Ravana.
Girl. At last you begin to see. Now realise also the futility of resistance. I am the Beginning and the End of Everything. Soon I shall be at your threshold, in the flesh. And you shall learn to use that magnificent body for better things than battlecraft.
‘NEVER!’ she screamed, turning, slashing with her sword. Determined to fight to the death rather than yield an inch.
But her blade met only empty air. There was nobody there. And in a flash of blinding crimson light, she was transported again.
Nakhudi burst into the bedchamber, hissing like a clutch of angry cobras. Her enormous frame filled the space by the bedside as she tore away the mosquito netting, seeking out her mistress, seeking to protect.
The bed was empty. She grunted in frustration, raising her large head, her curled locks glistening darkly in the moonlight.
‘Here, Nakhu.’
The amazonian bodyguard was across the bed and by the veranda door in a flash. She squatted beside Sita, her powerful thighs bunching like a young elephant’s legs, her several sheathed weapons catching the direct moonlight from the low-hanging half-moon and glittering like jewellery. She reached tentatively for her mistress.
‘Rajkumari?’
‘I’m fine, Nakhu. I just had a bad dream, that’s all.’ Sita gestured sheepishly. ‘I fell out of bed, I guess.’
The protectoress scanned the face of her princess anxiously. A noise came from the open doorway as Sita’s other bodyguards followed in Nakhudi’s wake. Nakhudi waved them away impatiently. They took in the scene, bowed apologetically, and retreated, shutting the doors to the rajkumari’s chambers.
Nakhudi turned back to Sita.
‘When I heard you cry out—’ Her voice was low and gruff. She shook her head, clenching her fist. ‘I thought perhaps dakus …’
Sita almost smiled. Dakus? Forest bandits would hardly attempt a raid on the royal palace of Mithila. Nakhudi’s heart was larger than her intellect.
‘It was a very bad dream. I must have cried out.’
The bodyguard exclaimed in her native tongue and her large hand shot out with the speed of a cobra lunging. Yet her grasp was as gentle as a mother holding her babe. She raised Sita’s hand to the moonlight.
‘A bad dream that bleeds?’
Sita followed Nakhudi’s gaze, looking at the sword still clutched in her hand.
The tip of the blade was smeared with blood.
FOUR
Kartikeya was minding the herd when he saw the smoke. It rose slowly, lazily, at first, like wisps of ganja smoke from the pipes his father and uncles smoked in the evenings and on feast days. For a moment, lulled by the calm of the early hour and the memory of the warm khatiya he had left only moments ago to tend to his morning chores, he thought it was ganja smoke. He imagined he could smell the sickly-sweet odour of the drug roasting, feel the intoxicating lightheadedness that came just from inhaling that exuded smoke.
He had never smoked a pipe directly, but all his brothers had and they took pleasure in ragging him because just being around other smokers was enough to make him fly higher than a patang on kite feast day. It was one of the natural hazards of being the youngest in a large rakshak Kshatriya family and an even larger clan. Their taunting nettled him, making him eager for the day when he would be permitted to sit with the older men and smoke as they did. But truth be told, just inhaling their second-hand smoke was sufficient to make him relax enough to spin wild, extravagant daydreams. As he was doing now, sitting on a flattish rock at the top of the knoll, as his family’s herd grazed on the slope below.
They were dreams of growing up to become as big and strong as the other men in the clan, as proficient a warrior as the Kshatriya code demanded. Of some day leaving the village and setting out for other places, other worlds. Not just Dhuj, the town over the hills, but perhaps to ride on one of the giant sailing vessels that docked in the bay below the town, thence to travel to foreign shores. Or even to go the other way, up the cart path that led out of Dhuj, past numerous tiny hamlets and villages like his own, thence to journey to the raj-marg that led to other Arya nations, the fantastic rich kingdoms of legend that his father and uncles were always talking about - Kosala, Videha, Banglar. To see the famed capital cities of those faraway nations, walk the gold-paved streets of Ayodhya, Mithila, Kolkat. Perhaps join a rakshak troop guarding mighty Mithila Bridge or Gandahar Pass, or any of the strategic points that Kshatriyas were trained and caste-sworn to protect and maintain. Ah, those were fine dreams indeed for a cowherd in a remote sleepy hamlet too small to even have a proper name or a court-ordained panchayat. Ganja dreams.
Perhaps that was why he was so slow to respond to the sight of the smoke. It was only after several moments had passed and the wisps had turned into plumes and then into large roiling black gouts that he realised his error. He leaped up, startling the animals browsing closest, and stared at the distant hilltops. He rubbed his eyes and stared again. There was no mistaking it this time: those dark forbidding clouds rising up from over the hills were very real, and very ominous.
Dhuj was burning.
Kartikeya took to his feet. He sprinted through the flock, calling out impatiently in his singsong voice, using his stick to poke and shove the beasts aside. He slipped on a pile of hot and slick manure and had to grip the horns of the nearest animal to keep his balance. She protested loudly and indignantly, and that set the lot of them lowing raggedly.
He all but threw himself down the hillside, loping with large ungainly strides as he left the outskirts of the herd and gained open ground.
As he neared the gauthan, he heard the excited yells of other cowherds calling out and saw their white dhotis flashing luminously in the dull, gloamy light of dawn. They had all seen the smoke and were running home. By the time he reached his hut, his brothers were already streaming out of the narrow doorway, some still hurriedly knotting their langots in the tight fashion that all rakshak Kshatriyas—perhaps all Kshatriyas, for all he knew—favoured for combat. As was the clan custom, they were naked apart from the langots, their only other clothing their swords and maces. There had been no time to oil their bodies in the rakshak manner, the better to slip through the enemy’s grasp in close-quarter fighting, which itself conveyed to Kartikeya how urgently they took the threat. One of his middle brothers, Jayashankar, had already yoked the bulls to the cart and brought it around, large wooden-spoked wheels rumbling on the brick ground. His brothers poured out of the hut and clambered aboard grimly as he stopped, breathless and minus his stick, which had snapped and which he had discarded along the way.
‘Fire!’ he said.
Nobody paid attention to him. He watched wide-eyed as his sisters and mother emerged from the hut, each one armed and with garments girded at the loins in the martial fashion of rakshak women at war. His mother called out to him to move out of the way to let the cart pass. He was shocked to see her without her enormous nose ring, and bereft of all her customary jewellery. That brought the magnitude of the crisis home to him like nothing else.
‘Come on, Kattu,’ his youngest sister said, swatting his head as she pushed him back the way he’d come. ‘We have to go back and get the herd. They’ll make a good protective circle around the houses.’
He looked around, bewildered, and saw that all the other houses in the gauthan were similarly occupied—men and boys clambering aboard carts, riding off up the mud track which led to the town, while the women and girls prepared for an attack. But where was the enemy? Who were they preparing to fight?
‘Protective circle,’ he repeated numbly. ‘Protective against what? The fire?’
‘Kattu, take care of your sisters and your maa,’ his oldest brother, Vinayak, called out. ‘You are now the oldest male in the village.’
He was the only male in the village, he saw, casting a bewildered glance around at the unexpected chaos that had shattered the customary routine. Even old Pancham-chacha, who must be all of seven decades, was perched precariously on the back of one overcrowded cart. The front cart, his own family’s, was goading the bullocks into a run with the urgency of a cart race. The carts trundled noisily and surprisingly quickly up the path to the bay town. Whenever possible, rakshaks always rode, believing that the energy conserved was better utilised in the first crucial moments of martial contact.
‘Come on!’ his sister cried impatiently, tugging at his arm. She ran toward the hill. ‘There isn’t time!’
He followed her awkwardly, still trying to catch up with this sudden rush of events. To their right, as they ran up the grassy slope, the dozen or so carts filled with armed men and boys rattled and rolled noisily away, the road winding around the steep rise to take a gentler gradient towards the town. They dropped out of sight a moment later as he topped the first knoll and went down the other side.
Ahead, his sister was a pale streak of muscled flesh limned against the green of the pasture slopes. Over another two hills and they would reach the pasture where he had left their herd grazing.
‘What happened?’ he asked, shouting to her as he struggled to catch up. She had long legs and was the best runner of them all, except only for their second-eldest brother.
‘Asuras landed at Dhuj,’ she called back, and disappeared over the next rise.
He stopped then, dead in his tracks, as if he had run into a tree, as he had once when much younger. Sat down with a whoosh of expelled air, right on the dew-damp grass. A small, sharp stone dug into his left buttock. He sat there and breathed with his mouth open and eyes staring blindly, gasping. A fat black wasp came buzzing around his head, then veered off westwards, toward the burning town. The entire western horizon was glowing reddish-orange now, as if Surya Deva had suddenly decided to reverse his normal route and ride his solar chariot from west to east this day.
His sister came back a moment later, looking exasperated. ‘What happened?’ she yelled. ‘Come on, Kattu! Get up! There isn’t time!’
He shook his head, not looking at her. Buried his face in his hands and rocked himself forward and backward, like a Brahmin boy reciting his rote-learning.
‘Kartik,’ she said in a less harsh tone, dropping to her knees beside him. ‘I know how you feel. We all feel that way. But this is not the time to let fear freeze you like a rabbit before a cobra. We must fight. Get up and come. We have to get the herd back before they reach the gauthan.’
When he still didn’t move, she bent down and put her arm around him, hugging him tight, lending him some of her warmth, although the winter chill had all but fled from the air by now. ‘Kattu, Kartik, Kartikeya,’ she said into his ear, her breath redolent of betelnut leaf, which he knew she ought not to have been chewing this early in the day. Maa would be mad if she found out. ‘We’re rakshaks. We have to do our duty. Rise now and fulfil your dharma.’
He looked at her for a long moment, then clenched his teeth tight. He knew she was right. He knew he had no choice. It was the rakshak way, to form a barrier with their bodies, their flesh, their lives, to prevent the enemy from progressing further. In the last asura war, thousands of their clan had thrown their lives away merely to buy precious moments for other divisions to regroup, or refresh themselves, or even, simply, to buy time. That was why their kind always built their settlements near bay towns, near bridges, passes, outside cities. To raise the first alarm and provide the first line of defence.
When he rose finally, his knees trembled like a sapling in a sea gale. She caught his arm and helped him stay upright. He nodded to her, then realised she wasn’t looking at him.
‘I’ll manage,’ he said. She looked at him closely, then let him go. He began walking towards the west, towards that angry red sky and the billowing dark clouds.
They topped the rise together and froze, mesmerised by the sight on the other side.
The entire hillside seethed with movement, a living carpet. In the garish red light of the burning town of Dhuj, an asura army was racing across the hillsides. Not marching or proceeding. Running. If you could call the progress of those carapaced, many-legged, bestial nightmares running.
They swarmed across the rolling slopes like an infestation of killer ants. The very green of the lush hills was churned up into black sods by their passing. Their numbers were beyond counting. Kartikeya looked right and left, and for as far as his keen eyes could discern, they covered the land entirely. Far to the right, over the ridge, where the town road was, and where the carts would have reached by now, he could faintly make out the sound of clashing weapons and cries of combat. His brothers and father and uncles had met the wave and clashed. Which meant that Dhuj itself had been overrun and put to flame.
He stared at the oncoming masses, the bristling feelers, horns, antlers, snouts, hoods and other alien forms, racing like a horde of death incarnate across the familiar pastures over which he had roamed his entire childhood, illuminated by the garish glow of a burning town that only hours ago had been the foremost docking bay of the Arya nations, and had no words to describe what he felt.
He turned to meet his sister’s eyes. He saw that she had reached the same conclusion he had —there was no point trying to outrun this insane, headlong wave of carnage. Already, as the first asuras reached the confused herd, he saw the animals being cut down like so many stalks of straw before a thresh-knife. His family’s entire fortune was decimated in scant seconds. In another few moments, the hordes would be upon them.