A moment later, he emerged into a clearing and had his answer. It was not the clearing he had expected to find–there was no pit or pool anywhere in sight. Just a round corral made of a low vinaashe-wood fence barely a yard high. The cattle cloistered within could easily have stepped over the fence and escaped. But it was obvious that they had no desire to do so. They merely sat or stood around the roughly circular enclosure, staring as mutely as sheep or pigs.
They were human cattle. Bejoo had found the vetaals’ food store. What was more, he realised, as the two-dozen-odd men and women within the corral grew aware of his presence and began to shuffle towards the fence, they had all been turned, every last one of them. It was obvious from their red-irised eyes, glowing wetly in the pitch-darkness. And the greedy way they looked at him as they became aware that he was that rarest of rare things, a human as yet untouched by their vetaal masters.
They smiled at him, by way of attempting a grotesque greeting. To his horror, some even attempted namaskars. He understood at once why the vetaals hadn’t tracked him into the thicket. He had headed straight to the one spot where they would have taken him anyway.
The vetaal cattle began creeping towards him, smelling his fresh, untainted blood and uninfected body. Several of them began to grin, their teeth flashing in the darkness.
They began climbing over the low fence, reaching out longingly. Touching him, tugging at his clothes, even trying to clasp the point of his sword. Their movements grew agitated, their smiles broader.
They wanted him.
***
Sita knew at once that she was being stalked. She felt the familiar prickling on the nape of her neck and the itchy sensation at her wrists that meant she was under threat. She glanced at Nakhudi. The Jat Kshatriya had obeyed the brahmarishi’s instructions by finding her own course through the thicket, but she had followed her own immutable life-oath by staying within sight of her ward.
Nakhudi’s large head bobbed once, briefly. Signalling that she was aware of their stalkers too. Sita felt better at the Jat’s presence. She would have willingly ventured into the thicket alone if the sage had commanded, but having Nakhudi in sight made her feel complete. She had been intrigued to see how similarly Rama and his brother were bonded.
She had always wished that her sisters would take an interest in swordplay and warfare the way she did, but they had stayed with their girlish pursuits while her interests had taken her in these less effeminate directions. As her daiimaa had once put it, she was obsessed with martial pursuits, while her sisters were obsessed with marital pursuits! Thank devi she had Nakhudi at least. She re-affirmed Sita’s conviction that a girl didn’t have to wear oiled tresses and red saris in order to assert her femininity, and that wielding a sword and riding a horse bareback wasn’t the exclusive pursuit of men.
Sita made a fist, bent it forward, then raised one finger and twirled it around. Nakhudi raised her open palm sideways to show she had understood. They were to pretend to move forward, then circle back very quickly and try to force their stalkers into a confrontation.
Sita followed her own strategy, moving forward at the same careful pace until she found a thick clump of brambly poisonwood bushes ahead. She slipped behind the bushes then crouched down low for a moment before darting sharply round them to the left. She sprinted between tree trunks and wildflower clumps, circling around several yards, sword raised and ready for action.
She stopped abruptly.
They were waiting for her. Arrayed in a crescent, their deep ruby eyes gleaming in the darkness. As she froze, they closed the gap behind her, surrounding her completely. They had seen and understood her signal and waited for her to circle around and return to them. She had forgotten: they weren’t like other asuras. They understood human speech and communication. They thought like humans.
They moved in, teeth flashing whitely, talons held ready by their sides. She smelled the familiar acrid odour of fresh human blood from their open mouths. They had fed just moments ago. She had a fraction of an instant to wonder who might have been the hapless victim. Where was Nakhudi? Caught in a similar trap of her own probably.
The circle closed completely and she was alone with her own private group of suitors. What they sought from her was much more intimate than marital bliss. They sought her immortal aatma.
***
Lakshman burst out of the thicket and into the clearing moments behind his brother. The dull glassy gleam ahead told him that Rama had found the Pit of Vasuki. The clearing was not large, perhaps twenty yards in circumference, but the mind boggled at the thought of a snake that thick being pulled out of the ground. The pit–rather, the pool–occupied almost all the clearing, with only a thin lip of about two yards between the woods and the water. Rama was standing a yard from the pool, almost close enough to leap in and continue to the next phase of his mission.
But he had run into trouble.
The clearing swarmed with light-skinned, dark-eyed beings that had lost the right to call themselves human a long time ago. Their eyes and teeth were the only things that were clearly visible, flashing blood-red and ivory-white respectively. They were between Rama and the pool.
Lakshman had the impression that they knew that Rama desired to enter the water and were determined to prevent him. Although Rama was swinging his sword ruthlessly, slaughtering them left and right, more of them kept coming to take the places of their downed comrades, swarming from the woods, rushing out in endless numbers.
Lakshman roared his battle cry and leapt beside Rama, wielding his own sword.
‘Rama, go! I’ll deal with these vermin!’ he shouted. Rama needed no more urging. Together they cut a swathe down to the edge of the water. Lakshman swung around, shielding Rama from the vetaals. As they rushed him, screaming silently, eyes glistening with tears of blood, Lakshman fought them bitterly. Without turning, he heard the sound of Rama’s sword falling to the ground beside him, then his rig and bow and arrows.
An instant later, he heard a gentle splash. Rama had dived into the pool. The vetaals produced a strange throaty sound, a rasping, grating noise like a creature’s death rattle, and even greater numbers swarmed out of the thicket to bear down on Lakshman with murderous zeal.
‘Ayodhya Anashya!’ Lakshman roared, and fought on with renewed fury.
He didn’t stop to wonder if he could possibly hold out until Rama returned. He had to hold out. That was all there was to it.
EIGHTEEN
Rama fell slowly. The water pushed his arms away from him, and he didn’t resist. His elbows rose to the level of his chest and stayed there, bent inwards. At first, he was aware only of the water encasing his body, embracing it, caressing it. It was cool and soft and felt like a thousand tickling feathers. As he descended lower, it seemed to grow warmer but there were moments when a swathe of colder water would pass by suddenly and once he was swept sideways by the force of one such swathe.
There were bubbles in the cold swathe, as if something that breathed air had pushed its way through at great speed and with great force. But each time he tried to turn his head slowly to see what it might be, there was only the murky dimness of the pool. He continued to fall slowly, seeming to grow heavier with each yard he descended, as if the water above was now greater in mass and weight than the water below. He had learned about water pressure in his gurukul days, but the store of Arya knowledge on the subject of sub-marine science was limited by the national fear of deep water.
He saw little of his surroundings as he descended. For the first several moments there wasn’t sufficient light to see anything; even his hands before his chest seemed insubstantial, ghostly. He had to touch his chest repeatedly to remind himself that he was still solid. When the descent was smooth, it felt as if he was floating in the same place, immobile. This must be what an insect trapped in ancient amber must feel like. Suspended. Frozen eternally.
But after a while, sight began to return to him. He began to see colours first. Swirls of dark hues at the edge of the spectrum, the deep ochres of spiritual enlightenment. Then the softer, warmer tints of the tertiary colours. And eventually, as he felt his descent slowing, natural colours. They danced and flowed, one way then another, never still, always changing form, shape, size, direction. He tried to puzzle out what they might be. Weeds? Fish? Coral?
When he reached out to touch one of the streams of colour, it seemed to avoid his hand deftly, dancing out of his reach then returning to swirl close by, as if taunting him to try to catch it again. He shook his head, smiling, and kept his arms before his chest. This was no time to play.
He knew he was reaching the bottom when the gloaming illumination of the Brahman-infused stones lit up the area around him in a wide circle of blue light. Each stone seemed to physically bleed light, the blue effusion rising upward like a string of bubbles. These rising bubbles had given him the dim light with which he had been able to see at the lower end of the descent. Here at the bottom of the pool, they glowed as brightly as small glassy lamps, their cerulean emission suffusing the water and staining it a glaucous blue-green.
His feet found bottom with a gentle impact that he barely felt. He felt weightless, as if he could begin to float up at any moment, or be buffeted aside by the slightest current. But there were no currents in a pool. The water was still here, and startlingly clear. He had expected mossy murkiness at the bottom, obscure darkness even. Instead, he could see for several dozen yards in every direction. He could see an assortment of natural objects on the floor of the pool. Boulders and rocks mainly, of all shapes and sizes. Gleaming yellow-gold fish darted through hollows in the rocks. The floor itself was surprisingly regular and firm rather than soft and muddy as he might have expected. After peering down closely he discerned that the reason for this was simple: it was a man-made surface, slightly weathered by millennia beneath water but otherwise as unbroken and regular as stone. That struck him as odd. After all, if this were the sage Gautama’s hermitage, how would it have a stone floor? He probed with the toe of his sandal and found that it wasn’t stone at all, just a bitumen coating over a thatch-mud surface, like the floors of most ordinary Arya homes. The stillness of the pool had prevented it from decaying much.
He marvelled at the thought that perhaps two thousand years ago, human hands had laid and carefully smoothed this floor, applying layer upon layer until it formed a surface almost as strong as woodplank to walk on. Then had used the shakti of Surya, direct sunlight, to bake the surface hard. And eventually, the same hands had raised walls made of the same material and a roof of thatched straw over it all. Which raised the question: what had happened to the roof and walls of the ashram? After all, if this was the floor of the original hermitage, then the rest of the structure ought to be–
He looked up then and had the first real shock since his descent.
The swirling colours he had descended through, the ones that had seemed to dance playfully just out of his reach, were still there. They filled the pool in every direction, forming a dense wall that had evidently opened briefly to allow his passage then closed ranks once more.
The colours were indeed breathtaking and beautiful, mesmerising in their pattern of sway and swirl, turn and twist. It was the most amazing display in nature he had ever seen. As gaily decorative as a Holi festival or a troupe of Marwari folk dancers.
But they were neither rang-colours nor gaily hued mirrorworked fabric.
They were snakes.
Rama reached for his sword, remembering too late that he had no sword. No bow and arrows. No weapon at all. He could only stand and look up at the incredible profusion that teemed just yards above his head.
Water serpents. Thousands upon thousands of them, all of different hues and tints. The swirling dance was a result of their ceaseless writhing. They formed a thick carpet, the bottom of which was perhaps ten yards above the floor of the pool. He had been unable to see them properly while descending because the light was too dim. But standing here on the floor of the pool, the Brahman stones gave off enough light to illuminate them clearly.
The thickness of the whole group was impossible to discern from where he stood, but based on the time it had taken him to descend through the colours, he deduced that they formed a mass perhaps fifteen yards from top to bottom. Each serpent was at least three yards long, while several were ten times that length.
Their thicknesses varied with their lengths, some as thick as his fist, others the size of his head, and a few enormous ones as wide as his chest. Their mouths opened and closed, releasing bubbles constantly, which meant that they breathed air and must rise to the surface periodically to take in fresh air before descending again. He wondered how long they could breathe at one go, and if they were venomous.
He had always heard that the bites of water serpents were deadlier than those of their landlocked brethren. The thought of his bare skin passing within lunging distance of those fanged mouths made him want to scream. He stayed still and watched the serpents dance; unable to believe he had descended safely through their midst. Yet he had, somehow. That must mean they were benign. Or that he wasn’t their natural prey. Either way, he was here, unharmed, and they seemed unconcerned or unaware of his presence. Their dance continued, the colours swirling into obscure patterns and combinations of hues, a mesmerising interweaving and mingling that demanded to be watched. He had the impression that if he didn’t exert his will and look away, he could stand here and watch them for ever. He forced his eyes down. He had a task to perform.