Ahead of him, he sensed Rajkumari Sita and her bodyguard Nakhudi struggling to keep up the pace. Even though they knew that the sage was using his own shakti to speed them up, Nakhudi had refused to accept that such a thing was possible. Blinkered by the sage’s corridored illumination, the hulking bodyguard had probably convinced herself that they were sprinting fast, not super-humanly swiftly. It was difficult to tell speed without clearly visible signposts. Rama wondered how Nakhudi was able to explain the lack of obstacles in their path. But he wasn’t really concerned about what Nakhudi was thinking and feeling. He wished, though, he could read what was passing through Rajkumari Sita’s mind at this moment.
Rajkumari Sita. It would take some getting used to, calling her Sita now. But he could hardly call her Janaki Kumar any more. He remembered the fall by the river, when he had tried to catch her and stop her slipping into the mud-pool, and she had screamed and batted him away. He had felt the softness of her upper body briefly, but she had pushed him away so hard, he hadn’t had a chance to truly suspect anything amiss.
Only now that he knew it was a woman he had caught, not a man, did he understand that unexpected softness and the vehemence with which she had resisted his touch. Everything, her sweating overly, her nervousness at certain questions, her blustering arrogance at others, made sense now. It even added to her personality as he had come to perceive it: the witty, sharp-tongued roving sword-for-hire Janaki Kumar was not entirely fictional. It was just that he was a she with an extraordinary lack of the coy artifice that most noble-born Arya women usually affected.
Rama had met several princesses before—his social status dictated that he would eventually have to marry one—but he had never met a woman quite like Sita. More importantly, he had never met a man quite like her either. That last insight, he realised, went to the heart of the matter. There was something so unusual and attractive about her, it almost seemed irrelevant whether she was a woman or a man. Either way, Rama knew he liked her, him, Janaki Kumar, Janaki Kumari. Sita.
He smiled to himself in the darkness as they ran. The sage was picking up the pace, he sensed. Five yojanas an hour, six … seven … Now he could no longer tell their relative speed from the starlight and foliage overhead. It took all his concentration to keep pumping his legs and swivelling his arms for balance.
Yet he knew that no matter what he did, the sage had control of them now; they were all being carried by the flow of Brahman. Their windmilling limbs were merely allowed to keep moving to provide a rational physical explanation for their progress. If the brahmarishi desired, he could probably whisk them across half the nation in the blink of an eye.
Then why didn’t he? Rama wondered idly as the night blended into one endless blur of darkness and wind. Why did seer-mages of Vishwamitra and Guru Vashishta’s stature need to bother with physical niceties at all? Why not simply accomplish everything through a wave of a hand and by reciting a mantra or three? It was something to ask the sage when he got a chance.
Right now, he decided to stop thinking and simply run.
***
Sumitra scanned the room in frustration. Manthara’s private chambers were so utterly immaculate. The Third Queen had never seen any woman’s chamber this clean - except maybe a palace concubine’s room, and then only when she expected a visit from her lord. The thought of the withered spinster hunchback entertaining men was ludicrous but it brought no smile to Sumitra’s delicate features. She was running out of time. Already she had spent several minutes searching the daiimaa’s rooms, without any luck. She had no idea where the woman had gone or when she would be back, but it couldn’t be very long. The hour was late already.
Sumitra was beginning to think this had been a foolish idea. Her suspicion of the daiimaa had begun when she had decided to undertake her own investigation of the morning’s incident in the maharaja’s sick-chamber. After the heart-breaking encounter with Kausalya, Sumitra had realised that if she was to clear her name of this slur, she would have to work alone.
Shatrugan was gone, sent to his grandfather with two divisions to prepare for the imminent invasion; there was still no news of Lakshman’s return; and there was nobody else in the palace she could trust to carry out this delicate task.
Besides, who better to do it than herself? She would only grow more miserable sitting in her chambers alone, and while a trusted serving girl would be unable to explore the queens’ palaces, Sumitra herself could roam freely without being stopped or questioned. Angry as she was with Kausalya for having believed that she could do such a thing as poison Dasaratha— even by accident—she also had to admit that the First Queen had been gracious enough not to spread her assumption about the palace. Sumitra still retained all her privileges and honour.
Still, it rankled that Kausalya of all people would even entertain such a notion against her. Sumitra would die before she let such a thing happen. But she didn’t hold it against Kausalya personally; these were trying times and everybody was under a lot of pressure. She was certain that if she could only find some shred of evidence to support her story, Kausalya would change her assumptions in a trice. That was what had motivated Sumitra the most: the knowledge that Kausalya still loved her, despite the misunderstanding. And that she herself wanted desperately to make Kausalya see that she had misjudged her.
Prosaic, sensible, logical, that was Kausalya. It was what made her so dependable and so perfect. The complete opposite of Second Queen Kaikeyi, who was always a blathering mass of extreme emotions. Kausalya never touched intoxicants; Kaikeyi drank like a fish, although she denied it hotly. Kausalya never ate living flesh, neither meat nor fowl nor fish, and she even avoided any preparation cooked in animal fat; Kaikeyi relished her meat, demolishing skewers and platters at the same rate as any Kshatriya male. Kausalya could be passionate, Sumitra knew, but her passion was banked, controlled and always kept strictly within the circumference of propriety; Kaikeyi was wild, wanton, out of control. No wonder then that men found Kaikeyi irresistible and women envied her, while women admired Kausalya and men respected her!
Sumitra sighed. Now she was being unduly harsh. Yes, her comparison of the two senior queens was accurate but it left out one essential factor: heart. For all her prim propriety and rigid adherence to protocol and sanskriti, Kausalya’s heart was always in the right place. Kaikeyi, on the other hand, reminded Sumitra of the darkest avatars of the devi that she and Kausalya worshipped. Not the Earth-Mother’s Durga avatar, or even her Lakshmi or Saraswati avatars. Those were benign, maternal, affectionate. Kaikeyi resembled the more bloody brooding forms of the ur-goddess. Parvati. Uma. Kali. Or even …
The idea came to Sumitra with the suddenness of a flame sparking.
Avatars. Goddesses. Deities.
Pooja room.
What had she smelled the minute Manthara emerged from her chambers and hustled down the corridor like a serpent out of its subterranean lair?
Smoke. Fires. Burnt … something. That unmistakable scorched odour of a yagna. Or a cookfire.
Why a cookfire? Sumitra wondered for an instant if she really was suffering from some kind of delirium. How could she have smelled a cookfire in the daiimaa’s chambers?
Then it struck her.
Balidaan.
A sacrificial rite.
That was exactly what that odour had been. The distinct, unmistakable smell of a balidaan yagna, like the ones conducted at certain festivals. Less popular now, and generally falling out of fashion as the Arya nations attempted to encourage more rational and scientific behaviour, advocating the necessity of moving on from the superstitions of their ancestors. But indisputably the smell of roasting flesh.
Sumitra searched now with renewed hope, seeking with her nose, not her eyes.
She found it in moments. A faint ashy odour coming from the daiimaa’s pooja room. At first, she doubted her nasal sense, thinking that it was probably just some combination of agar, myrrh, camphor, phosphor, the familiar perennially lingering smell of all unaired pooja rooms. But then, as she went further into the room, towards the deity altar, she caught it again. This time it was so pungent and putrid there could be no mistake. This was no blend of wax and camphor or any such thing. It was the smell of burned flesh.
After a few more moments of searching, her nose told her the odour was coming not from the pooja room itself, but from somewhere behind it.
She found the narrow space between the back of the altar and the rear wall a few minutes later. Knocking on the rear wall, she was soon convinced it was hollow. She had expected to find something, but not such concrete evidence. There could be no good reason to have a secret chamber in such a place.
She debated calling for help, thinking through her options carefully.
Her suspicion had been right: someone had been using black sorcery in the palace, just as Guru Vashishta himself had suspected. But unlike the guru, Sumitra had not hesitated to point a mental finger at even the highest-ranking members of the royal family. After all, she reasoned, if she could be accused of having carelessly almost poisoned the maharaja, surely someone could have deliberately attempted to do so. Someone like Kaikeyi. Even when she had learned that Kaikeyi had genuinely been cloistered in her chambers these past nine days, she hadn’t been discouraged. That was the whole point of sorcery, that it used maya to deceive and alter perceptions.
Kausalya had found a theory that fitted the facts, however unlikely, and had moved on. But the facts she had considered failed to take into account Sumitra’s eye-witness account of what had transpired in the sick-chamber. Now, Sumitra had a theory that fitted the facts that she knew.
Suppose for a moment, she had mused, that Kaikeyi hadn’t been in the maharaja’s sick-chamber this morning, then perhaps someone else had been there, someone whose appearance had been altered to make her seem to be Kaikeyi. On that assumption, she had questioned all the guards independently, this time asking not if they had seen the Second Queen enter the sick-chamber, but if they had seen anyone else, however innocuous.
The answer had come quickly enough. All the guards had seen a serving girl go in at almost exactly the same time that the incident with Kaikeyi-the-snake had occurred. They hadn’t mentioned this earlier to Kausalya because the First Queen had been asking specifically about Second Queen Kaikeyi and nobody else. The guards even recalled noticing that the serving girl had seemed a little flushed and out of breath when she emerged from the maharaja’s sick-chamber. But it wasn’t the first time they had seen serving girls look that way after a visit to the maharaja and had assumed she was simply reacting to an unusually strong compliment or perhaps an inadvertent brush of the king’s arm in passing.
From that revelation, it hadn’t taken much further investigation to trace the serving girl back to her point of origin: Manthara-daiimaa’s chambers. And Manthara-daiimaa served Kaikeyi. Which made her part of the dark devi camp. Which made her a prime suspect.
Sumitra was not one of those who foolishly harboured irrational prejudices against people who were physically or otherwise challenged. She knew that outward appearance didn’t always reflect the inner being. But Manthara was a famous exception to the assumption that beauty was within and not skin-deep.
This wasn’t just Sumitra’s point of view. There had always been something about Manthara that set her apart, not only from the bustling and lovable daiimaas like Sakuntala-daiimaa or Susama-daiimaa, but from women in general. There was an air about Manthara that made even women want to stay far away from her. An air of deep self-pity that bordered on masochistic tendencies combined with an exaggerated sense of ego and false pride. It made for an unattractive combination. The fact that the wet-nurse was hunchbacked and club-footed would not have deterred her from finding friends and even loyal companions in the royal palace; but her dreaded foul temper, acid tongue and penchant for inflicting brutal corporal punishment on those below her station had given her a notoriety uglier than any physical deformity. She was that saddest of all the devi’s girl-children, a woman as ugly on the outside as within.
Now, as Sumitra sought a way to enter the secret chamber behind the daiimaa’s pooja room, she wondered what Manthara’s game was. Was she using sorcery to try and keep Kaikeyi in the maharaja’s favour? Or was it more than that? After all, this morning’s near-poisoning had been close to an assassination attempt. Anyone who could have accomplished such a powerful sorcery had surely been practising the dark arts for a long time. And to what purpose? Most troubling of all, was Kaikeyi aware of Manthara’s evil activities? How could she not be aware?
Sumitra was so absorbed in her thoughts and search that she failed to notice the figure that had entered the pooja room and now stood behind her, watching with eyes that blazed with fury. Though she had been alert for any signs of the daiimaa’s return, she hadn’t reckoned with the woman’s ability to cloak her own presence through the same sorcery that occupied Sumitra’s thoughts.
The first hint she had of Manthara’s presence was when the daiimaa spoke a short, harsh incantation.
Before Sumitra could even turn around, the entrance she was seeking so eagerly flew open abruptly. Caught unawares, she fell directly into the secret chamber. At once the stench assaulted and disoriented her. She scrambled to her feet, turning back the way she had fallen in.