RAMAYANA SERIES Part 4_KING OF DHARMA (58 page)

“Your mother could be dead already. You know that she gave specific orders for how to act in such an event. You are not to return to the ashram. You are to go to the pre-arranged meeting point and wait there.”

This time he could not resist. Rather than ask the most expected question—
How do you know what we had pre-arranged?
—he asked the next most relevant one. 

“Wait there for what?” he demanded, not slowing his pace. “If she is indeed dead as you claim—which I don’t accept—then what are we to wait for?”

“For us,” said Ragini, turning her head to look at him. 

He glanced at her briefly as they ran and saw the earnestness in her light brown eyes. She was telling the truth. The forest blurred behind her. 

He felt a small flutter of shock: these were the ‘friends’ that Maatr had spoken of? The ones who would come to help them in the event of a calamity? Impossible! They were bearkillers. Scum of the forest!

“Our association with your father and mother goes back a long way, Luv,” she said. 

He was not impressed by her being able to tell his brother and he apart, since he had yelled out Kush’s name earlier. But he believed her when she said that she had known his mother. Maatr had spoken of old friends of their father and she. Everything this woman, this bearkiller, was saying rang true. He swallowed, feeling a twinge of emotion even as he sprinted. That meant the bearkillers had known their father. And to think that Kush and he had regarded them with scorn and derision, often making jokes about their appearance or derogatory comments about their hygiene and sense of dharma. Even Rishi Dumma had often participated in these jocular insults, coming up with real gems. Dumma did have a sense of humour, that and a great appetite. 

“Turn away now,” Ragini said, bringing him back to the moment. “Follow your mother’s orders. Turn away and come with us. We shall protect and care for you. We are sworn to do so until our dying breath. Do not go back to the ashram.”

He hesitated mentally, even though his feet continued pumping and his arms swung to and fro and the breath chugged in and out of his lungs in the rhythmic pattern that he could maintain all day and for twenty yojanas if need be. Then the sounds of screaming rose again from ahead, very close now, barely a mile or so, and he shook his head grimly, lowered his chin and increased his pace. 

Ragini had to strain now to catch up. Whatever else the bearkillers might be, they were not long-distance runners—or perhaps they were burdened by their heavier metal weapons. Kush and he only carried bows and rigs, which made a difference. Someday, they would graduate to metal blades, and in a pinch, they could use them just as well up close, but at his and Kush’s age and size the weight of swords and blades far outweighed their usefulness. 

Besides, Maatr had always preferred that they use bows.
So that we could fight from a distance and be safer. She always tried to keep us safe.
He fought back the emotion that was threatening to engulf him and sucked in two sharp, shallowed breaths, regaining control. 

Because he had not replied, Ragini reached out and touched his shoulder lightly, a gesture of affection. “I see you will not heed my warning. Very well then. Whatever happens now, in the ashram,” she said, “you must not risk your lives unduly. Remember that your brother and you have a far larger purpose to fulfill. It is not your destiny to die at the hands of those mercenaries today. Leave the fighting to us. Stay with your brother. Stay back. It was your mother’s wish.”

And then, surprising him, she shot out a foot and deftly tripped him, sending him sprawling in a pile of wildgrass, winded but unhurt. 

“Stay back and let us fight!” she shouted, then was gone, sprinting up ahead. 

The rest of her gang raced past him, the scarred man glancing down briefly as he passed to make sure that he was all right. Then the dogs were there, also loping past, long muzzles dripping froth, Sarama whimpering as she ran past as if to apologize for running with her pack rather than stopping to help him. Her tail flicked his nose as she whipped past. 

Luv sat up and rubbed his head, wondering at how neatly the half-chested outlaw woman had tripped him. He was not harmed or injured in any way but it had effectively stopped him, if only for a moment or two. That was all the advantage she had needed, clever woman! 

He was on his feet and picking up pace again just as Kush caught up with him. Luv glanced sideways at his brother who grinned back at him, displaying a fleck of grass between his upper front teeth. From the blades of grass and leaf or two pasted to Kush’s face and arms, Luv guessed that he too had been similarly delayed by the bearkillers. They exchanged a glance and it was all he needed to let him know that his brother had had a similar exchange with one of the gang, probably the scarred man, and that they both knew all that was needed to be known. 

Except what happened to Maatr and Gurudev Valmiki. 

Shoulder to shoulder now, they ran the last few hundred yards to the ashram. Up ahead, they could already hear the sounds of the bearkillers roaring and calling out in their vulgar way and the dogs growling and snarling with the low-toned ferocity of animals at war as the new arrivals clashed with the attackers in the ashram. 

Moments later, Kush and he burst into the clearing and joined them. 

SEVEN

Even though Sita saw what she had expected to see, it was still a shock. 

The large rectangular central courtyard of the ashram, lined by huts on either side, with the ashram’s largest domicile at the head, was a melee of flailing bodies, human and equestrian. Rishis and their wives, all dressed alike in red-ochre dhotis and anga-vastras, with their junior acolytes clad in white, ran about everywhere in confusion and fear. Riding among them were the attackers, armed and armoured horsemen wielding longspears, swords, axes and pikes. The attackers were randomly chasing down and slaughtering the ashramites without cause or provocation. It was a massacre. 

Sita watched as a frail dark woman whom she recognized as the wife of Rishi Divakara attempted to run down the alleyspace between two huts and was checked by a spear flung by a horseman. The spear struck her in the back, severing her spine, and she fell, instantly dead, her eyes still open and staring blankly. 

She saw the aging Rishi Kanwa, a visitor from the South-Eastern kingdom of Kalinga, standing with his hands clasped together in silent appeal, as he was hacked down by two separate horsemen, one from the front cutting through his clasped hands with a sword, the other chopping at the juncture of his neck and torso with an axe. He fell into a spreading pool of his own blood, half-severed limbs dangling grotesquely, lips still parted in recitation of a shloka of forgiveness. Bodies lay sprawled everywhere, blood splatters staining the white robes, the red ochre robes concealing the brutality meted out to the bodies they clothed. The air of the ashram, usually so pristine and clear and crisp, was sullied by the stench of death and the odour of bodily effluents spilled out into the dust. 

It had been a long time since Sita had seen such brutality, the brutality of unbridled human arrogance unleashed for its own selfish pleasures—male arrogance, to put a fine point on it—and she had forgotten how cruel men could be, kshatriya men in particular, when embarked upon a mission they were convinced it was their dharma to execute. Forest living was harsh; the animal kingdom was ruthless; life itself was never easy, and nature herself posed as many relentless challenges to existence as she provided succour and nourishment. But this, this was naked male arrogance, the madness of muscle and virility unchecked, the naked lust for violence that some men insisted was a natural part of all humankind but was in fact only an ailment of their own twisted psyches, perpetrated by them through generations in order to justify their own violent urges and lustful indulgences. Only an evil man spoke of good versus evil; and those who spoke of good versus evil always insisted they were on the side of good. In fact, as any sane, rational person knew, there were no good or evil people or beings, only people who did things to serve their own ends—whether those things were adjudged good or evil depended on the perception of others.  

Yet if she were to start believing in evil, this was as good a time as any. For what was being perpetrated here, under whatever guise or excuse, was an evil, abhorrent act. 

She had watched the horrific slaughter for only a few moments, the bare minimum time needed to orient herself to the sheer ruthlessness of the attackers and the shameless manner in which they pursued their given task. She witnessed only three actual deaths, although many other victims were already dying or about to be attacked when she appeared on the scene. And she could hear the sounds and screams from beyond the huts and within the huts as well. But it was all she needed to see and hear. There was no point in appealing to such men. Any kshatriya who would ride into a peaceful camp, ignore the sacred appeal of a man of the cloth, and murder him so brutally as they had just murdered Rishi Kanwa, were not men at all. They were monsters driven by a misguided madness, a fanatical devotion to an aberrant sense of dharma, soldiers who had the power to mete out life and death and were abusing it to slaughter rather than save, to murder rather than protect. They were exterminators driven by a distorted interpretation of dharma. Dharmanators, to coin a phrase. And there was no arguing or speaking to such dharmanators. They could only be stopped in one way: by killing them as quickly and efficiently as possible. 

She aimed at a helmed face with its mouth open wide in laughter, raising a sword high as it prepared to strike down a young rishi who had just been ordained only days earlier, his face wet and shiny from copious weeping. 

She loosed, and watched the arrow punch into the open mouth and through the back of the head, the arrowhead striking the inside of the helm with a metallic clanging impact. The rider toppled backwards off his horse, his sword striking the rump of another horse nearby and sending it bolting, knocking that rider off his aim as he was about to throw a spear at another woman running away in shrieking panic. 

The young rishi blinked through his tears, saw the arrow sticking out of the gaping mouth of the man lying on the ground, the man who had been about to kill him only a moment ago, and stared upwards uncomprehendingly. Unfamiliar with war and its methods, he could not fathom that the arrow had been shot by a mortal hand. He assumed that his soldier had been struck down by the devas. 

Sita turned her attention to another target. 

A soldier on horseback was about to hack down a kneeling rishi with his parasu. The kneeling rishi was Rishi Angira, an old and venerated man known for his ascetic habits and ever-joyous temperament. The younger acolytes always joked that Rishi Angira had never lost his temper or said a word in anger all his life, so when he did turn angry, it would surely be an epic temper tantrum! Looking at him now, calmly cradling the head of a fellow brahmin—Rishi Ashita, she saw, with a horrible disfiguring wound to his face and neck—as he sat on the stoop of his own hut, Sita thought that if he was not losing his temper now, he never would. To have such self-restraint and single-minded conviction in his vows was beyond admirable, it was proof to her yet again of the inherent goodness and desire for peaceful co-existence that pervaded all creatures of the universe. That face, calm and self-assured even in the face of a hideous violent death, was proof that the natural state of all beings was peaceful existence. 

The face beyond the tip of her poised arrow displayed the exact opposite of that natural calm. It was a face distorted by its own anger and lustful energies, nostrils flaring as the man snarled in evident delight at his brutal task, swinging the parasu at a diagonal angle intended to lope Rishi Ashita’s head from his body. To see a man use an axe for such an act was itself a reminder why the legendary Parasuram, Rama of the Axe, had taken up the weapon, intended for chopping trees and wood, and used it to eliminate the kshatriyas of the mortal realm seven times over in order to teach them humility and respect for their own preceptors. Clearly, this kshatriya had not heeded that lesson. 

She loosed and saw her arrow strike the man in the slim gap between his helm and his chest armour. It took him in the neck, passing through the soft liquid-filled stalk and punching through the other side in a small explosion of blood and gristle. His snarling turned to a liquid gurgling, and the parasu fell useless from his muscled hands as he grasped at his mortally wounded throat. He fell, thrashing in his death throes, singing a different tune from the cry of victory he had been snarling a moment earlier. 

She loosed three more arrows in quick succession, saw three more men fall. Two of them were mortally wounded and died in moments, but one was forewarned by the fall of the soldier next to him and swung away just as she loosed, the arrow gouging open a bloody track on his upper thigh but missing all vital organs. He screamed in pain and outrage and turned to point at her position, having already watched her two earlier arrows strike home and placing her with accuracy. 

That brought the attention of the others to her and a half dozen riders galloped towards her at once, roaring with pleasure. 

“It’s her!” shouted one to the others, swinging his sword overhead as he came. “Remember the reward, men!”

She took him down with an arrow in the throat, wincing as his feet and hands tightened instinctively, bringing down his horse in a fetter-snapping fall. The horse screamed out the agony that he could not express and she loosed again, and again, and again, bringing down another, and a third, and wounding a fourth. But there were still three riders coming at her, and she was out of time. She had known she ought to have stopped after the first or second shot, circled around to a new position and then fired again, but she had been unable to let more innocents die as they would have if she had taken the extra time, so she had continued standing her ground and loosing arrows, and now it was too late to get away. So much for her plan of self-extrication!

She leaped over the dead tree trunk that marked the northern boundary of the main ashram grounds, ducked behind an ancient banyan tree, and ran through the thickest part of the woods to make it harder for her followers. But there were more riders coming at her from the other side and there were too many of them and the same obstacles that made it harder from them to follow also made it harder for her to shoot while running with any degree of accuracy. She knew they would catch her in a moment and when they did, she would be dead, so she made a decision in an instant. 

She leaped up on the Y-shaped cradle of an aging tree, swinging around and letting her back strike the trunk hard, bracing herself, then raising her bow and preparing to shoot the first horseman who came into sight. That eliminated their height advantage of being on horseback. There was no way for her to escape this alive now, but she would take as many of them as possible with her before dying. 

***

Nakhudi cried out with outrage.

She had emerged from the forest into the gurukul. This was a large clearing just north of the main ashram, used mainly for children’s games, morning and evening group exercises, and rote chanting by brahmacharyas—the youngest acolytes of the ashram. Unlike the more permanent denizens of the hermitage who were all brahmin by vocation if not by birth, these young acolytes could be from any varna. They were children sent here to be schooled in the guru-shishya parampara, also known as Upanishad, or learning-by-the-side-of-the-guru, and they ranged from the age of 7 to 14. 

From the looks of it, they were the ones who had been here at the time of the attack, drilling in martial training exercises as they did everyday, under the supervision of the rishis. The red-ochre garb of the half dozen rishis who had been supervising today stood out across the clearing, laying where they had been standing at the time of the attack. They were overwhelmed by the three dozen other, much smaller bodies clad in white that lay sprawled around the clearing. Many of these smaller corpses lay in postures and attitudes that suggested they had tried to use their meagre training weapons against the intruders. But wooden swords, lathis and ropes were hardly a match for steel blades and iron spears. 

She passed around the clearing with rage boiling in her belly. How could anyone do this to little children? Mere boys, these were. What had they done to deserve such a fate?

But after all, it was not about what anyone had done or not done, simply about who they were. 

In a world of haves and have-nots, the man in armour upon horseback with a sword felt he was entitled to run down and slaughter even innocent young boys—because they were not ‘Arya’, not noble-born, city-living, high and mighty citizens here, just shishyas in a forest gurukul. And in a world where power and wealth and citizenship were what made you superior to your fellow man, if you were out here in some remote forest, you were not human in the same sense that those superior beings were human; you were no less than animals, and as such, fit only for slaughter. 

Not a single intruder’s corpse lay in the clearing, testifying to the shock and overhwelming odds of the attack. These boys and their teachers had never stood a chance, nor been given one. It went against the very spirit and rule of the kshatriya code, but after the massacre in her village, she already knew that these intruders were not kshatriyas, merely vendors of death, come to ply their business in exchange for coin paid by the highest bidder. No king, no minister, no Arya court of justice would find them guilty of any crime or wrongdoing. Their’s the sword, therefore their’s the power and the glory. 

Well,
she thought, hefting the specially weighted blade she carried to suit her larger form and heavier carrying strength,
I have a sword too, and unlike those poor brahmacharyas and brahmins, I know how to use it and will can do so! 

The sounds of butchery and terror were loudest up ahead, past the vegetable gardens where the ashramites grew their own food. Horse hooves had tramped through the gardens as well, she saw, for when one did not respect life, then why would they respect the things that sustained life? She circled around the crushed pods and yams and then she was running past a line of sheds that smelled of cow. She was relieved to hear the panicked mooing and looing of the milk-giving beasts and thanked Durga Maa that the attackers had not slaughtered the animals as well. Then she realized it was not out of compassion or even out of reverence for Go-Maata, the sacred Mother Cow, sustainer of life and nourishment, but simply out of expedience that they had spared the cows—they would probably be back later, to finish them off, once they had killed their main targets, the human residents. 

She came around a cow shed just in time to see a woman in saffron-coloured sadhini’s garb come shrieking from the direction of the main ashram complex. Three horsemen followed the poor woman, swinging bloody swords and pikes, and a fourth was following belatedly, hefting what looked like an elephant mace—the kind used to club war elephants in battle and crush their brains within their skulls. The faces of the men were glowing with excitement and lust, the lust for blood and slaughter that she had seen too often before. It was a face she too had worn, but never as a mask against the slaughter of innocents or the unarmed. And in response to those leering expressions of lurid lustfulness, she put on her own face of terrible justice.