RAMAYANA SERIES Part 4_KING OF DHARMA (43 page)

FOUR

When Luv came sprinting around the outcrop, two pairs of eyes instantly snapped around to stare at him. The two men on the second wagon looked startled to see him. I know that look. They think I’m Kush and can’t figure out how he could have run off in that direction and then appeared again from this direction. He was used to that response. He yelled at them as he sprinted past: “Stay where you are!” They looked too startled to try anything anyway.  

Barely had he run past the wagon when he heard the sound of pounding hooves from ahead, around the next spur of rock. A few broken boulders lay on the path, their insides gleaming rusty red where they had broken open after falling in a minor landslide during the last monsoon. Others had been pushed over deliberately to block the path, for this was a popular ambush point on the raj-marg. The sound of hooves and rattling of wagon wheels was very loud by then and he knew better than to run around a blind turn. Instead he swerved and leaped up onto the largest broken boulder. He could smell the iron in the air here, so rich was the vein in the lohit stone. These hills were rife with minerals, good pure ore for making steel. 

He stood in the relaxed archer position that Bearface had taught them, waiting. 

Don’t call your guru that name, Maatr’s voice said in his mind’s ear, He is Gurudev to you, remember! 

Yes, Maa. 

The position that Bearface had taught them, the lazy cobra, their guru had called it, was now second nature. He waits, seemingly indolent, swaying lazily, but the instant threat appears, he strikes with lightning-speed. 

Luv didn’t know if he moved at lightning-speed, but the instant the wagon came into sight, he let fly. The first arrow hit its mark and the second was flying even before the wagon had rolled fully into view. A man shouted out with pain and tumbled off the wagon, with two arrows sprouting, one from each shoulder – the first had clearly been Kush’s work. The driver screamed like a wounded horse and clutched at the arrow quivering in the meat of his thigh – the head must have struck the thighbone, hence the vibration and the extreme pain. Then the wagon rolled past and the next came into view, and still no sight of Kush. 

Damnit, Luv thought, feeling the heat rise in his face, cheeks burning. Where are you? 

The men on this wagon were better prepared and better shots. Three well aimed arrows came blurring at Luv and he had to somersault sideways to dodge both. Landing on his bare feet on the rubble of the lohitstone, he felt warmth on his waist where one had nicked the skin just enough to draw a bead or two. He loosed off two quick ones before the men could shoot the second volley, and both hit their marks. Both men dropped their own bows, one grunting, the other choosing the strong silent response. 

Then the rest of the grama came into view, riding fast, faster than any grama ought to have been especially on this twisting treacherous neck of the raj-marg, and everything began to move very quickly, so quickly that Luv felt his senses slowing to a crawl as they always did in a fight, the world popping into brilliant crystalline clarity and colour: the veins on every leaf visible, every knothole on the wooden slats of a wagon’s side in view, hearing every grinding creak in a wheel, smelling the raw red odors of freshly spilled human blood mixed in with the pungent smell of horse sweat, man-sweat and the rusty tang of the lohitstone. 

The flaps of the following wagons opened and revealed armed men. Burly, hirsute, armoured men in the familiar purple and black of Ayodhya’s inner guard. PFs, or some new extension of the PF regiment – for PFs were meant to guard the inner city, not ride with trading gramas as hired escorts. Whatever they were, whomever they were, there were a lot of them, too many for Luv to simply disarm. He would have to fight them seriously to survive, kill some quite likely. And even then it would be touch and go. 

The good warrior knows when to retreat, said his guru’s gruff voice in his ear. The code of the kshatriya means nothing if there is no kshatriya left to fight! 

Agreeing with Bearface – sorry, Gurudev – was his mother’s voice in his other ear. Run, Luv, run! You can’t fight them all! 

Ji, Maatr, jaisi aagya, he said in his mind as he began the heavy task of fitting arrows to bow and aiming not to maim or disarm but to disable, possibly kill. I would love to run. But not without my brother. 

“Damnit Kush, where the hell are you?” he said aloud as he began shooting. 

***

Kush emerged from the wagon to see his twin brother standing on a pile of lohistone landslide, the edges of the outcrop at his back, loosing arrows with concentrated ease. He appeared to be single-handedly battling what looked like at least five quads of armed PFs, even though PFs never ventured armed and uniformed outside the Ayodhya city limits. Clearly this grama was a notable exception to the usual rules. 

Which makes sense, considering the cargo they’re carrying, he thought as he sprinted away from Luv and to the other side of the raj-marg, unnoticed by either his brother or the men busy trying to kill him. In three deft leaps and grabs he had climbed a tree and was standing on a near-horizontal branch twice as thick as his own thigh. It would have bent and drooped under a grown man’s weight but it took his own lithe form easily, and he steadied his left shoulder against the trunk, took aim at his first target and loosed. The man took the arrow in the meaty muscle joining shoulder to neck, and it popped out through his collarbone with a small explosion of blood. The man yelped like a pup and dropped the javelin he had been about to fling at Luv. 

Without turning to look directly at Kush, Luv cried out with joy. “Kush!” Then added in a disgruntled tone even as he continued loosing and dodging: “Took your time, didn’t you!”

“Had to make a short visit to the royal treasury,” Kush called back, grinning. He continued loosing, and saw his third target drop, roaring with frustration and fury as he tried to clutch at the arrow sprouting from his shoulderblade. Hit the bone, hurts like blazes. That voice was old Nakhudi’s, who always seemed to know how to inflict maximum pain on the enemy without actually killing them. Only male enemies, as she liked to remind them, grinning to reveal her astonishingly white gleaming teeth in her buffalo-dark face. 

The fight continued for another few moments, the PFs on and around the halted wagons trying with admirable skill to face an attack on two diagonally opposed fronts with diminishing success. Their leader, an efficient and intelligent-seeming fellow, tried to rally his men to use the wagons as shielding, while attempting to send a pair of quads around to outflank Kush – Luv was bolstered by the outcrop which would have taken hours to cut over and around – but the brothers had them at the deadliest cross-angle two bowmen could take, and the broken stones shielded Luv while the tree and foliage shielded Kush, and while many arrows and javelins were aimed at them, none came closer than a single wayward arrow that thunked into the tree branch between Kush’s big toe and its neighbour. 

Then, as fierce fights usually did, this one dissipated like a puddle evaporating under a mid-day sun, and suddenly the captain of the PFs was waving his arms in surrender. 

Kush grinned and dropped down from his perch, making his way cautiously towards the halted wagons. He had his eye on some men at the back who might, if still feisty enough, try to fling a javelin or two as he approached. But every one of them and all the others as well had at least one arrow in their arm, leg or back, and one massively built chap who had refused to settle down with just two or even three arrows had four bristling from his extremities, lying on his back and cursing the sky roundly with a raised fist, turning the air blue with his choice of profanities. Kush grinned even wider, making a note of several for future reference. Living in an ashram community as they did, good curses were hard to come by! 

Luv had leaped up to the tall broken lohitstone boulder, keeping his weapon trained on the PFs as his brother approached. Kush winked at him as he came and saw Luv shake his head in mock-disgust – complaining about the moments when Kush had disappeared from sight earlier. The PFs quietened as he reached them, holding down their moaning and grunting and cursing as they saw the ‘men’ who had bested them up close for the first time. 

FIVE

“You should have seen their faces,” Kush said, slapping his thigh with delight. “They looked like brahmins who had eaten ashubh bhojan by mistake and didn’t know whether to spit it out rudely or swallow it and violate dharma!” 

“And they had so many arrows sticking out of their arms and legs,” Luv said, “if they stood close together in a bunch, they would have looked like a giant hedgehog!” 

Both boys laughed in the high-pitched tone of young men whose voices had not been altered by maturity yet.

Nakhudi grunted non-commitally, shaking her head wistfully. “You boys. One of these days, you’ll run up against someone who’s a match for you two, and there will be hell to pay. How many gramas have you held up and robbed until now?”

“Nakhudi!” Luv said plaintively. “We didn’t rob anybody! We just took back a fair share of what Ayodhya takes from the people unlawfully, that’s all.”

“That’s right,” Kush said, equally outraged. “Whatever we took from those gramas belonged to the people, and we took it to give it back to the people anyway. So it wasn’t robbing!”

Nakhudi looked at their two young faces, identical chins turned up stubborn to point at her, dusky cheeks flushed with their recent adventures and their present outrage. She shook her head slowly. She had been picking out berries from her thatched basket to offer them: the boys loved berries and she always kept some just for their visits. She put down the handful of choice berries she had picked out lovingly from the basket and stood. Her head almost bumped the roof of her little hut when she drew herself to her full height, for it was built low to withstand the sweeping monsoon winds that sometimes washed this hillock in the midst of the deep woods. She glared down at the boys. Standing to her full height, she topped their tousled heads by easily twice their height; she was taller than any woman they had ever seen, taller than most men they knew, and her scarred broad face, flat nose, shining dark eyes and formidable bulk all combined to give her a fierce aspect. She used all of that as well as the hoarse voice that lent her an air of danger and made her seem angry even when she wasn’t, to deliberately intimidate them. 

“Listen to me, and listen well, for I’ll only say this once,” she rasped, poking an outstretched finger into Luv’s chest and then at Kush’s chest. To the boys, strong as they were for their age, it felt like being struck by the blunt end of a thin staff or rod. She cracked her knuckles and stretched her hands, as if limbering up for more aggressive action, which only added to the air of threat. “Ayodhya makes the laws in this part of the world. By Indra’s hundred eyes, what am I saying? Ayodhya is the law. This jungle may seem unpopulated and a long way from any city, but it’s still part of the Kosala nation. And by law, it falls under Ayodhyan jurisdiction and governance. That governance includes the right to tax the people as required from time to time. So don’t call what they take unlawful.”

They glanced at each other doubtfully. Suddenly, the same two young bowmen who had stood upto an entire grama protected by armed warriors had been reduced to just two startled young boys. It had taken only a change of tone and attitude on Nakhudi’s part; the hermit woman always had that effect on them. Part of it was a result of the respect and awe they felt for her warrior skills and longstanding comradeship with their mother. But they were also scared of her. Nakhudi when angered was a fearsome thing to behold. For reasons they could not wholly fathom, she was clearly angered now. And they didn’t like it one bit. 

“Now, you boys may feel that after the droughts and famines and other ill winds that have harried the kingdom over the last several years, Ayodhya ought not to be taxing the people and I can’t say I disagree with you. Kali Herself knows that times are hard enough as it is, and the tax is only one more back-breaking burden piled on top of too many others. But that’s not for you or me to decide. That’s Ayodhya’s decision. And if Ayodhya chooses to levy the tax, then that makes it a lawful tax. You boys saw the suffering of a few people who reside in these remote parts and felt sorry for them. So you decided to hold up a grama or two – or is it three? How many is it anyway?”

She snapped her fingers right by Kush’s ear, loud enough that it sounded like a twig snapping underfoot. 

The boy didn’t flinch but said sullenly, “Three so far. But one was only—”

“Be quiet while your elders are talking.” She continued decisively, “So you hold up three gramas in as many seasons, and take a wagonload from each one. And you distribute the contents of that wagonload to the poorest, most needy people you can find around here. And it’s true, the few people who live here in this Durgaforsaken jungle are really poor and truly needy. And it’s a great service you do them, by giving them those provisions. I don’t deny that one whit. But make no mistake about this one truth: those wagonloads of goods you take by force don’t belong to the people anymore. The minute Ayodhya’s tax-collector’s claim it, it belongs to Ayodhya. So you are robbing Ayodhya. I’m not saying it’s not for a good cause; indeed, I agree that it’s a very good cause. But that doesn’t make it right, or just, or even lawful. So don’t go fooling yourself about the rightness or lawfulness of what you’re doing. Understand?”

Both boys glared at her with such identical expressions of righteous indignation on their handsome young faces, she was instantly reminded of someone else. A man’s face, older, leaner, darker-complected. Much darker-complected, for they had inherited their mother’s wheatish colouring and more than a smidgen of their grandfather’s lightness of skin. But the features were the same. So much the same that looking at them now, with those defiant expressions on their young faces, it made her want to grin and burst out laughing. She restrained herself. She knew how much they respected and looked up to her and this was an important lesson she was giving them. Their mother had been right. ‘Be a friend to them, Nakhu,’ she had said quietly to her at the beginning, when she had first come to live here. It had been soon after she had rebuilt her old ties with her old friend and sometime mistress and they had grown close enough to speak heart’s truth to one another again. ‘Be the friend to them that I cannot be, because I am their mother. And as a friend, teach them the things that they will not heed if I try to teach them. For oftentimes, young boys and girls will heed the same advice when given by an outsider when they would shrug off a parent saying the same things.’ And Vedavati, as she was now called, had smiled wistfully and shaken her head before going on with more than a trace of sadness: ‘Because my boys are growing up already. And I fear they may be growing too fast.’

Nakhudi had taken her former mistress’s and lifelong friend’s words to heart. She had wanted to give the twins this talk ever since they had burst into her hut last monsoon, flushed and bursting with pride from the thrill of having successfully waylaid the first grama and having taken an entire wagonload of grain from the tax collectors. But she had remembered their Maatr’s words, gritted her teeth, and bided her time until now. She had even laughed with them and celebrated their ‘success’ at the time, although when they returned in the autumn to crow about waylaying the second grama, her smile had been forced and her joy a pretense. This time, she could not take anymore. It was time to stop being a friend and be something more. Perhaps even past time. A grama guarded by six or seven quads of Ayodhyan PFs? Parvati protect us all! Even allowing for some youthful exaggeration, they had still put their little heads into a tiger’s jaws this time. It was one thing to hold up a tax grama or a trading grama and take away some grain or other provisions. This new shenanigan was in a different league altogether. She shuddered to think what would have happened had their little adventure gone awry. After all, for all their skill with the dhanush-baan, they were still just boys. Not yet adolescents. And if they continued on this path, not likely to achieve that stage of maturation. Yes, Vedavati, she said silently now, your boys are indeed growing up too fast. And I think there is nothing anyone can do to slow or stop it. 

“But I can correct you at least,” she said aloud. They both frowned simultaneously, and where their frowns met in the center of their foreheads, between their brows, two little diagonal crinkles appeared, like tiny crow’s feet. Her heart leaped with emotion. Their father had the exact same crinkles on his forehead when he frowned. That little detail, more than all the similarities of face and body shape and attitude, brought home to her once more just who and what they truly were. And why it was so important that they be bred right. She raised her palm, showing it to Kush, who was closest – and this time he did flinch, for she was close enough to slap him if she wanted, and an open-handed slap from her would hurt far more than just harsh words. But she only placed it on his left shoulder, firmly and quite gently in fact. 

In a much gentler tone, she said, “I can correct you and show you when you’re wrong. For that is what friends do for one another. And it is time you realized that you have gone too far. By taking on this grama today and injuring all those PFs, you’ve not just stolen another wagonload of provisions from the tax collector, you’ve challenged the military might and authority of Ayodhya herself. And that’s not something you boast and laugh about, young men.” She patted Kush’s shoulder affectionately, tempering her tirade with friendship now, before she lost their trust entirely. “That’s all I want you both to understand. As a friend who cares about your well-being,” she added, looking from one to the other slowly.

“They weren’t provisions,” Luv said sullently, looking down at the dungpacked floor of the little hut that had been home to Nakhudi these past two years.

“What was that?” she asked sharply.

“He said, they weren’t provisions,” Kush replied. “The wagonload we took today. It was something else. Something different.”

And he shot her a glance that was at once a defiant challenge as well as a triumphant comeback: See? We’re not just young children to be corrected and talked down to. We did something today that children could never do. 

Nakhudi swallowed. Something stirred deep inside her belly, some long-sleeping snake of forgotten fear. 

“Show me,” she said shortly. And prayed to all the avatars of the Goddess she could name.