RAMAYANA SERIES Part 4_KING OF DHARMA (26 page)

Mercifully, the blazing sword turned away from Bharat, as Atikaya glanced back over his shoulder. There was a very long pause and when Atikaya spoke again, it was in a tone that left no doubt of his reaction: he was shocked!

“You?”

Bharat’s eyes might not have been able to look past the dazzling beacon of the moon-sword. But his ears could hear just fine. What they heard in that single word spoken aloud was incredulity, inadvertently expressed and completely sincere.

He has been taken by complete surprise
, Bharat thought.
Whoever that is behind him now, he wasn’t expecting it.

Feeling some small satisfaction in the rakshasa’s response, Bharat used his peripheral vision and mental judgement to
observe
rather than clearly
see
Atikaya turn to look at the new arrival. The blinding scream of the spell sword diminished a little – but even a little was some blessed relief

– as the rakshasa turned his back on Bharat in order to face his new enemy. “How did you—?” Atikaya began, then stopped. “It’s impossible,” he went on finally. “
No one
can withstand the glamour of Chandrahas.”

Footsteps now. Soft, slow, measured. Crunching the gravel that lined the inside of the wall in a swathe several yards wide, to enable the heavily laden carts of merchants carrying precious produce to the city for the weekly market to pass unharmed.

Then the footsteps ceased. Close by. And even without being able to see past the ardour of Chandrahas, Bharat sensed that the person who had leaped down from somewhere above had stopped just a few yards short of Atikaya.

“None,” repeated the person, agreeing. “None except someone who also has moon blood in their veins.”

Silence from Atikaya. The rakshasa stood with his back to Bharat, and even without being able to see past the blinding blaze of maya shakti, he could tell that the rakshasa was struck dumb. And that, he assumed, did not happen often to the son of Ravana.

“Of course,” said Atikaya slowly. Then chuckled. “Of course! You too have moon blood in your veins. Because after all, you are my blood-kin. I knew that!”

“Say it then,” said the other voice. “Say it aloud, and acknowledge what is true.”

“So be it,” the rakshasa replied, recovered from the initial shock far faster than Bharat would have expected. “You are my one and only surviving—”

“—sister,” Sita said stepping forward, her sword lowered and held at an angle, poised to strike upward, for while Arya men favoured the brute strength of arms, back and shoulders gathered together by hacking downwards, a woman’s body – even a warrior of Sita’s skill and mettle – was best served by slicing
upwards
at a diagonal angle, under the guard of a man, the point of the blade sent piercing home into the softness of the armpit and thence onward to the heart chamber, or at the very least cutting a deep gash at the point where even the best fitted armour must yield space to allow for the wearer’s movement. She held it two-armed and angled as she moved towards Atikaya, on feet that seemed to tread on invisible beetles softly enough not to cause a single shell to crack, her face lowered, eyes hooded by the fringe of hair over her forehead, dark eyes burning in the white slits, petite nostrils flared, breath steady.

“That is your story,” she said. “And a fine one it must make to put sleeping rakshasa babes to bed at night. But here in Ayodhya it has the ring of a poorly written poem. There are better tales told in the drinking houses in the old quarter, where the kusalavya bards know that a tale well told could mean supper that eve, and a tale that displeases the hardworking hard-drinking boisterous audience would result in—” she shrugged. “Well, going to bed without supper would be the least of their complaints that night.”

Atikaya cocked his head, very much like a dog listening to his master perform some peculiar vocal feat. “Perhaps you haven’t noticed, sister dear,” the last words spoken so sweetly they came out as the opposite of a sneer yet managed to convey the same derogatory tone, “but there are neither drinking houses left in Ayodhya now, nor an old quarter, nor kusalavya bards, nor any hard-working hard-drinking boisterous—”

Sita laughed. Atikaya broke off in mid-sentence, and even without being able to see his face, Bharat knew that the rakshasa’s reaction was one of utter surprise. He wished he could smile to show his satisfaction at the ease with which his sister-in-law threw her head back and laughed full-throatedly.

“That asura-maya may fool everyone else,” she said when her mirth was exhausted. “But it has no effect on me, young brother.”

Silence from Atikaya. A smouldering, brooding silence that smelled of growing rage.

Sita strolled sideways, let the tip of her sword almost touch the dirt – almost, but not quite, which showed that the weapon remained in her control, and thus ready to strike despite the casual pose – as she manoeuvred into what Bharat instinctively knew was a better position than the earlier one. “It was a very clever plan indeed. Perhaps too clever.”

She stopped and glanced at the frozen figures suspended in the grip of the sword’s spellsong. Bharat sensed her gaze pass over his own face, felt the frisson of connection briefly, before moving on. Measuring her odds, weighing her strategy:
God, but what a formidable general my bhabhi must be on the battlefield!

“But you overlooked one major factor,” she said, turning her attention in the general direction of her still-silent opponent without looking directly at him. “True, the ruling dynasty of Ayodhya comes from the Suryavansha Ikshwaku line. And their alignment to the sun-god Surya makes the bloodline most vulnerable to the power of Chandrahas, moon-sword. But you forgot that they are also related to the line of the Chandravansha dynasty, from which my own adoptive father Janaka of Mithila hails. And from that line they have a connection to the moon as well.”

Atikaya remained silent, standing stiffly and watching Sita as she roamed and spoke, neither yielding any expression nor giving away his reactions through movement or twitches. Yet that very lack of response was in itself the most vocal response of all.
He is left speechless,
Bharat thought with growing hope.
And that’s surely a good sign.
If nothing else, at least his sister-in-law had shut off the rakshasa’s boastful, offensive gloating.

“And that connection,” Sita said, glancing up at Atikaya now, her dark eyes flashing intensely as they met his, undisturbed by the blinding glare of Chandrahas even at this close distance. “is one you would have done well to recall in time. Before you launched this pathetic deception and miasma of illusion like a cheap fair-day conjurer.” She gestured toward the gate off to the left, “Before you killed your own mother to precipitate an imaginary breakdown in ‘negotiations’.” She tossed her head in a clipped feminine shrug of impatience. “Oh, don’t even bother to try countering that. I know that the javelin came from the direction of our ramparts, but that too was illusion. In fact, it was thrown by
yourself
and made to seem as if it came from another direction through the use of Chandrahas’s shakti – bending the light itself to create an optical illusion.”

Bharat would have exclaimed aloud at that revelation had he been able to do so, and it would have elicited and deserved one of his choicest abuses.
He killed his own mother?
That was low, even for a rakshasa. Even for the son of Ravana. It also meant that this Atikaya was a lethal opponent and not one to be trifled with. He felt a faint seed of unease and hoped Sita knew what she was doing, toying with an enemy so perverse, so powerful.

“But that was not the end of your cheap mela-day jiggerpokery,” Sita said, settling into a stance not unalike the one she had first presented – but with a much better angle of approach, Bharat noted approvingly. “After that, everything else you ‘did’ was pure illusion.” She gestured with an inclined head at the city behind her, still burning and smouldering and in ruins. “All this. The devastation of Ayodhya. The rape of an Arya nation. This is no more real than your absurd claims and allegations made earlier. True, you hold a great weapon in your unworthy hands. True, Chandrahas is capable of wreaking such devastation – far greater than even this spectacle, were it real. And true, Ravana did have a vengeance he prepared for and carefully nurtured over
millennia
– not mere years or decades or centuries even! But that vengeance, and Chandrahas’s role in its execution, and your own part, were not intended to be played out in this manner. Nor were you to take matters into your own hands thus. And for doing so, and for ignoring your own father’s wishes and deviating from his carefully manicured plan, you will pay a price. You know this already, of course. I am merely reminding you.”

“Stop!”

The word was a high-pitched squeak of protest. A panicked denial and appeal from a nervous adolescent. Atikaya’s hands trembled visibly as he lowered the moon-sword to point at Sita. The glow blazed out towards her, obscuring her and that entire field of view in its brilliant blaze. Without being able to see them clearly, Bharat sensed that the rakshasa’s hands were trembling now.
Sita-bhabhi’s words really hit their mark! Can it really be true? All that she just said?
But if it was true, then it begged the question—

“How could you possibly know all that?” Atikaya asked, his voice higher pitched than before, breaking at the end of the question. “How?”

Sita smiled. Or at least Bharat assumed she did. “I know more than you think, my naïve and foolish
brother
. I know that your mother and you were in fact sent here as envoys to propose a new world order, one in which Ayodhya and Lanka would be allies, and all Aryavarta would unite into one harmonious empire to be ruled not by a single king but by a table of kings. It would end wars between kingdoms, between chieftains and factions, and unite the mortal realm into one great empire ruled by mutual trust and peaceful harmony. That was Ravana’s genius: To use his own defeat in order to generate sufficient sympathy to unite the entire world. And because Rama was responsible for Lanka’s decimation, he would feel compelled to comply. All kings would. Those who refused would be seen as churlish at best, and hostile to their neighbours at worst. In a single brilliant stroke of statesmanship, all mortalkind would be brought together and compelled to work together in peaceful unity hereafter. A legacy so great, it would be remembered for all time to come.”

She raised the sword, pointing it at Atikaya. “But you disagreed. For such a move would rob you of your chance at glory. This was not the ‘vengeance’ you had been raised for, which you had dreamed of since you were a child. You wanted blood and spoils, rape and reaving, plunder and land, dasyas and power alliances. Under this new world envisaged by your late father, you would be just another diplomat in a world of diplomats, reduced to roundtable discussions and heated but ultimately peaceful talks. All words, no actions. No spoils! No loot. No gain. No glory. That would not do, not for you. So you played along until the last moment. And then, you turned the tables. Your mother would have blustered and spoken a few more harsh words, levelled her accusations and allegations. But once her anger and frustration had burned out naturally, she would have capitulated and laid before all the master-plan of her late husband. That was what you would not let happen. And so you turned coat. You killed your mother, and used her death to justify the destruction of Ayodhya. And now, by killing Ayodhya’s ruling family, you would remove the greatest obstacles to your own plan. Leaving nobody formidable enough to stand in your way as you achieved the goal you felt you were born to achieve: Mastery of the entire mortal realm!”

Atikaya shuddered, whether from unbearable anger or fear, Bharat could not tell. The rakshasa’s voice was still trembling with nervous anxiety when he spoke: “I still don’t understand. How could you know all this? And what do you mean, this is all an illusion? I destroyed Ayodhya. You can see it for yourself, smouldering in ruins. It’s gone! Surely you cannot deny the evidence of your own senses!”

Sita laughed again. “Even you aren’t foolish enough to have entered the gates of your enemy, left him standing alive behind you, while you plundered and looted his city. Even if he was under the spell of Chandrahas. Killing Rama is the first thing you would do upon entering these vaunted gates. And it is the first thing you were about to do just now – before I interrupted your reverie.”

She glanced back over her shoulder and to Bharat’s amazement, the smoking fires, the crumbled edifices, the decimated towers, all resolved themselves in one shimmering, melting moment – back into a fully solid, perfectly intact, unharmed and untouched Ayodhya once more. He swore mentally as he realized that it had all been an illusion – or some kind of day dream within the perverse imagination of Atikaya himself, and through the power of the moon-sword, it had been transposed to the minds of all those under the spell. Only now, because they knew it was not true, their minds were able to see the city as it truly was. Pristine and undamaged.

Sita continued. “You merely stepped in through the gates, paused a moment or two to let your imagination play havoc – which sick vision was communicated to the minds of all those under Chandrahas’s thrall – before turning to step this way to despatch one by one Rama and his family. Had I not been able to shake free of the moon-sword’s spellsong, you would have finished your dirty deeds and then gone on to do exactly as your perverted mind envisaged.”