RAMAYANA SERIES Part 4_KING OF DHARMA (21 page)

The oldun nodded once to show he understood and turned and passed instructions to the long triple row of archers standing ready with bows strung and drawn and arrows set to the haft. One gesture now and more arrows would fly at the albino stranger than any ten men could dodge.
Or ten rakshasas.

Without a single wasted action, Shatrugan dropped his javelin, picked up Bharat and hauled him up onto his shoulders in one smooth motion. His thighs bulged with the effort, as did his biceps, and he rose from the squatting posture to a full stand, turned, and strode back to the sally port, passing through without a backward glance. The door was shut and bolted behind him instantly, and he set Bharat down on a shaded bench, gently grabbing his brother’s head and resting it slowly against the cut-pine logs that made up the pillar against which he rested.

Bharat’s eyes fluttered open almost at once. “Where—”

“Shhh. Shantam. You’re safe.”

Bharat groaned and raised his uninjured hand to his forehead – pressing the palm there as if feeling the aftermath of the same pain Shatrugan had experienced moments earlier. Shatrugan imagined how intense that pain must have been though it had lasted only a moment for him. A few more seconds and he would have fallen too, he had no doubt. It took a lot to bring Bharat down, he knew. He was glad now that Bharat had insisted that they both not go out together.

“Some kind of asura maya,” Bharat said, then gestured for water. It was handed to him at once by a waiting soldier. He sipped carefully and Shatrugan watched the intelligence return to his eyes again.

“Yes, I know. I felt it too. Bastard tried it on me.”

Bharat looked at him quizzically.

Shatrugan shrugged. “I tossed a javelin at his ugly skull. It seemed to work.”

Bharat sputtered water. “You—”

Shatrugan patted his arm, gently because it was the dislocated shoulder. “Don’t worry, he ducked in time. But it did the trick. The pain stopped right away.”

Bharat’s eyes flicked from side to side, mind working furiously. “Still.

That was not appropriate under the circumstances. We were attempting a diplomatic parley.”

Shatrugan chortled. “Yes. Sure. Of course. They knocked you down using sorcery, would have knocked me down too in another second. But I should still have tried to talk to them, right? Well, diplomacy can go suck a lemon!”

Bharat seemed about to respond then stopped. He grinned and nodded. “You’re right. To hell with diplomacy. They made the first move.”

A commotion. The dense rows of armoured soldiers parted to reveal a dark form moving like wind across water. Rama. Followed closely by Lakshman, Sita and an entourage which included, Shatrugan noted, the entire War Council.

“Bharat, my brother,” Rama exclaimed anxiously, crouching down to his eye level. “Are you—?”

“Yes.” Bharat cut his eyes at Shatrugan. “Thanks to Diplomacy-Is-AJavelin-Well-Thrown over here. If not for him, I would still be lying out there…” He shuddered, “…dying, I think. It felt like nothing less.”

Shatrugan saw the look in Rama’s eyes change. It was not a look he would have liked to see on a battlefield opponent.

“What happened?” Rama asked. “Tell me exactly.”

Bharat began, and Shatrugan finished.

Rama nodded, his eyes hooded by the end of it. Shatrugan felt a chill finger on his spine:
I’m glad he’s my brother not my enemy.

Rama sat on the bench beside Bharat. Shatrugan remained standing, as did the others. He saw Sita shoot him a sympathetic glance and he smiled wanly. Lakshman’s mirror image of himself had a look of dark fury that was more kith to Rama’s dark brooding look than Shatrugan’s own.
Whatever they went through in those jungles and in Lanka,
he thought,
it changed them forever. These two brothers of mine, they are rakshasa slayers now and forever.
He respected that greatly; it also made him sad. Sad for what had changed, what had once been, and what might have been.

Rama sighed, “Very well. Let us see for ourselves what new devilment has come to our gates.”

There was a flurry of protest, from Saprem Senapati Dheeraj Kumar, Senapati Drishti Kumar, the War Council, Sita, even old Somasra. Rama held up his hand.

“Yes, I hear you. Yet I am king of the Kosala nation. And if there is an army at the gates of our capitol city, it falls to me to protect our citizenry. What danger lurks out there, someone has to go out to face it. I cannot command anyone else to go if I fear to face it myself.”

Lakshman spoke quietly: “Let me go, Rama. I shall put an arrow through his eye before he so much as looks at me.”

Rama nodded. “No doubt you would. And could. But we cannot do that either. The challenge he issued was to me, not you. And as king, it is my dharma to go face him and attempt one last time to resolve this crisis if possible.”

“And if not?” Sita asked the question.

Rama turned to glance at her, nodded again, then looked up at the sky, blue and cloudless now, perfect. Shatrugan saw its blue expanse reflected in the pools of his black eyes, and in the shaded alcove where he sat, it lent his dark face a certain aspect, almost a glow.
A bluish glow.
But for that, and but for the hundreds of thousands waiting for his response, his decision, his next words, as well as the army waiting outside the gates…but for these things, he might have been a man sitting on a bench anywhere, contemplating the sky philosophically.

When he spoke at last, it was into a still, terrible silence.
The calm before the war,
Shatrugan thought grimly, seeing Rama’s decision in his eyes, his face, his stance, even before the words were spoken aloud.

“If not,” Rama said at last, then paused, looking down at his hands, the muscles of his jaw working tautly before he continued, “If they will not see reason, if it is war they truly want, then we shall give them war.”

FOUR

Kausalya rode silently through the empty streets of Ayodhya. Her horse sensed her anxiety as well as the tension in the air and snickered at shadows and sounds. She saw only soldiers all the way from the palace to the seventh gate and they all looked alert and ready to fight. Mahamantri Ashok had attempted unsuccessfully to dissuade her from venturing out of the royal sanctum but she had spent the earlier part of the morning watching the extraordinary events unfolding from a window and she could no longer stand to be cooped up in her chambers.

It was difficult to believe that so much had already happened, or that something as incredible as the news from the outer gate could be real:
An army? At the gates of Ayodhya? Here to invade us?
Had she not witnessed all that had occurred already with her own eyes, she might have reacted by smiling it off as a jest. It was simply too incredible. Yet it
was
happening. Here and now. She had watched the shocking appearance of Kala-Nemi and the subsequent events. If not for Hanuman and Maharishi Valmiki this city might already be reeling under the shadow of fatal disease! With a crisis so dire looming over her kingdom, she had no business staying cloistered in the palace, at the mercy of the trickle of news that the Mahamantri thought relevant for her knowledge. She needed to see and hear what was happening with her own senses, firsthand.

For the past decade and a half, since Dasaratha’s demise and Rama’s exile, she alone had stood between the throne of Ayodhya and all those who sought to disable, unsettle or openly assault it. Bharat had been king in name only – he had refused to undergo coronation or accept the rajtaru, the kingstaff that was mandatory for the reigning liege to take hold of formally by ritual, and had managed the kingdom’s affairs from Nandigram. Nandigram was virtually an outpost of the Kosala nation, and everytime Ayodhya was threatened or disturbed, it had fallen to Kausalya and her able administrative and military supporters to hold the capitol together and maintain peace. As seniormost Maharani of the Ikshwaku-Suryavansha dynasty, wife of Dasaratha, and most of all, mother of Rama Chandra, the “true heir” as he came to be called by his many supporters, it was she who commanded respect and grudging discipline from even the most unruly elements. The court historical record credited her with embarrassing achievements that she always sought to downplay, but over the many years, even her self-effacing modesty could not shy away from the fact that she had held the capitol, and by extension, the kingdom together in these dark, tragic years.

She even had the scars to prove it; Arya women were not exempt from physical attacks nor expected to be mere Sati-Savitris, not even if they were Queen Dowagers of one of the most powerful nations in Aryavarta. She had had to prove herself more than once. Not too often, which was a relief because unlike her sister-queen Rani Kaikeyi, she had never enjoyed physical combat or violence. In fact, she abhorred it. Which only made her task all the harder. Her real strength lay in statecraft, in judging the subtle currents of sociopolitical movement and change, anticipating, negotiating, and above all, artfully managing and maintaining peace. Like all true heads of state, she knew that peace was a dangerous thing to uphold and maintain. Perhaps the most dangerous political freedom of all.

Now, she wanted to be with Rama when he took the decisions that she knew would resonate for years to come. If not to guide or aid him – he had no need of that now, she mused wistfully, her mother’s heart still unable to fully accept the fact – then at least to observe him in action. To be there in case he needed her for any reason. She understood the complex, intertwining, sociopolitical problems of the kingdom far better than he did, but she also knew that Rama was an instinctive leader: he had assumed the kingship with the practised air of one who had been groomed for it all his life, not as an exile returned from years of battling insurmountable odds and enemies.

Fourteen years. For almost a generation she had not seen his face or heard his voice or touched the crow black hair that she had once curled with her fingers as she sang him to sleep with lullabies. She had parted from him once, as a boy of seven, when he went for the mandatory brahmacharya period to Guru Vashishta’s ashram and gurukul deep in the Northwoods. She still remembered the day he had returned; that memory had carried her through these past fourteen years, given her the confidence to believe that he would return again, as he had then, stronger and harder than before, less her son and more the warrior that circumstances had moulded him into becoming. When he stepped from the golden flying vahan Pushpak with his companions, her swelling heart had come close to bursting. With pride, yes, of course. For he had taken everything that life had dished out and still kept his head high and his chin up, and triumphed over it all. But also with pain. With inexpressible motherly anguish and grief. At the sight of that dark face now further darkened not in skin tone, but in its hard angular lines and grim set. The itihasa of his exile was written on Rama’s face, reflected in the dark pools of his crow-black pupils; the shadow of all he had endured, and done, lay upon his soul like a landslide across the mouth of a cave. Somewhere inside, deep inside, was the boy she had nursed and nurtured and nourished and raised to youthful promise. But he was gone now, lost forever. In his place had returned Rama the man. The kshatriya who had fought and killed ten thousand rakshasas. Slayer of the king of asuras himself. Yoddha of yoddhas. Mahayoddha Rama Chandra.

That day, through all the pomp and ceremony and roaring crowds and showering petals and rituals and feasts, she had cried inside in secret. For that boy. Her boy. Her son. Who was no more. Who had been replaced by this…man. This legend. This living myth. And she had looked up once to see Rama looking at her intently, as if he knew exactly what she was thinking and feeling – mayhap he did – and she had smiled and pretended that all was well and everything would be as it was before. But time was a river, and like the Sarayu, one could return to it everyday, and it would be the same river, but would the person returning be exactly the same? Not quite. Perhaps never. If Ayodhya had changed so much, how could Rama not have changed too? As a boy came of age in a distant brutal jungle battling daily for his life and for the lives of his beloved companions, so also a city had passed her prime and began greying. The city had existed long before the boy; but now their fates were forever entwined, and so Rama’s coming of manhood had been mirrored by the waning of Ayodhya’s glory. The city and the man. Apart. Yet always together. For what was Ayodhya if not Rama by another name? So the city had endured its own season of exile, banished from the joy, peace, prosperity and unbridled optimism and enthusiasm it had once been world-famous for. And just as Rama returned with something less than what he had left with fourteen years ago, Ayodhya too had so much less than what it had once possessed.

And now, it was no mere twist of fate that this crisis had arisen only weeks after Rama’s return. For Rama’s life and fortunes were bound with those of Ayodhya. As one fell, so would the other. Which was why she must be with him when he took whatever decision he took. For even though she was no longer the Dowager Queen awaiting the return of the rightful heir, she was still Ayodhya’s bride and Rama’s mother.

The tense silence around the seventh gate told her all she needed to know. From the direction of the gazes, she could see that someone, probably Rama, had gone up to take the traditional high spot from which the master of the city spoke to any potential invaders. It was little more than a platform built higher up at a far sharper angle than any spear or javelin could be easily flung, or an arrow loosed without a precious moment taken to raise a bow and adjust for wind force. She glanced up as she dismounted and her heart bobbed as she glimpsed the familiar dark skin and lean upper body through the cleverly slatted protective railing of the high spot. She handed the rein to the head of her personal security unit, a strapping Banglar Queensguard who rarely spoke and always listened and saw every single thing around. As Kausalya walked over to the boxed-in enclosure she deployed her all-female unit in a protective web that seemed redundant given the ridiculously considerable number of armed Ayodhyan forces all around. She could see her stepsons, Sita and what appeared to be the entire War Council. All eyes were on Rama above, and as she approached her daughter-in-law, she heard the strong clear tones of her son’s voice call out. She felt a strange mix of pleasure and pride to hear her son –
my son the King
– call her name: