Then he reached the peak of his ascent, or as high as the fist of rock holding him aloft wished to go, and gasped in shocked wonder, experiencing a moment of perfect weightlessness. Like a bird pausing in its flapping to allow a current of air to bear it along. But this was no air wave holding him a hundred yards aloft; it was the ground itself, risen up. And he knew that what rose up must surely fall. He braced his body, curling himself up into a ball and awaiting the impact of the fall. He would survive it, no matter what, he would survive it and then he would …
The earth shifted beneath him, scraping his bare back, moving under his limbs, tearing itself apart and putting itself together anew, reshaping itself. Great groaning and grinding sounds came from beneath him. He dared to open his eyes once more and tried to orient himself. There was almost no light to see by up here, but he could sense the transformation taking place by the sound and vibration itself. The finger that had raised him up was not falling back—apparently, tonight on Lanka, the natural laws of the world would not be entertained. Instead, it was growing, expanding. He uncurled himself slowly, cautiously, rising to his feet. And instantly wished he had not done so.
The burning debris from the fire, flung across the plateau for tens of yards in every direction, served to illuminate isolated patches of land. Seen from this vantage point, a hundred or more yards above the ground, it was like seeing a map of this part of the island laid out before him, drawn upon parchment by some obscene, twisted artist.
The ground was re-forming itself into a new shape. He could already guess what that shape might possibly be, because the progress was so swift. It was as if the island of Lanka itself had been commanded by the lord of rakshasas to alter its appearance according to his desires. And in doing so, it was moving of its own volition, rising, falling, squaring off, elongating, accomplishing what ten thousand artisans could not do in a dozen years—within a single night. For at the pace at which the reshaping was proceeding, it was evident that this devil’s work would be done before dawn. The fact that they, Rama and his fellows, his troops, had been present here at the time of the earth’s reshaping, was no doubt part of the lord of Lanka’s plan. For while accomplishing his epic feat of sorcerous engineering, he was also launching the first major assault upon Rama’s armies. Rama could see dead beasts everywhere: some torn apart by the earth separating, others crushed beyond recognition when two sections hammered themselves together, yet others tossed high, over the edge of the cliff perhaps, to fall on the jagged rocks far below, or even here on the plateau.
He saw a cluster of vanars, bunched together as was their tendency under crisis, thrown mercifully upon the upper branches of a tree, clinging desperately with limbs and tails. Another group, not as fortunate, were tossed high and then left to fall back upon naked rock, their bodies shattering, skulls smashing open to spill splatters of gore, the survivors dying slow, agonising deaths as they lay there helplessly, spines and limbs broken to fragments. Bears were worse off, by and large, for even when thrown down onto trees they could hardly be expected to cling on to passing branches. They hit the ground with heavy thuds, many never to rise again. Those who did rise, were thrown down once more, for the earth continued to shake and shudder, and split open, hiving off in unexpected directions. There was no way to predict which way it would go next, up, down or sideways. In places, he saw the earth split open, swallowing entire companies of his troops, the poor creatures falling silently into the dark maw of a crevice so deep, he could not hear their bodies strike the bottom.
As he watched, stunned and helpless for the moment, he began to discern the rough outline of the new shape the land was taking, and to guess at the ultimate form this sorcerous redesigning was aimed at producing. His fists tightened with cold, impotent fury, and he began reaching for the celestial weapons with which he had compelled the lord of the ocean himself to show himself and cease his attacks not long ago. But he stopped, fingers curling in upon themselves, knowing that there was nothing he could do to stop this particular assault. Here, even the weapons of Brahma and Vishnu and Shiva would have no effect upon the sorcery of Ravana. For this was the rakshasa’s domain. He had prepared for this very moment ingeniously, infusing the earth with his sorcery in some fashion, waiting until enough of Rama’s troops were on the island—yet before they were ready to launch their own assault—and then he had struck. Now all Rama and his armies could do was wait out the attack. Attempt to survive it somehow. And when it was over …
He sat down cross-legged upon the spur of ground that had borne him up. It continued to shudder and writhe beneath him, as the sorcerous reshaping continued. Had it been possible, he would have climbed down and attempted to do something, anything. But there was nothing to be done. They were an army at war, and the enemy had launched the first assault. A treacherous cowardly assault, for not one soldier of the enemy’s ranks was here to spill blood or even offer a target. An unbalanced, unfair, uneven assault by an invisible, greatly superior force, upon a relatively helpless one. But an assault nevertheless. And faced by such an assault, he could do only what any commander did at such a time: wait out the assault and pray that his soldiers survived it.
He tried to calm himself, regain control of his senses, and prepare himself for the war ahead. To form in his mind a strategy by which he could strike Ravana a blow as intense and unexpected as the one he had struck Rama. He sought the calm of meditation that had always come to him easily, like a flower yielding its fragrance to a kiss of the breeze.
This time, calm was hard to come by.
The screams and cries of dying and suffering vanars and bears kept battering his senses all night long.
***
Hanuman was filled with chagrin. He had come to the same conclusion that Rama had: There was nothing he could do. He tried to leap here to save some troops from a falling mound of earth, there to catch others who were flung up by another heaving section, to do what he could here and there. But the entire island was writhing and churning, and there was only so much he could do at one time, only so many he could reach. He worked all night long, refusing to give up, using every ounce of his strength and ability to try to save whomever he could. But as the long terrible night wound on, and more and more vanars and bears died in his arms, he began to realise that it was a hopeless task. It was akin to trying to rush around a battlefield, saving one’s fellow soldiers from the attacks of the enemy. A battle could not be fought in such a way; not even by a soldier possessed of the powers that he possessed. It was futile. Ultimately, if he saved someone here, someone else died there. If he flew and picked up a cluster of vanars and carried them out of harm’s way in one place, moments after he had left them there the earth would rise up and fold itself upon them where they stood, crushing them all without a second’s warning. Soon, he was so covered with gore and gristle that he could barely get a grip on anything, his entire body slick with bodily fluids and dust and dirt.
He flew up as high as he could, trying to see as far as possible, and spy out the land. It was towards midnight now and the last of the troops had arrived as expected, for the greybacks had held their line for as long as it was physically possible; no sooner had the last of the vanars and bears leaped onto the killing sands of Lanka, the greybacks moved away with a great lowing and mooing, offering their heartfelt commiseration for the terror that was befalling his compatriots. He sent back thoughts of great sadness and grief, as well as sentiments of great gratitude and love, for the greybacks had done their task admirably; what transpired after his people arrived on Lanka was not within their control. Even so, he heard their voices all night long, lowing and calling in the dark ocean, offering support and encouragement to their new landlocked friends while offering the occasional sirens of rage against those inflicting such suffering upon them. It tore at his heart then, that despite his great shakti he could do so little to help others. He opened his mouth and bellowed his anguish, beating his fists upon his chest.
***
L
akshman survived a flailing of earth, a mad frenzy of dust and dirt and shrubbery that blinded him for several moments and caused him to lose all sense of direction—or even orientation. For how could you tell which way was up or down when the very earth itself was surging to and fro in impossible patterns? One moment he was being pushed from behind by a wall of earth that rose out of the ground and continued to rise until it had gone too high in the darkness for him to see the top of it; another moment, he was dodging a row of protrusions that shot forward from the wall with alarming speed. Despite being made of just mud, they were hard enough and pointed enough to pierce flesh, as he saw happen to one unfortunate bear who did not dodge them quickly enough. Three separate spears of mud penetrated the bear’s shoulder, chest, and ribs, and even as Lakshman lunged forward to try to aid the poor creature, the points of the mud-spears emerged from his back, bursting out of the fur with bloody precision, and continued their forward motion. They were no more aware of their ability to kill than any force of nature, but they were no less deadly for that. Lakshman roared with fury as he struggled to wrest the bear’s gasping body off the spears, and in the dust and confusion he almost failed to see the second row of mud-spears emerging from a lower point on the same wall. These were thicker, blunter, but they looked ugly and hard enough to break leg bones. He spun around and began shouting warnings to everyone within hearing range. But despite hearing his cries, several of the troops continued to mill around in dazed bewilderment. Their terror and confusion was compounded by the holes appearing in the ground around them, in a pattern that made no sense at first, but gradually assumed a meaningful purpose to Lakshman. One of the soldiers found his foot caught in a hole that suddenly dropped out from beneath him, and screamed. His vanar and bear friends nearby tried to pull him out, while he kept screaming that the ground was trying to swallow him whole. Lakshman saw to his horror what none of the rest of them was aware of: the lower row of blunt spikes were approaching them at a remorseless pace. He shouted to warn them and they turned, looking at the wall. But they were too late. The spikes struck them, punching through the bones of their feet and thighs with sickening force, and knocked them over en masse. Even as they struggled to break free, the earth shuddered nearby, and a pile of earth flew up in an arching swoop, landing right on top of the hapless band of trapped soldiers. The thud of the earthfall striking ground again cut off their dying screams.
Lakshman saw many more such scenes of sickening, meaningless violence all around him. At one point he began searching for Rama, and when he could not find him anywhere, nor find anyone who had seen him, he began to feel his gorge rise up in his throat. The thought of Rama being brought down by mud-spears or spikes or holes in the ground sickened him. Surely they had not come through so much, survived so many battles and fights, just so the future King of Ayodhya could die here on this plateau in Lanka, killed by nothing more vicious than mindless mud manipulated by an absent rakshasa’s sorcery? He searched desperately for hours, passing grotesque tableaux of carnage, until, with an immense bone-shivering, grinding sensation, the first phase of the reshaping ended and a pause more terrible than all the dusty chaos descended briefly upon the battlefield—for it was nothing less than a battlefield. As he waited, not knowing what new horror might erupt next, he looked around and took stock. Immense vaulting walls of earth had sprung up all around the plateau, running along its rim in a pattern that his mind dimly recognised but did not wish to stop to name right now.
As the dust settled at last, he raised his eyes, wiping grime and blood from his forehead, with equally gore-and-dust-smeared hands. Holding his head up to keep a trickle from his head from rolling into his eyes, he saw that a solitary figure was perched on top of one great wall, perhaps a hundred, or a hundred and fifty yards high, it was hard to tell exactly how high in this dust-bedevilled darkness. He tried to find a better angle to see by, and when he looked up again, he saw the figure move, rising to stand in a manner that suggested a man looking down. There was a moon out by now, a quarter, not quite a half moon, and it emerged from behind a bank of cloud just then, silhouetting the lone figure on top of the wall. Then he was sure. There was no mistaking a mortal man’s outline and that was certainly no vanar or bear.
‘Rama,’ he said with a sense of relief so great that tears welled up in his eyes. He dabbed at them fiercely, unmindful of his blood-and-dust-smeared hands. ‘Rama is alive.’
Then the next phase of reconstruction began, and he leaped aside just as the ground on which he had been standing began to ripple and slide. It moved slowly from side to side, not quickly or forcefully enough to smash or batter and he saw that the troops across the field were easily able to sidestep these new developments, although they remained fearful and mistrustful of Ravana’s sorcery. He called out to those captains and other tribe and clan chiefs within hailing range to remain alert and not to band too closely together, the better to dodge whatever hellish new thing came bursting out next. But now that they were forewarned and alert, nothing happened, of course. The shifting plates and sections of the great scheme that had been put into place earlier merely adjusted and slid a few inches this way and that, the sounds of groaning rock and protesting piles of packed earth more eerie than any actual threat.
And so began a new stage in the battle, one in which the enemy continued to shape its mysterious design, working with the elements of soil and rock and tree, crafting them with invisible forces into a design that was clear even to the most dull-headed vanar or bear on the plateau now, while Rama’s army continued to do the only thing it possibly could when faced with such a foe: survive until morning.
It was a long night.
FIVE
It was dawn when the sorcery finally ceased. First light was creeping across the sky, patches of indigo, violet, purple, crimson,
and lime green seeping into one another, streaking across the world like coloured water flung across a parquet floor or like some bizarre after-effect of Ravana’s maya. Everyone glanced suspiciously around, doubting that things were as they seemed, doubting their companions, their fellows, their leaders, even doubting themselves. For where, only last evening, they hadstood upon a lush, green plateau, undulating into rolling meadows, quiet brooks, placid flower fields, dense thickets rife with life and growth, rolling farther to the foothills of distant mountains, where only last evening all this pictureseque natural beauty had greeted their vision, now in its place stood a terrible, heart-chilling vision. A dark nightmare made real through asura maya.
Rama rose slowly to his feet, staring in first one direction then another, seeing with disbelieving eyes what the early slanting light unveiled. He had formed some notion of what was being wrought this long, dark and awful night. But it was still a shock to see it rendered complete even before morning was full-blown. And to know that all this had been achieved through the manipulating of mere earth, rock, trees and water, the natural materials of the land. Manipulated, reshaped, coagulated, hardened, baked and chiselled until the startlingly effective result lay before his very eyes, only a night’s watch later.
The raised ledge of packed earth which had carried him aloft was now a solid wall of piled stone. The wall rose much higher than he had thought last evening. He had felt it shudder and move all night long, no doubt increasing by steadier, slower degrees. It had risen to a height of some three hundred yards and was at least thrice as high now. The surface on which he stood was not dry earth packed together, but solid blocks of cut stone, as if carved in great chunks from living rock and then shaped into identical regular blocks, which then appeared to have been placed upon one another to form a piled wall. There were fortresses like this across the Arya nations, although none this high or thick, and surely none that had been erected in a single night. He bent and pressed his palm upon the stone on which he stood, feeling a familiar roughly chiselled texture. The grooves where the individual stones met were lined with a thin glue of mortar, as if living hands had applied the mortar before each new st
one was lowered into place by teams of horses or men using ropes and pulleys. Yet no ropes had lowered these stones, no hands, mortal or rakshasa had applied any mortar, no engineer had supervised the placement of the stones and the chiselling of their planes. Despite the absence of these normal essentials, the wall felt perfectly solid and real. After all, he realised, the wall was real, made from the same materials that would otherwise have been used in a normal construction. Only the means by which it had been constructed was unreal.
The wall’s top was several yards wide, with crenellations running along the edge of each side for the entire length of the wall. And, he saw as the light illuminated more and more of the island, the wall itself ran across what seemed to be the entire length of Lanka itself. Or as much of Lanka as he could glimpse from where he was: from this height, he could see for a full yojana at least, any further view blocked only by the range of mountains that rose gradually, topped by a single great peak, the one that Vibhisena had named Mount Nikumbhila. Up to that point, and possibly beyond it as well, this wall ran like a great fortification, looking as if it had stood here a thousand years and would stand a thousand more. It rose and fell with the land’s natural slope, dipping down to the valley where he could see brooks and thickets and glades that remained as they were the day before, then rising again towards the foothills of the mountain range, dwarfed only by Nikumbhila. Beyond the mountain, he glimpsed a reddish glow that seemed not to belong to the scarlet flares of the coming dawn. For one thing, it was in the south-west. It appeared like a great fire dimly glimpsed far beyond the mountain itself, perhaps several yojanas farther south. But surely no fire, however great, could send up a glow that would be visible beyond the height of such a mountain? It was something else, he could almost name it, but the name eluded him. He dismissed it for the moment. Right now, he wished only to return to the ground below, to join his armies once more. If these were ramparts, there must be steps cut through the heart of the wall, for defending soldiers to come up and go down. He began walking the length of the wall, searching for such a stairway.
RAMAYANA Part 3_PRINCE AT WAR Page 60