The Queen's Play (7 page)

In truth, the ogress had fled through a passage in the rocks while she was being pursued, and it was there, deep in the caverns, that she met her violent death. It was, in fact, the first of her thick blood that had sloped out from the mouth of the cave and had made the one waiting desperate, while the victor was negotiating one of the several passages that opened out from the accursed chamber and led straight to a dead end. By the time he stumbled upon the correct way
he was much troubled, but his troubles were far from finished as he soon realized he had been bolted in quite thoroughly by the very person he had left behind to watch his back.

What was betrayal and cowardice to the other appeared to me from the exile's narration simply an error of judgment, entirely free from malice, although there was something of the cowardly about it. But we judge quickly and severely, forgetting that on him who waits each passing moment falls like a hammer and in the very act itself lie the seeds of its abandonment.

The punishment, notwithstanding the justness of the other's anger, was too harsh, and we decided to recruit an army of men to lead a rebellion against the arrogant ruler. But the recruitment went along pitifully. What could we offer to lure anyone into our foredoomed cause? For the ruler was feared in the entire realm as possessing supernatural strength and was famed for having beaten even the demon king in his younger days. Legend had it he had received a boon from a seer that his adversary's strength will fall to half against him in combat. Not many, therefore, could be found who readily espoused the cause of the rebellion or did not fear for their lives at the hands of the enemy. Mostly only outlaws and petty brigands were willing to join in the hope of a later booty or reinstatement into the tribe.

But those who had been recruited stayed away from the exile's loyal group, keeping company with their own kind and waiting for the incursion to begin. I kept a wary eye on them for they were day by day growing lazier from inactivity and dissipation. These were men whose entire lives were ruled by base drives and indiscipline, and all they looked forward to while they deferred even as they whetted their instinct for carnage was to eat and drink around campfires they built at night, telling tales which were little else than poorly culled and rehashed versions of the fables enshrined in the
Vedas
, and which they had picked up on their itinerant movements through the region from the mouths of tradesmen or gypsies whom they would first waylay and later rob and murder without a thought.
Fables, the same ones I had learnt with such care and patience, and whose real meaning not one among us could fully elucidate. Noble words which were sublime portents on a sage's lips, here in the depths of night were only quick, supple bearers of stories and myths that softened the terrifying possibilities of unbounded time and gave the half-lit faces of these rogues the vulnerable look of babes in cribs. Here as elsewhere, words, narratives, and consciousness were inextricably bound together so that speech seemed the prime refuge of souls loosed upon the impenetrable face of without.

Night after night, I heard them from the shadows of a sal tree, beyond whose sprawling branches curled the flames that lit up their faces from below as they squatted about the burning logs, constantly sputtering crimson rinds into the grey pillar of air, and passed clay pitchers around, telling stories by turn, till their eyes lost the fire in them and turned smoky and stood open for the night and whatever lay in its wake.

It was then, on one of my routine wanderings, that I came upon resting on a rock the exiled prince, who, along with his brother, was slowly making his way to the demon king's capital to rescue his wife. But how? Two warriors, no matter how able, were helpless against the vast strength of the enemy and his forces. And for a start they were not even certain of their way. I took them along to my friend's shelter, where the exiles met and exchanged their sad tales in sympathy and agreement, conferred at length, and finally sealed the historic pact, a solemn oath of exiles that would see wrongs done to each punished, iniquities put right, honour restored, virtue re-established.

The plan then was for my friend to go and challenge his brother to a duel and while they were assaulting and tearing each other apart, for the prince to shoot an arrow from behind a tree and kill the arrogant fool. Thus, not only his rightful position and his wife, but the entire kingdom would be restored to him, in return for which he would forthwith align his men and, with himself at the head of the troops, help the princes lay siege to the enemy's citadel and rescue
the woman in captivity.

It was not much different from a coup d'état, though none of us saw it as such in our simple inflamed hearts bent solely upon avenging the wrongs done to each. The plan was both quick and effective. None saw anything but victory in it, none saw anything near abominable. Now there was little need of the irregulars we had been recruiting, and we left them sitting on their haunches girdling the burning logs, regaling one another with tales and drinks and laughter, to pick up on the morrow their violent lives from where they had left them, without once thinking of the lost opportunity. Nothing was unusual in this. Life was one such long chain of unful- filled plans and discarded choices, and where one gate closed, ten others came open.

Surprising though it seemed, things went scrupulously to plan, even if there were delays and misunderstandings along the way. For when the exile had won back his wife and the kingdom besides after what seemed to him a cruel and extended period of hardship, he, as was only natural, wished to delay further travails and enjoy a little the pleasures of throne and community, until he was rudely pulled out from a night of carousing and squarely threatened by the younger prince. Very soon the tribal army was on the march through the forest, snaking its course toward the southern tip of the peninsula, having received along the way crucial guidance regarding the route it was to take.

More than a millennium had passed since then, and all the actors in that horripilating drama had long since turned to dust or something finer than dust. Past that epic war, past many great wars, only he remained, the child in the tree. Not a few hundred years, and already the events were being recounted as children's tales. Maybe that was why wars were fought, so that at some remote point in time they could be told as tales to children. Everything was possible here where no matter how slowly the wheel rolled it would get from blood to laughter soon enough.

Just the other day, while he sat above a huge rock beyond the
spray of the falls, he had heard coming down the opening in the hills the voice of a woodcutter reciting the story to his little son astride a burro, utterly pared and simplified, as is the case with stories or the telling of them, the story of the demon king's death at the hands of the prince-in-exile, the former, in his telling, the embodiment of pure evil and the latter of pure good, a moral tale, a tale of morals. As if there ever was such a thing in life, as if what was cruelty to one was not kindness to another. Now all that remained was for a bard to come along singing it from village to village, improvising and embellishing it as he sang into history, Rama's journey or Rama's story, for one's journey was also one's story, the only story, no matter how and in how many ways one chose to tell it.

But not a word passed from father to son about that death on the battlefield at the very cusp of night, much like that of the demon king at the end, but nowhere near as significant to this story, the death on the close of the first day, the death from my hand, the death which occurred outside time, the unaccounted death, the death that could have been avoided if I had not been entirely beside myself clearing my way all day through bones, blood, bodies.

What to think of it? We are but trailing phantoms in another's story to say nothing of those who trail in ours.

The child turned suddenly to look at something. His pet puma had materialized on the branch as if out of thin air, and was now watching him with its yellow-green eyes. The child spread his arm round its neck to caress it from below. A low mist was rising over the trees in the east, but here the sun shone clear and the rays left a reddish tinge in the animal's coat. Far into the distance, at the rim of the world, blazed the immense, metaphysical wall of ice.

IT RAINED without cease for several days. The heavens were making good for the longest dry spell in years, for the most part of which the war had raged on.

Had it happened, we would probably not have noticed the gradual grading of the sky from blue to white to grey, the world darkening above us and feral sparks renting the cloudbank and the thunder rumbling DA, DA, DA, DA, DA, that a golden light was falling in bands far out in the sea, while here amidst the turmoil rain was upon us, churning and loosening up the mud under our feet, so that the solid ground beneath was soon a quagmire where mud not water dripped from our hair, silting in any cavity it could find, even working as a salve for our wounds.

But, of course, it did not rain, and the soil was kneaded solely with the sweat and blood from our teetering, faltering bodies. The sun burned stark and incandescent in the skies and drew out of the humid air a terrible effluvium of death and decay, against which bracing ourselves we went on thrusting and parrying until night fell, provisionally or for good.

Within hours from the start of the day's fighting, vultures were alighting on the corpses that lay strewn along the war ring. The birds would settle on the still bleeding warm flesh and begin at once to peck at the softer skin around the neck and the face or scoop out the eyes clean from their sockets and suck on them for all their worth. If the breath of war moved closer, they lifted their wings, even flapped them in slow, deliberate strokes a few times, but then having barely
risen would come down instantly to the free and generous repast before them.

And rain it did not when the war was over, not when the throne was no more vacant, nor when I took my siesta day after day, smoking my pipe and watching the tiny, indigo-crowned birds flitting in the hedgerows, threading fleeting lines of colour through them, nor when the long and spacious marble stairway and then the pavilion itself swam before my eyes.

The sky was high and clear above the yard when the stable boy brought in my horse, bridled and groomed, the leather saddlebags, holding a few personal effects and provisions for the journey, hanging from each side of the seat. But not before I was deep in the forest did it occur to me for the first time, so much had the war, its preparation and the resulting exhaustion, made us neglect, how long it had gone without rain.

Prancing on they went all day long, the traveller and his horse, mixing their breath with that of the trees, leaving a white plume in their wake and filling the world to the brim with the continuously unrolling, untiring clickety-clack of their movement, elated at this sudden freedom, consuming all earth and all time, until unexpectedly they emerged from the forest and the rider reined in his horse and the horse reared and neighed, and the rider saw the pavilion, issuing like a flame above the earth at the extreme end of a path that went crawling into a distant hill. A lone band of light was washing over it where it stood towering and radiant on the escarpment, while in every concavity about shadows were gathering, swooping down straight from the fast flowing clouds which were closing in on the sun from every direction. Even better, thinks the man, even better than how I envisioned it. And then the last ray of light was snuffed out and night came on suddenly.

By the time the rider ascended the hill, rain was upon him. A cloudburst. Birds had flown away, all life had retreated into the bush. Torrents gushed down the slopes and through the trees and the entire country sank in a deluge of rain, out of nowhere an enormous
lake appeared that would slowly come to cover everything. Thunder struck and gales blew. Shielding his eyes against the downpour, he went trotting up the path that blazed white, pink and ochre by turn in its swift dissolution, reflecting the wrathful face of the firmament, in a torrid landscape where none moved save he. There was nothing to tell if he had in fact seen the building or it was merely a vision engendered by a mind reeling from tiredness, hope, and yearning. But onward he went, soaked to the bone and shivering from the sharp drop in temperature.

Around halfway up the hill as the track made hairpin bends, I could make out tiny lamps or flames being lit one by one, like the first stars appearing from the gauze of dusk, and toward them I went, a weary traveller riding this constellation of lights as a guide to the end, never letting it out of my sight, although the slanting rain and the curving, melting road and the hair plastered over my face made this difficult.

Upon dismounting, a searing pain shot from the soles of my feet, up through my legs, collecting and pinching in the small of my back. I suddenly noticed how modest this place was, how utterly unlike what I remembered of it. The rain was at work in the front lawn which was untended and slipping into ruin and wilderness. The marble steps, maybe ten or fifteen, not more, neither too wide nor too high, nothing like how I had dreamt them, but fixed solidly to the ground, paling and coming apart on the edges. This was just an old hunting lodge slowly falling into decay from lack of interest or forgetfulness. Long ago, the dead king had passed it on to me in a kind and spontaneous gesture after we had returned from a successful hunt one evening. Often had I thought of the place, but not once had I returned. One thing or another kept happening, whether at the court or out in the field, delaying my decision. Later I had even thought of bringing Misa here for a day or two, but I could never garner the courage to ask her, and besides is one ever sure about love?, either it is too quick in coming or it is too late, and in both cases calamitous for the parties involved. Better it would
have been for the poets to never sing of love, for then maybe we would not have discovered it within ourselves. Soon anyway the events took a turn for the worse and war was upon us. Yet I was glad to have come now, if only alone and vaguely grieving.