Prince of Dharma (71 page)

He looked around for something, anything, to defend himself with. He remembered his stick, discarded in the haste to reach home to warn his family. Then he grinned, thinking of the futility of waving that flimsy wooden rod at these monstrosities sprung from the slipstream between legend and myth. Shouting curses would be more effective than using a cowherd’s stick! 

His sister caught his grin and returned it. They hugged one last time, and he was glad that she was here with him to make this last stand. It was meet to have your own blood and kin beside you when the end came. Bonded in death, bound together for eternity. 

They laughed together, laughed at the snarling, slobbering avatars of death that roared up towards them like a black wave, wielding their defiant laughter as boldly as steel weapons. 

The wave of invading asuras passed over them, then through them, shattering their fragile bodies like wine flagons crushed by stampeding elephants. One moment they stood there laughing defiantly, the next they were reduced to twin puffs of bloodspray and bone-fragment. 

The creatures roared on, crushing the puny human remains underfoot, surging relentlessly onward towards the tiny ten-hut hamlet where the rest of Kartikeya’s clan awaited their own tryst with Yama. 

Dhuj lay burning behind them. 

Ahead lay the breadth and span of the land of the holy rivers, the nations of Arya, and the entire civilised mortal world. 

KAAND 1

ONE 

Lakshman woke in the darkness before dawn, clammy with cold sweat. He reached for his sword and found his rig instead. The bow was in his hand, an arrow aligned, the cord drawn to firing tautness, before he realised where he was. 

A dream. Just another dream. 

He loosened the cord. Regained his breathing rhythm, slowing his pulse. As his senses attuned themselves to the here and now, he grew aware of the smells of the hut and the ashram, the sounds of the night. It was pitch dark here. No torches burned at night in Siddh-ashrama, no quads of palace guards or PFs patrolled the perimeter. Once the cookfires were doused, the lamps extinguished, the stars and moon were all that remained to light one’s way. It was a world apart from the pomp and majesty of Ayodhya. A world of meditation and tapasya, not luxury and indulgence. 

And yet he had come to relish it: the tranquil days filled with the sonorous chanting of brahmacharya acolytes, the peaceful nights filled with rich forest smells, insect calls, animal sounds. After the bloody violence of the Bhayanak-van, it was a welcome retreat. A quiet space in which to re-arm the soul. 

And yet. 

Already he felt a gnawing restlessness, a strange, anti-climactic unease. A sense of something yet to be done, a task unfulfilled. 

Between battles. 

It was a phrase his mother had used to describe his father after Maharaja Dasaratha had sustained a deep gash in a friendly chariot-fight at a holiday tournament. It could as well be used to describe any Arya raj-Kshatriya, that sub-caste of warrior-kings whose lives were dedicated to the art of combat. Like a weapon of war forged from molten steel, a raj-Kshatriya was designed to fight, to kill. However long a sword might lie at rest, it was but a moment’s work to knock off the superficial plating of rust and mildew, wash it clean in a cauldron of boiling oil. And lo and behold, it was ready to sing its song of rage and sorrow once more. A raj-Kshatriya was like that sword: even at rest, he did not become a man of peace. He simply remained, in Third Queen Sumitra’s words, between battles. Waiting. 

A light rain was pattering down on the plantain-leaf roof of the small hut when Lakshman stepped outside. The clearing before the hut was sprinkled with early spring buds and a light growth of darbha grass. Even in the dull light from the eastern sky, the new buds were visible, as varied as daubs of Holi colour on a child’s face. 

Lakshman stepped off the mud stoop of the hut and on to the grass. It was damp from the unseasonal drizzle and felt wonderful, cooling and soothing his bare feet. He walked slowly across the clearing, into the rear groves. 

In moments, he was out of sight of the ashram clearing and surrounded by tall bowed trees, shur-shurring softly in the gentle dawn breeze like a hundred silk saris being rustled at once. 

The rain became steadily heavier, growing into a more determined shower. He brushed past a papaya frond bowed with collected rainwater and it spilled its cool contents on to his bare shoulder. He was in the midst of a papaya patch, the thick, squat trees barely as high as his head, their large palm-like fronds acting as natural cups for the rainwater. He bent his mouth to a frond and sipped tentatively. It tasted sweet as night’s dew collected from a lotus leaf. He drank greedily, slaking his morning thirst. Some spilled down his chin and ran down his neck, mingling with the rain. The aftertaste was faintly redolent of the odour of unripe papaya. 

The rain had awoken the natural fragrances of the forest. Lakshman could smell the rich mineral scent of damp soil, the mulchy smell of wet bark, the sweet perfume of nightqueen blossom only just starting to shut its buds against the onset of day, the papayas ripening in the grove around him, the market melange of vegetable smells from the large plot where the rishis of Siddh-ashrama grew their produce—and cutting keenly through it all, the unmistakable cloying musk of a golden deer in musth. 

He frowned. The last smell was out of place. It was too early in the season for deer to go into heat. It intrigued him, almost made him want to return to the hut to find his bow and arrow and go on the hunt—or at least play at hunting, since the taking of life and eating of meat were expressly forbidden at Siddhashrama. 

Already, the sky was growing light enough for him to see the greenish bulges of the papaya fruits, the first tinges of muted saffron only just beginning to appear in their swollen centres. A dozen yards away, the jungle proper loomed darkly. The oak, peepal and banyan trees of the Vatsa woods were still shrouded in night-dense darkness. The rain had passed and left behind a peculiar light. It cast dreamlike shadows, suffusing the air with a deep ultramarine luminescence. Drops of rainwater clung to the tips of leaves like jewels on the earlobes of court danseuses. The air swirled and swarmed with motes of multiple hues, like a rainbow trying to come into being. If it was possible to see an indra-dhanush from the inside out, this was what it would look like. 

He smelled it before he saw it, the odour of musk dense and cloying in the still air. 

It stood in a gap at the far edge of the patch of papaya trees, just within the dark shadows of the jungle. It was almost completely obscured by the trunk of a banyan tree. Its ears were the only thing that moved, twitching with that peculiar restlessness that was its own way of watching. It seemed to exude a delicate glow, its ochre fur gleaming in the watery dawn light, and its eyes were wild with the heat of its condition. 

For a moment, he was transfixed. Just before leaving Ayodhya, Rama had caught a deer in the groves on the north bank of the Sarayu. Later that Holi morning, he had saved the same deer from poachers and taken Lakshman back to the spot only to find the wounded deer gone. Now Lakshman felt a curious certainty that this was that very deer. Except that he couldn’t see any sign of an arrow wound. It would be a miracle if it had survived such a wound at all, let alone recovered without a trace of a scar. And it would have been fantastic for it to have then made the long journey south to Siddh-ashrama. No, it couldn’t be the same deer. What was he thinking? 

Yet there was something in its eyes, its eager, watchful stance, that made him remember Rama intensely. As if it knew he was searching for his brother and was trying to tell him something. 

‘What is it, doe-eyed one?’ he said softly, keeping very still so as not to startle it. ‘Do you know something I don’t?’ 

It stood rock-still, in that familiar frozen posture prey animals assumed when they sensed a predator. He lowered himself to his haunches slowly, coming down to its height, careful not to show his teeth, humming very softly to calm it. 

‘Have you seen my brother Rama?’ he asked, almost singing the name. ‘Rama Rama oh. Oh Rama Rama.’ 

The deer watched him through wide almond-shaped eyes. Its pupils were dilated, very large in their beds of white. Its ears flickered once, then were still again. 

The wind changed. Somewhere in the thicket behind, high above, a langur shrieked and was answered by its simian companions. A family of red-tailed parrots, clustered on a branch until the rain passed, shot up into the air and were silhouetted against the lightening sky, thin red and green chalk streaks on an ash-grey slate. 

The deer skittered, twisting round and round as if chasing its own tail, its ears twitching madly. It spun for a moment like a temple devdaasi whirling in a paroxysm of religious ecstasy. Its musky odour increased. 

It came to an abrupt halt facing the thicket of dark-enshrouded banyan and peepal trees that marked the start of the forest. Lakshman tried to follow its gaze, to see what had startled it. The langurs resumed their screeching and chittering in the trees above, passing on a primordial panic alarm, and the deer bolted. 

It was gone in a flash, a golden shadow rippling through the woods, fleeing back to its fairy realm. Its musky perfume lingered a moment longer, then was lost in the smells of rain and forest. 

Lakshman remained crouched on his haunches, peering into the darkness of the trees. The wind changed again abruptly, bringing the scent to him a fraction of an instant before his eyes found the beast. 

It was standing in the dense shade of an enormous banyan tree, the high vaulting boughs too thickly interwoven to allow the dull light of dawn to pass through easily. He saw its eyes first, bright as diamonds gleaming against the dark background of the jungle. The rest of it was all but invisible, but the eyes were riveting, yellow orbs of fire smouldering in a bed of coals. 

The tiger stepped out of the shadows, becoming visible in stages. Its striped flanks seemed to go on for ever. The lithe, slow steps it took, the deep impressions its pugs made in the soft loamy ground, and the sheer size of the animal took his breath away. It was a beautiful young male, very large for its age. 

Lakshman’s throat felt parched despite the water he had just drunk. There were many tiger pelts in his father’s palace in Ayodhya. None were as large as this creature. 

The tiger’s eyes watched him intently, its throat issuing a low growling sound that was its way of throwing down a challenge. He understood at once that it was angry at having been deprived of the deer, which it must have been stalking for a while. A nocturnal creature, it had probably not fed this night, and soon the heat of the sun would drive it back to its deep forest lair, to sleep empty-stomached until nightfall. It was on the hunt, and since it had lost its chosen prey, this two-legged one would have to do instead. 

It came slowly, one outstretched paw at a time. Ten yards from him, then nine … seven … In moments it was within springing distance. It stopped, crouching down, its powerful shoulder muscles bunching, the golden black-striped fur creasing as it gathered all its strength for the leap. 

At the very last instant, a voice spoke out, unexpectedly loud over the stillness of the thicket. 

‘Shantam.’ 

The single word acted as a mantra on the crouched tiger. One moment it was coiled to unleash its ferocious destructive energy upon its two-legged prey; the next it relaxed its powerful muscles and sank to the ground, purring like any house cat. 

Lakshman rose to his feet as Brahmarishi Vishwamitra strode past him, approaching the tiger with fearless familiarity. 

The seer-mage bent and stroked the animal’s head. Its ears twitched appreciatively and it rolled over, offering up the pale fur of its belly. Vishwamitra chuckled in his deep, gravelly voice, his long white beard rippling with his amusement. 

‘You want to play, do you? I would love to play with you awhile, my friend. But there is much work to be done. Your workday is ending, while ours has barely begun. The good rajkumar here and I, we have a journey to make today with our companions. A long journey.’ 

The tiger mewled. 

Vishwamitra smiled. ‘Yes, certainly. When I return I shall play with you. Now, run along and give your brothers and sisters my regards. Go on now, it’s almost sunrise, and your mother will worry.’ 

The tiger snorted twice, issued a last sulky growl, and rose to its feet, padding away quickly. In moments, it had blended with the shadows of the forest and was gone. 

Vishwamitra turned to face Lakshman. 

‘Rajkumar Lakshmana, the animals of Siddh-ashrama live in harmony with humans. They mean you no harm.’ 

Lakshman bowed his head, putting his palms together respectfully to offer the first greetings of the day to his new guru. 

‘Pranaam, Guru-dev. The tiger was clearly hostile to me. When it sought to assault me, I was left with no choice but to prepare to defend myself.’ 

The brahmarishi inclined his head slightly, acknowledging Lakshman’s explanation. ‘What you say is true. But remember that in this place we are the outsiders. Perhaps you were a little too quick to invoke the power of the maha-mantras Bala and Atibala. Certainly the tiger sensed your great strength and saw you as a hostile intruder. Even though it knew your enhanced abilities would result in its destruction, still it sought to defend its habitat and its dignity.’