PRINCE IN EXILE (12 page)

She opened her eyes to find herself enveloped by pitch darkness. The absence of light was so complete, she could not see even her hands in front of her face. Her first instinct was relief: she had learned to love the dark ever since, as a child, she had begun to see through the eyes of others around her the hideous ugliness of her hunchbacked deformity. Darkness was her friend, her ally. It was the light that she feared. 

She clawed at the ground with her sticky, blood-smeared hands. Even without light to see, she could tell at once that it was tiled with the same immaculately smooth hand-polished redstone that adorned the floors of every chamber in Suryavansha Palace, not the coarser grey flagstones that were used in the courtyards and outer areas. This meant that she hadn’t fallen into the chaukat after all. She was still within the palace somewhere.
But where? 

Then her fingers found the place on her thigh where she had sustained the sword wound, and she gasped with disbelief. The gaping wound was closed, the skin uncut and unblemished except by the normal parchment-like coarseness of age. Her hand flew to her face next; she touched her eye accidentally in the darkness and it began to water as she blinked rapidly. It was true. She was healed again. She could feel the strength returned to her limbs, the crushing void gone from her mind, life filling her veins and senses once more. She thanked him silently for the miracle: no matter how many times they repeated this cycle of torture and restoration, it never ceased to evoke her deepest awe. 

‘Master! It is you, then! You have healed me. Thank you, swami. You are truly magnificent.’ 

The room flared to life around her. Manthara blinked, dazzled. She forced her eyes to open, squinting against the brightness. A figure stood before her, familiar in silhouette yet too brightly backlit for her to be able to focus her vision upon it. 

‘Manthara,’ said a voice she knew almost as well as her own. ‘It’s me.’ 

And the sari-clad figure of Maharani Kaikeyi strode toward her, heavy gold jewellery clinking noisily. 

‘My lord?’ Manthara said shakily, almost doubting her own mental equilibrium for once. ‘Is it thou?’ 

Kaikeyi paused, threw her head back and emitted a low throaty laugh, her mouth reddened with paan-chewing. ‘Very good, Manthara. You see through this guise then. But will anyone else?’ 

Manthara raised and lowered her eyes, turning her head this way then that as she examined the Second Queen as closely as she could manage. ‘My lord, your art is beyond compare. The perfection of the illusion—’ 

‘Spare the superlatives, hag,’ Kaikeyi said with a startling red-toothed smile. ‘There’s work to be done. And since you’ve foolishly exposed your role in our great campaign, it’s up to me to finish the task we began.’ 

The Second Queen paused to adjust her sari, drawing the pallo up to her head, covering her gleaming burnished dark hair with the end of the silk. ‘And now,’ Kaikeyi said, ‘I will show the young prince that one battle alone does not win the war. He will pay for the decimation of my forces on the fields of Mithila. He will pay by losing everything he holds dear.’ She added with a chilling grin, her eyes reflecting the dancing firelight, ‘And
everyone
!’ 

And then she turned and walked away, vanishing instantly. Manthara was left in darkness once more, alone. 

*** 

Kaikeyi was awakened by the sound of dhol-drums pounding a martial rhythm. They were all around her, beside her bed, upon the sweat-drenched mattress, filling the darkened boudoir in 

which she lay, their heavy thunder reverberating in her chest, making her collarbones and breastplate ache, hammering at her temples, filling her skull with their remorseless monotony. 

She rose slowly to her feet, prepared to feel the rest of the familiar morning-after symptoms of her nightly excesses, even to empty the contents of her bilious belly and void her bowels before starting to feel something akin to human. 

Several moments passed, and to her surprise, nothing of the sort occurred. Neither nausea nor rising bile. No knifing pain in the bowels nor the old swimming blurriness before her eyes. Instead, she found herself steady on her feet, able to see the room well enough, and her head clearer than it had been for days … or years even. 

Then she remembered: she hadn’t been out carousing the night before, or the night before that. She had been here these past two nights-or was it longer? She couldn’t recall exactly. But she was certain of one thing. She had been nowhere but here. In her own bedchamber, lying on this very bed, brain feeling as if it was being pressed down by a hundred-kilo weight. She glanced around the boudoir. As if in confirmation of her recollection, there were no telltale depleted jugs of wine, no half-quaffed goblets cast aside, dribbling soma on to the richly brocaded rugs. 

She sniffed, and smelled only the fragrance of orchids and incense which was usual to her chambers, and below that, the faint odours of her own exudation, understandable after a long sleep. She certainly needed to bathe herself, but nothing worse than that. 

So it was true. She had slept sober and woken clean. If so, it was a first for her in a long time. Years certainly. 

What day was it anyway? She recalled it being Holi feast day only two days earlier … three days at best. So much had happened that day, her mind was still filled with little flickering fragments of images. The last of which was the sight of Rama and Lakshman departing with the seer Vishwamitra while she watched them from a window, Manthara beside her, saying something nasty as usual. After that, everything was a blur. She strained and struggled, but nothing else came to her mind. How long could she have been asleep to not remember anything at all? Not more than two days surely, or simple hunger and thirst would have woken her earlier, wouldn’t they? 

As if hearing his name being called, Annapurna, deity of food and drink, began working upon her appetite. Her stomach churned suddenly, reminding her that it hadn’t been fed for a while, and her throat was parched with a thirst so great, it felt as if she must have water at once or die for want of it. 

She started to call for a serving maid, then thought better of it. There was a jal-bartan right there by the bed. She drank deeply of the cool rose-scented water, relishing every gulp more than she would have relished the finest Gandahari red right now. When she set the copper-bottomed silver jal-bartan back on its bedside stand, it rang hollowly, empty. 

The dhol-drums had continued unabated all this time. Now, their steady marching rhythm sounded less hostile and menacing, more festive. She caught the sound of conches blowing, and the shirring ocean-like roar that could only be the sound of large numbers of people cheering. Somewhere in the city, a celebration was in full spate. A celebration of what? There was only one way to find out. She called for a serving girl and waited, patiently for perhaps the first time ever. When nobody responded to her calls the third time, she began to feel uneasy. This was strange; surely someone ought to have heard her and responded by now. 

Her feet felt as if they had been freed of lead fetters. After a few steps, a light sweat broke out on her face and upper body, and once she had traversed several rounds of her boudoir, she felt she had regained enough confidence in her ability to navigate the outer world once more. She went to the door of her bedchamber and pushed it open, expecting serving maids to come rushing at the sight of her. Instead, an explosion of light assailed her. She blinked, her eyes adjusting to the gaudy brilliance after the unilluminated dimness of her bedchamber. 

The outer chamber was arrayed with a profusion of diyas, each painted a different colour and lined up in neat rows along the walls. The effect was dazzling, like Deepavali, the festival of lights. But that was ridiculous. Deepavali was celebrated on the last moonless night before winter, not in early spring! There must be some other reason for this light show. Obviously it was related to the commotion going on in the city outside. She couldn’t think what it might be, but there must be
something
. Some formal occasion she had forgotten probably. Manthara would know. Manthara always knew. Speaking of which, where
was
Manthara? For that matter, where was everybody? She had only just realised how deserted her chambers were. At first she’d assumed that everyone was in the outer chambers, but there was not a soul in sight here either. 

It took her a full circuit of most of the main level of her palace, some two dozen large rooms with antechambers, offshoots, and intersecting corridors, before she would admit to herself that there was nobody around. Her chambers were deserted. 

This was unusual in itself. With a personal retinue of fifty-odd serving girls, and as many guards, all hand-picked from her own clans, kith and kin from her native Kaikeya, there ought to have been at least a dozen around to cater to their mistress’s needs at any given time. But all she found were more diyas blazing away brightly in every corner and cranny. She even stopped at the pundit’s desk to consult a panchang, the religious almanac of moon phases by which all Arya festivals were assigned. No, there was no special occasion listed for several days after Holi. What was going on? 

When she found that even the guards at the outermost door to the apartment were missing, a cold prickle of fear ran down her spine. She sat down on a diwan in some antechamber and tried to think, to remember. What had happened before she lost consciousness? What had she done? She knew that she had done something wrong, something bad. But what? 

Her hand struck something metallic, causing it to echo hollowly. She glanced down reflexively, and recognised the beaten-gold-plated breastplate that she always wore to feast-day mélées. The rest of her armour was here as well, beside some soiled rags and a mud jar filled with vile-smelling metal-polishing fluid. Some maid had been shining her armour before putting it back into storage until the next occasion. 

She held the breastplate in her hands, turning it over. Unexpectedly, the corner of the lower end scraped her forearm, drawing blood. She peered at the metal, seeing that the latch that locked the two halves together had been twisted out of shape, as if the person who had last worn it had taken it off carelessly, undoing the latch with more force than was necessary. She put the armour plate down on the diwan, examining the cut. It was barely a scratch, only a thin, faint line of blood visible below the first layer of skin. Not worth washing even. She raised the hand to her lips and instinctively licked the scratch. The salty taste of her own blood filled her palate, startling in the strength of its flavour. Her senses were accentuated by her long sleep-fast. 

The taste of blood stirred something deep within, awakening some hidden memory. Something that had happened recently. At the mélée? She vaguely recalled taking part in the event, riding hotly down the track, lashing this way and that with her cat-o’nine-tails, downing opponents one after another, wounding some severely-she remembered liking that, laughing at their screams of agony. Then a memory of herself riding and flinging a spear at the stuffed-dummy target, an effigy of a rakshasa—again that old nemesis—before being distracted by the glint of fading sunlight off a chariot too richly gold-plated to be any other but royalty. Dasaratha, riding off the field in the direction of the palace, and following close on his heels, Kausalya. And like a tidal wave rising out of the heart of the ocean, it all returned with shocking intensity. 

She remembered feeling a sudden red-hot rage. So Dasaratha and Kausalya were leaving the Holi festivities early, no doubt to sit together in some cosy nook and resume their dalliance of the morning, leaving right in the middle of Kaikeyi’s own event, as if she were nothing but one of the many hundreds of Kshatriya contenders seeking a purse of gold and a little name-glory, not the Second Queen of Ayodhya, and by rights the
First
Queen. 

As she sat there, holding the armour in her hands, pressing it tightly enough that the jagged corner of the clasp dug into the flesh of her forearm, drawing blood, it all burst into her brain like a wave in a monsoon-maddened ocean battering a rocky cliff. The clasp dug deeper, gouging through flesh, but she was barely aware of the pain and the blood, the shakti of her mind’s eye more powerful than the two feeble organs of contemporary vision. She saw herself, like a player in someone else’s dream, face puffed and swollen with excess, red-cheeked with fury, striking aside a companion in the mélée, breaking left into the stands, leaping over the audience with no heed for the safety of the watchers, numbering children among them, then riding off the field in the wake of Dasaratha and Kausalya. She saw the scene in the Seer’s Tower several minutes later, herself flinging abuse and accusations at both her husband and his First Queen. Remembered with terrible clarity the wretched things she had mouthed, those foul words and fouler insinuations. Ending with her about to cast the spear at her real-life nemesis, stopped in the nick of time by her son Bharat. 

Kaikeyi came to her feet. She dropped the armour plate and backed away sightlessly. Blood dripped in a steady stream from the gouge in her forearm. She put a hand before her face, gesturing, as if trying to dismiss the tumult of images that rolled through her fevered brain now, begging for mercy, mercy. 

The images rolled on. The memories seared her with their sharpness and unbearable clarity. It had been years since she had seen so clearly. Not since she’d been a child, a girl in her father’s court. Had she been blind all these many years? Surely she must have been, to have done so many terrible things, felt such nameless, meaningless rage. A demon had possessed her then, a rakshas born of some nether realm, captaining her body and mind like a mahout on an elephant’s head, guiding its every move. Why else would she have indulged in so many petty deceptions, committed such venal sins, manipulated and connived? That could not be her doing. She was not a bad woman, she was just a … needy woman. A woman who wanted what was hers.