The Rise of Hastinapur (11 page)

Touching his beard, he surveyed the terrain around him.

Amba remembered the words of admonishment that Parashurama had used with Jarutha, that he did not like being used, and at the time she had wondered what he had meant, but now she saw: Hastinapur’s rock quarries could be safely ransacked if Bhishma could be distracted, and Drupad had used Parashurama – through her – for the purpose. Despite what he had said, he must have spies in Hastinapur that told him that Bhishma had left for a battle, so he had sent Jarutha up north to take back their rocks and cripple Hastinapur’s weapon factories.

She saw twenty or thirty villagers now surround Jarutha, and at his command they began to dig the ground and lay the foundations for a defensive structure. From within the shadows many more men emerged and set to work, while Jarutha and his men stood guard. A dozen or so archers positioned themselves behind the working men, their quivers brimming with arrows.

Amba wondered vaguely where Bhishma must be, and at once the shapes in the smoke dissolved and arose again to reveal a large circular clearing in a dense forest, at the either end of which stood a chariot, one drawn by white horses as in her vision, and one drawn by black. In the former she saw the sturdy figure of the sage, clad in saffron and with lines of sandal paste on his forehead. In his left hand he held a bow fashioned out of crude wood.

He looked out at the other end of the clearing, where at the wheel of his chariot stood Bhishma. His face had not changed from the last time she had seen him – she had ceased being surprised about that – but in stature he seemed to have grown. His frame was still wiry, much like that of the sage he was facing, but he seemed to have acquired this air of resplendence about him. Amba had heard that gods, when they descended upon Earth, appeared to mortal eyes as though a light shone forth from behind them. Bhishma looked the same. His eyes too seemed to have turned into a darker shade of blue.

‘I do not wish to fight you, High Sage,’ he said, and Amba felt the voice had become softer since she had heard him last. ‘I pray to you; let us not allow the matter of a woman come between us. Let us put our differences aside and part as friends.’

‘The time for words is behind us now, Devavrata. I have told you what I wanted. You have said you cannot do my bidding. Is that still your answer?’

‘Yes, my lord,’ said Bhishma. ‘I have taken a vow that I shall never touch a woman, and I must abide by it.’

Parashurama grunted in disapproval. ‘Then you can certainly take the maiden and give her shelter in your city. She lives as a priestess at my hermitage; no place for a maiden used to the comforts of palace life.’

‘I shall be only too happy to give her shelter in Hastinapur, my lord.’ Bhishma picked up his bow, wore his quiver around his shoulder, and ascended his chariot. ‘But doing so shall put her life in danger. The people of Hastinapur believe that their king would not have died but for her, and if they see her living amongst them, I am afraid they will name her a witch and stone her to death.’

‘Ah,’ said Parashurama, ‘if you desire to have her in your city, you can. You are the champion of your city’s throne, and if you said one word in support of Amba, your people would accept her. But you do not.’

‘I cannot but bow down to the will of the people, my lord,’ said Bhishma.

Even with her mind at the mercy of the images in the cloud of smoke, Amba felt anger stir within her. Bhishma was not afraid of her being stoned to death; he was scared of what might happen if she, Amba, were to stake a claim to the throne ahead of her two sisters. With Vichitraveerya now gone, they were bound to look for a Brahmin to father the future king. It would be messy, indeed, for Bhishma and the royal house if she were to bear a child through the Brahmin before Ambika and Ambalika. If that were to happen, Bhishma and Mother Satyavati would have no choice but to accept her son as the future king, except for the fact that she had never wed Vichitraveerya. It would raise some questions that would surely be interesting; questions that Bhishma would rather prefer not to ever have to answer. It would be so much more convenient if Amba did not live in Hastinapur at all, if she were to be banished with one flimsy excuse or another.

Right now he could end this all, crown her the first queen to Hastinapur, and allow her to bear the future High King. But he would not. He would rather fight his teacher and kill his men in meaningless skirmishes with Panchala than see her ascend the throne. Why, she could not fathom. Had she hurt his pride so much when Mother Satyavati, on her behest, ordered him to release her? She had heard it being said that men least liked to give away their prizes of war. She remembered that her father had a whole palace built of marble to display the various shields and swords he had won during his conquests.

Men lived by these strange symbols of honour. Bhishma was the foremost man in the land, so his sense of honour must be tougher than most, his pride more vulnerable than most. Had she hit it on that day when she first told him about Salva? With all his talk of being the champion of Hastinapur, was he anything more than a petty man who could not rise above this disgraceful notion of nobility?

The neigh of horses and the blowing of a conch shook her and brought her eyes back to the image in front of her. Bhishma raised his bow and sent an arrow flying into the ground. ‘I still do not wish to fight you, my lord,’ he said, ‘but I do not think we have a choice, either of us.’

‘No,’ said Parashurama, tying around his forehead a thread of twine. ‘We do not.’ He picked up his bow and set an arrow to it. ‘May you fare well, Son of Ganga. We shall see how well you have learnt my lessons.’

TEN

T
he horses dug into the dry earth with their hooves, and at the cry of the charioteers and the crack of their whips, they charged at each other, raising a cloud of dust that shielded Amba’s view. For a while all she heard were sounds – of Bhishma and Parashurama calling out to one another: ‘Rain your arrows on me, Son of Ganga. Let me see if any of them can pierce my skin.’ ‘I am ready for you, Venerable One, my armour wishes to taste the tip of your spear.’

Then all of a sudden the mist cleared, and Amba found herself between the two chariots. She turned to face Bhishma only to see a lance being hurled directly at her. Before she could do anything other than throw her hands up in the air and shriek, the lance passed through her without hurting her and flew in the direction of Parashurama, who nonchalantly brushed it away with his mace.

The High Sage stood in his chariot with his legs apart, his chest puffed out, with all his weapons on his person. Amba saw a bow slung over his shoulder, a mace in one hand, a jagged sword in the other, a spear in a sheath of deer hide at his waist, his axe fastened to his back, and two combat knives at either wrist, ready to be drawn out of their pockets any second. But of all this, the biggest transformation was in the face. The eyes smouldered with the red fire of bloodlust, and the naked joy of a king drunk on wine, of a child at play. His arms and legs pulsated with energy, as though he could not wait to throw himself into the midst of this and draw the blood of his favourite pupil.

At this moment Amba realized what he had meant when he said he had his own demons to fight. This Brahmin, whose favourite activity ought to be the study of the Vedas and the unlocking of the Mysteries of the Goddess, loved to fight and to kill. He was a Kshatriya born in saffron clothes, a king with sacred ash smeared over his forehead and arms. His hands, which held the staff and brass vessel, wanted nothing more than to wield an axe or a bow. He always seemed to her to be out of place at the hermitage, as though his mind were perpetually on something else.

It was only now that he seemed to be at home.

As the lance fell to the dust by him, Parashurama smiled, not one of kindness that she had become used to seeing at the hermitage, but one of delight. He said something that Amba could not quite make out, and when she floated closer to him so that she could hear him better, he shot an arrow in her direction that followed her as she swerved out of the way and sliced through her with a whoosh.

Bhishma warded it off with a shield and instructed his charioteer to drive along the periphery of the clearing, raining arrows on Parashurama, shooting them such that they appeared to be flying away from him for half their flight but changed course and curved toward him. Parashurama’s chariot began to move too, in the opposite direction to Bhishma’s, and the arrows began to miss their mark now but only for a moment that it took Bhishma to adjust to the sage’s motion. Once again the arrows began to swoop in with precision, and each one fell to the ground, blunted by Parashurama’s mace or sword. Amba looked at one of the fallen arrows and found that it was curved to one side, and there was a smattering of lead on the left edge of the tip.

She had heard that archers from the Kuru kingdoms had pioneered the art of applying weight to selected portions of their arrows so that they would swerve in mid-flight if shot in a precise manner. Other kingdoms of North Country had picked up this technique by now, but no one was yet able to shoot such arrows with the skill of someone from the plains. She noticed that Bhishma was not fully drawing back the string of his bow, and that he was releasing his arrows up into the air instead of aiming them directly at the sage, and yet each one dived in with unerring accuracy and hit Parashurama’s moving chariot. And each time Bhishma drew back the string of his bow and released it, he cocked his wrist a certain way, sometimes to the left, sometimes to the right.

The first rule of archery, from her own lessons as a child all those years ago, was to pull the string back to one’s ear and release the arrow at the highest speed possible. But she had heard that archers from the plains deliberately slowed down their arrows so that they would have enough time to bend in the air. Not only did this make it difficult for the target to defend himself, it enabled the archer to keep shooting for longer.

Now arrows seemed to rain down on Parashurama as he scrambled with both his weapons to mow them down. Amba could not believe that Bhishma was shooting only one arrow at a time; such was his speed. Since each arrow required only half a draw and since each one travelled only at a fraction of its highest speed, at any one time Amba saw five or six arrows in flight, each one dipping toward the sage one after the other like a group of hawks descending upon a lone, scurrying rabbit.

The sage kept up his defence admirably enough, though a few of the arrows scraped his shoulders and hips. Bhishma looked like he had just stepped off an oil bath, drenched in sweat but his armour unscathed and spotless. Even his horses and his charioteer appeared fresh and purposeful; no wonder, for none of Parashurama’s weapons had yet reached within ten feet of the regent. Parashurama hailed from the woods and the mountains; his weapons were the mace, the sword, the axe; with a bow and arrow he was no more than a journeyman, she guessed, which was why he had chosen to defend himself against Bhishma’s cunning arrows with hand weapons.

Then Amba saw that Bhishma’s arrows let up in numbers – whether fatigue had started to tell on him or whether he wanted to give his teacher a chance, she did not know. She could distinctly make out moments of silence between successive twangs of his bow now, whereas earlier it had been one continuous buzz, like a bee hovering over its comb. His chariot stopped too, and Amba saw the front two horses buckle to their knees with a short neigh and a snort. The charioteer yelled at them to get up, but they bucked and pulled with their heads and refused to relent to whiplashes on their thick, black manes.

Parashurama recovered enough to untie his bow and quiver and shoot arrows of his own, but most of them buzzed harmlessly past the flag of Bhishma’s chariot. Amba noticed that his arrows swerved too in mid-flight, but they did not have the same merciless aim, and all Bhishma had to do to defend himself and his chariot was to stay still, watch for the rare arrow that found its target, and decimate it with short, straight shots. When defending he used another bow and arrows from another quiver. Amba guessed these were straight-flight arrows, and sure enough, this time when he drew back the string of his bow, he did so right to his ear, and took that extra half a second to aim properly. His wrist pointed dead straight, like the tip of a sharpened spear.

Not once did he miss.

With Parashurama’s growing anger she felt restlessness well up within her too, and she wished she could take arms and support the sage. She flew close to Bhishma and stood in front of his arrows, hoping to disturb him in some way, but neither he nor his arrows saw her or stopped for her. Parashurama’s chariot stopped now too, and his charioteer panted, nursing the bruises on his arms and chest caused by Bhishma’s arrows. His horses did not buckle, but their breath came in hard, heavy bursts. One of them had a long, curved arrow sticking out of its side. These horses and the charioteer must have been loaned to Parashurama by Bhishma for this fight, so he would not kill them, Amba thought; but he would certainly cripple them as much as needed to win the duel.