The young soldier nodded, abashed. ‘I must have seen a vulture, that’s all, and my imagination ran away with me. I’ve been listening to too many stories in the Veterans’ Inn, I guess.’
Somasra laughed, clapping the young man on the back almost hard enough to knock the novice off the wall and into the moat. ‘Stories are necessary, young youngun. Even the seers teach us that katha, the art of story, is the food and drink of an intelligent mind. But that’s all the tales of the asura war are now. Stories. And may they always stay just that, Vishnu be praised.’
He looked up abruptly, squinting at the eastern sky. ‘Past gate-opening time. Move to it, greenhorn. Time enough for stories and wine when the shift’s ended.’ He winked, his grizzled features a grey shadow in the dusky dimness. ‘You want Jatayus? I’ll tell you a story about Jatayus that’ll turn your blood to icemelt, over a matka of the maharaja’s bhaang at the Holi feast today. Now get back to work.’
The gates opened a few minutes later and the two mismatched guards had no time to discuss mythical giant vultures again. They were busy working the heavy winch-wheel that lowered the enormous wooden gate. The gate also served as a bridge across the moat outside; when lowered fully, it spanned the fifteen-yard gap. The sound of it settling in its iron cradle was like a giant thumping his fist. Then they worked the levers that drained and refilled the moat with fresh water directly from the river. This was done weekly to avoid diseases breeding in the water.
A small crowd was waiting outside the gate when it came down. The brief chatter between the two guards had delayed gate-opening by a few minutes. The other six gates had already opened and allowed in the travellers eager to enter Ayodhya.
It was a motley bunch. Mostly bullock-carts carrying entire families from the outlying northern farms, children squealing excitedly at the thought of spending a feast day in the great city. A few Kshatriyas, professional armsmen, also arriving for the festival or simply passing through. A courier from Mithila, Ayodhya’s sister city in the eastern region of Kosala, with Maharaja Janak’s royal seal on his leather bag. A few Brahmins on foot or riding mules and asses, their enormous bellies murmuring at the promise of the feast ahead. A vendor leading three camels laden with bagfuls of rang, the brightly coloured powders used during the Holi festival. An assortment of street entertainers—a snake charmer, a family of acrobats carrying their paraphernalia, a rope climber, two jadugars, a flautist, a Shaivite self-flagellator wielding a five-yard-long set of metal-tipped whips, a bear-and-monkey show-man. They were just the early birds. By sunrise, there would be an incessant flow of traffic into Ayodhya. In recent years, it seemed as if every citizen in the kingdom of Kosala wanted to come to their capital city to avail themselves of the king’s open-house policy of free food and drink to all for the day. Holi was the biggest festival day of the Arya year apart from Deepavali. And while Deepavali provided one last opportunity to celebrate and feast before the onset of winter, Holi marked the celebration of the first day of spring. A new beginning to a new harvest year.
The two seventh-gate guards watched the ragged caravan of travellers trundle excitedly through the open gates. It was Somasra’s ageing but still sharp eyes that saw the figure in the thick of the crowd, a tall white-bearded man clad in the red-ochre robes of a seer, carrying a wildwood staff. Somasra peered at the seer and blinked, startled.
The crowd cleared, turning right and left as their business took them, and for a moment the seer was clearly visible, illuminated in the flickering torchlight from the mashaals bordering the gate. He strode purposefully into the city, heading up Harishchandra Avenue. Somasra rubbed his eyes, unable to believe he was seeing right.
If his eyesight hadn’t failed him at last, then that old seer over there, now already several dozen yards down the main street of Ayodhya, was none other than the legendary seer-mage Brahmarishi Vishwamitra himself. The famous likeness was unmistakable, a mirror image of the huge portrait in the Seers’ Gallery. But how could it possibly be Vishwamitra? The great seer hadn’t been seen by human eyes in over … how many years was it? Two hundred? Two hundred and fifty?
Several minutes later, while Somasra was still trying to decide whether he had seen correctly, the real Vishwamitra, still disguised as a sudra hunter, strode through the gate, following the same route as the impostor who had assumed his form.
This time, even Somasra’s alert vision failed to recognise the visitor.
SIX
Manthara hated her own shadow. It was one thing to be a hunchback and quite another to see the deformed evidence of her own misshapen form projected ten times lifesize on to a wall. But the serving girl holding the mashaal had been slow in getting out of the carriage after her, and was following Manthara when she should have been ahead of her. The flickering flames of the backlight sent Manthara’s shadow fleeing ahead of her, dancing across the cobbled street then up the wall that marked the end of the blind alley. At this dark hour, after yet another sleepless night in a succession of sleepless nights spent in anxious anticipation, the sight was more than Manthara could bear. She turned abruptly to face the startled serving girl and laid her hand across the wretch’s face. The girl cried out, whimpering, but kept her hold on the mashaal. Even in the flickering glow, the marks of Manthara’s long bony fingers stood out as clearly as lashes on the girl’s pale young cheeks. She stared wide-eyed, not knowing what her error had been, and Manthara didn’t bother to inform her. She had already turned back and was shuffling the last yards to the door at the end of the alley.
Manthara paused for a moment to listen for the sounds of the night patrol. But her sharp ears heard nothing except the faint sound of the seventh gate being lowered with a booming like distant thunder. It was getting dangerously late. She must return to the palace before the change of guards which took place at dawn.
She raised her hand to knock on the door but it opened even before her knuckles fell on the battered and scarred wood. A short dark figure clad in a flowing black chaddar gestured her in impatiently. She entered a small room dimly lit by a foul-smelling pair of candles and sparsely furnished. The serving girl followed her, extinguishing the mashaal as usual. The walls of the windowless room were painted black and appeared bare of any decoration, but Manthara knew from past experience that when illuminated by a violet light, phosphorescent writing would be revealed, covering virtually every square inch of those apparently blank surfaces. Forbidden tantric symbols in a tribal dialect long since forgotten by most Aryas, pagan markings from a primitive age when the thousands of deities in the Vedic pantheon were regarded not as manifestations of the One True God but as individual gods in their own right, a polytheistic outlook that was considered blasphemy in these civilised times. Even worse, these wall markings professed allegiance to the darkest and most forbidden of those ancient deities. Not the benign and just devas that civilised Aryas worshipped, but the primordial spirit-lords that the asura races bowed to—and a few discontented Aryas like Manthara herself. Manthara herself was shrewd enough to keep her worship of asura gods a secret; there were no blasphemous symbols painted on her walls, in phosphorescent paint or otherwise. Even her yagna chamber was secret, unknown to even her mistress and ward, Second Queen Kaikeyi. By painting his walls with such symbols, this tawdry tantric was inviting trouble. The kind of trouble that came dressed in the purple and black uniform of the Purana Wafadars whose job it was, among other things, to seek out and arrest such demon-worshippers.
She turned to the man. ‘Do you have what I need?’
He didn’t reply. He rarely talked, this one. Most tantrics affected that posture in the belief that it gave them an aura of great wisdom. Manthara didn’t care. She didn’t have much to say to him anyway, and there was nothing he could say that she would want to hear.
He went over to the far end of the room, bent down and picked up a gunnysack filled with something heavy. Dragging it across the room, he dumped it at her feet. A subdued moan issued from the coarse jute sack and faint movements caused it to billow outward. The tantric frowned, looked around, picked up a short wedge of wood, bent down and clubbed a rounded bulge that was distending the mouth end of the sack. At the unmistakable sound of wood striking bone, the moaning and agitated movements subsided. Satisfied, the tantric dropped the makeshift club and stood, dusting his hands.
Behind Manthara, the serving girl gasped out a brief prayer for forgiveness to the Mother Deity Sri. She was forever offering prayers to the Devi, despite Manthara’s specific orders forbidding her. She would have to be reminded later. Manthara unknotted the calf’s-leather purse that she wore at her waist and fished out the coins she owed the tantric.
He reached out silently for the rupees but she held them clutched in her fist a moment longer. His eyes registered the delay and rose slowly to meet her own. She realised at once that the man was under the influence of some drug. Ganja, most likely. Tantrics always seemed to favour ganja for some reason. She wrinkled her face with distaste. She disapproved of drugs and intoxicants; they made one careless, and when employed in such undertakings, a careless man was a dead man. She held the money back, bitterly aware of how easily this wretched fool could ruin everything.
She questioned him sharply.
‘Were you seen or heard?’
He stared dully at her, his black pupils dilated far more than warranted by the dim light. She waited.
He shook his head at last.
She gestured at the gunnysack.
‘He will not be missed?’
She waited another eternity for another dumb shake of his head.
‘He was an orphan like the others? Taken from an anarthashram like the five before him? No parents or known relatives?’
Another shake of the head.
‘And yet you made sure he was a born Brahmin, with his naming ceremony and thread ceremony performed correctly, as well as his coming-of-age ceremony performed in the past week, just like the other boys before him?’
A longer pause this time, followed by an up-down affirmative nod.
‘And nobody has questioned you about any of the earlier disappearances? You haven’t talked to anyone about any of these kidnappings, or about your dealings with me at all? No PFs sniffing around asking funny questions?’
He seemed unsure whether that required a shake or a nod. He settled for moving his head diagonally. His eyes had drifted down to her fist, still clenched tightly around the six silver coins, one for each year of the boy’s age.
She wasn’t satisfied. Far from it. But if he had been stupid or overtly careless, she wouldn’t be standing here bantering right now; PFs would be breaking down the door and hauling them all away to the maharaja’s dungeons. And he had delivered a half-dozen Brahmin boys to her thus far. It wasn’t easy to find someone to kidnap a fresh six-year-old boy every month in a city as priggishly self-righteous as Ayodhya. Even the outlaws and waylayers she had interviewed over the years balked once they learned what was to become of the boys, spitting viciously at her feet.
She didn’t understand how murderers and thieves could claim to be so righteous, but that was Arya morality for you.
She had found this tantric after great effort and risk. But now, she realised, she had dealt with him once too often. He knew too much of her affairs. With the great day so close at hand, that much knowledge could be dangerous to her. Yes, she decided, she would have to make sure he didn’t have an opportunity to share his knowledge with anyone else. She had come much too far to be thwarted now by a pathetic bhaangaddled tantric who thought that a few painted symbols were sufficient to show his devotion to the Dark Lord.
The sound of him clearing his throat distracted her from her thoughts. She realised she was still holding the money and her work here was finished.
Move, Manthara. It will be daybreak soon. There’s much to be accomplished today, and it can’t be done standing around in this stupid man’s shack
.
‘Here,’ she said disdainfully, holding out the money.
To her surprise, he didn’t take it.
Instead, he raised his eyes to look at her. Insolently.
‘You promised,’ he said. His voice was hoarse and cracked. It told her that he took his ganja through a hookah rather than through a chillum.
She frowned. ‘Yes, I promised six silvers. Here they are. Take them quickly. I am in a hurry.’
He shook his head, straining to express himself better. Speaking in a dialect of commonspeak so chopped and garbled as to be almost incomprehensible. No wonder he didn’t talk much.
‘Promised, I join you. This yagna. Dark Lord, welcome, into Ayodhya.’
She stared at him. Had she promised this lout that she would let him aid her in performing her yagna? How did he know that this was the crucial rite, the penultimate sacrifice with which she would welcome her lord on the eve of His entry into Ayodhya? Why in the three worlds would she have revealed this much to a ganja-addicted tantric? Then she remembered. It had been his insistence, not her revelation. He had guessed without being told. Had put two and two together over the months—it wasn’t hard, given the task she had hired him to do—and had added rumour, dark gossip, and word brought by tantrics from the Southwoods of strange developments afoot. He had come up with this smart but wholly logical conclusion: that she was a worshipper of the Dark Lord of Lanka, who demanded the sacrifice of a threaded Brahmin boy at every interface, and who was prophesied to rise from his ignominious failure in the last asura war and launch a great new campaign of conquest.