‘A bad dream that bleeds?’
Sita followed Nakhudi’s gaze, looking at the sword still clutched in her hand.
The tip of the blade was smeared with blood.
FOUR
Kartikeya was minding the herd when he saw the smoke. It rose slowly, lazily, at first, like wisps of ganja smoke from the pipes his father and uncles smoked in the evenings and on feast days. For a moment, lulled by the calm of the early hour and the memory of the warm khatiya he had left only moments ago to tend to his morning chores, he thought it was ganja smoke. He imagined he could smell the sickly-sweet odour of the drug roasting, feel the intoxicating lightheadedness that came just from inhaling that exuded smoke.
He had never smoked a pipe directly, but all his brothers had and they took pleasure in ragging him because just being around other smokers was enough to make him fly higher than a patang on kite feast day. It was one of the natural hazards of being the youngest in a large rakshak Kshatriya family and an even larger clan. Their taunting nettled him, making him eager for the day when he would be permitted to sit with the older men and smoke as they did. But truth be told, just inhaling their second-hand smoke was sufficient to make him relax enough to spin wild, extravagant daydreams. As he was doing now, sitting on a flattish rock at the top of the knoll, as his family’s herd grazed on the slope below.
They were dreams of growing up to become as big and strong as the other men in the clan, as proficient a warrior as the Kshatriya code demanded. Of some day leaving the village and setting out for other places, other worlds. Not just Dhuj, the town over the hills, but perhaps to ride on one of the giant sailing vessels that docked in the bay below the town, thence to travel to foreign shores. Or even to go the other way, up the cart path that led out of Dhuj, past numerous tiny hamlets and villages like his own, thence to journey to the raj-marg that led to other Arya nations, the fantastic rich kingdoms of legend that his father and uncles were always talking about - Kosala, Videha, Banglar. To see the famed capital cities of those faraway nations, walk the gold-paved streets of Ayodhya, Mithila, Kolkat. Perhaps join a rakshak troop guarding mighty Mithila Bridge or Gandahar Pass, or any of the strategic points that Kshatriyas were trained and caste-sworn to protect and maintain. Ah, those were fine dreams indeed for a cowherd in a remote sleepy hamlet too small to even have a proper name or a court-ordained panchayat. Ganja dreams.
Perhaps that was why he was so slow to respond to the sight of the smoke. It was only after several moments had passed and the wisps had turned into plumes and then into large roiling black gouts that he realised his error. He leaped up, startling the animals browsing closest, and stared at the distant hilltops. He rubbed his eyes and stared again. There was no mistaking it this time: those dark forbidding clouds rising up from over the hills were very real, and very ominous.
Dhuj was burning.
Kartikeya took to his feet. He sprinted through the flock, calling out impatiently in his singsong voice, using his stick to poke and shove the beasts aside. He slipped on a pile of hot and slick manure and had to grip the horns of the nearest animal to keep his balance. She protested loudly and indignantly, and that set the lot of them lowing raggedly.
He all but threw himself down the hillside, loping with large ungainly strides as he left the outskirts of the herd and gained open ground.
As he neared the gauthan, he heard the excited yells of other cowherds calling out and saw their white dhotis flashing luminously in the dull, gloamy light of dawn. They had all seen the smoke and were running home. By the time he reached his hut, his brothers were already streaming out of the narrow doorway, some still hurriedly knotting their langots in the tight fashion that all rakshak Kshatriyas—perhaps all Kshatriyas, for all he knew—favoured for combat. As was the clan custom, they were naked apart from the langots, their only other clothing their swords and maces. There had been no time to oil their bodies in the rakshak manner, the better to slip through the enemy’s grasp in close-quarter fighting, which itself conveyed to Kartikeya how urgently they took the threat. One of his middle brothers, Jayashankar, had already yoked the bulls to the cart and brought it around, large wooden-spoked wheels rumbling on the brick ground. His brothers poured out of the hut and clambered aboard grimly as he stopped, breathless and minus his stick, which had snapped and which he had discarded along the way.
‘Fire!’ he said.
Nobody paid attention to him. He watched wide-eyed as his sisters and mother emerged from the hut, each one armed and with garments girded at the loins in the martial fashion of rakshak women at war. His mother called out to him to move out of the way to let the cart pass. He was shocked to see her without her enormous nose ring, and bereft of all her customary jewellery. That brought the magnitude of the crisis home to him like nothing else.
‘Come on, Kattu,’ his youngest sister said, swatting his head as she pushed him back the way he’d come. ‘We have to go back and get the herd. They’ll make a good protective circle around the houses.’
He looked around, bewildered, and saw that all the other houses in the gauthan were similarly occupied—men and boys clambering aboard carts, riding off up the mud track which led to the town, while the women and girls prepared for an attack. But where was the enemy? Who were they preparing to fight?
‘Protective circle,’ he repeated numbly. ‘Protective against what? The fire?’
‘Kattu, take care of your sisters and your maa,’ his oldest brother, Vinayak, called out. ‘You are now the oldest male in the village.’
He was the only male in the village, he saw, casting a bewildered glance around at the unexpected chaos that had shattered the customary routine. Even old Pancham-chacha, who must be all of seven decades, was perched precariously on the back of one overcrowded cart. The front cart, his own family’s, was goading the bullocks into a run with the urgency of a cart race. The carts trundled noisily and surprisingly quickly up the path to the bay town. Whenever possible, rakshaks always rode, believing that the energy conserved was better utilised in the first crucial moments of martial contact.
‘Come on!’ his sister cried impatiently, tugging at his arm. She ran toward the hill. ‘There isn’t time!’
He followed her awkwardly, still trying to catch up with this sudden rush of events. To their right, as they ran up the grassy slope, the dozen or so carts filled with armed men and boys rattled and rolled noisily away, the road winding around the steep rise to take a gentler gradient towards the town. They dropped out of sight a moment later as he topped the first knoll and went down the other side.
Ahead, his sister was a pale streak of muscled flesh limned against the green of the pasture slopes. Over another two hills and they would reach the pasture where he had left their herd grazing.
‘What happened?’ he asked, shouting to her as he struggled to catch up. She had long legs and was the best runner of them all, except only for their second-eldest brother.
‘Asuras landed at Dhuj,’ she called back, and disappeared over the next rise.
He stopped then, dead in his tracks, as if he had run into a tree, as he had once when much younger. Sat down with a whoosh of expelled air, right on the dew-damp grass. A small, sharp stone dug into his left buttock. He sat there and breathed with his mouth open and eyes staring blindly, gasping. A fat black wasp came buzzing around his head, then veered off westwards, toward the burning town. The entire western horizon was glowing reddish-orange now, as if Surya Deva had suddenly decided to reverse his normal route and ride his solar chariot from west to east this day.
His sister came back a moment later, looking exasperated. ‘What happened?’ she yelled. ‘Come on, Kattu! Get up! There isn’t time!’
He shook his head, not looking at her. Buried his face in his hands and rocked himself forward and backward, like a Brahmin boy reciting his rote-learning.
‘Kartik,’ she said in a less harsh tone, dropping to her knees beside him. ‘I know how you feel. We all feel that way. But thi
s is not the time to let fear freeze you like a rabbit before a cobra. We must fight. Get up and come. We have to get the herd back before they reach the gauthan.’
When he still didn’t move, she bent down and put her arm around him, hugging him tight, lending him some of her warmth, although the winter chill had all but fled from the air by now. ‘Kattu, Kartik, Kartikeya,’ she said into his ear, her breath redolent of betelnut leaf, which he knew she ought not to have been chewing this early in the day. Maa would be mad if she found out. ‘We’re rakshaks. We have to do our duty. Rise now and fulfil your dharma.’
He looked at her for a long moment, then clenched his teeth tight. He knew she was right. He knew he had no choice. It was the rakshak way, to form a barrier with their bodies, their flesh, their lives, to prevent the enemy from progressing further. In the last asura war, thousands of their clan had thrown their lives away merely to buy precious moments for other divisions to regroup, or refresh themselves, or even, simply, to buy time. That was why their kind always built their settlements near bay towns, near bridges, passes, outside cities. To raise the first alarm and provide the first line of defence.
When he rose finally, his knees trembled like a sapling in a sea gale. She caught his arm and helped him stay upright. He nodded to her, then realised she wasn’t looking at him.
‘I’ll manage,’ he said. She looked at him closely, then let him go. He began walking towards the west, towards that angry red sky and the billowing dark clouds.
They topped the rise together and froze, mesmerised by the sight on the other side.
The entire hillside seethed with movement, a living carpet. In the garish red light of the burning town of Dhuj, an asura army was racing across the hillsides. Not marching or proceeding. Running. If you could call the progress of those carapaced, many-legged, bestial nightmares running.
They swarmed across the rolling slopes like an infestation of killer ants. The very green of the lush hills was churned up into black sods by their passing. Their numbers were beyond counting. Kartikeya looked right and left, and for as far as his keen eyes could discern, they covered the land entirely. Far to the right, over the ridge, where the town road was, and where the carts would have reached by now, he could faintly make out the sound of clashing weapons and cries of combat. His brothers and father and uncles had met the wave and clashed. Which meant that Dhuj itself had been overrun and put to flame.
He stared at the oncoming masses, the bristling feelers, horns, antlers, snouts, hoods and other alien forms, racing like a horde of death incarnate across the familiar pastures over which he had roamed his entire childhood, illuminated by the garish glow of a burning town that only hours ago had been the foremost docking bay of the Arya nations, and had no words to describe what he felt.
He turned to meet his sister’s eyes. He saw that she had reached the same conclusion he had —there was no point trying to outrun this insane, headlong wave of carnage. Already, as the first asuras reached the confused herd, he saw the animals being cut down like so many stalks of straw before a thresh-knife. His family’s entire fortune was decimated in scant seconds. In another few moments, the hordes would be upon them.
He looked around for something, anything, to defend himself with. He remembered his stick, discarded in the haste to reach home to warn his family. Then he grinned, thinking of the futility of waving that flimsy wooden rod at these monstrosities sprung from the slipstream between legend and myth. Shouting curses would be more effective than using a cowherd’s stick!
His sister caught his grin and returned it. They hugged one last time, and he was glad that she was here with him to make this last stand. It was meet to have your own blood and kin beside you when the end came. Bonded in death, bound together for eternity.
They laughed together, laughed at the snarling, slobbering avatars of death that roared up towards them like a black wave, wielding their defiant laughter as boldly as steel weapons.
The wave of invading asuras passed over them, then through them, shattering their fragile bodies like wine flagons crushed by stampeding elephants. One moment they stood there laughing defiantly, the next they were reduced to twin puffs of bloodspray and bone-fragment.
The creatures roared on, crushing the puny human remains underfoot, surging relentlessly onward towards the tiny ten-hut hamlet where the rest of Kartikeya’s clan awaited their own tryst with Yama.
Dhuj lay burning behind them.
Ahead lay the breadth and span of the land of the holy rivers, the nations of Arya, and the entire civilised mortal world.
KAAND 1
ONE
Lakshman woke in the darkness before dawn, clammy with cold sweat. He reached for his sword and found his rig instead. The bow was in his hand, an arrow aligned, the cord drawn to firing tautness, before he realised where he was.
A dream. Just another dream.
He loosened the cord. Regained his breathing rhythm, slowing his pulse. As his senses attuned themselves to the here and now, he grew aware of the smells of the hut and the ashram, the sounds of the night. It was pitch dark here. No torches burned at night in Siddh-ashrama, no quads of palace guards or PFs patrolled the perimeter. Once the cookfires were doused, the lamps extinguished, the stars and moon were all that remained to light one’s way. It was a world apart from the pomp and majesty of Ayodhya. A world of meditation and tapasya, not luxury and indulgence.
And yet he had come to relish it: the tranquil days filled with the sonorous chanting of brahmacharya acolytes, the peaceful nights filled with rich forest smells, insect calls, animal sounds. After the bloody violence of the Bhayanak-van, it was a welcome retreat. A quiet space in which to re-arm the soul.
And yet.
Already he felt a gnawing restlessness, a strange, anti-climactic unease. A sense of something yet to be done, a task unfulfilled.
Between battles.
It was a phrase his mother had used to describe his father after Maharaja Dasaratha had sustained a deep gash in a friendly chariot-fight at a holiday tournament. It could as well be used to describe any Arya raj-Kshatriya, that sub-caste of warrior-kings whose lives were dedicated to the art of combat. Like a weapon of war forged from molten steel, a raj-Kshatriya was designed to fight, to kill. However long a sword might lie at rest, it was but a moment’s work to knock off the superficial plating of rust and mildew, wash it clean in a cauldron of boiling oil. And lo and behold, it was ready to sing its song of rage and sorrow once more. A raj-Kshatriya was like that sword: even at rest, he did not become a man of peace. He simply remained, in Third Queen Sumitra’s words, between battles. Waiting.
A light rain was pattering down on the plantain-leaf roof of the small hut when Lakshman stepped outside. The clearing before the hut was sprinkled with early spring buds and a light growth of darbha grass. Even in the dull light from the eastern sky, the new buds were visible, as varied as daubs of Holi colour on a child’s face.
Lakshman stepped off the mud stoop of the hut and on to the grass. It was damp from the unseasonal drizzle and felt wonderful, cooling and soothing his bare feet. He walked slowly across the clearing, into the rear groves.
In moments, he was out of sight of the ashram clearing and surrounded by tall bowed trees, shur-shurring softly in the gentle dawn breeze like a hundred silk saris being rustled at once.
The rain became steadily heavier, growing into a more determined shower. He brushed past a papaya frond bowed with collected rainwater and it spilled its cool contents on to his bare shoulder. He was in the midst of a papaya patch, the thick, squat trees barely as high as his head, their large palm-like fronds acting as natural cups for the rainwater. He bent his mouth to a frond and sipped tentatively. It tasted sweet as night’s dew collected from a lotus leaf. He drank greedily, slaking his morning thirst. Some spilled down his chin and ran down his neck, mingling with the rain. The aftertaste was faintly redolent of the odour of unripe papaya.
The rain had awoken the natural fragrances o
f the forest. Lakshman could smell the rich mineral scent of damp soil, the mulchy smell of wet bark, the sweet perfume of nightqueen blossom only just starting to shut its buds against the onset of day, the papayas ripening in the grove around him, the market melange of vegetable smells from the large plot where the rishis of Siddh-ashrama grew their produce—and cutting keenly through it all, the unmistakable cloying musk of a golden deer in musth.
He frowned. The last smell was out of place. It was too early in the season for deer to go into heat. It intrigued him, almost made him want to return to the hut to find his bow and arrow and go on the hunt—or at least play at hunting, since the taking of life and eating of meat were expressly forbidden at Siddhashrama.
Already, the sky was growing light enough for him to see the greenish bulges of the papaya fruits, the first tinges of muted saffron only just beginning to appear in their swollen centres. A dozen yards away, the jungle proper loomed darkly. The oak, peepal and banyan trees of the Vatsa woods were still shrouded in night-dense darkness. The rain had passed and left behind a peculiar light. It cast dreamlike shadows, suffusing the air with a deep ultramarine luminescence. Drops of rainwater clung to the tips of leaves like jewels on the earlobes of court danseuses. The air swirled and swarmed with motes of multiple hues, like a rainbow trying to come into being. If it was possible to see an indra-dhanush from the inside out, this was what it would look like.
He smelled it before he saw it, the odour of musk dense and cloying in the still air.
It stood in a gap at the far edge of the patch of papaya trees, just within the dark shadows of the jungle. It was almost completely obscured by the trunk of a banyan tree. Its ears were the only thing that moved, twitching with that peculiar restlessness that was its own way of watching. It seemed to exude a delicate glow, its ochre fur gleaming in the watery dawn light, and its eyes were wild with the heat of its condition.
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