PRINCE IN EXILE (14 page)
Kausalya turned back and saw Sumitra looking at her. Sumitra’s delicate face, as light-boned and fragile as a bird’s, was pinched with concern. Her eyebrows rose, asking the same question that Kausalya was asking herself: what is Kaikeyi up to this time?
Kausalya had no answer, but the question worried her a great deal.
On the elephant ahead, Rama touched Sita’s hand gently. She looked up at him, smiling. The smile faded slowly as she saw the expression on his face. A moment ago, his dark-complexioned features had been lit up by that luminous blueish glow that she was already coming to love. Now, he looked suddenly grim.
She followed the direction of his gaze. He seemed to be looking at a tiny knot of women beside the palace gates through which they had just entered. It appeared to be three elderly matrons—daiimaas, she thought instantly—herding a strikingly beautiful if somewhat overweight woman away from the royal procession. The woman was in quite a state, her sari dripping wet and filthy, as if she’d been rolling in a ditch somewhere, her long lustrous hair knotted and billowing wildly, the front ends of her blouse unknotted and open to reveal her ample bosom. Sita took her to be some madwoman, one of the many driven to ludicrous ecstasy by the sight of Rama or one of the other princes. Rama, probably, for even now the woman’s eyes were focused clearly on the foremost elephant, looking directly at them. The daiimaas attempted to lead her away, in the direction of the palace no less, but she twisted and turned, her eyes riveted to Sita’s husband.
Just then, their elephant lurched to a halt, and began performing a peculiar sideways shuffling movement, turning to bring itself in line with the palace steps, where its occupants would dismount. Sita lost sight of the madwoman for a moment. Then, as the elephant finished its half-turn, she was given a last glimpse of the lady—for she was clearly of noble lineage, judging from the cautious manner in which the daiimaas were handling her—and a tiny dagger of ice entered Sita’s breast, piercing through to her heart, the same sharp pinprick of coldness that she had felt as a girl when she had learned that she had no mother.
The woman was shouting a single word over and over again, her head lolling madly like a jogini in the grip of an ecstatic trance. Even without being able to hear her voice above the deafening sounds of the conches, Sita was certain that the word was ‘Rama’.
EIGHT
From the edge of his aerie atop Lanka, the king of vultures brooded angrily
The aerie of the bird asuras was set upon the highest tower of the black fortress, a thousand feet above the ocean battering the rocky shores of the island. On the north side it overlooked one of the many volcanoes on the island-kingdom of Lanka. One of the more active ones, constantly spewing forth great geysers of blazing lava. The heat reached all the way to the aerie, warming the very stone of the tower. It kept the younglings warm and the other ground-bound asuras at bay, and these were good enough reasons to suffer the stench of sulphur and gouts of black smoke that drifted up night and day, obscuring the rest of the island of Lanka.
On the south side, the aerie overlooked the ocean itself, brackish and perpetually angry, like the asura king who made his home upon its waters. Turned blood-red by the angry light of sunset, the ocean stretched to infinity in every direction. Running parallel to the shore, spanning the length of the curved sticklike shape of the island, the black fortress rose like a living thing, a dark grimy pile of greatstone, like the carapaced shell of some titanic ocean creature.
Nestled upon the open ramparts, the aerie was laden with enormous stacks of hay, saplings and bushels of leaves, hauled up by the bird-beasts and tamped down with their beaks and talons until the tower top resembled some lofty Himalayan nest rather than the roof of a fortress.
At present the aerie was occupied by only a few dozen younglings and a half-dozen decrepit and crippled old bird-beasts, the pathetic remnants of what had once been the greatest flying warrior host on earth. The air was filled with the cranky calls of the younglings as they fought and scrabbled around for scraps. A pair of slightly more mature vulture-gryphons were daring one another to take the first leap off the rampart wall, egged on by the rest of their younger cousins. The resulting cacophony was almost loud enough to drown out the gnashing and booming of the primordial juggernaut below Jatayu’s talons.
Almost, but not quite. From time to time, Jatayu could feel the solid rock beneath its claws tremble with the vibrations from the volcano below, and the tips of its wings, hanging a good thirty feet down, shivered with the searing heat. A fresh geyser erupted, throwing up great gouts of red molten magma shot through with black slag, and the fledglings squawked nervously and leaped back into the aerie. They cackled to each other about Jatayu’s fearlessness in staying poised there despite the ferocity of the eruptions.
Jatayu barely heard their awed squawking and cackling. The bird-beast was angry, and it had been angry for the whole of the day. On its arrival at the island-kingdom three days earlier, it had found only the old ones of its flock in the aerie, those pathetic youngling-minders that had been too badly crippled, old or feeble-minded to undertake the long flight north for the Lord of Lanka’s invasion.
The olduns had nevertheless received their vulture-king with a mixture of superstitious awe and fear. Once they were reassured that it was indeed Jatayu itself and not their lord’s aatma returning to haunt its last roost, they had welcomed it back as best as they were able. Jatayu had been consoled and fed and had its wounds tended to, and even rested these past two nights and days. It had stayed in the large tower-roost long enough to grow weary of the fledglings’ constant squawking and squabbling. When it slept, the little ones crawled and flapped and leaped over its large body with an utter disregard for Jatayu’s lordly stature or its currently injured condition. Normally, Jatayu would have occupied the far side of the aerie, surrounded by the pick of the plumpest females of its flock, all its needs tended to with lavish care. But there were no females now, nor any males, and the younglings had the run of the entire aerie.
Physically, Jatayu felt almost normal, and it was certain that a few moon-spans of rest and feeding would restore its robust health in full. What it was unable to accept was the loss of its entire flock. It had been bitterly disappointed to find that not a single one of the winged warriors that had set out with it on the flight to Mithila had returned. Every last one had been wiped out by the Brahm-astra. Even though it had witnessed the awesome ferocity of the celestial weapon, it had still harboured a faint trace of hope that somehow, somewhere, a survivor had managed to escape the dragon breath of the mantra and would find its way home.
But three entire days had passed, and just today, Jatayu had made a few brief flights to chase down and interrogate many of the southward-flying birds who had fled the environs of Mithila in sheer terror. All those it questioned roughly were unanimous on one count: there had been no survivors. When Jatayu had told one of the birds, a particularly pompous white swan leading its harem, that it, Jatayu, had managed to survive the Brahmastra, the puffed-up fool had cocked its head in mock dismay and issued a cackling call that was echoed all down the curving line of its harem flock. Jatayu had wanted to tear off the stupid bird’s head with one snap of its mighty beak, but its strength was still depleted and it had already flown far from the island in its chase after the swan flock. It chose instead to turn back, its heart leaden enough to weigh it down until its wings brushed the tips of the foam-flecked waves all the way back to the black fortress.
Clearly, the swan-king had been wrong in its assumption: after all, Jatayu itself had survived, but as its interrogations continued and the same message was repeated by a variety of other south-flying species, Jatayu was forced to admit that it was probably the only survivor of the devastation wrought by the Brahm-astra.
Apart from one other.
Jatayu’s mannish features darkened to an ugly grimace as it recalled the block of glassy red stone that had accompanied it on the return voyage home to Lanka. The block had been suspended beneath the Pushpak, and from its perch atop the celestial vehicle Jatayu had been able to look down directly at the form murkily embedded in the heart of the veined stone. It had taken every ounce of its willpower to retain its grip on the Pushpak instead of letting go as it dearly longed to do. Had it possessed the strength to fly on its own to some other safe clime where it would be rid for ever of the king of rakshasas, it would have done so. But its oozing wounds and loss of feathers and wing muscle had compelled it to cling on to the speeding air-chariot and endure the ten faces of Ravana staring up at it all the way to Lanka. At least the asura lord’s eyes had been closed, all twenty of them.
Besides, it had had no other place to go, Jatayu mused now as it raised its bald head to peer around the dark roost filled with squabbling, crying younguns. The last of its breed were all here in Lanka. Apart from this pathetic clutch, there were no more of the giant bird-beasts that had once dominated the skies. This was all that remained of a proud ruling clan, a few tottering old fogies that could barely spread a wing, and a score and ten younguns too small to know a jatayu from a garuda if they ever saw one.
The thought of Garuda brought to mind the recollection that the lord of winged beings still lived, and ruled over a flourishing and prosperous clan, or even a number of clans by now, up in Swarga-lok, the heavenly realm. But that celestial plane was long since barred to Jatayu. No, here on Prithvi-lok, this was all the family it had left. And the only hope it now clung to was that some of these spitting, quarrelling young brats would grow up to breed a new dynasty of bird-beasts as magnificent as the ones Jatayu had grown with.
The image of its youth brought back a flood of memories of times when Jatayu had basked in an eminence second only to Garuda itself, father of all birdkind. Ah, those had been the days. Before these wretched warmongering asuras had appeared on the scene, when the name Ravana hadn’t been in the vocabulary of any language yet known.
Jatayu was torn out of its memories by a blood-chilling sound. At first it assumed that one of the younglings fooling about on the rampart had fallen over and its wings were too badly frozen with fear for it to lift itself in time to avoid the leaping geysers of lava below. It turned and scanned the aerie. No, the younguns were still safely in the nest, all looking as startled as Jatayu itself, peering around to identify the source of the scream. The olduns shuffled and hopped around agitatedly, calling out to each other and to Jatayu. The bird-king felt sick of their constant mewling and complaints. Was this its future? To live amongst feebles and younguns too nervous to take their first leap? Bah. It should never have flown towards the Pushpak in the first place. It would have been better off battling the crab-rats, or even rksas if it came to it. Anything would have been better than this wretched existence.
Then it raised its head to peer in the direction of the setting sun and saw something that made it change its mind all at once. A pair of kumbha-rakshasas had emerged on to the ramparts a few hundred metres west of the aerie. Had they been closer, Jatayu might have suspected them of coming up here in search of younguns - rakshasas would eat anything if they were hungry enough. And those damn nagas and uragas salivated —if snakeasuras could be said to salivate— at the very scent of young jatayus.
Jatayu scraped its talons along the rim of the rampart, issuing a screeling cry that lacked much of its former vigour but was nonetheless piercing enough to make the younguns cower nervously and a distant flock of swallows, some two yojanas out to sea, veer away and take a major detour from their flight path. For good measure, it raked its claws along the edge of the rampart at an angle designed to cause the most nerve-grating sound. It scored deep long scars in the ancient volcanic rock, cracking one corner and sending it hurtling into the red-orange maw of the belching monster below.
The kumbha-rakshasas glanced up, peering in Jatayu’s direction, then turned back and resumed whatever it was they were doing. Satisfied that this wasn’t another snack-quest, Jatayu flapped its enormous wings and rose several yards into the air to gain a better angle to see what they were up to. Asuras never came up here if they could help it. The only thing the demon races loathed more than fresh running water was sunlight. For the kumbhas to brave even the dim glow of the waning sun meant that their chore was urgent.
Silhouetted against the fading orb, the pair hunched over something, vigorously working their disproportionately long ape-like arms. Jatayu flapped its way a little closer, its curiousity aroused now. What were they doing?
After a moment, the kumbhas stood upright again, raising up what seemed to be a very tall and thick pole with some kind of banner at its top. It was the banner that they had been struggling to fix upon the top of the pole. They embedded the pole into a depression in the rampart specially provided, and then checked to make sure it was firmly fixed.
That task accomplished, the two rakshasa-sergeants stepped back, lumbering in the leering, simian manner of their subspecies, and peered up at the banner atop the pole. It rippled desultorily in the slow wind for a moment, then a stronger gust caught it and snapped it fully open. It caught the gust and flapped noisily, surprisingly large once unfurled. Jatayu estimated that it was easily ten yards long and half as many in breadth. It had never seen a banner of this type before.