Then he lost himself in the chanting, in the sheer beauty and throbbing power of the shlokas. He surrendered himself to the flow of Brahman, black and viscous, like a river of oil that came from beyond and passed through his being, roaring through his veins, rushing out of his mouth and eyes and nostrils, igniting and forming a flaming torrent that he released into the cavern. The river of Brahman fire fell like a waterfall from the Pushpak, the intensity of its light dispelling all shadows, illuminating the cavern in a searing light more bright than noon sunlight. It fell to the bottom of the cavern, and spread like a raging river breaking its banks, washing through the countless lines of oblong stones, rising to engulf them, flowing over them.
In moments, the entire floor of the subterranean cavern was flooded with the shakti he had conjured. It washed up at the walls, splashing against them like waves against a rocky cliff. He increased the pace of the chanting, accelerating the powerful flow. The liquid Brahman in the cavern below seethed and boiled, erupting in gouts and splashes. The rock-like objects embedded in the ground began to tremble, then shiver, then shake violently. One by one, they began to explode.
TWO
Despite her determination to give her captor no satisfaction, Sita felt compelled to watch the scene unfolding in the cavern.
What were those rock-like things? What power was he unleashing? She had recognised some of the shlokas he was chanting, as part of a great and powerful maha-mantra; only the most elevated of Brahmins could acquire knowledge of such verses. How could a king of demons come by such sacred learning? Just when she thought she had seen and learned all there was to know about Ravana, he surprised her once more. As his chanting increased in intensity, she made out several different voices speaking separate mantras all at once. No wonder he was such a powerful sorcerer. He could work ten different spells at once—in perfect coordination—something that even ten independently potent brahmarishis might not be able to accomplish with such precision. It was strange and troubling to hear a being as evil as this reveal such great depth of knowledge and prowess in the craft of wielding Brahman shakti. What was this Ravana truly? He was not just the black-hearted demonlord that everyone assumed he was. There were so many levels to him, so many faces, that it was hard to tell which was the real Ravana. Perhaps they all were Ravana.
Now, she watched spellbound as the Brahman fluid he had released into the cavern flooded the entire floor of the enormous chamber. The viscous, smoking, blue liquid gouted and boiled like molten lava freshly erupted, precipitating a reaction in the egg-shaped rocks. She watched as entire rows of the eggrocks burst open, each spewing out sticky strings of amber-hued ichor. The top of each rock ripped open like a flower bud violently blossoming. And as she watched with growing horror, a creature emerged from the exploded apertures of each eggrock.
She saw one such creature appear from the blasted top of a rock, writhing and twisting, forcing its way out into the open. It was sheathed in a honeyed webbing that dripped thick strands of amber ichor. It tore open the webbing, ripping off strands and clumps to fling them aside, and gained its full stature, standing on two nether limbs. Its yellow, lizard-like eyes blinked open, recording its first sights. Looking around with an expression of snarling hostility, it raised its head and roared out a cry of terrible anguish. If this was a birthing, then the creature that had been born seemed to resent its very existence.
The cavern filled with the roars of the newly birthed creatures.
As Ravana finished the chanting that had completed the birthing process, she saw his ten pairs of eyes open again, witnessing what he had wrought. She could see them flicking this way, then that, rising to the horizon of the vast sculpted chamber, then scanning the other way to the far end. The rows of eggrocks extended from end to end, hundreds of thousands of them. All hatching explosively in successive rows, as the Brahman waves washed over them, birthing the lord of Lanka’s horrific creations. As the first ones trampled on the egg-like things from which they had hatched, they looked around at their surroundings. Instinctively, drawn by the flow of Brahman that still bound him to them, the shakti that had been responsible for birthing them all, they began to raise their eyes to the celestial sky-chariot floating high above them, sensing that their creator and master was there. They raised their dripping snouts and growled, showing their gratitude and pledging their allegiance.
One of Ravana’s heads muttered an incoherent command, and at once the Pushpak began descending. This time, Sita was ready for just such a move and did not give him the satisfaction of hearing her gasp as she had done before. Still, she felt the vertigo that had plagued her earlier torment her again, making her feel as if she were plunging down an endless spiral. She gripped the golden pillar of the vahan and kept up a stoic front. Dignity and self-worth were her last bastion.
Ravana slowed the Pushpak several hundred yards above the floor of the cavern. High enough to afford a view of all his newborn creations, yet low enough that they might see him and know their master.
And their father. For each and every one of these beings was created from his own seed. The seed of Ravana. Sita knew this without being told, because each of the rakshasa creations below resembled one face or another of Ravana himself.
As if to confirm this very fact, Ravana spoke softly. ‘Behold, my children,’ he said.
She said nothing in response. But her eyes were riveted to the sight of the hordes below. Even at this distance she could tell that each of those rakshasas below was larger, stronger and more powerful than any of the other rakshasas in Lanka.
‘This is the new army of Lanka,’ Ravana added. ‘They are the children of my mind, and will do my bidding, whatever it may be. They know neither fear, nor pain, nor retreat. These are the forces your husband will have to face.’ He paused and added deliberately, ‘If he is able to come to Lanka.’
At those last words, she responded at last. Turning her head slowly so as not to upset the delicate balance of her depleted senses, she said in a soft but clear voice, ‘Rama will come. Do not doubt that. Even if you assemble all the rakshasas that have existed since the beginning of time, Rama will come and face them all. No force you create can stop him now.’
He chuckled. ‘Your audacity is impressive, and your naive fealty is touching. But both are sadly misplaced. These are no ordinary rakshasas. They are touched by the power of the gods themselves.’
She could not help her expression. ‘The gods?’
‘Yes, my lady Sita. The gods themselves are arrayed on the side of Lanka in this conflict. This new breed of rakshasas you see before you is only one of the many ways in which we are empowered by celestial forces.’
She stared at him, shifting her gaze from face to face, trying to tell if he was lying. She could not be sure by his facial expressions alone, so diverse and unrelated were they all, but there was something in his words that was compelling. And she had seen ample evidence of how even rakshasas could be devout and suffer austerities. Could he be telling the truth? It made her heart sink. Surely the devas could not be aligned against Rama and his forces.
He smiled at her discomfiture. ‘Do not tax yourself, Princess. I will show you more evidence of how the devas assist us.’
He willed the Pushpak to fly. The vehicle zoomed across the cavern at a speed so great, the rock walls blurred past. She sucked in a silent breath, feeling the pit of her belly, so painfully deprived of nourishment, pressing back—against her very spine, it seemed. She said a silent prayer to the goddess for her unborn offspring, and exerted all her willpower to remain standing upright. Even so, she could feel the blood draining from her face and her head grew dizzy again. She almost blacked out as they sped at an enormous velocity towards the far wall of the cavern where, she now spied, a tunnel existed, hitherto hidden by the long shadows cast by the unnatural light.
A great roar rose from behind them as they reached the far end of the cavern, a host of rakshasas cheering their lord and creator. And then they had left the roar
ing hordes in the cavern behind and were flying at nauseating speed through a tunnel almost half as vast as the chamber they had left. She had a moment or two to wonder what it would feel like to simply let herself fall over the railing of the vahan, to plunge down those several hundred feet to land on bone-shattering bedrock. It almost seemed tempting. But she suspected that Ravana would be able to catch her easily before she fell, and would derive great satisfaction from her weakness—and her despair.
So she gritted her teeth and held on. She had meant what she had said. Rama would come. Hanuman’s visit had made her certain of that now. The vanar’s incredible adventures in Lanka had filled her with hope that was food itself to her battered soul. Rama would come. And whatever Ravana threw at him, he would face it and defeat it, and teach this arrogant, malevolent, shloka-spouting monstrosity a lesson such as he had never been taught before. He Who Made The Universe Scream would himself be made to scream. She held on to the pillar with all her strength, buoyed by the conviction that the day of her release was approaching fast. Rama would come.
Her vision began to dim. She blinked, worried that she was losing consciousness. Then she realised that it was not her vision but the surroundings that were darkening. She looked back and saw the illumination from the cavern they had departed far behind, receded now to a tiny thumb-sized aperture. From the sharp upward position of the light behind them, she could also tell that they were plunging deep down into the earth, perhaps miles deeper. Turning back to look ahead, she saw they were approaching an area of utter darkness, a cavern that was not illuminated by Ravana’s sorcerous light. She sensed a subtle shift in the air as the Pushpak emerged from the tunnel into this new cavern and then they were swallowed up by darkness.
‘I will arrange for illumination in a moment,’ Ravana’s voice said out of the abyss. ‘Do not be alarmed.’
She did not dignify that with a response. But the truth was, her skin was creeping. A peculiar smell had assailed her senses. It was sickeningly familiar. The smell of rakshasa but somehow subtly different. An odour of decayed flesh and mulch like no other odour on earth. Like deep Southwoods boars’ offal and blood. Like stag musk on the bark of a pine trunk. Like river-fish guts left in the sun for days. It reminded her, oddly, of the lingering odour in the stables in the Princess Palace of Mithila, except that whatever creature was stabled here was neither horse nor elephant.
She heard Ravana’s voice uttering new shlokas.
At first she thought it was another cavern filled with eggrocks, and that he would repeat the same ‘awakening’ ritual he had used earlier.
Suddenly, the cavern was filled with light, forcing her to blink, coronas filling her hunger-dazed pupils.
And she saw that she had been both right as well as wrong.
The cavern was indeed filled with rakshasa. But not a whole horde of them. Just one.
‘Devi, protect us,’ she whispered despite herself.
Ravana chuckled. ‘You will excuse my brother’s inability to greet you, Princess. He tends to sleep a great deal. It is the natural consequence of an old curse, but the upside of that curse is his enormous size, which, as you might well imagine, can be quite a formidable advantage in a battle.’
He paused and gestured in the air. ‘And now, I think, it is time to initiate the process of awakening him. Something that can take anywhere from hours to days, depending on the urgency of the matter. It is now almost five months into his usual sleep-cycle, only a month or so short of his full sleep period, but that does not make it any easier. I think you would not like to be present when he awakens. It often proves to be fatal.’
Sita saw that the floor of the cavern was now covered with several hundred kumbha-rakshasas running to and fro, pointing up at the flying chariot and shouting orders. A horde of them formed into companies before a towering object at least a hundred feet high; that object was the sleeping rakshasa’s outflung hand.
She could not begin to comprehend the sheer size of a being that large. The very cavern itself was so enormous, it seemed that if she were to look up she would see the sky itself, and the far end of it was like the horizon seen from an open shore. As for the being lying prone in the cavern, its proportions were beyond comprehension. She had thought Hanuman’s amazing expansion incredible. This creature’s size belittled even that miraculous feat.
‘I give you Kumbhakarna,’ Ravana said. ‘My brother. Once he is fully awake, I will introduce you properly to him. He will be pleased to meet his new sister-in-law.’
Before Sita could respond or react to that last comment, the vahan was moving again, hurtling forward at fantastic speed. It was all she could do to hold on and keep her balance.
As they entered yet another tunnel and were embraced by pitch darkness, she used the opportunity to shut her eyes and try to regain her calm. Why was Ravana showing her all these things? To demonstrate his great military strength, of course, and to boast of his superiority in battle over Rama’s forces. But also because he truly believed he would triumph in the coming war. His tone was one less of condescending superiority than of supreme complacency. He believed he would win. That he would defeat Rama and outlive him. And because he believed it, he was wooing her, Sita. For that was the part of his aspect that had puzzled her until now, and which she now understood. This was not a king displaying his military might; it was a paramour showing his betrothed the power of the man who was wooing her. She didn’t know which made her more frightened, the fact that Ravana believed he would defeat Rama in battle, or the fact that he believed that he could win her heart.
She sensed intense bright light upon her closed eyelids, and opened her eyes.
They were emerging from a cave-mouth overlooking the ocean. The bright sky and sea were blinding at first, causing her to blink, but the openness was a comfort after those subterranean caverns. She had feared he would take her still deeper and deeper, to the very depths of hell itself. For it was rumoured that Lanka had once been, and perhaps was still, a conduit to the nether realms. She had seen no hard evidence of that since coming here, and if she understood correctly what little she had heard, then the portal to the underworld had closed some fourteen years ago, when Lanka had been destroyed in the asura race riots and Vibhisena had resurrected Ravana in the volcano. But the very knowledge that she was in a place where there had once existed a pathway to the hellish realms was frightening.
But this was no hell-mouth, only a seashore. Filled with sunlight and the tangy smell of ocean and nature’s rich, refreshing goodness. The rumours were true, then; whatever had once been here had been closed years ago.
She breathed in the fresh, cool sea air, relishing the warmth of the sunlight upon her face and arms. It was autumn now, and the wind was bracing despite the fact that the sun was high in the morning sky, but she did not mind the cold at all. It made her feel alive and free. If she looked upward and outward, ignoring the Pushpak’s lines, and the ten-headed being who controlled it, she could almost believe she was free.
Ravana began chanting again. This time, she neither recognised the shlokas nor understood them. It was a mantra foreign to her education. She was not even sure if it was Sanskrit or some even more ancient tongue.
Almost at once, the sky began to darken, the sun was shrouded by clouds, and the ocean began churning and seething. She gulped drily. Ravana’s powers were far greater than anything she had imagined. She stole a glance and saw that all ten pairs of the demonlord’s eyes were tightly shut. A jet black onyx-like stone embedded in the bone of his grotesquely muscled chest glowed brightly with power.
The chanting went on for a long time, and all the while the ocean grew wilder and more furious, like a typhoon brewing.
Then Ravana opened his eyes and lightning flashed in the stormy sky, thunder gnashed its teeth mightily, and the ocean itself rose in a great torrent to stand in a body several hundreds of feet high. Sita had thought she had seen impossible sights already. But this was beyond the limits of her expectations. Eve
n without having witnessed such a thing with her own eyes before, she knew what she was seeing. That great anthropomorphically shaped body of sea water standing before them could be none other than—
‘Varuna, lord of the sea,’ Ravana cried out. ‘I call upon you to honour your vow to serve me in my hour of need.’
A deep rumbling came from the standing body of water. Sita sensed banked anger in that sound, but also resentful obedience. ‘What is your wish, lord of Lanka?’
Ravana pointed towards the far horizon. ‘There, upon the mainland, my nemesis Rama Chandra and his army of vanars and bears are building a bridge to cross the ocean and invade my kingdom. I command you, Varuna-deva, to raise a tidal storm great enough to destroy that bridge and decimate my foes.’
For several moments, the wind howled, lightning flashed and thunder growled. The sound of the ocean god replying was like the voice of the ocean itself speaking, a watery rasping. ‘It shall be done.’
And, to Sita’s horror, the watery effigy of Varuna turned away and began moving, taking the typhoon storm and wind and lightning and thunder with him, moving towards the mainland to where Ravana had pointed.
Ravana laughed then. Laughed at his own power and at Sita’s horrified expression. He was looking at her with unbridled pleasure. ‘Finally,’ he said. ‘Finally you begin to understand, Princess. No power on earth, no being, can oppose me and survive. As you see, the devas themselves serve me. Forget Rama now. For once Varuna-deva pits the power of the ocean against him, neither Rama, nor his empowered vanar Hanuman, nor all the vanars and bears in the world can hope to win. Your hopes of rescue are doomed to end in a watery grave, my beloved Sita. Along with your husband and brother-in-law and all their forces. You have only one way left to ensure your survival and the survival of your unborn child. Relent now, repent, and be my bride. Refuse, and I shall take you by force, ravaging you the way Lord Varuna’s oceanic powers will ravage your husband’s forces.’
RAMAYANA Part 3_PRINCE AT WAR Page 47