Prince of Dharma (18 page)

‘So how did you do it?’ 

Rama grinned up at him, displaying lips and teeth yellowed by the sour fruit. 

Lakshman sighed and nodded. ‘Ask a stupid question …’ 

Rama pointed down the long raj-marg. The king’s highway wound through the groves and sloping valley road of the north bank of the Sarayu for another full yojana before reaching the city gates. ‘Why don’t you ride to the first gate and have them send an escort for these wretches? Then maybe we can get to the practice session we’d planned. I bet you Bharat and Shatrugan are hard at it already. They’re determined to top us in archery as well as the chariot race.’ 

Lakshman snorted. ‘They can dream.’ He took up the slack in Marut’s reins gently. ‘Why don’t you give your flock a rest for a few moments? I’ll be back before you can finish that kairee.’ 

Rama grinned and patted a bulge in the pocket of his kurta. ‘That’s okay,’ he said. ‘I have more.’ 

THIRTEEN 

Dasaratha was seeing the impossible.
Two Vishwamitras? One claiming the other was an impostor, an assassin? What was going on? And if the sudra hunter was just an asura in disguise, how did he have the use of Brahman?
Dasaratha had seen the sacred force used enough times in his lifetime to recognise that bluish light. 

The man who said he was the real Vishwamitra stopped a few yards from the first Vishwamitra, the man whose feet Dasaratha had been about to wash with holy Ganges water a few minutes ago. He raised his hand and Dasaratha heard a whooping sound, the sound of heavy wildwood whipping through the air. He turned to see the sudra hunter’s spear, which had been lying on the street beside the stunned guard who had confiscated it, flying through the air towards its owner. 

As it flew, making that whooping sound, it transformed into a hefty wildwood staff, identical to the one in the hand of the first Vishwamitra. The staff reached its destination and the man who claimed to be the real Vishwamitra raised it in a threatening stance at the amazed soldiers blocking his path. 

‘Move aside, Ayodhyans. I have no wish to harm you. My business is with that impostor over there. He is the intruder and a threat to your king and city, not I.’ 

The soldiers looked at their captain uneasily. Dasaratha knew that scenarios such as this were not part of their training. He himself had never seen anything like it before. To his credit, Captain Drishti Kumar, swallowing his obvious puzzlement, shouted to the men defending the maharaja and the gates to hold their positions. Then he barked an order to the rest of the platoon to attack the stranger without hesitation or mercy. Dasaratha nodded approvingly. This was the result of
his
training,
his
army. 

A moment later, he lost all faith in his own experience. 

The challenger, seeing that his warning hadn’t been heeded, calmly sketched two half-circles in the air with his staff. 

An explosion of blue light filled the avenue, visible for a mile in every direction. 

The entire contingent of soldiers blocking his path, some forty-odd hefty armed men, were thrown up into the air like a child’s rag dolls. They flew to either side like sods in a field riven by a plough, and fell in a crumpled heap of tangled spears, armour and bruised limbs. Even in this moment of crisis, Dasaratha’s battle-hardened eyes noted that none of them were actually harmed by the sorcerous bolts.
But if he could do that to them, he could easily have killed them too
. He recalled what the sudra hunter had said about not wanting to break his tapasya by taking a life, and the first seed of real doubt began to sprout. 

Now, nothing stood between the challenger and the first Vishwamitra. The man whom the sudra hunter had accused of being an impostor had turned to face his accuser. Dasaratha saw that the moment his back was turned, a quartet of soldiers rushed up and escorted Pradhan-Mantri Sumantra aside, out of harm’s way. The prime minister was trembling like a leaf. Dasaratha had seen Sumantra fight like a veteran in the heat of battle, but sorcery of this magnitude was any Kshatriya’s nightmare come true. Flesh and metal were poor armour against seers’ sorcery. 

The soldiers did not attempt to lead Guru Vashishta aside. If there was anyone here who could deal with the situation, it was he, Dasaratha knew. Why had he not acted yet? It was this rather than anything else that made Dasaratha himself hold his tongue and wait before giving another order. He needed to hear the guru speak again. 

Preternaturally sensitive to the maharaja’s mind as always, Guru Vashishta spoke again into the thick silence that followed. He addressed his words to the man who stood before him, the first Vishwamitra. His tone was calm, almost casual, as if he was discussing the weather and harvest with his seer colleague. 

‘There seems to be a question of identity, my esteemed friend. This man has challenged your authenticity. Aren’t you going to respond in some way?’ 

The man whose feet Dasaratha had almost washed with his own hands looked at the guru silently. Then, with a perceptible reluctance, he turned and faced his challenger. 

‘I am Vishwamitra. You are the impostor.’ 

The challenger smiled grimly at those words. ‘You will have to do more than claim now, assassin. Prove it!’ 

The seer-mage looked at him intently. ‘My word is my proof. Now be gone or be ruined.’ 

If he was acting, Dasaratha thought, it was one hell of a performance. 

But then the other Vishwamitra spoke. 

‘I cannot perform an aggressive act, impostor. It will negate my entire penance. I have not endured two hundred and forty years of tapasya in the fetid swamps of the Bhayanak-van just to be tricked by a shape-shifting asura such as yourself. As I did with the soldiers, I will only defend myself. Unleash your black sorcery. Do your worst.’ 

Guru Vashishta nodded and looked pleased, speaking again. 

‘Well said, old friend,’ he said approvingly. The guru’s voice turned harsh as he turned back to the first Vishwamitra standing barely a yard before him. ‘It is time to show your true self now, impostor.’ And with a penetrating, bone-chilling cry, he uttered a mantra: ‘Reveal yourself, rakshas!’ 

With a shock, Dasaratha realised the guru was siding with the second Vishwamitra! Vashishta believed that the insolent sudra hunter was the real seer-mage! Which meant
the other man was the impostor
. Dasaratha watched, transfixed, as the drama at the gates took its unexpected new turn. 

Just at that moment, reinforcements arrived. Out of the corner of his eye, Dasaratha could glimpse a senapati shouting orders to a quartet of elephant-mounted spearmen, while several chariot-borne archers blocked every ingress and exit. A second squadron of his personal guard began to ring Dasaratha, eager to spirit him away from this incomprehensible but obvious threat. It took two successive orders from the maharaja, spoken quietly but firmly, before they reluctantly settled for a defensive position around him. Dasaratha twisted and turned to get a better view. The sound of armour rattling and feet running echoed from all around. Whatever the impostor’s goal may have been, he would not get into the royal palace now. Not without killing several thousand of the finest warriors in the Arya nations. Behind the palace gates, 

Dasaratha saw a crowd of servants and staff being kept back at a safe distance by guards, while at the far end of Raghuvamsha Avenue a growing crowd of citizens had begun to gather and were similarly being kept behind a line of spearmen. Word spread fast in Ayodhya, especially when the army alert was sounded. By now, the entire city would know that a crisis had arisen at the palace gates—a crisis involving their king himself. 

The man who was the centre of all this attention, the first Vishwamitra, slowly raised his staff. 

For a moment Dasaratha thought he was about to sketch a mantra in the air, blasting the other Vishwamitra to ashes, proving his own authenticity. 

But with a tired sigh, the man simply threw the staff lightly up into the air and caught it. It was the gesture of a court juggler and it had the same effect. For an instant, every pair of eyes followed the rise and fall of the staff, shifting away from its owner. 

In that instant he changed back to his true form. 

FOURTEEN 

A medley of gasps and exclamations rose from the massed soldiers surrounding the avenue. Dasaratha heard his own voice uttering a hasty invocation to Lord Indra, patron deity of warriors, general of the army of the gods. 

The thing standing before Guru Vashishta was no longer a man, let alone a legendary seer-mage. 

It was a rakshas. A demon from the netherworld, the third and lowest plane of existence, of which Lanka was the capital city and gateway. Its blackish-red skin, garments made of human skin, necklace of human infant skulls, wild snake-mouthed hair and blood-red eyes left no doubt at all. No seer would assume this form, even in jest. This was a born rakshas, and from the size of its horns, two-yard-long antlers formidable enough to match the headgear of a Himalayan black stag, he could see that it was a very aged and powerful rakshas. It towered at least thrice as high as Guru Vashishta, and the guru himself was over six feet tall. 

The rakshas laughed, revealing a mouthful of splintered black fangs. The sound it emitted was nothing like human laughter. 

Dasaratha’s hair curled and his teeth keened at the sound. Somewhere beside him, a soldier moaned and uttered a brief prayer. Dasaratha added his own, but silently. 

Guru Vashishta was the only person on the avenue who seemed unperturbed by the apparition that had appeared before him. The fact that the creature was barely a hand’s reach away didn’t seem to bother him in the least. 

He spoke, cutting sharply through the demon’s laughter. 

‘Kala-Nemi, it’s been a while since we last met.’ 

The rakshas turned to look at Vashishta. His antlered head was too heavy even for his bulky muscular body, and the action was slow and deliberate. Dasaratha realised with a surge of disgust that the rakshas’s skin was
alive
, a crawling carpet of living tissue that bulged and boiled and seethed like the surface of a volcanic mass rather than an epidermal covering. And there were
things
living inside the beast’s body, he saw, their blind white worm-like forms snaking into and out of his flesh, his form undulating as they writhed. 

Vashisht. Still alive, old fool?

The rakshas’s voice was like the sound of gravel grinding with glass. It hurt the ears physically. 

Vishwamitra addressed Vashishta. 

‘You know this beast, old friend?’ 

Vashishta replied without taking his eyes off the rakshas, who kept turning his antlered head slowly to look at each of the seers as they spoke. 

‘He and I have had … encounters over the millennia. He comes from a very illustrious line of asuras. I’m sure you know him by his family name at least. Pulastya.’ 

Vishwamitra snorted. 

‘You must be joking. This stinking foulness is descended from the sage Pulastya?’ 

‘Yes. Through his son, Visravas. This handsome fellow is Visravas’s brother, in fact.’ 

‘How interesting. So that would make him … uncle of Ravana, the self-proclaimed king of the rakshas clans?’ 

At the mention of Ravana, the rakshas raised his antlered head and opened his mouth wide. A slimy, maggot-infested serpent with snapping jaws emerged a foot out of his open mouth and emitted a high-pitched scream that jarred Dasaratha’s ears. The serpent retreated as quickly as it had come, dropping one wriggling greenish-white maggot on to the dust of the avenue. 

Dasaratha saw the ground boil with a frenzy like soup bubbling, and the maggot dissolved into a tiny puddle of steaming fluid, unable to survive outside the fetid environment of its natural habitat. 

I am Kala-Nemi, king of rakshasas. Ravana is merely my nephew. I roamed the three worlds long before he was even a mote in my sister’s eye.

An elephant reared in fright, startled by the unnatural sound of the rakshas’s voice. An old veteran, Dasaratha thought, just like me, hearing and seeing things it has tried desperately to forget for many years. 

Suddenly, he wanted a sword in his hand. The sight of the rakshas sickened him to the belly. He had almost washed this thing’s feet! Bent his head before its vile presence like a goat bowing before a butcher. Close enough to be struck down with one treacherous blow. At the gates of his own palace, in the heart of the most impregnable Arya city ever built. Unbelievable. He turned to Drishti Kumar and asked him for a sword. The captain responded without a word, eyes fixed on the tableau unfolding before the palace gates.