The Mountain Goddess

by Shelley Elizabeth Schanfield

  The mountain goddess loomed above, aflame with the sun god’s first rays. Soon the yogi’s hermitage would be battered by fierce storms. There would be no roots or berries to eat. The animals would all have taken shelter, hidden from any hunter. Dhara would freeze and starve up there.

  No god had tamed Dhavalagiri, like other goddesses whose consorts guided them, like women with husbands. The power of Indra’s thunderbolts paled before the massive, terrifying beauty of the mountain. Would the goddess protect Dhara or destroy her?

  A single bird called. A breeze soughed through the trees, dispelling the mists and shadow.

  Sakhi’s father said that one who followed that lonely path to self-knowledge faced the darkness of his own heart, which held far greater terrors than wild beasts or howling demons. Sakhi knew she must get help for Dhara before it was too late.

  She ran, crashing and stumbling through dense thickets, blinded by tears. Somehow she reached the hunters’ trail in a nervous sweat, wondering how she would face her parents and Dhara’s. Something else troubled her, too: by this time, everyone must have known that Dhara and Sakhi were missing, yet no one was on the trail looking for them.

  At the edge of the village, none of the usual sights and sounds greeted her. No children played along the path; no smoke came through the holes in the roofs of the well-thatched, sturdy homes of Chief Dandapani’s favored warriors; no cook fires burned in front of the shepherds’ and farmers’ smaller huts. Not a goat bleated nor dog barked.

  A high cry broke the strange quiet. Of course—the call to the soma sacrifice. Her father had gathered the clan at the eagle altar without Sakhi and Dhara, and had begun the prayers. This made her even more anxious. Bhrigu would be furious she was late. She hurried on. The sun wasn’t yet at its zenith, the precise moment he would light the sacrificial fire. She might make it.

  Thin keening cut the air like a scythe. Her father had started, yet it didn’t sound like him at all. When he chanted the hymn to King Soma, Bhrigu’s full, deep voice filled everything between the earth and the brilliant blue sky with its richness.

  At last the altar came into view. The whole clan was clustered around it.

  “There she is!”

  Everyone turned to stare. Sakhi stopped in her tracks. No one greeted her. She would have to tell them everything, make them understand that she’d been helpless before the wild yogi, who possessed physical and spiritual power so much greater than hers.

  At any moment, Bhrigu would emerge from the crowd to look at her in disappointment, and her mother would follow him, throwing her hands up and declaring that Dhara had led her astray. Sakhi didn’t dare imagine the reactions of Atimaya and Dandapani.

  The clan parted, revealing the altar, to let Chief Dandapani through. Before it a corpse was wrapped in white and bound with strips of cloth. A woman lay sobbing across it, clad in a familiar green robe, grey-streaked hair hiding her face. Atimaya knelt next to her, patting her back.

  Someone had died in the night. Bhrigu should be here to chant the prayer for the dead, but he was nowhere to be seen. Then Sakhi knew. The green robes, the unbound black hair streaked with grey. It was her mother.

  For an instant, Sakhi was only aware of the bead of sweat trickling down her back, the sun warm on her face, the cool air that raised bumps on her arms. A shadow passed over the altar—the widespread wings of a vulture riding fitful breezes.

  It was not her father’s voice, but her mother’s wail that had pierced the heavens.

  Sakhi shut her eyes. When she opened them, she would wake up next to Dhara, back in the chief’s hall. None of this would have happened.

  Someone gripped her shoulders. She opened her eyes. It was Chief Dandapani. The breeze picked up a wisp of grey hair that had escaped his thick, dark warrior’s braid and blew it across his broad face.

  “Bhrigu was the wisest Brahmin I have ever known,” he said. “The Lord of the Dead will judge him kindly. He has earned a long stay in Indra’s heavenly city before he is released from the wheel of existence. He will not be reborn again into this endless round of suffering. A soul such as his is ready to unite with atman, the great Self we all seek.”

  It was no dream.

  Several village women came forward to take Bhrigu’s body and prepare it for the pyre.

  “Come, Sakhi,” Atimaya said.

  “What… ?” Sakhi turned to her in a daze.

  “Ghosha will take care of your mother. We need to know what has happened to Dhara.”

  Sakhi looked from Atimaya to Dandapani. Atimaya’s face was twisted with fury, but to Sakhi’s surprise, Dandapani did not look at all angry or upset.

  At the chief’s hall, Dandapani drew up cushions for Sakhi and sat down next to her, patting her knee. Atimaya took her place on the low dais, looking down with flashing eyes, and unleashed a barrage of questions as if Bhrigu had not just died.

  “Wife!” Dandapani stopped her. “What are you thinking? The poor girl needs something to eat and drink.”

  But when the food arrived, Sakhi couldn’t eat. Stuttering and crying, she poured out her story. When she came to Mala’s appearance on the tigress’s back, Dandapani nodded thoughtfully.

  “It’s what we spoke of, wife.”

  “This is not what we spoke of! Study yoga.” Atimaya snorted with contempt. “If you wanted to round out her education,” she said, curling her lip, “better we send her to Varanasi, to study under Valmiki. Even though she’s a girl, he would have taken her as a student if Bhrigu had asked.” She glanced at Sakhi. “Too late for that now,” she muttered.

  Atimaya’s words pierced her heart, but Sakhi would hold her tears. Atimaya would not make her cry.

  “Wife,” Dandapani said with disgust.

  “Forgive me.” Atimaya grimaced. Her face softened. “But husband.” When she turned back to Dandapani, it hardened again. “We must find a respectable guru, one worthy of our daughter’s royal blood, not this—this creature.”

  “Valmiki is no fit guru since he became King Prasenajit’s court Brahmin.” Dandapani glowered.

  They continued to argue while Sakhi stood there, miserable and silent, only half-listening. She shouldn’t have agreed to go with Dhara to the shrine that night. She shouldn’t have been at the chief’s house at all, but with her own little family. Perhaps Father wouldn’t have died…

  She returned home to find her mother in widow’s whites, hair tangled, sitting in a stupor in front of the little house. It was just the two of them now, Sakhi realized with a shock. This stranger who was once her bustling mother, the one who tended the family fire, muttering over her cooking about the latest trick Dhara had played on a suitor or Atimaya’s scandalous flirtation with the suitor’s father. Agastya sat unseeing and unmoving while villagers came by with good intentions and sometimes a bowl of rice or a small sack of onions. They left as quickly as they could.

  The next day dawned clear, cold, and still. The village gathered near the altar. Above them, Dhavalagiri rose brilliant white into the lapis sky. Sakhi wondered if the prayer she said to the mountain goddess for Dhara’s safety had something to do with her father’s death. That Indra was angry with her for thinking the mountain was more powerful than his lightning bolts. She swayed on her feet, and Dandapani put an arm around her to steady her.

  A girl could not say the prayer for the dead or light the pyre. There was no time to send to the Malla or Licchavi clans for a distant Brahmin relative, so Dandapani would do it, though Sakhi knew this prayer, and many others that her father had taught her, better than anyone in the village.

  Dandapani stood next to Sakhi. Atimaya stood on Dandapani’s right, cold and beautiful in her yellow silks.

  Sakhi looked for Tilotamma. After Dhara, Tilo was Sakhi’s closest friend. The night before, Tilo came to see her after she finished her many duties at her new husband’s home. She stayed all night,
though it meant a tongue-lashing or a beating from her dreadful mother-in-law. She said she would stand by Sakhi when the pyre was lit.

  Agastya stepped forward with a scraggly bunch of the season’s last wildflowers. Her hand shook as she laid the crushed stems with wilting yellow flowers on the pyre. She stepped back and buried her tearstained face in Sakhi’s shoulder. Sakhi could hardly keep her balance, much less support her mother.

  Dandapani stepped forward with a lighted brand and muttered a few broken prayers, then touched it to the stacked boughs on which they had laid Sakhi’s father.

  Agni’s flames leaped, crackling and snapping in the still fall air. A single white cloud floated almost directly above the pyre, a chariot there to receive Bhrigu’s soul and take it to Indra’s heavenly city. The fire god’s smoke carried the scent of pine resin and burning flesh to the gods. The smell made Sakhi sick, and the smoke stung her eyes.

  Her mother shrank against her, and Sakhi wrapped one arm around Agastya’s shoulders.

  Though sometimes she was only outwardly obedient and longed to escape her parents’ nervous hovering, she loved them. It was just that they were older, different from the other parents, and the only Brahmins living among the dwindling Kolis. She had been a late gift from the gods, a blessing after her two older brothers were gone. She had never known them. The oldest broke Bhrigu’s heart by studying the warrior’s arts and dying in a border skirmish with the Sakyas. The second left to study in Valmiki’s ashram in Varanasi, but had a falling out with the guru and had not been heard from since.

  Her mother’s airs had always embarrassed her, but Agastya’s complaints that neither her Malla cousin who owned hundreds of cattle nor the famous relative Valmiki had come to pay their respects were better than this stricken silence.

  Sakhi’s father had taught her the sacred language, opened to her the majestic world of rites and hymns he should have passed to a son. If only she had tried harder to understand.

  Flames roared. Blackened logs collapsed inward. Sparks leapt up and winked out. Dandapani had been generous with the ghee, and the butter-soaked wood burned so hot that Sakhi took a step back. She tried to draw her mother back with her, but Agastya slipped out from under Sakhi’s encircling arm. She stared into Agni’s fiery mouth.

  Then she stepped toward the flames and turned one last time.

  “A woman belongs with her husband,” she said, and with surprising strength she threw herself toward the flames.

  The villagers stepped back. It was a widow’s right, after all, to join her husband in death.

  But Sakhi couldn’t bear it. “Don’t leave me!” She just managed to keep hold of her mother.

  Out of nowhere Tilo appeared and took Agastya’s other arm. Her mother and Tilo both stared into the flames for a moment. Watching them, Sakhi shivered.

  “Come,” Tilo said with a gentle tug, and Agastya obeyed.

  The guru

  Dhara woke alone. Bright sunlight glowed golden outside the cave’s mouth. Her throat was parched and her head ached. She sat up. The cave did not spin. Her scorched palm did not appear as if she had burned it at all. The fat had soaked into it and the skin was pink and slightly tender, but not painful.

  A bow and quiver full of arrows, as well as a half-eaten haunch of cured deer, were leaning on either side of the cave’s mouth. A sheathed knife hung from the protruding shank bone, but the thought of cutting a slice of meat for breakfast made a sour taste fill Dhara’s mouth.

  “Sakhi!” Dhara breathed. Sakhi was in danger. The forest held wicked sprites and wild boars. And the white tigress, too—or had that been a dream? If there was a white tigress, Dhara had ridden it to the stars, and such a creature would not harm her friend.

  “Jai, jai Ma… amritam mai ananda mai… Jai, Ma… ”

  A strange chant floated through the cave’s sunlit entrance. Dhara headed out into dazzling sunlight. Mala was seated on a hide-covered rock, legs crossed one over the other, chanting a hymn Dhara had learned from Ghosha. “Victory, victory to the Mother… immortality and bliss are Hers… Victory, Great Mother… ”

  A waterskin hung from a stunted cedar growing next to the cave’s mouth. A large wooden ladle dangled nearby at the end of a leather strap. Dhara held it up to the narrow mouth of the skin, pulled out the rag stopper, filled the ladle and drank. She did this twice more and was ready to fill it again when Mala called out to her.

  “You’ll get sick.”

  Dhara hurried to replace everything. “Namaste, Mala-ji.” She bowed.

  “At last. You’re awake. You slept a whole day and night.” Mala motioned. “Come sit by me.”

  Dhara obeyed. The stiff deer hairs were warm underneath her. The view took her breath away. Above shone snowy Dhavalagiri and her companions. In the distance, the foothills disappeared into a haze that hid the flatlands and Ganga’s river. Closer, in Koli territory, green cedars and hemlocks filled the ridges and valleys, and the ridge where Dhara and Sakhi often played hid the village.

  “Mala-ji, what happened to Sakhi?”

  “She is safe in the village.”

  “She must have been terrified!” But it was Dhara who was terrified and still feeling a little sick. “I wish she were here.”

  “She does not dream of learning a yogi’s ways.”

  Dhara brushed away her tears. “But she is a very wise and good pupil. Her father says she learns the hymns better than any boys in the village.”

  “Hymns have nothing to do with what you will learn here.”

  Sakhi and Atimaya were so right. Dhara knew nothing about yoga. The shaman Garuda said that taking strange poses to emulate animals or heroes, or sitting in quiet meditation, could still the mind and unite the little self with the great Self, atman, but Dhara had no idea what that meant.

  The shaman’s wife had told her she had a gift for charms and spells, but sometimes the spells didn’t work. She could never be sure if she had given Tilotamma’s rival the wart that appeared on her nose, and she’d tried several times without succeeeding to make herself invisible and to control her mother’s thoughts. One thing she did know: Mala had said she could become powerful if she learned yoga.

  The shaman’s wife didn’t radiate power like Mala did. It was plain the yogi possessed a higher knowledge than Ghosha or her man Garuda, or even Bhrigu. It was unnerving to be alone with this fascinating, dangerous woman.

  “My father will be looking for me. Maybe I should go tell him where I am, and then come back.”

  “He won’t be looking for you.”

  “Sakhi must have told them what happened by now. Father will have organized a search party. He wouldn’t want me to live up here, but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if I come sometimes for lessons.”

  “He knows it’s your karma.”

  “How? I don’t believe you. You—you can’t keep me here! I’ll run away.” Dhara leaped off the rock, away from Mala.

  The yogi just smiled. “Go, then. Perhaps I was wrong to tell him I’d teach you.”

  “You—you told him?” Shock silenced her. The day Mala left the village came back to her in a rush. The look between her father and the yogi, what had that meant? He had hardly spoken of Mala afterwards, that she could recall. Even if her parents had talked about it, her mother would never have agreed. Everything was mixed up, crazy. “Why does he want you to teach me?”

  “He knows that you could one day become a great warrior, even a chief, in spite of being a woman. He thinks you could lead the clan to glory and that yoga’s powers will aid you in that. But I—”

  “Mala-ji! Really? Lead an army?” The boys always picked her to lead when they played war games. “Has any woman ever done such a thing?”

  Mala gave her a grim smile. “Yes. I know one who has.”

  “Which clan? Maghada? Their king’s bodyguard is all women, I’ve heard.”


  “Enough to say that it is possible. You must be certain it’s what you really want.”

  “Yes!”

  “You say it so easily.” Mala looked at her with contempt. “Listen. A Kshatriya’s dharma is to fight, to protect the clan, to conquer its enemies. These are worthy aims, followed by many. A yogi is a kind of warrior, too, whose dharma is to fight the hatred and anger that reside deep in the human heart. On this path, one does not conquer other peoples. One conquers oneself; a much harder task.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You remember the story of the prophesied prince.”

  “I’ll never forget it. The Sakyan prince will either rule the world or be the greatest sage to have ever lived.”

  “And if he becomes a sage,” Mala said, “his clan will be wiped off the face of the earth. What do you think is the right choice? To rule the world? Think of the wars, the slaughter. Or to give humanity the gift of wisdom?”

  “There will be war or suffering either way. Can’t you be both a great warrior and a sage?”

  “Few dare try. Fewer succeed.”

  The prophesied prince might not, but Dhara might. “How do you know?”

  Mala stared toward Ganga’s river. “I followed the warrior’s path for a time,” she said, staring into the distance. “But now, I have chosen the path of peace.” Then she fixed her eyes on Dhara. “What will you choose?”

  Dhara balanced on her left leg, her right leg bent and heel fixed at the root of her left thigh. She joined her palms and raised her arms overhead with a deep inhalation of the bracing, cedar-scented air. Every muscle and nerve vibrated; a golden aura surrounded every tree and rock. It was as if she had never seen or felt anything before.

  “I was meant to do this,” she said to Mala at the end of the first morning’s lesson.

  “You have some promise,” Mala said with a shrug. “Pupils your age are often too scattered and silly to learn, unable to stand still as the tree you emulate in this pose and make the internal adjustments.”