It was the first time Pradeep had killed a man. He always thought it would feel sad and depressing.
But in that moment, it felt surreal. Almost unreal. As if all of it was a dream and he would wake up soon.
He ran ahead, bent down and pulled the knife out of the man’s head. As he stood up, he was hit wide in his chest by the hoof of a horse as it leaped over him, knocking him over. Pradeep was thrown back a few feet into the air and landed painfully on the ground, rolling over backwards. He buried his knife into the ground to stop his fall and skidded to a halt.
He stood up, pulled his knife out of the ground and started running towards the horseman who was circling back towards him.
This time the horseman missed as Pradeep ran up to him and jumped high, burying his knife in the horseman’s shoulder and dragging him down as he landed. He pulled his knife out from his shoulder and put it to the man’s throat.
He hesitated for a moment. Now that he could see death so up close, he couldn’t do it. And that moment of hesitation was all that the horseman needed. He kicked Pradeep hard in the stomach with both his feet, sending him tumbling a few feet back. Pradeep regained his balance and got ready to charge again. But the horseman was already on his feet and he drew his gun.
The first bullet barely missed Pradeep. He dodged it but screamed in pain as the bullet tore through his shirt and grazed his arm, taking his skin and a sizeable chunk of muscle along with it.
The horseman smiled.
“I wish you didn’t have all those bandages around your face. I would love to see your face as you die,” he said.
Pradeep stood there with his other hand on the wound, trying to stop the bleeding. Suddenly he heard a female voice shout “Duck” from behind and he ducked.
The next moment an arrow zoomed above him and straight into the horseman’s chest right through his bullet proof vest. He gurgled blood as he fell to the ground, clutching the arrow with both his hands.
Pradeep turned around to thank his saviour but the words never left his throat. He watched in stunned silence as his eyes lay upon Veda, wearing shoulder and knee pads and holding a cross bow.
“Bullet proof vests can’t stop arrows. Too pointy for them,” she said, her speech sounding clumsy yet coherent on her tongue.
Her voice was sweet and yet strong.
The look of shock and surprise on Pradeep’s face slowly transformed into an amused smile even amidst all the danger around him.
“If only words could kill…” Veda smiled and ran into the battle.
They both stood back to back, fighting off the horsemen.
“So, you can totally talk now?” Pradeep shouted over the din of the battle.
Veda didn’t fumble but the words still tumbled out, a little alien and disjointed. “It’s like learning to speak all over again. Something snapped. I feel like I am almost there,” she shouted back.
Maybe it’s the battle, Pradeep thought. Maybe all the violence, struggle for survival and fear that came along with it.
Pradeep cut across the leg of a charging horseman while Veda put an arrow into the heart of another.
“Where did you learn how to shoot?” he shouted, pushing away another one of them.
“My mother!” Veda shouted back. “She was a state–level archer,” she said, aiming at the legs of a quick horse.
But no matter how many they fought off, the horsemen simply kept coming. There were at least a hundred of them still alive and kicking. Veda could aim well and shoot them from long distances, but she was defenceless on close quarters as she didn’t carry any close-range weapons. Pradeep had managed to save them from closer threats so far. His combat knife had cut through at least a dozen of the horsemen now.
One of them, a bulky, muscular bald man with a bloodied face, grabbed Veda from behind by the neck and held her under his elbow. She elbowed him in the stomach as hard as she could but it only managed to elicit a mildly painful grunt from him. His grip on her didn’t loosen. He brought up his knife on to her neck but then screamed like a wild animal, loosened his grip on her and fell to the ground.
His back revealed a wide gash sprouting blood, right from his shoulders to the base of his spine. Roy stood there looking down on him, as his katana shone in a brownish crimson haze, mixed with blood and the dark rain.
“Can I join the party?” Roy asked, smiling.
The General’s heavy footsteps dug deep into the wet ground. He had his arms wrapped around the neck of one of those BlueSkins. A quick twist and snap– the man’s neck broke. Weak, he thought –all of them were weak and scared. He caught another horseman by his foot as the he galloped across on his horse and pulled him down. This one’s head hit the ground with an audible thump as he fell. He was gone.
These fanatics can try all they want but he was not going to let his people be chained up and treated as slaves. A BlueSkin tried to stab him. He first gave the man a broken wrist and then a heavy concussion.
He could see that loud-mouth Roy fighting alongside Veda and Pradeep in the distance. Veda had surprised him. All these days he had looked at her as someone who needs to be protected. He didn’t want to admit it but the fact was, she reminded him of his little angels. But today she turned out to be a protector. The General was half proud and half concerned, seeing this new side of hers. What if something happened to her? He couldn’t let that happen.
Something told him she was safe as long as she was with Pradeep. The General shot a man in the face, blowing it in an explosion of blue mixed with red. Pradeep fancied Veda, he knew that. Hell, anyone could see that on that young man’s face.
Pradeep had been smitten right from the first day he had seen her.
Pradeep was a good man –he had known that since the moment he had saved him on that fateful day in the sun – but something fiercely protective inside the General still made him uncomfortable at the thought of both of them. But he knew deep down that if something were to happen to him, Pradeep would be the only one he would wish to look after Veda.
He could feel the tide turn. The Forgiven were gaining ground. They were still outnumbered – two against one – but the Forgiven were well armed. True, they were untrained but they had more firearms and incidentally, no amount of training could help you dodge or stop bullets. Later, the General would have cause to think that things might have actually been different if not for the leader of the BlueSkins.
Later he would recall that in his rage and his commitment to fight to save those he loved, the General had failed to notice that the BlueSkins were not completely interested in fighting them. As some of them indulged them in combat, their leader was slowly luring the fighting Forgiven farther away from the gates and into a human trap. An arena in which they fought endlessly no matter which direction they looked. They were surrounded by the BlueSkins who kept them occupied. As some of them perished, newer one’s joined whose aim seemed to be to not let them outside the circle.
The General was content in disarming and putting more BlueSkins into the ground. There was a sort of cruel enjoyment that was to be derived from this. He was pummeling away at unfortunate horsemen who had the misfortune of being in his proximity. He was grinning like a crazy man, choking a BlueSkin when he heard their leader’s voice from the megaphone. What surprised him was that the voice seemed to come from behind him –from the gates rather than the field ahead of him.
“Surrender!” the voice boomed.
The General turned back to see the leader of the horsemen standing by the gates along with around twenty of his men.
And in front of them stood the elderly and the women of the Forgiven. The horsemen held some of them with knives at their necks.
“Drop your weapons,” the leader said into the megaphone. “That’s enough bloodshed for today,”
“Let them go!” the General screamed.
“I will … once all of you drop your weapons. We do not want to kill. That is not our duty. It is up to Lord Kalki to judge you. If you haven�
��t sinned, you have nothing to fear. We offer a new life to all of you. A life in our towers –a life full of security, stability and hope.”
“We are not going to be your slaves,” the General shouted.
“We are all slaves to Lord Kalki. To serve him is our duty. You can either follow us into a new life or you can see all of your women, children and the elderly slaughtered, before you yourself die for no reason. This battle is over. We have won. Now is time to save lives on both sides. I don’t want to lose any more of my men either. You may believe it or not but I am just another man like you, trying to protect my men and at the same time lead your men down the right path.”
The General knew in his heart that it was over. But he couldn’t give up. He couldn’t surrender now. “You can shove your right path up your ass,” he shouted and shot another of the BlueSkins in the face.
“Dammit, old man! You are making this tough for me,” the leader said, and nodded his head, looking at one of his horsemen.
The man promptly proceeded to cut the throat of the old man that he held. A gurgled scream and the old man collapsed to the ground.
The General’s face had drained. He had saved that man from an abandoned shopping mall, years ago. His name was Mrinal. He had been an aging shopkeeper. He remembered how the old man had cried about his dead grandchildren when he had first rescued him.
All of that gone. All his memories vanished just like that –in an instant.
“I’ll count to three. All of you drop your weapons or we slaughter all of them. Make this easy for me.” There was an earnest plea in Vikranth’s voice.
“One!”
The General knew everyone’s eyes were on him now. They would follow him into death and hell if he had decided to fight. This, he was sure of. His grip on his gun had tightened.
“Two!”
He couldn’t give up fighting. He had to save their lives.
But right now he actually had an opportunity to save lives. But giving in meant losing his pride. Losing everything he stood for. No way could he do that, he thought.
“Three!” The voice boomed into the megaphone.
It felt like giving up his breath. His grip on the gun loosened. His stomach was in a knot and his chest hurt from knowing what he was about to do. He could feel the eyes of tired and wounded fighters of both the Sinless and the Forgiven strained upon him, burning him from within as he finally let go of the cold metallic grip and the gun hit the wet ground.
INTO THE WOODS
The greasy black chains pulled Pradeep’s hands painfully as he trudged along. He was part of a long human chain consisting of the captured Forgiven. The surviving Forgiven were fashioned into two columns of people and chains bound all of their hands to the saddles of the forty odd horses that had survived the battle at Belum.
The horsemen rode their horses slowly on either side of the two columns with batons and whips in their hands. The terrain was rough and the sun was harsh. Pradeep’s heavy eyes scanned through the human chain for his friends. He spotted the General walking slowly like a tired ox. His skin was drenched in sweat. One of his shoes was torn away and his toes bled with each step.
Pradeep found Roy in the second column, walking briskly with his head held high. The look of disdain and tainted pride was writ large on his face. He was stripped of his katana and Pradeep knew that there was nothing that Roy hated more than to be separated from his katana. Pradeep found Veda way back in the chain along with other women and children. She looked as mute as she had been before the battle. Niv was far behind and wore an expression of indifference.
The horseman beside him cracked his whip and it struck painfully on Pradeep’s back.
“Forward, Sinner!” he ordered.
Pain and rage coursed through Pradeep.
“I am not a sinner. We are the Forgiven,” he muttered through clenched teeth.
“No one is forgiven, sinner,” the horseman sneered. “You all will get what is your due,” he warned.
“Anyone who defies the Purohit is a sinner.”
“And what do you think makes you sinless?” Pradeep teased. “Your good deeds, or your slavery to a megalomaniac tyrant?”
The whip cracked again and Pradeep grunted in pain. The horseman got down from his horse. His blue skin gleamed like the hot sky above. He walked up to Pradeep and kneed him hard in his stomach.
“I love it when doing the work of the Lord allows me to teach a lesson to assholes like you,” he said, and kicked him hard again.
Pradeep fell to his knees and coughed up blood. He could hear Roy and Veda shouting behind him, pleading the horsemen to stop hurting him. Their requests were only followed by the sounds of whips and screams filled with pain.
“Now shut up and walk,” the horseman said. “Or your entire body will end up bandaged like your face.”
He got back up on his horse.
The chains pulled on Pradeep’s hands as the Ashvin rode forward. Ahead of him loomed large the forest of Nallamala.
The horizon was marked with trees built of thick trunks and dense branches, while behind the trees in the far north, the Beam shimmered brightly into the dark clouds high above. The ominous depth and eerie darkness of the forest seemed to be beckoning them with open arms. A shudder ran through the spines of both the Forgiven and the Sinless alike as they marched ahead into the dark woods.
Urushi’s tall and slim body shivered in the cold breeze as she stood in her chamber. She looked out of her window in the first tower. The view from the tower had always been both hauntingly dark and spectacular. The towers were an architectural marvel. The only good thing to be built in the End Age, she often thought.
There were three towers in total, one each at the vertices of an invisible triangle. She vividly remembered the Purohit explaining to her about the towers on the day she had been appointed as an Avadhani.
“The towers of Brahma!” the Purohit said.
They were modelled after the ancient towers in the Kashi Vishwanath temple on which the mathematical problem– Towers of Hanoi –was built. There would be three towers and disks of varying sizes stacked up around one of the towers. The challenge was to move the disks from one tower to another by moving a single disk at a time and without ever placing a larger disk on a smaller disk. It is said that when all the disks are finally moved, the world would end.
The Purohit believed it is up to the Sinless to actually carry out this task and finally bring about the end of the sinful world and usher us into the Satyayuga. It was what he said would be their ultimate legacy. And hence three towers were built. And around the first tower, twelve rings were built which could be moved vertically using huge cranes and pulleys. Twelve huge rings in descending order of circumference around the tower.
Every day the rings were moved and placed around the other two towers in different combinations. The calculations said that for twelve rings, 4095 moves were absolutely essential if they made all the right moves. And hence the cranes and pulleys went all day long, moving the rings in carefully crafted combinations.
She had remembered how she had wondered how long it would take for all the moves to be completed. For each move, a ring is lifted off a tower, moved across towards another tower and descended down that tower. The whole process usually takes around one and half hours. Hence it would take at least two hundred and fifty-five days. It already had been ninety-five days since they had started moving the rings. So, in another hundred and sixty days, the world would end if the legends were true. She quickly calculated the date. EA Ten would be the year everything would finally end.
But the genius of it was that the towers were actually living complexes, spiralling upwards in terms of prosperity and holiness. All of the Sinless lived, ate, slept and died in the towers. The lowest floors were the areas where the lowest of the scum lived according to the Avadhanis. It contained cages for the sinful and those awaiting trial. As one moved up the towers, one would encounter people more fortunate and deemed more pious
by the Purohit.
The floors just above the lowest floor housed the common folk, the stable keepers, the lower varnas and until recently, all the women of the Sinless. It took a bloody rebellion and countless women’s lives to change that. Urushi was a living example and embodiment of that change.
Her chamber was high up in the sixteenth floor, placed conveniently away from the people of the lower floors –the sinful, corrupt and the common. From up here, she could see workers toiling away, rangers and gatherers dispersing and returning back to the towers like ants to an anthill. The Beam decorated the backdrop like a silver thread across the black canvas of the wasteland sky. Though the view from up above stimulated her in new ways every day, her heart still longed for the lower floors –the place where her roots lay. She had lived there for almost 2 years up until the rebellion. Before that she had been just another woman among the Sinless. Not a great place to be – living in the floors just above the sinful and the punished, cut out of contact from the world and especially the men.
The rebellion had changed that. It had cost Urushi her dear sister, but in the end, all the women were better off than they had been before. She had been chosen to represent women in the council of Avadhanis, to meet the primary demand of the rebel warriors –a female representative in the Avadhanis. She had often felt the weight of all this on her thin shoulders and today was yet another such day. She quickly walked away from the window to shrug away the thoughts.
It was prayer time. She had to report to the prayer hall to perform her daily rituals.
She picked her prayer robes and stood in front of the mirror. She looked pale and lost as she looked at herself. Her tall frame had an unconscious and effortless elegance to it. She unbuttoned her daily robes and let them fall slowly from her smooth shoulders.
Sinners- The Dawn Of Kalki Page 10