Once inside Lanka, it was not hard to pick up the scent of the two Lankan spies although it was terrifying to be within the city of their most feared enemies, alone and unarmed. But by hiding in plain sight—pretending to be Lankan spies themselves—they had simply strutted through the other barricades and guards and followed their targets right into the heart of the capital. There they had managed to conceal themselves in the high branches of a great banyan tree and watched as the two Lankans passed on their vital information to a rakshasa general with the most magnificent teeth they had ever seen on a living creature.
‘General Vajradanta,’ Vibhisena said, on hearing this description. ‘He can bite through the blades of three swords at once, leaving perfect indentations of his teeth on all. He is blessed with a boon that enables him to bite through anything he chooses.’
After being debriefed by their general, the two spies had wined and supped and been allowed to indulge in Lankan hedonism most of the night, until they fell into a drunken, satiated stupor. Early this morning, they had staggered awake and made their way blearily back to Rama’s army before dawn. On Hanuman’s instructions a little while earlier, the three Kiskindha vanars had stayed close by the two Lankans in the trees, falling upon them when Hanuman gave the pre-arranged signal. And here they were.
Satabali nodded at Rama, Lakshman and Hanuman, including them all in his gruffly spoken congratulations. ‘Smartly scented, shrewdly devised, brilliantly executed. But what would you do now, Lord Rama? Your Lankan spies must be killed, or they will go back and tell their masters all your real plans.’ He added with a chortle, ‘Unless you think that these spasas can be made allies as well!’
Rama studied the two rakshasas crouched on the ground. They looked amazingly like vanars. Hanuman sniffed. Their baleful eyes glared angrily up at the mortal yodha, as if they desired nothing more than to tear out his throat. He resisted the urge to cuff them for their insolence, knowing that if he did, he might wish to hit them harder than living bone could endure.
‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘They can never be our allies. But we shall not kill them either.’
Angad asked, with his customary impatience tinged with genuine curiosity, ‘Then what do you wish done with them?’
Rama’s lips curled in a semblance of a smile. ‘They shall be escorted to the gates of Lanka and handed over to the sentries there. Hanuman, you shall do this, fly them there and return as swiftly as possible. Dawn is upon us, sunrise is nigh, and we have many preparations yet to make. Go, my friend. Do as I have instructed.’
Hanuman needed no second bidding. He moved forward, bending down and scooping up the two rakshasa-vanars in both arms, then took to the skies with a swiftness that brought startled, choked gasps and a cheeka of outrage from the two Lankan spies. In moments, he was cutting through the sky like a falcon following its prey.
***
‘I don’t understand, Rama,’ Lakshman said. ‘Doesn’t this defeat the plan of shima you described earlier? Won’t the Lankan spies now go back and tell Ravana everything you outlined this morning as well? If what our Kiskindhan spies told us is true, the Lankans were able to read our lips and so deduce everything we discussed here at this war council as well. Now both our original plan and our counter-plan are in Lankan hands!’
Rama smiled. ‘What makes you think that either of those are our real plans?’
Lakshman looked at him, dumbfounded for once. So did everyone else.
Rama said quietly, ‘Now, if you will listen closely, I will tell you what we must do today to turn the tide in our favour and show the lord of Lanka that we are not an enemy to be dismissed lightly. It is time that we showed him that rakshasas can be slaughtered and massacred too.’
NINE
Hanuman flew up several hundred yards, high enough to view the lie of the land, yet not so high that he could not be seen easily by Angad and the other generals and captains and chiefs of the armies. He floated in mid-air, examining the scene below with great curiosity.
He had deposited the Lankan spies at the gates of Lanka, dropping them from a height of several yards right at the feet of the startled gate-watch kumbha guards—high enough to injure and cause pain, but not kill—and before the kumbhas could so much as raise their spears and howl a warning, he was speeding back to Rama. He had rejoined the council barely a moment after Rama had begun outlining his real plan. And now, only a short while after the council had ended, here he was, in the sky again, preparing for the first battle against Lanka.
He hovered in the air and examined the lie of the land below. To the north-east, the sun had risen above the rim of the ocean horizon and cast its golden light upon the world. Seen from this height, the ocean glinted and glistened, encapsulating Lanka as the waters of a pond encircled a lotus.
Only now, in the clear light of day, could he truly see the results of Ravana’s sorcery of the night before and compare the land that lay below him now to the Lanka he had seen only a day or two earlier on his previous visit.
What had been a lush, fecund plateau sloping down on the south side into a valley which then rose again to the foothills of mountains, had been transformed into a vast enclosure bounded on all sides by the towering fortress wall. In a sense, Rama’s forces were now contained within the walls of Lanka. But this was illusory, for these walls were intended to imprison, not to include. Lanka’s true walls of defence were much farther south, where the inner fortress city now lay, resurrected in all its former blackstone rakshasa glory, the volcano beyond it spewing red-hot hellish rage. This was the Lanka that they had heard fables and legends of, the land of rakshasas and asuras and unspeakable things.
What Ravana’s sorcery had achieved the night before, apart from killing almost a tenth of Rama’s forces—decimating them in the most literal sense—was to imprison them in this part of the island, the northern end. Hanuman could see for a good yojana in every direction from his current vantage point: the armies of vanars and bears spread thickly across the landscape, fenced in by those menacing blackstone walls with their cruel spiked spears that protruded several yards.
After the council ended, the first thing Rama had done was offer a prayer for those who had fallen during the night of the killing stones, followed by a second prayer for those who had been spared. Speaking briefly to the assembled commanders, captains and tribe chiefs of both the vanar and bear forces, his words passed on to the gathering through word-of-mouth as usual, Rama had told his warriors that it was a sign of their good fortune that although they had suffered great losses during their first night in Lanka, almost all their commanders and leaders had lived to see daylight. That surely indicated that they were meant to live and to extract reprisal for their fallen soldiers.
The next thing he did was quickly sketch out his analysis of Ravana’s strategy, based on his observations of the manner in which the fortress had been raised, and the design of its fortifications. He pointed out what they had all observed by then in the slanting light of sunrise: ‘These fortifications are designed to contain us within, not keep us out. That itself tells us everything we need to know about their next plan of attack.’
Hanuman watched now as the lakhs of vanars and bears carpeting the landscape below milled about in apparent confusion, seemingly still fearful and disoriented after the night’s traumatic events. Slowly, with apparent difficulty, the troops to the south began to organise themselves into battle formations, lining up in typical fashion. Farther south, he could see the clouds of dust raised by the approaching armies of Lanka. To all appearances, Lanka’s armies had come from the city and were attacking from the south, as was logical, and Rama’s forces were responding by forming up to face the defenders.
But appearances could be deceptive.
The troops were doing as Rama had ordered, playing their part exceedingly well. Slowly, in apparent confusion and with visible reluctance, the vanar and bear lines began to form, facing southwards. This left a great patch at the northern tip of the plateau co
mpletely deserted. Not a single vanar or bear was visible for several miles at that end.
A movement by the wall at the northern tip of the plateau caught his eye and he shifted his attention to that spot. That was the farthest point north, literally the place where he had pressed the cliff face to provide a more negotiable slope for Rama’s armies to climb from the beach. Now it was bounded by the rampart wall. It was at that very point that he had found Rama an hour or so earlier, and carried him down to the ground below. Rama had spoken to the council about his search for a stairway down from the top of the rampart to the ground, and how he had found no such thing. Which defied all logic. What good was a rampart wall without a stairway for soldiers to climb to the top to defend the wall? There was only one answer to that, said Rama: The wall was never meant to be climbed, either by the defenders or the attackers. It was merely intended to fence them in.
Which raised the next, most vital question: Now that Ravana had Rama’s army fenced in upon this part of his kingdom, imprisoned by those unclimbable walls on every side, how would he launch his first attack? The logical choice would be from the south, from the direction of the city of Lanka itself. But that would be too simple, too obvious. And Ravana was not given to simple strategies, as the sorcerous display of the night had itself proven.
No, Rama had said, had Ravana desired to attack them in the usual fashion, sending his armies across the mountain ranges to engage Rama’s forces in face-to-face confrontation, he would not have designed the walls as he had. It was no mere coincidence that Rama had been raised up by the rising wall, for by that happenstance, he had been able to discover the lack of an ingress for Ravana’s soldiers in the rampart walls, and from that lack, he had been able to deduce Ravana’s entire battle strategy— and prepare a counter-strategy of his own.
And that was what was being put into action right now. From the moment Nala’s messengers had brought word of the event that Rama had told them to look out for, the die had been cast. Just as Rama had predicted, the scouts posted as close to the walls as they could possibly get had felt tremors from deep within the ground. Anybody else would have thought that this was evidence of some new phase in Ravana’s sorcerous redesign, but Rama was confident that it meant that his analysis was right, and had immediately given the word to move to the next phase of their counter-strategy.
Hanuman watched with bated breath as the troops below moved farther south as if they only had a mind to engage Ravana’s troops arriving from that direction, with no awareness of any other threat. As they moved they left the entire plateau apparently empty.
The key word was ‘apparently’.
Back on the ground, he had watched along with everyone else as Rama had pointed out the crevices and crenellations carved into the foot of the wall at regular intervals. Rama had explained for the benefit of the two species, who had no previous knowledge of such things, that in normal fortifications those apertures would lead to stairwells and tunnels providing passageways for troops defending the wall to travel along its length and to the top of the ramparts to reinforce the defences. But as he had already discovered, there were no such stairwells leading to the top of the walls, which left only the other possibility—passages. It had taken only a few moments of quick scouting by a handful of bold vanars to report that, indeed, the crevices and crenellations led to passageways within the walls, and that these passageways led, not upwards as would have been usual for a fortification of this type, but down. Once Rama heard this, he had smiled a smile such as Hanuman had never seen before. And then he had outlined the strategy they were now putting into effect.
Hanuman focussed his gaze on the dark shadows gathering at the foot of the walls. At first, it would seem that they were what they appeared to be—shadows. But in many places, they fell the wrong way, aslant to the angle of the sunlight streaming down from the eastern sky. And they moved as no shadows could possibly move. As he watched, they grew bolder, emerging into the light as they saw that Rama’s troops had abandoned this region to march south, just as their master had intended.
Now he saw the flash of a rakshasa’s tusked snout, now the gleam of a horned head, now the silvery flash of a steel weapon being unsheathed. Ravana’s troops were coming up through the secret passageways inside the wall, just as Rama had predicted, and were now waiting until sufficient of their number had accumulated to launch the first attack. He smiled grimly. So this was Ravana’s plan, just as Rama had expected: The lord of Lanka intended to catch them between a rock and a hard place—or to be more accurate, between a rock wall and a charging army. He was launching his forces from the south, duping Rama into forming his troops to fight there, and when the battle was fully underway, with all of Rama’s troops committed, he would order these rakshasas, creeping up through the secret passageways, to strike at Rama’s armies from the flanks. Rama’s forces would be bound on all sides, hemmed in, and it would be easy for the rakshasa hordes to press them inwards until they had nowhere to turn or retreat. It was a brutal, cruel plan, and a brilliant one.
He watched as the rakshasas emerged more boldly now from the walls, like cockroaches swarming out in the absence of the occupants of a house, and lined up in preparation for their devious assault. There was nothing between them and Rama’s unsuspecting troops to the south except a few empty miles of dense thickets. They would wait for the battle to begin before launching their assault.
He flew a yojana or so in a southwards direction, until he was floating over the approaching armies of Lanka. They looked formidable in the early sunlight, endless lines of rakshasas racing in the familiar thumping marching style that he had seen before during Rama’s battles in Janasthana. There were legions of kumbha-rakshasas among them too, dwarfing their fellow rakshasas and wielding great wooden hammers with iron heads. Even though they were far fewer in number than the other rakshasas, the cloud of dust spiralling up from their battalion was denser and greater than that rising in the wake of the rest of the army.
He watched as the rakshasa army came within a mile of his own forces, and slowed to a halt, the two armies arrayed across the width of this end of the island, spread thickly across some two and a half yojanas. Even now, Rama’s forces were much more numerous than those of Ravana, but in this too, Hanuman knew, appearances were deceptive. Ravana had many tricks up his sleeve, and even Rama could not second-guess every one of them; while all the troops that Rama commanded were there to be seen and counted.
He grinned slyly. Well, perhaps not all.
He flexed his body and prepared to carry out the next stage of Rama’s plan.
***
General Vajradanta watched from a promontory atop Mount Nikumbhila as the Lankan forces reached their appointed places
in the valley below. A hint of movement in the sky above caught his attention and he peered up to see a tiny speck flying high overhead. He scowled. That was the vanar champion, Hanuman. He could not tell whether the flying vanar seemed so tiny because he was so very high, or because he was merely his normal vanar size, but in either case, he knew that the simian was doing exactly the same thing as he was: spying out the lie of the land before the battle commenced. He watched as the speck sped northwards, back to the enemy ranks, and briefly contemplated calling for a regiment of archers to loose. He dismissed the idea almost at once: the vanar was flying too high and too swiftly for even the most accurately aimed missiles to catch.
He returned his attention to examining the troops below. From this projecting ledge of stone, jutting out several yards from the promontory of the fortress ramparts and enhanced by the considerable height of Nikumbhila itself, he had an excellent view of the valley below as well as a clear sight of the landscape for several miles in every direction.
Even from this height, the reverberating sound of the bone-horns of the heralds was faintly but distinctly audible, as the rakshasa leaders far below ordered their hordes to halt. The densely packed rakshasa lines slowed from a canter to a trot, and finally came to a trun
dling stop, the dust cloud created by their movements slowly carried away by the strong early-morning winds. At once, the inevitable fights and arguments broke out between the more belligerent tribes over stopping too soon or too slowly, and were suppressed as quickly by the barbed metal-rope lashes of the kumbha herding officers.
Vajradanta examined the formations carefully, turned to issue a few crisp orders regarding troop adjustments for his lieutenants to courier down through the trained vultures used for this purpose, then decided that the ragged formations were about as close to a semblance of orderliness as any rakshasa army was ever likely to achieve. With a grunt of satisfaction, he turned and strode back along the jetty, walking across the promontory to the spot where the rest of the Lankan command stood. As he approached, he could see the blackrock fortress walls undulate in both directions, running along Lanka’s coastline for as far as the eye could see, an impenetrable defence that no army could possibly breach. It made him want to roar with exultation at the sheer power and might of his leader and his race.
Generals Mahaparsva, Mahodara, and Virupaksa stood watching the battlefield with glowering eyes. They were naturally resentful at Vajradanta being chosen over them to command the army, after that wretched vanar’s rampage in the tower three days earlier. The looks of malevolence they shot his way didn’t bother him one whit. He could bite through any of their limbs without even straining his jaw muscles. The only one who did inspire some slight unease was the veteran Prahasta, who had wisely suggested that he maintain his position of city commander and manage the defences against any possible intrusion or siege. Siege! Intrusion! Ludicrous, given the formidable new defences that Ravana’s sorcery had wrought. But he was still glad that Prahasta was not among the rivals who stood glaring at him from the rampart circle.
RAMAYANA Part 3_PRINCE AT WAR Page 64