Still, it rankled that Kausalya of all people would even entertain such a notion against her. Sumitra would die before she let such a thing happen. But she didn’t hold it against Kausalya personally; these were trying times and everybody was under a lot of pressure. She was certain that if she could only find some shred of evidence to support her story, Kausalya would change her assumptions in a trice. That was what had motivated Sumitra the most: the knowledge that Kausalya still loved her, despite the misunderstanding. And that she herself wanted desperately to make Kausalya see that she had misjudged her.
Prosaic, sensible, logical, that was Kausalya. It was what made her so dependable and so perfect. The complete opposite of Second Queen Kaikeyi, who was always a blathering mass of extreme emotions. Kausalya never touched intoxicants; Kaikeyi drank like a fish, although she denied it hotly. Kausalya never ate living flesh, neither meat nor fowl nor fish, and she even avoided any preparation cooked in animal fat; Kaikeyi relished her meat, demolishing skewers and platters at the same rate as any Kshatriya male. Kausalya could be passionate, Sumitra knew, but her passion was banked, controlled and always kept strictly within the circumference of propriety; Kaikeyi was wild, wanton, out of control. No wonder then that men found Kaikeyi irresistible and women envied her, while women admired Kausalya and men respected her!
Sumitra sighed. Now she was being unduly harsh. Yes, her comparison of the two senior queens was accurate but it left out one essential factor: heart. For all her prim propriety and rigid adherence to protocol and sanskriti, Kausalya’s heart was always in the right place. Kaikeyi, on the other hand, reminded Sumitra of the darkest avatars of the devi that she and Kausalya worshipped. Not the Earth-Mother’s Durga avatar, or even her Lakshmi or Saraswati avatars. Those were benign, maternal, affectionate. Kaikeyi resembled the more bloody brooding forms of the ur-goddess. Parvati. Uma. Kali. Or even …
The idea came to Sumitra with the suddenness of a flame sparking.
Avatars. Goddesses. Deities.
Pooja room.
What had she smelled the minute Manthara emerged from her chambers and hustled down the corridor like a serpent out of its subterranean lair?
Smoke. Fires. Burnt … something. That unmistakable scorched odour of a yagna. Or a cookfire.
Why a cookfire? Sumitra wondered for an instant if she really was suffering from some kind of delirium. How could she have smelled a cookfire in the daiimaa’s chambers?
Then it struck her.
Balidaan.
A sacrificial rite.
That was exactly what that odour had been. The distinct, unmistakable smell of a balidaan yagna, like the ones conducted at certain festivals. Less popular now, and generally falling out of fashion as the Arya nations attempted to encourage more rational and scientific behaviour, advocating the necessity of moving on from the superstitions of their ancestors. But indisputably the smell of roasting flesh.
Sumitra searched now with renewed hope, seeking with her nose, not her eyes.
She found it in moments. A faint ashy odour coming from the daiimaa’s pooja room. At first, she doubted her nasal sense, thinking that it was probably just some combination of agar, myrrh, camphor, phosphor, the familiar perennially lingering smell of all unaired pooja rooms. But then, as she went further into the room, towards the deity altar, she caught it again. This time it was so pungent and putrid there could be no mistake. This was no blend of wax and camphor or any such thing. It was the smell of burned flesh.
After a few more moments of searching, her nose told her the odour was coming not from the pooja room itself, but from somewhere behind it.
She found the narrow space between the back of the altar and the rear wall a few minutes later. Knocking on the rear wall, she was soon convinced it was hollow. She had expected to find something, but not such concrete evidence. There could be no good reason to have a secret chamber in such a place.
She debated calling for help, thinking through her options carefully.
Her suspicion had been right: someone had been using black sorcery in the palace, just as Guru Vashishta himself had suspected. But unlike the guru, Sumitra had not hesitated to point a mental finger at even the highest-ranking members of the royal family. After all, she reasoned, if she could be accused of having carelessly almost poisoned the maharaja, surely someone could have deliberately attempted to do so. Someone like Kaikeyi. Even when she had learned that Kaikeyi had genuinely been cloistered in her chambers these past nine days, she hadn’t been discouraged. That was the whole point of sorcery, that it used maya to deceive and alter perceptions.
Kausalya had found a theory that fitted the facts, however unlikely, and had moved on. But the facts she had considered failed to take into account Sumitra’s eye-witness account of what had transpired in the sick-chamber. Now, Sumitra had a theory that fitted the facts that she knew.
Suppose for a moment, she had mused, that Kaikeyi hadn’t been in the maharaja’s sick-chamber this morning, then perhaps someone else had been there, someone whose appearance had been altered to make her seem to be Kaikeyi. On that assumption, she had questioned all the guards independently, this time asking not if they had seen the Second Queen enter the sick-chamber, but if they had seen anyone else, however innocuous.
The answer had come quickly enough. All the guards had seen a serving girl go in at almost exactly the same time that the incident with Kaikeyi-the-snake had occurred. They hadn’t mentioned this earlier to Kausalya because the First Queen had been asking specifically about Second Queen Kaikeyi and nobody else. The guards even recalled noticing that the serving girl had seemed a little flushed and out of breath when she emerged from the maharaja’s sick-chamber. But it wasn’t the first time they had seen serving girls look that way after a visit to the maharaja and had assumed she was simply reacting to an unusually strong compliment or perhaps an inadvertent brush of the king’s arm in passing.
From that revelation, it hadn’t taken much further investigation to trace the serving girl back to her point of origin: Manthara-daiimaa’s chambers. And Manthara-daiimaa served Kaikeyi. Which made her part of the dark devi camp. Which made her a prime suspect.
Sumitra was not one of those who foolishly harboured irrational prejudices against people who were physically or otherwise challenged. She knew that outward appearance didn’t always reflect the inner being. But Manthara was a famous exception to the assumption that beauty was within and not skin-deep.
This wasn’t just Sumitra’s point of view. There had always been something about Manthara that set her apart, not only from the bustling and lovable daiimaas like Sakuntala-daiimaa or Susama-daiimaa, but from women in general. There was an air about Manthara that made even women want to stay far away from her. An air of deep self-pity that bordered on masochistic tendencies combined with an exaggerated sense of ego and false pride. It made for an unattractive combination. The fact that the wet-nurse was hunchbacked and club-footed would not have deterred her from finding friends and even loyal companions in the royal palace; but her dreaded foul temper, acid tongue and penchant for inflicting brutal corporal punishment on those below her station had given her a notoriety uglier than any physical deformity. She was that saddest of all the devi’s girl-children, a woman as ugly on the outside as within.
Now, as Sumitra sought a way to enter the secret chamber behind the daiimaa’s pooja room, she wondered what Manthara’s game was. Was she using sorcery to try and keep Kaikeyi in the maharaja’s favour? Or was it more than that? After all, this morning’s near-poisoning had been close to an assassination attempt. Anyone who could have accomplished such a powerful sorcery had surely been practising the dark arts for a long time. And to what purpose? Most troubling of all, was Kaikeyi aware of Manthara’s evil activities? How could she not be aware?
Sumitra was so absorbed in her thoughts and search that she failed to notice the figure that had entered the pooja room and now stood behind her, watching with eyes that blazed with fury. Though she
had been alert for any signs of the daiimaa’s return, she hadn’t reckoned with the woman’s ability to cloak her own presence through the same sorcery that occupied Sumitra’s thoughts.
The first hint she had of Manthara’s presence was when the daiimaa spoke a short, harsh incantation.
Before Sumitra could even turn around, the entrance she was seeking so eagerly flew open abruptly. Caught unawares, she fell directly into the secret chamber. At once the stench assaulted and disoriented her. She scrambled to her feet, turning back the way she had fallen in.
But the wall had closed behind her magically. It was seamless and solid once more. More solid on the inside that it had been on the outside, for Manthara’s spells had been designed to keep sounds from going out of the yagna chamber, not the other way around. Sumitra was trapped within the very secret chamber she had been trying to find.
FOURTEEN
Among the more incredible sights of that long night run was the view of the Ganga. It was toward the end of the first half of their journey and Rama sensed that they were nearing Visala. Until now, they had been travelling through heavily wooded plains and rolling hills. They emerged into open plains for a few yojanas, mostly brushland except for a handful of farms.
A field full of cows lowed in sleepy surprise as they shot past. Rama wondered what they saw, or thought they saw. By now, the brahmarishi’s party was racing through the Brahman corridor at a speed easily seven yojanas an hour. At that rate, all the cows would have seen was a dark-blue cloud of some foggy substance rolling across the field, with some human-like forms within it. The reverse was also true. A pair of dark shuddering figures looming in their path turned out to be two elephants in musth, indulging in the oldest dance of all. The Brahman corridor curved upward, over the furiously mating bigfoot, and then down again. The elephants never even noticed their passing, or if they did, it was probably absorbed in the tantric energies of their dance of bliss. They sped over the rutting beasts, then down again, and were gone in a flash.
They came over one final rise, the familiar hump of a millennia-old alluvial deposit that Rama knew at once was the ridge of a river valley. He was right. A moment later, the corridor curved sharply upward, then steeply down the far side of the ridge. They shot down almost vertically, then the corridor straightened out into a more gradual incline, and that was when Rama and his companions were given a clear view of the valley of the Ganga.
Even at night, shrouded in the darkness of an almost completely moonless night—the moon had risen and set an hour earlier, too weak and weary to offer much help—the beauty of the vale was breathtaking. Or perhaps it was just the knowledge that this was no ordinary river vale but the blessed and sacred Ganga herself that added a final sheen of lustre. Whatever the reason, that instant was the first time that Rama wished he could actually stop right there, on that downward-sloping incline, and wait for sunrise. But like so many other incredible sights and experiences since he had left Ayodhya, this sacred vision was not meant for him to enjoy at leisure. And so they had sped on, descending further into the valley, until they were on the famous flat plains of the sacred river’s banks, the Brahman corridor undulating below and before them then straightening out to shoot ahead until it reached the very edge of the silver ribbon that lay a yojana or so ahead.
The corridor ended at the bank of the Ganga. Previously, when it had encountered obstacles like the rutting elephants or a stream, or even a deep ditch or pit, it had simply carried them across or over. But this time, Rama saw, it was actually stopping. He could see the end of the corridor dissipating as he watched, the fog unravelling and melting away into the darkness.
Rama sensed himself slowing. The brahmarishi was altering their speed to give them sufficient time to halt before they reached the end of the corridor.
He felt a vague sense of disappointment; in its own way, the running had been enjoyable. In that state of physical challenge, he could simply give himself over to the extreme exertion, blanking his thoughts and emotions for the duration of the exercise. With a return to normality came the return of mundane thoughts, feelings, anxieties. How was Ayodhya preparing for the invasion? Were they sending a force to support Mithila? Did they even know there was an invasion imminent? How was his father’s health? How had his mother received the news of his success—and of his delay in returning home?
As he came to a halt, body dripping with sweat, his whole life seemed to come rushing at him like a bandit lying in wait to ambush him. No wonder then that each time he gave himself over to the flow of Brahman, he felt more reluctant to return to his own self, to the real world of everyday cares. In that magical plane, everything seemed possible, no problem unsurmountable, every dream achievable. Here, it was the complete opposite. Well, not complete, but close.
The night rushed back in like a wave descending, washing over him. Smells, night sounds, the coldness of the air, the familiar but briefly unfamiliar sensation of standing on solid ground once more.
From what he could tell, they had landed on a knoll near the south bank of the Ganga. He could hear what sounded like rapids up ahead over the rise. Like the rest of this part of the Gangetic plain, the knoll was heavily shrouded in a profuse variety of semi-tropical as well as northern flora. Papaya and banyan stood beside date palm and coconut. Hibiscus reared their intensely coloured heads beside marigold and lionface. Rama could smell the rich soil, could almost feel the fertile power of this land. Only the Sindhu river to the distant north-west across the Hindu Kush range was as fertile as the land irrigated by the Ganga’s flow. Some day, he imagined, great Arya cities would rise here too and flourish. Cities as magnificent as Ayodhya and Mithila, Gandahar and Kaikeya. As long as the Ganga flowed, mortal life would surely go on.
Then he recalled the shadow that fell across their lives in this historic crisis and his proud thoughts turned grim. There was still the asura invasion to survive.
Ahead of him, Nakhudi and Sita turned around, examining their surroundings. Sita’s eyes sought him out. He nodded briefly at her. She turned away abruptly, ignoring the gesture.
Lakshman came up beside him. He spoke softly in Rama’s right ear, ‘Looks like someone’s still sore as a mule at being outed, brother. Watch out for her back-kick!’
Rama dug his elbow into Lakshman’s ribs. Lakshman anticipated and dodged the elbow. He collided with Bejoo, who was coming up to join them.
‘Easy there, Rajkumar. Takes a moment or two finding your land feet again after that magic flight, doesn’t it? Now I know how geese must feel when they touch ground again after flying across the earth.’
Rama gestured to them both to be quiet. ‘Guru-dev calls.’
The sage was beckoning to them. They went to him. The ground was covered with deep roots and trailing vines and creepers. They made their way up the side of the knoll to where the seer stood with his staff extended to arm’s length, facing them. The head of the staff glowed softly blue, casting enough light to see by.
Walk with me,’ the brahmarishi said. He led them to the top of the knoll, parting the bushes that blocked their way. The sound of the river grew louder as they went further. They emerged from the shrubbery on to a small shoulder of land that jutted out sharply.
They were looking down at the Ganga, dark and resplendent as a rope of black velvet in the darkness of the moonless night. The sage stood at the edge of the knoll and pointed down with his staff. The head glowed intensely brighter, illuminating the calm clear waters flowing below.
‘Behold the Ganga,’ he said, ‘the destination of every devout Arya. Blessed are those who seek it. Graced are those who find it. Tonight, it is our goal as well.’
He pointed with his staff to a pathway leading down from the knoll to the riverbank.
‘Come,’ he said, leading the way. As they went down the path, the seer continued:
‘We shall cross from the bank below. But first, I have words to say to all of you. These words will save your lives tonight and perhaps even ensu
re the survival of Mithila tomorrow.’
Vishwamitra led them down the path to the bank below. The bank was clear for several yards, like many spots Rama had seen along the Sarayu that were marked for ferry crossings. Sure enough, a boat was moored to a rod embedded on the bank. It bobbed gently in the river, a sturdy, well-constructed little vessel that seemed just right to carry the six of them.
They sat by the bank of the Ganga. The river flowed gently beside them, its passage soft and musical. This was not the fierce roaring of the Sarayu, glacial and ferocious as a Kshatriya army descending from the mountains. The Ganga was a Brahmin body, flowing serenely across the subcontinent from west to east.
Vishwamitra hardly needed to raise his voice to be heard by his band. ‘In a few moments we shall cross these blessed waters. Our destination lies on the north bank, a few yards downstream.’
Bejoo frowned. ‘Forgive me, maha-dev. I am not overly familiar with this area and it is difficult to tell where exactly we are at night without landmarks visible. But I would think that Visala is at least half a yojana’s walk from here downriver.’
The Vajra captain indicated the sky above. ‘At least that is what I would deduce from the position of the Makar constellation in the seventh house.’
‘Well mapped, Captain. But we have a task to complete before we enter the gates of Visala. In fact, this task is the reason we came here. Back by the banks of the Shona, I deliberately emphasised Visala to avoid letting our enemies know our real destination.’
‘Our enemies, maha-dev?’ Lakshman looked surprised. ‘But there was nobody to hear us by the Shona. Only our own Kshatriyas and Brahmins.’
Vishwamitra’s voice was unruffled and serene. ‘So it often seems, rajkumar. Yet in these hours of crisis, you can be certain that our foes have eyes and ears everywhere, observing us as closely as a cobra watches the jaws of the mongoose.’
PRINCE OF DHARMA Page 79