Then he turned with a great smile and addressed his company. ‘Start the ascent in an orderly fashion.’
***
Supanakha thought she was doomed for certain. It took her a moment to understand what the vanar intended when he began to expand himself. She turned and scampered away down the cave tunnel not a moment too soon. A fraction of a moment later, the cave mouth behind her began to close shut with a grinding of rock, and the tunnel went pitch dark as the vanar pressed the rock itself inwards. She felt the thumping vibrations of sections of the tunnel’s roof caving in and the pricks of fragments striking her furred back and haunches. She raced down the tunnel until finally, several moments later, she discerned it was safe to stop and look back. There was nothing to see. The tunnel had collapsed, the very cliffside moulded by the vanar into god alone knew what—although it was not hard to guess. The vanar had obviously pressed the cliff rock into a more negotiable slope, so that Rama’s soldiers could climb it more speedily.
She padded on all fours down the dark tunnel, pausing to sneeze out some of the dust raised by the vanar’s manipulation of the rock, and seethed silently.
She didn’t know whether to curse the vanar for almost killing her accidentally or marvel at his brute power. A little of both, probably. Fortunately for her, she had seen his amazing size-altering ability first-hand the previous night, and knew well enough to get out of the way. He was a fool, though. Had he been sharp enough to see this cave, they would have had another ingress into the heart of Ravana’s sanctum. For this network of tunnels led all the way to the heart of Mount Nikumbhila, yojanas from the northern shore. By following the tunnels, Rama’s troops could easily have penetrated to the innermost bowels of Ravana’s power centre. And as far as she could tell, even the normally paranoid lord of Lanka had not seen fit to post guards in them. Come to think of it, how careless could her cousin be, to have neglected to send a horde or two to repel the invaders as they arrived on the beach? It would have been easy enough for the kumbha-rakshasas to roll a few boulders down from the cliff top, or vats of boiling oil. Or better still, use some of his high-falutin rakshasa maya to smash those arriving vanars and bears before they could even land on Lankan soil. She had not thought herself a patriot, and irreverence and rebellion had been her lifelong trademarks, but for better or worse, this land was her home, the last bastion of rakshasa life upon the mortal plane—upon all the planes, for that matter— and it rankled her to see the invaders land on its shores and start their campaign of ingress without so much as a rakshasa claw raised to obstruct them.
Is that what you think, cousin dearest? That I would stand aside and let the mortal and his furry friends land upon our shores like holidaymakers arriving for a friendly visit? Do you take me to be that much of a fool?
She stopped short, sniffing the darkness sharply. There. She could smell the unmistakable odour of the lord of rakshasas: that stench as of vegetation rotting in a deep jungle, a reek like long-decomposed boar or bull lying fly-laden in the hot summer sun, a sharp tang redolent of freshly spilled blood … and a pungent smell pervading the whole mix, like freshly spilled semen from an elephant in masth-heat. Only Ravana smelled like that.
She relaxed, not wasting her time trying to figure out whether he was present here in flesh or merely in spirit. Here in Lanka, Ravana was the very air you breathed. Reeking and omnipresent.
‘I thought you were spending too much time in the palace of pleasures indulging your carnal lusts, cousin,’ she said mockingly. ‘Why else would you not take steps to repel the invaders? Why else would you allow them to land on our shores in the first place? And why else would you send your generals to their beds for the night while Rama and his vaulting vanar heroes cover your land like a pestilence of locusts? Yes, cousin. I thought you must be surely slaking your lust between the haunches of some new rakshasi plaything—or some two dozen new playthings. Too lost in your own sensual gratification to even take this menace seriously. Either that or … ’ she paused.
Go on, my sweet cat-sister. Don’t hold back now when you’re enjoying a rare moment of perfect eloquence. Finish that last thought as well.
She shrugged. She had said enough to rouse his ire already. She might as well say the rest. ‘Either that or I thought you were so shaken by the vanar’s display of strength last night that you were cowering and cringing in some haunted corner, and were intending to stay there while Rama overran our country and came to drag you out by your hair—by your ten heads of hair!— and put an end to your misery.’
There was utter silence after she had finished. She could hear the steady thrumming of blood in her veins. Had she gone too far? Calling Ravana a coward was somewhat beyond the bounds of good taste. But she had been genuinely angry. She shrugged. Someone had to say it. And his generals were hardly man enough to stand up and tell him such things to his face—to his faces. Or even to whisper it behind his back, for that matter.
A soft chuckle came back from the darkness. It was the most unexpected response imaginable. But in a way, she felt a sparking of hope. If he was that confident that he could laugh away such bitchy criticism, then he must be more in control of the situation than she had thought. Only a king who had completely lost his senses would laugh like that at such a time—or a king who possessed secret knowledge that nobody else had.
Bravo, cousin, bravo. It would appear you have become something of a loyalist after all. Who would have thought it? Just a few months here in the homeland and you are a Lankan through and through. Simply amazing! I had no idea you had become this patriotic.
She sniffed out a suitable spot in a corner of the tunnel and relieved herself copiously. After she was done, she shook herself vigorously. ‘I care nothing for Lanka,’ she said brusquely. ‘But this matter concerns my rakshasa honour as well. I want to see the mortal crushed and broken like a smashed beetle, not running free across the countryside with an army. It is not right for mortals and vanars and bears to dare to encroach upon rakshasa land this way. Why do you stand aside and do nothing? I heard you tell your generals to go to bed. Why are you not repelling the invaders? Why did you let them land here at all? That is what I understand least of all! Why could you not stop them before they even reached Lankan shores?’
Ravana’s voice, still rich with the amusement he had found in her last remarks, was tinged with steel this time. ‘Because this is an endgame, cousin. Not a skirmish. Not another battle. Not even a war. It is the end of all wars. The culmination of a long and ancient conflict, the last of many campaigns waged over more than one era. I do not seek merely to win this time, nor to repel, or crush. I seek to triumph.’
She realised that his voice was no longer in her head; it had assumed physical form. He was here in the tunnel, she sensed, not far from where she stood. She sniffed, seeking him out, and her senses told her that he was less than three yards ahead, to the right. Slowly, as if locating him had made it happen, he began to emerge from the darkness, his sorcerous shakti illuminating the very pores of his leathery skin, until he stood revealed before her in all his rakshasa splendour, nine of his ten heads engaged as always in their individual bickering and constant dialogue, while the central head addressed her, its eyes glittering like jewels lit by their own inner light.
‘Cousin. You asked me why I permitted Rama to land his forces here? It was because this is rakshasa territory. This is my land. And by coming here, he has played right into my hands. Now, I have only to reach out,’ his hands did as his words promised, reaching out with the palms facing upwards, then closing into mighty fists, the bones crunching harshly, ‘and crush them. Back on the mainland, they might have been able to run or hide or evade me somehow. On the open seas, they might have found help from their oceanic allies. But here on Lanka, they are within my grasp, naked. They have nowhere to go from here. There is nothing they can do to resist my power. Nothing they can do now … except die.’
She stared, mesmerised. His vitality was so overwhelming, his power rollin
g off him in thick, palpable waves, that she was compelled to believe every syllable. If any creature possessed the ability to do as he willed, it was Ravana. All her doubts and resentments melted away, seeming foolish now in the presence of such potent shakti. How could she ever have doubted him? How could she have accused him of neglect, of cowardice even? Look at him! Magnificent, omnipotent, conqueror of the overworld and the underworld both, defeater of the devas themselves, master of all he surveyed. What fool would dare oppose him? Of course he had a plan. Brilliant strategist that he was, he had chosen to allow the armies of Rama to land on the shores of Lanka, to lure them here just as a predator lures prey into its sanctuary, the better to pounce on it and savage it at its leisure.
In a single moment, she went from blustering resentment to reverential ecstasy. She gazed up adoringly at the ten-headed master of her race, quivering with pleasure and sensual delight at merely being within his virile presence. She knew she was allowing herself to be hypnotised by the sorcery he wielded to subjugate those who encountered him, but did not care. He was Lanka. And he was indomitable. This was the Ravana she had admired and feared for so long. Who was so named Ra-va-na because his aspect and his deeds were fearsome enough to make the universe scream.
Only one question occurred to her.
‘How?’ she asked, lowering her eyes to show him subservience. ‘How will you do it, my lord?’
She asked it not as a form of censure or objection, only out of curiosity. How would he choose to dispatch the forces of Rama? What devious intent did he have in store for them? The sadistic part of her relished the revelation of some grotesque new means of taking life, the one act that gave her most pleasure of all, more than even the act of procreation, which after all, was only a means of defying one’s own mortality. She preferred to embrace the dark descent. To lick the loins of the deepest, darkest, most secret craving of all living beings—the ultimate mating of all, the coupling of living flesh with sudden, unforeseen, brutally violent death.
Ravana’s faces shared one of those rare moments of concatenation, those brief instants when all ten heads were united in a common thought, joining their formidable individual powers to form one great chain of mental prowess. All heads smiled, displaying a variety of teeth, glistening with the saliva of predatory anticipation. The lion was hot for the hunt.
‘Come,’ he said, his ten tongues speaking in ten mouths all at once, writhing glossily like serpents in the mouths of suboceanic sea-caves. ‘Let me show you.’
He clapped his hands together.
And in a wink of an eye, she found herself elsewhere. She gasped as she teetered on the edge of an abyss, her claws scrabbling for purchase on a gravelly slope, then ceased her struggles as she realised that she was not present here in physical form. Ravana had brought only her consciousness with him— or rather, had summoned it to him—for he was here in all his corporeal glory, naked body weeping perspiration that roiled and dripped like hot oil through the crevices and contours of his exquisitely defined musculature. But she had no time to lust at the sight of his magnificent anatomy, for the thing he had brought her here to see lay below, far below, in a great abyss that she guessed was within the labyrinthine network of cavernous tunnels that led ultimately to the great volcano that had once birthed Lanka and formed the island-kingdom itself. The volcano had lain silent and still for nigh on fourteen years, as had Ravana himself under the influence of the brahm-astra cage in which he had been imprisoned at Mithila. But she saw now that it was not truly dead, only dormant, and even in this dormant state, the heat it gave off was immense, intolerable. She cringed at the rim of the ledge as waves of searing heat rolled up and over her. Had she been present here in the flesh, it would have been roasting now, and her fur singed and smoking. Even incorporeal as she was, she crouched in reflex, fearful of the power of the sleeping titan.
Ravana was chanting shlokas in that rhythmic incantation that she loathed. Every time she heard a rishi or tapasvi sadhu in a forest muttering those Sanskrit verses, she felt inclined to leap upon them and tear out their throats—and she had done exactly that innumerable times. Every rakshasa hated the very sound of those incantations, that smooth, perfect Sanskrit that seemed to carry the motes of energy of Brahman itself in every syllable. Except that Ravana was chanting them backwards, perfectly inverting every syllable, every word, every shloka, to reverse the energies of Brahman. And the effect was galvanising to a rakshasi ear. It was the sound of roaring blood and cracking bone and brutal agony, the very antithesis of the peace and beauty of their original meaning.
Revelling in the sound, she persuaded herself to peek once more over the rim of the crater. And saw a sight astonishing enough to hold her attention despite the terrible maw of the volcano far below. From a ledge at the tip of another tunnel much like this one but a few dozen yards below and to the right of where she crouched, a line of rakshasas of both sexes were emerging. From their white and red-ochre robes she knew them to be the followers of the same Brahminical cult that Vibhisena had espoused. Indeed, every one of them was anointed on their foreheads with the ash markings of Brahmins. They were lined up in neat rows extending far back into the dimly lit tunnel. From the glazed absence of intelligence in their half-shut eyes, she guessed that Ravana had mesmerised them somehow. And compelled them to do what they were about to do. For as she watched, the first Brahmin rakshasas stepped off the ledge they were standing on, and fell to certain destruction far below. She followed their plummeting bodies for a long moment until they struck the dark slag-covered surface of the volcano’s pool of curdled magma. Their flesh ignited instantly on impact with the searing magma and burst into flame. More bodies followed in an unending procession, until the belly of the volcano was a hotbed of flaming spots.
As the Brahmins continued to fall, and Ravana continued to chant his obscenely inverted mantras, she felt a trembling beneath her insubstantial paws. Or perhaps she felt it beneath her real paws, still back in the cavern where Ravana had found her. For she sensed that this potent vibration was reverberating not just through the maw of the volcano, but throughout the length and breadth of Lanka itself. She had no clue what dark ritual Ravana was performing here, but it was obvious that it was some form of power-enhancement. He was clearly using the fire-sacrifice of these hundreds upon hundreds of pious Brahmin souls to create a well of Brahman power with which he intended to work some monstrous sorcery.
Just what that sorcery might be, she shuddered to imagine. As the rumbling increased, growing deafening and causing her every nerve to shudder painfully, she was transported back to the cavern. Just before she was pushed away by Ravana—for she knew it was he who had magically removed her in the nick of time—she caught a tantalisingly brief glimpse of a pillar of fire rising up from the depths of the volcano far below. She barely had time to glimpse it before she was whisked away by Ravana’s sorcery, but she could have sworn on her own black soul that the unnatural fire had a face and features that strongly resembled those of the being responsible for its creation—ten faces and sets of features in fact.
THREE
Rama felt a faint trembling beneath his feet and frowned. Perhaps it was caused by the pounding of the feet of his enormous army.
As suddenly as it had begun, it faded away. He dismissed it and refocussed on the task at hand, overseeing the transfer of the armies from the sea-bridge to land.
After Hanuman’s dramatic alteration of the cliffside, the ascent posed no challenge. Rama and Lakshman led the first wave to the top, deafened by the cheering of the troops in celebration of their crossing as well as at entering Lanka so easily. The top of the cliff was a plateau stretching for many miles, rolling grassland dotted with clumps of wooded areas. Vibhisena had said that Lanka was shaped like a teardrop suspended just below the mainland. It was some hundred and twenty yojanas in length from shore to shore, and at its widest point at its waist, some forty-five yojanas across. That was both larger and smaller than Rama had expected. All he had
learned of Lanka before today were stray bits of information gleaned from legends and myths. Like all such scraps of information, they had ranged wildly from fantastical descriptions of a hellish asura-infested landscape with a great black castle set in the heart of a seething exploding volcano, to a vapid desert island barely a mile from end to end. Like all realities, the truth was to be found in neither extreme. It was a country much like the southern tip of the mainland they had left behind, the flora and fauna appearing almost identical to that one, for at some point in its geographical past, this island had certainly been attached to that mainland. Its lushness was unexpected, yet welcome. For his first concern had been how to feed such a large army with an ocean separating them from their familiar sources of sustenance. Now, he saw, he would not have to concern himself with such mundane matters: the troops could easily find forage in these fecund grasslands and forests. He and his generals could concentrate on the real issues at hand: the strategies of war.
He called a meeting of the leaders at a suitable spot on the plateau, close enough to the edge that they might oversee the beach, where troops were still arriving in a steady stream, as well as spy the lie of the land and plan their next moves. Twilight had fallen by now, a quiet, luminous pallor falling upon the world, with birdsong and the soft shirring of the ocean providing a placid backdrop. It was hard to believe this was the dreaded lair of rakshasas. He noticed the disbelieving look on the faces of each new wave of troops that ascended to the plateau: surely this could not be Lanka? Land of rakshasas? Lair of asuras? Impossible!
RAMAYANA Part 3_PRINCE AT WAR Page 58