial torrent to a gushing stream and then a more placid thick-girthed flow, until finally it released its hold on him and he returned to normality.

  He blinked in the gaudy sunshine, in full command of his wits again, and remembered what had brought him back to his senses in the first place.

  Tataka.

  The giantess loomed above him, a sculpted idol of feminine perfection created on a massive scale. He was on his guard, sword still in hand, mind prepared to distrust the evidence of his senses as the result of maya. But Tataka’s beauty was overwhelming. It made him hesitate long enough to allow doubt to creep into his mind.

  This being can’t be an evil demoness, can she?

  ‘Tataka,’ he said softly, staring up at the giantess.

  She smiled at the sound of her name on his lips. Her smile was a wonderful thing, warm and innocent and full of relief and pleasure at hearing him acknowledge her presence. Except for her size, she might have been any woman, only her ears, the pale whiteness of her skin, the bright redness of her hair, and the faint dotting of freckles on her face marking her as different from other Arya women. That, and the very distracting fact of her utter nakedness.

  Beware, Rama. Remember who this is.

  ‘Tataka,’ he said again. ‘At last I meet you face to face, legendary demon.’

  The smile faltered. ‘Demon? Is that how you see me, my prince?’

  ‘Rama!’ The brahmarishi’s stentorian voi
ce boomed angrily through the clearing. ‘Do not be deceived by Tataka’s shrewd ingenuity. She seeks to distract you with maya. asuras are masters of illusion. Turn a blind eye to her beauty and femininity and fulfil the duty with which I entrusted you. Slay the monster at once!’

  Every pair of eyes in the clearing turned to look at the sage. Vishwamitra still stood on the mandala, but the column of Brahman light had vanished. The seer raised his longstaff and pointed up at the giantess, calling out to Rama: ‘Do not delay, rajkumar. Remember what I told you: her power is weakest when the sun is highest. This is why she uses this alluring disguise to delay and entice you. Hold fast to your dharmic duty and slay her at once.’

  Rama looked at Tataka once again, then at the brahmarishi. ‘Parantu, gurudev, she appears to be a woman rather than an asura. Kshatriya honour forbids me to kill a woman.’

  The sage shook his staff in fury. ‘Do not be fooled by appearances, Rama. This Yaksi is guilty of a thousand crimes. The devas themselves have sought her destruction time and time again. Remember the tale of Kama’s Grove! Of how the devas sought for millennia to rouse Lord Shiva from his million-year tapasya. It was to destroy this very being. Resurrected by Ravana’s sorcerous evil, she assumes this bhes-bhav to confuse you. Neither listen to her honeyed lies nor pay attention to her womanly attractions. Take up your weapon now and strike her down!’