‘Kshatriya,’ Sumantra said sharply, ‘do you know how many couriers arrive with messages for the maharaja daily? Today alone four other riders have arrived since daybreak, bearing messages of the greatest urgency directly from the maharajas of four Arya nations and intended solely for Maharaja Dasaratha. All four messengers willingly entrusted their missives to me without delay or argument.’
Sumantra pulled out an ornately carved gold seal-ring from a pocket in his robe. ‘I dictated the replies myself and sealed them with the maharaja’s own seal-ring. As you can see, I am fully empowered to act and speak on his behalf. I command you for the last time, deliver your message to me, or face a trial for treason under martial law.’
He held up the hand bearing the seal-ring before the lieutenant could respond, and added, ‘Think carefully before replying. Your honour as well as your life could well depend on what you choose to say.’
Mantri Jabali broke in hastily: ‘I am sure the prime minister does not intend to impose this harsh penalty on you without cause, my good Bheriya. Pray, speak freely and trust us to bear your every word to the maharaja as if you spoke them directly into his very ears.’
The Vajra lieutenant glanced around the hall as if trying to collect his thoughts.
Sumantra added as an afterthought: ‘One last point. I am willing to let you speak your message in private, to me alone if you prefer.’ He gestured towards the rajkumars and the palace guards, including even Mantri Jabali. ‘That is the last concession I make to you, soldier. Now speak.’
Bheriya looked up at the prime minister. ‘Forgive me, Pradhan Mantriji. I cannot violate my orders.’
Mantri Jabali stifled a groan of dismay.
Sumantra nodded, seething inwardly. Stubborn Kshatriya fool! ‘Very well then. You leave me no choice. Guards, take this man to the city jail. He is to be charged with treasonous disobedience of the maharaja’s law.’
A quad of guards marched forward and took charge of the Vajra lieutenant. Bheriya made no move to resist.
Mantri Jabali sighed. ‘Most regretful. Pradhan Mantriji, I will go along with the arrested man to see to his arraignment.’
As Bheriya was led out of the hall, Rajkumar Bharat approached the prime minister.
‘Sumantraji,’ he said, a frown creasing his handsome features, ‘that man has word of Rama and Lakshman and the outcome of their mission to the Southwoods. They may require our aid urgently, or …’ He paused. ‘Or worse.’
‘I am aware of that, Rajkumar Bharat, and am as eager to learn of their condition. But you saw the man’s stubbornness. He left me no choice under the law.’
The young prince chewed his lip anxiously. ‘Yes. But perhaps if you speak to Guru Vashishta, he may find some way to release the man of his oath-obligation. The guru is wise in finding solutions to impossible problems.’
Pradhan Mantri Sumantra nodded. ‘An excellent suggestion, young Bharat. That is exactly what I intend to do right away.’
A disturbance outside the hall attracted their attention. They turned to see Mantri Jabali returning with an uncharacteristic smile on his normally austere features. The guards and their prisoner followed in his wake.
‘The devas are with us today,’ Mantri Jabali said to Sumantra. ‘The situation has been resolved.’
He turned and bowed his head to greet the person following close behind.
Maharaja Dasaratha, seated on a travelling chair carried by four palace guards, entered the parliament hall.
‘Sumantra,’ the maharaja said in a tone far softer than his usual booming baritone, but nevertheless as commanding, ‘this messenger wishes to deliver an urgent missive to me personally. I will hear him without delay. See to it that we have complete privacy for a few moments.’
Pradhan Mantri Sumantra smiled. ‘With pleasure, your majesty.’
Addressing the other occupants of the hall, the prime minister clapped his hands. ‘You heard the maharaja. Everybody except Maharaja Dasaratha and the Vajra Lieutenant Bheriya is to leave at once.’
He descended the steps of the royal dais, passing the maharajah, who was carried up to the level of the throne and assisted in seating himself. In seconds, the hall was clear and Sumantra himself backed his way to the large, ornately carved wooden doors.
‘Aagya, maharaja,’ he said, taking leave formally. ‘We shall be without these doors until you send for us.’
Sumantra emerged backwards from the hall and issued an order to the palace guards standing by to shut and bar the massive doors.
The stubborn Kshatriya has his wish, he thought, relieved. He’s alone with the maharaja and can do as his captain ordered.
The doors thundered shut. As the reverberating echoes faded away, Sumantra was reminded for some reason of the sound of the city war-gong. It was meant to summon citizens to the walls to prepare for battle, to announce the approach of an invading army. Ayodhya had never sounded that gong because the city had never been attacked or besieged. But if that relic were to be struck, Sumantra was certain it would make a sound not unlike the doors of the parliament hall had just made.
***
Bejoo controlled his horse with a nudge and a twitch of the reins. Her nostrils flared as she smelt the pungent scent of one of the large predators nearby, but she held steady as her master surveyed the scene in one quick sweep. Behind him, the solitary remaining scout reined in his mount as well.
‘By the gods,’ Bejoo muttered under his breath. What had the princes got themselves into this time?
The scene in the clearing was as exotic as any Ayodhyan artist could have imagined. Two different species were frozen in a tableau of brutal violence and hatred. On one hand were the humans, a motley assortment of men and women clad in garments roughly woven from bark and hemp-rope. They all looked much alike, as if they might be members of one vast family; this illusion owed more to their similarity in appearance than their features.
Their coarse henna-red hair was matted into knotted locks, their faces and bodies were uniformly filthy and unwashed, shiny with sweat, badly healed scars and more recent wounds. Their beggarly garments clung to ill-fed bodies taut with the aggressive, jumpy tension typical of lives lived in constant fear of violence.
A pathetic assortment of weapons were clutched in their fists– chipped swords, longknives, twisted daggers, sharpened rods, rusting tridents, a battered mace or two, and in the massively muscled arms of two enormous bearded brutes, solidly cast ironwood hammers each almost a yard long. They were about thirty-odd in number, and Bejoo had seen enough bandits to know a gang when he saw one.
The leader of the group seemed to be a man with a face uglier than any Bejoo had seen before: the flesh had been mauled brutally in some old encounter, gouged too deeply to allow regrowth. The man’s teeth were clearly visible through three gaps in his left cheek; the cheek itself, if you could call it that, consisted of just three stringy strands of flesh hanging loosely. You can probably see his food being chewed when he eats, Bejoo thought, disgusted. He knew only one animal that could inflict such a wound: bear. But he had never seen a man clawed by a bear that badly who had survived to tell the tale.
As if in mute confirmation, the scarred leader of the gang wore an iron chain around his neck sporting at least a dozen bear claws, and predictably, his main garment was a faded chewed-up bearskin.
The other group in the fight were, not surprisingly, rksas. Bejoo, like all other Vajra Kshatriyas, had a family totem which gave him his clan-name and was his protective mascot in life and battle. This totem was the black mountain bear, or Bejoo. Quite naturally, he had been brought up to regard rksas as a kind of guardian deity. Yet he was sensible enough not to let his reverence for the furry predators overcome his natural human wariness of their short-sighted, hard-of-hearing, bad-tempered natures. At this moment, however, his clan loyalty was calling out to him like conch-shell alarms, driving the blood through his veins and making him eager to join the fray.
There were four bears in the cle
aring. Ten if you counted corpses. The six bears that lay dead were horribly maimed and wounded, their black fur slashed with gaping flesh-bright wounds. Their snarling snouts testified to the struggle they had put up before yielding to superior numbers and metal weaponry. With every fallen bear, at least five bandits lay fallen too. Some were clasped in the crushing embrace that humans mistakenly called bearhugs.
In fact, the so-called ‘hug’ was the bear’s way of swivelling its torso from the hips, putting all its considerable upper-body bulk into a cuffing slash of its inches-long claws. The resulting force with which those lethal claws struck usually saw them embedding themselves deep within the victim’s flesh, so a watcher would see the rksa appear to be hugging its prey closely. Each fallen bear had at least two humans apiece caught in its claws in this fashion. Even seeing the gruesome wounds on the bandits brought down by the dead bears didn’t evoke any sympathy in Bejoo. It was clear who was the real predator here.
The four surviving bears were clustered together. Bejoo assessed the largest one to be a female in her early middle age. Behind her, partly concealed between her broad back and the trunk of a thick ancient oak, were three cubs of varying sizes. The cubs were very young, too young to be of any real use in a fight against so many armed enemies, but even so they peered out from behind their mother’s flanks, snarling and growling fiercely at the humans who threatened her.
The female was bleeding from several small wounds, none significant enough to be fatal but cumulatively enough to cause great pain and hamper her movements. The bandits wore her down, slash by slash, jab by jab, Bejoo thought, his fury rising as he pictured the desperate last stand of the mother rksa after her adult companions were butchered. Those were the howls of rage we heard—they were sticking her like a dummy at a carnival pig-sticking contest.
Despite her wounds, the female stood on her rear legs, presenting the largest possible front, and bared her teeth silently at the ring of bandits who surrounded her. They held their weapons far ahead of their vulnerable bodies, clearly having learned from the example of their fallen companions that the mother bear still had enough fight left in her to take several more of them before she went down.
The man with the ruined face was closest to her, supervising the last part of what had been a difficult and brutal clash of the two species.
But the bandit leader’s attention wasn’t directed at the cornered bear and her cubs.
It was focused on the two humans who were threatening him and his band.
These last two were clearly not part of the bandit gang. They were both dressed in the all-black head-to-toe garb of Kshatriyasfor-hire. Wandering mercenaries who travelled from kingdom to kingdom, hiring their swords out to rich merchants who needed bodyguards while ferrying their goods from marketplace to marketplace, entering melees and tourneys for the prize-money, occasionally even signing up with any army that was hiring and paying well.
Both had their heads covered with the same black roughcloth and their faces were veiled as well, only their bright eyes visible, shining fiercely. They were an odd couple, one a giant towering over everyone else in the clearing—everyone except the female bear, of course—and the other a slender, lithe Kshatriya a third of his companion’s size. They were armed with the familiar curved swords that Mithilan Kshatriyas favoured, and their backto-back stances revealed their own desperate struggle against the bandit gang. Four or five human corpses lay around them, confirming which side they were on.
Bejoo couldn’t quite understand this set-up. He would have accepted the bandits attacking the family of rksas, perhaps slaughtering them for their valuable teeth, claws, fur, even their sexual organs for their mythical aphrodisiacal properties; or the gang attacking the pair of Kshatriyas in the hope of stealing their purses–—ome of these wandering mercenaries did quite well for themselves, and this pair looked well-nourished and decently dressed. But he didn’t understand how the mercenaries, rksas and the bandits all fitted together.
One thing was clear, though: the rksas and the Kshatriyas were aligned on one side, the bandits on the other. Which made Bejoo’s choice of loyalty crystal clear. If he and his men entered this fight, they would side with the Kshatriyas, who were at least fellow-caste Aryas, and with the rksas, because they were the Vajra captain’s totem. Besides, he hated bandits. They were nothing more than scum who preyed on unarmed travellers and slaughtered them for a few coins, keeping the women as sexual slaves and the children to be raised as additions to their gang. He would enjoy dispatching this lot to the realm of Yamaraj.
But the boys he was sworn to protect were right in the midst of the tableau, between the bandits, the Kshatriyas and the rksas.
As Bejoo watched, Rajkumar Rama began speaking.
Rama addressed everyone present in the clearing without regard for whether they were friend or foe, human or animal.
‘In the name of Maharaja Dasaratha, king of Kosala, master of the sunwood throne of Ayodhya, I command you all to lay down your weapons at once and cease fighting.’
Sullen silence met his announcement.
Stunned by Rama’s spectacular entrance, the bandits were still gaping at him, and at Lakshman, who was a few yards away to Rama’s left. The two black-garbed Kshatriyas exchanged a quick glance and seemed a little relieved at this dramatic change in their situation. But the bear and her frightened cubs continued to snarl and growl as fiercely as before.
Lakshman guessed that to the unfortunate bears, one human was much the same as the next. Even if they could have understood Rama’s words, why should they trust him? He kept his focus as keenly on the rksas as on the bandits, figuring, as Bejoo had just done, that the Kshatriya mercenaries were the only allies he could count on in this face-off. A cornered bear was ten times as dangerous as a bandit. There was no telling what that female might do, or at whom she might direct her wrath.
After a pause, someone laughed. The sound was grating, and unexpected. The man who spoke had an insolent tone, his accent a careless drawl that echoed the speech of the Garhwali Himalayas. A mountain man, Lakshman thought. If that was where the speaker was from originally, then he was a long way from his hilly homeland.
‘Rajkumar Rama, we meet again! The devas must have entwined our horoscopes at birth. How else could we meet twice in less than one moon-cycle?’
Lakshman stared at the bandit who had spoken. It was the horribly scarred man, evidently the leader of this ragged band, judging from his appearance and the arrogant way he stood and spoke. For an instant, looking at the disfigured face, Lakshman thought the man’s wounds had just been inflicted, in this very fight; after all, they were rksa-slashes, and the man and his band were fighting rksas. Then he realised that the scars—if you could call them that—were very old. He recalled Rama’s encounter with the man named Bear-face, the leader of the gang of poachers hunting the deer near Ayodhya. This had to be the same man, although Lakshman couldn’t figure out how the bandit leader could have got out of jail so soon.
‘You do recognise me, rajkumar?’ the man was saying to Rama. He gestured mockingly at his damaged features, making a coy hand-signal like a classical dancer. ‘Or did you forget my pretty face so quickly?’
He clicked his tongue mockingly. ‘Ah, I know why you’re here. You didn’t get to kiss my pretty mug the last time we met. So you decided to come a-hunting for me so you could fulfil your heart’s desire!’
A burst of laughter exploded from the other bandits.
Some of the other men seemed to recognise Rama too, and one of the younger fellows was staring at the back of his head as if he was contemplating putting his dagger through it. Lakshman tightened his grip on his sword and waited to see what Rama did next.
Rama responded in the same measured tone he had used earlier. ‘I repeat: throw down your weapons and live. Or fight on and die. The choice is yours.’
Bear-face hawked and spat on the corpse of a female bear before him. Then he put a sandalled foot on the beast, unmindful of th
e still steaming mass of intestines oozing from the gashed belly.
‘I seem to recall you giving me similar words on that prior occasion as well, young prince.’
He emphasised the last word as if it was the worst abuse any living being could speak. ‘Right before you caught me unawares with that lucky stone-toss. Well, this time you won’t be so lucky, and my numbers are better than on that occasion. What’s more, you’re in my territory now. No city guards to back you up, no city jail to throw me into.’
He made the infuriating clicking sound again. Lakshman saw the man’s red tongue working inside his horribly exposed mouth and felt his stomach churn with disgust.
‘Not that the city jail kept me long. Do you know the funniest thing?’ Bear-face gestured to his band, all of whom were listening and watching attentively. ‘The young rajkumar arrested me on the morning of Holi feast day, and I was released by the city warden on the same afternoon. Can you guess why?’
Nobody answered, not even the other men who seemed to recognise Rama. Obviously the bandit leader was accustomed to speaking without interruption. ‘Believe it or not–or believe it a lot!–it was on account of this same rajkumar’s coronation announcement! Those Ayodhyan wretches have a custom that when a rajkumar is to be crowned prince-heir, or even when he’s just declared as such, they release all prisoners short of actual murderers! So the boys and I, though we didn’t get to pick the purses we’d gone into town for, got off scot-free by the courtesy of this young king-in-waiting right here! Can you beat that? Arrested and then released, both by the grace of the same man on the same day. If that isn’t karma, what is?’
PRINCE OF DHARMA Page 67