RAMAYANA SERIES Part 4_KING OF DHARMA (16 page)

“Boy! Everything you thought you knew until now is a lie. The war of Lanka, the battles preceding it…every single thing that happened up to this day…was all part of the epic vengeance of Ravana. The real battle has just begun. And this time the final victory will not be yours. It will be Ravana’s. Today you shall see the culmination of his great strategy, a battle plan put into place decades ago whose intricate details and ramifications you cannot even begin to understand…
Boy!
Compared to the ancient wisdom of the lord of rakshasas, you are still a boy. And always will be!”

Kala-Nemi roared with laughter. And with every exhalation of putrid breath, a cloud of greenish black particles were released into the air from his bruise-purple maw to rise high into the air like a swarm of insects; they dispersed across the rooftops with malicious speed, spreading their foul asura pestilence among the people of Ayodhya.

SIX

Hanuman could take it no more.

As the rakshasa finished delivering his bombastic speech, he moved into action. Focussing his attention in the method that had already become a daily ritual, he recited the name of Rama in his mind, unlocking the brahman shakti within his being and willed the cells of his body to expand. The twisted metal of the palace gates, the soldiers around him, the very avenue itself, all grew rapidly smaller in size as he grew larger. He stepped forward to avoid harming any of the Ayodhyans, rising so rapidly that it felt as if he had leaped up into the air and was reaching for the sky. He heard the shouts and exclamations from around him –
below
him now, and falling rapidly farther below – grow louder as he increased in size faster than ever before. The war of Lanka had pressed him to his limits, challenging him in every way, yet that very challenge had also given him a certain proficiency with the use of his newfound abilities. While he was far from a master of his new shakti, he had felt himself improving in performance and control with every passing day, not neglecting his daily training regimen even though the war was over and no obvious hostility visible on the horizon. It was something he had learned from Rama himself: the work of a warrior is preparing for war; the better prepared you are for it, the less likely you are to wage war.

He was prepared.

“Kala-Nemi!”
he roared, his own voice gruff and powerful enough to roll in deafening waves across the city, no less formidable than the rakshasa’s nerve-grating vocal effusions.
“I am Hanuman, servant of our Lord Rama. Face me and fight!”

The rakshasa turned his body to face him, and Hanuman was gratified to see that the beast was forced to raise his line of vision slightly. Hanuman had controlled his expansion to make himself only a little larger and taller than Kala-Nemi, just enough to be a formidable opponent but not so much that he bore an unfair advantage. If he had wished, he knew he could fight Kala-Nemi even in his own natural size but he recognized the grave risk at hand and knew that a prolonged battle would take a terrible toll on the innocent lives of Ayodhya’s citizens. The only way to end this quickly was to out-match the rakshasa and attempt to take the fight away from the city.

He was more than a little surprised when Kala-Nemi chuckled. The sound gnawed at Hanuman’s inner ear like a prickly insect squirming inside.

“Vanar.”

The rakshasa made that simple appellation sound like a humiliating insult. Had he said “monkey” – the offensive name all vanars could tolerate being called – he could not have irked Hanuman more.

“There will be no fight here,” Kala-Nemi said. “Neither single combat nor all-out attack. Would that I could, for it would give me the greatest pleasure imaginable to tear this city apart with my paws and talons. But my nephew’s plan was set in stone and he ensured that no deviation was possible.”

Kala-Nemi stepped forward, putting Hanuman on full alert. The rakshasa did not make any move to attack or harm him in any way, merely moved in closer. Now they stood near enough that Hanuman could smell the stench of the rakshasa’s rotten breath. It stank like baboon meat ten days-old in the summer sun, so putrid and rancid that even the crows would no longer pick at it. Except that it was not baboon meat, was it? It was…human flesh? Yes. Hanuman stood his ground without blinking or wincing, and tightened his arms and back muscles in readiness for the first blow. The rakshasa’s eyes looked up at Hanuman with a malevolent glint – Hanuman was shocked to see things actually squirming and writhing around
inside the sockets
of those eyes! He had not known that any living being could harbour parasites within its eyes, yet apparently Kala-Nemi could and did. He tried not to look too closely at the things, yet could not help noting that they resembled millipedes with hundreds of tiny, bony thorns rather than hairy cilia. Blood oozed from their tracks as they writhed and moved inside the rakshasa’s organs of vision, like bloodshot veins in a drunken man’s eyes.

“You dearly wish to fight me, do you not? I wish I could grant you your desire, vanar. But it is not to be.”

Kala-Nemi exuded a grinding sigh of regret and began to turn away.

Hanuman made the first move. He reached out and put a heavy palm on the rakshasa’s shoulder, stopping him,
“Coward! You will fight me whether you will it or not!”

Kala-Nemi chuckled again and glass shards pierced Hanuman’s hearing, as he said laconically without turning around: “I think not.”

The rakshasa burst open like an overripe watermelon.

Lakshman reacted despite himself. Of all the moves he had expected Kala-Nemi to make, this was not one of them; this was not even 100
on the list! He had expected the rakshasa to use his gigantic size to rampage through the city, perhaps knock down the tower, assault the palace, create chaos and wreak havoc. Which was why, when Hanuman had expanded himself and gone to confront the beast, he had secretly breathed a sigh of relief. Almost a decade and a half of battling rakshasas had taught Lakshman one thing: however fierce, huge or powerful, all rakshasas could be killed. But if they could be killed quickly, so much the better. If nothing else, Hanuman could take the fight outside Ayodhya, reducing the collateral damage to the city and its denizens.

But this? This was bizarre!

He watched, transfixed, as the giant burst into a million tiny fragments like an overripe musk melon struck by a heavy metal-head arrow, the kind that was designed to punch through body armour. No. Not fragments. Tiny globular bits, like miniscule black spores. There were patches of mottled colour rippling through the bunched spores, as if reflecting the organic colours of the rakshasa biology of which they were part only instants ago. The entire mass hovered in the air like a swarm of hornets, still more or less occupying the same overall shape as the rakshasa in his flesh-and-blood form –
if he was ever in flesh-and-blood form,
Lakshman thought with a sudden insight. They swarmed and buzzed and swayed a little to one side then another, as if buffeted by an invisible wind. The top section, still coherent enough to resemble a grotesque facsimile of Kala-Nemi’s bestial features, resolved into a semblance of a grin.

“How would you fight
this
, vanar?” asked the thing.

Lakshman watched Hanuman reach out and try to take hold of the thing’s shoulder. It was like trying to grasp a swarm of hovering insects. The swarm slipped through the vanar’s fingers, ruffling the fur on the back of his paws, and flew around the vanar’s hand, the ‘shoulder’ now detached and hovering apart from the body itself. Then, as Hanuman retracted his paw in puzzled astonishment, that part of the swarm flew back to join the main body once more, mingling with the rest of the mass.

“What are you?”
Hanuman asked with a voice filled with outrage. The vanars were not known for their love for rakshasas; least of all the more grotesque and unnatural sub-species of the race. Lakshman could imagine his friend’s horror at touching this perversion of nature.

“I am what Ravana intended me to be. What the brahmarishis Vishwamitra and Vashishta condemned me to become. And what I had to turn into in order to return to this mortal realm. It was the only way – and it suited Ravana’s plans perfectly. For you see, vanar, while your great and mighty mortal master’s city-kingdom is so stupidly proud of its defences – Ayodhya the Unconquerable! – the fools fail to realize that often the biggest threat comes not from armies or intruders or weapons of metal and steel. There are other ways to wreak havoc and take lives. From the very day I came here to Ayodhya fourteen years ago, my real mission was never merely to infiltrate and assassinate! I would hardly have attempted to walk in through the front gates had that been the case. Nay! My true purpose was to be interred here, not physically beneath the city but in that sector of eternal brahman that corresponds to this city’s physical location. For every hour of these past fourteen years I have festered and fulminated, awaiting this day. And now, what you see before you is not Kala-Nemi the rakshasa who once lived. He is long gone. Only his aatma powers this thing you behold. And this thing is the most potent weapon ever to strike at the heart of Ayodhya. A weapon devised from nature itself, corrupted and befouled. A weapon of pure biological evil. For remember this always, Ayodhya: Evil never dies. It only changes form and shape!”

And with that final missive delivered, the thing that resembled Kala-Nemi roared with laughter. The swarm that still resembled him lost its coherence and disintegrated, flying upwards with a roaring rush to travel high up into the air above the city. It hung there momentarily like a giant black monsoon cloud seething and swarming. And then, as Lakshman stared up in mute horror, the cloud dispersed itself, flowing
down
like individual fingers and streams in a half dozen different directions, each stream splitting further and further into branches and forks, moving with malicious supernatural speed, until a network of spores descended towards every corner of the city, carrying Devi alone knew what foul asura pestilence.

Bharat and Shatrugan heard the last words of Kala-Nemi booming across the city and felt the malevolence in that final message. They glanced back briefly over their shoulders as they rode down the last stretch to their destination, and glimpsed the dark cloud of swarming insectile things bifurcating and snaking out across the city, descending with clearly malicious intent. But the task they were undertaking was as vital, and they exchanged grim glances and turned forward again, slowing to a halt and then dismounting in a single liquid move, barely acknowledging the salutes of the white-faced PF massed facing the barred gates, racing up the carved stone steps to the ramparts of the third gate…. The alarm-riders had been clear in their message – this was a crisis of the highest level possible. Every instant counted.

Even though this was in fact the main gate of the city proper, it was actually the third such gate – a triple protection designed to fox besiegers and thwart even the most determined and persistent enemy assault. Beyond it lay two equally sturdy and solid ‘front gates’ – all three built to look exactly alike – separated by the deepest and most perilous moats filled with deadly predators, and with channels ready in which to pour down barrels of oil that could be set ablaze to further deter those foolhardy enough to attempt to breach the moats. The slender bridges that spanned the outermost two moats were designed in such a manner that a single command could result in their being wrecked completely, leaving no means for any invading force to ride or march to this true front gate, the third. It was a foolproof system, and Bharat knew that no army would ever dare to attempt to breach it, which was the whole point of all this excess and duplication of defences: to make would-be invaders decide it was not worth the effort and potential cost of life. That was why Ayodhya was literally in Sanskrit
A-yodha
, the city that could not be fought (or defeated or besieged or conquered, etc).

But today was the day that they had all been told would never come.

As Bharat reached the top of the ramparts and Shatrugan and he made their way through the thick throng of clearly shaken yet bravely disciplined gatewatch soldiers, he sought out the familiar clean-cut features of Senapati Drishti Kumar. The son of the Saprem Senapati, Drishti Kumar had some things in common with his father, yet was very much his own man. He turned with a curt snap of his neck to acknowledge and greet Bharat as he approached. The lack of expression on his handsome features could not mask the sickly cast that lay beneath.

“Yuvraj Bharat, Yuvraj Shatrugan,” he said crisply, saluting. “I apologize for not coming in person to fetch you. I felt this warranted my presence here, in the event…” His voice trailed off. Some things were hard enough to acknowledge or accept, let alone say aloud.

Bharat glanced again at his brother’s beefy muscled features, and saw a nerve twitch in Shatrugan’s cheek. He clapped a hand on his shoulder and nodded so discreetly only Shatrugan understood its meaning.
Hold fast. We shall get through this together as we have all else.
His own shoulder ached still with the memory of the dislocation, but there was no time for personal pain. He ignored his discomfort and stepped into the space cleared by soldiers who moved aside briskly to allow Shatrugan and him to have a clear view.

They looked out across the second moat, over the second gate, then across the first moat and gate, to the place where the raj-marg that cut through Sarayu Valley broadened into a field-wide space large enough to accommodate the regular throng of Kosalans who visited Ayodhya routinely for commerce, trade, politics or personal reasons.