There was nobody left to kill.
He stood, feeling the blood rise to his head in a roaring flood. His heart still pounded; his tongue was thick with the scum of his own sour juices. He wiped off a thread of blood that hung from his brow. The jungle was deafeningly silent. The sage was in his mandala behind them, unharmed and complacent as ever. It was only when he turned and looked at Rama that he got the first real shock of the day.
***
Bejoo was struck on the chest by a fragment of the chariot’s wheel. Fortunately for him, the wheel was wooden and his breastplate bronze-iron alloy. Even so, the impact almost unseated him.
What in Shani’s name was that
? His horse, a Kambhoja stallion that had proved implacable even in the heat of battle, wheeled in startled terror, settling only after he whispered the mantra of Shani, his patron deity, in its ear.
Other horses were neighing and rearing in shock as well, and at least three men lay unseated on their backs, either dead or seriously wounded. One horse had been cut in two by what seemed to be a fragment of the chariot’s frontplate, the metal embedded in its severed neck, its eyes staring up in stunned horror. Of the chariot itself, nothing more than debris remained; it had been shattered and flattened as effectively as a wooden toy beneath an elephant’s foot.
What could possess the power to do such a thing? Bejoo rode through his men, who were shaken only by the unexpected nature of the attack, not by the deaths themselves. Death was the inevitable end of a Kshatriya’s duties; it was the nature of that death that brought honour or dishonour. In this case, it brought only puzzlement. There seemed to be no sign of how the chariot had been destroyed.
One of his horsemen pointed up at the sky above the darkwoods, a bright blue upturned bowl capping the grim grey-green jungle. ‘Something came from there,’ he said, patting his horse reassuringly. ‘Like a siege-machine.’
A siege-machine? Bejoo knew of giant catapult devices that shot large boulders over fortress walls, or at those walls, that could easily destroy a chariot. But if the rakshasas within the jungle possessed and had used such a machine, then where was the damn boulder? All he could see were chariot fragments and the unfortunate remains of the chariot’s two horses and two occupants, gore and bodily parts strewn all over, everything covered with a thick layer of dirt.
As he came closer to the site of the attack he wrinkled his nose. That stench! What was that? It smelt like an animal compost heap. And no animal he knew of produced manure of this kind.
He frowned. What he had taken for dirt at first was too dark and claylike to be the loose iron-rich soil beneath his horse’s hoofs.
Then suddenly he knew. Instinctively, with an unerring certainty born of years of battling strange species and even stranger humans, he knew what had struck the chariot. Wheeling his horse around, he shouted a command to his men, both horse and wheel.
‘Scatter! Scatter! Keep apart from one another! Do it now! Scatter!’
His men responded without question or hesitation. But they were hampered by the thick undergrowth that surrounded the path. Even the path itself was grassy and treacherous with holes and stones, and it was impossible to simply turn chariots and ride them through three-yard-high thickets of bramblebush and clumps of thornweed. Still, they did the best they could, as Bejoo rode back to the end of the line, shouting for Bheriya. Where were those elephants? If they had the elephants, they could bulldoze their way into the jungle, and there they might be safer from the menace that he felt certain would strike again. After all, if the enemy knew they were out here, then they would hardly sit idle after that first blow.
He was almost at the end of the line when he heard the sound. It had escaped his attention the first time because it had blended in with the usual forest sounds and he hadn’t known what to listen for. Now that he knew, it was distinct, if faint. It rose as the threat approached, and he wheeled about yet again, falling silent. He had already yelled to his men that the attack would come from the sky, but he saw now that the warning was of no use whatsoever. The missile that came arcing over the tops of the trees came into sight only a fraction of an instant before it fell sharply to earth, landing on the back of one horse and the front of another, striking a glancing blow to a third horseman a good five yards away—the thing was enormous, at least ten yards across—and the sound of its impact really was like an elephant thumping its foot on the ground. Except that this was no elephant foot, it was a giant pile of animal manure, packed tightly into a ball and flung at them from over the tops of the hundred-yard-tall trees with deadly accuracy.
But flung by what
?
There was no time to think. He spurred his mount on with another mantra, riding to the aid of the fallen horseman, trapped beneath his own mount, its head hacked off and pumping gouts of dark blood, everything coated with a thick layer of brownish-black manure streaked with patches of mucousy slime. He leaped off his horse and began putting his shoulder to the fallen horse, which was still jerking spasmodically in its death throes, the gaping neck notwithstanding.
The stench was nauseating and it took all his self-will to avoid turning aside and retching. The man’s leg was crushed, he was saying, and Bejoo was bending over to pull him free, helped now by another half-dozen horsemen who had dismounted and come to their aid, when he heard the sound again.
He raised his head, following the sound. It was a faint whistling, like the burring a wasp might make if flying quickly past one’s ear. But it was much louder this time.
He stood, staring at the sky above the forest, and his blood ran cold.
The sky was filled with the dark disgusting missiles, all headed directly for the clearing in which his Vajra milled about. He counted three, four, five, then blinked as a sixth one followed its predecessors belatedly.
We’re all going to die, smashed to pieces by asura manure
!
NINETEEN
‘Rama?’
Lakshman stared at his brother uncertainly. Rama was still in his drawing stance, down on one knee, his bow in his hands, an arrow in its cord. His back was still to Lakshman. But even so, his brother knew that something was wrong, something was terribly wrong here.
Did he really do all this
?
The thought came to Lakshman not as a flash of jealousy. There had never really been envy between him and his oldest sibling, at least not the competitive urge to outdo which he felt when racing or competing against Bharat, or even Shatrugan. Only a desire to emulate; to do as Rama did. Or as his mother always put it: he wants to be Rama, he only settles for being Rama’s brother. So his first thought when he saw what Rama had wrought was not envy but desire.
I wish I could have done that
!
The pile of corpses Lakshman had left strewn across his side was perhaps three deep and ten wide. Thirty, mayhap three dozen corpses in all. He had felt immensely proud when he had risen, heart still pounding with blood-lust, and seen how many of the foe he had brought down single-handed. Thirty bestial attackers! In perhaps as many seconds! With only a shortbow and no place to retreat. Yet he had come off with no wounds—except a scratch or two where a flailing beast had succeeded in pawing or clawing him as it went down in a dead heap—and the enemy had been daunted enough to retreat. It was a victory that bards in winehouses would fight for the right to compose ballads about; a heroic victory.
Or so he’d thought.
The pile before Rama was at least seven or eight deep and perhaps twenty wide. It looked like a small hillock of corpses, piled by some marauding demon in his lair for future consumption. Like the piles of venison, goat and other corpses the royal huntsmen piled up before the kitchens for a royal banquet.
There must have been a hundred and twenty, even a hundred and fifty dead lying there.
The implication was staggering. For every arrow Lakshman had loosed, Rama had loosed five.
But that’s physically impossible
!
I was drawing so fast, my arm and my cord were a blur. How could anyone draw faster, let alone five times as fast
?
Lakshman took a step towards Rama, coming into the periphery of his half-circle sightline, and instantly found Rama’s bow turned to greet him, the notched arrow aimed directly at his throat.
He moved like a hummingbird’s wing
!
Nobody can move that fast
!
The sight of his brother’s face was more shocking than the piles of enemy mounted before him.
Rama was covered with the same gore and gristle that he himself was coated with, the inevitable spatters of animal blood and other bodily fluids. But there was so much more of it that for a moment all Lakshman saw was a gore-painted face with two bright eyes shining in the unnatural dimness of the jungle light.
Those eyes didn’t look like Rama’s. They didn’t even look human. Lakshman blinked, wondering if he was still intoxicated with the battle-lust, or whether the sight of so many monstrous aberrations and mutations had driven his imagination over the edge. Rama’s eyes seemed almost to glow blue. And in that distinct deep bluish glow, there seemed to float motes of golden light, like tiny shimmering stars suspended in a milky blue substance. As he peered at his brother, the golden motes seemed to be alive, moving with a precision and purpose that was alien, unlike anything he’d ever seen. Suddenly, the pile of corpses, the impossibility of Rama’s kills, was forgotten. All he cared about was Rama himself. And he could see that there was something wrong with him. He was about to take a step towards his brother when the seer’s voice cut through the deathly silence.
‘Stop where you are, Lakshman. He will not hesitate to shoot you down as he shot down all those monsters.’
Rama, shoot me down
?
Impossible
! Yet he could see that it was possible. There was no hint of warmth in his brother’s eyes, no sign that he recognised him or cared for him in any way. And that arrow was still pointed at his throat, following his every movement, however tiny, as precisely as if a metal wire connected his jugular vein to the tip of the arrow.
‘Rama?’ he said uncertainly. ‘Put your bow aside. I want to examine you. I fear you may be wounded.’
There was no reply from Rama. The eyes remained fixed, unblinking, their bluish glow unmistakable now. The gold motes swam in their alien patterns, celestial fish in a cosmic emptiness. A statue would have been as responsive.
‘He will not answer you, Lakshman,’ the seer’s voice said. ‘He is caught in the battle fever of Bala and Atibala. You felt some vestige of it too when you fought. The maha-mantras take you over at the moment of crisis and turn you into a perfectly efficient fighting engine. That is what Rama is now, a perfect weapon. Fixed in a state of stasis that will pass once the crisis is truly past. The only reason he does not shoot at you is because he senses your own Brahman flow and essential goodness.’
But he’s a man, a boy really, not a weapon. This is unnatural.
Aloud Lakshman said: ‘But then why am I not in the same state? Why can I think and move freely while he sits there like a bowman’s dummy, aiming at me as if I am one of Tataka’s miscreations?’
The seer sighed. ‘The maha-mantras affect each individual differently. In Rama’s case, they have taken strong root. Fear not, young prince. He will be as you knew him once the danger is over.’
Lakshman looked around at the silent jungle, the masses of dead corpses. ‘But it is over, isn’t it? They attacked and we slaughtered them. There were no more left.’
Vishwamitra shook his head. ‘Sadly, rajkumar, you are wrong. These were only the weakest and least effective of Tataka’s clutch. She sent them first to test your strengths and weaknesses. It is a common battle tactic used when facing a new enemy. The next wave will comprise her best warriors and they will not be as easy to slaughter, nor will they attack in any way you may foresee. Look for yourself. These are mere cubs, not fully mature even by their misshapen standards.’
Lakshman looked and realised that the seer was right. The deformities and bizarre combinations of species had distracted him from seeing this himself; now that he looked closely, he could recognise that the corpses strewn around resembled young beasts. By their colours, their stippling, their only partially formed talons and tusks and horns, he confirmed the truth of the seer’s observation.
‘You said there were no more than half a thousand of them,’ he said, glancing around cautiously now. ‘We faced and killed close to two hundred in that first attack. Almost half of their total numbers.’