Shakti: The Feminine Divine (17 page)

‘A strange woman has emerged, seemingly out of nowhere, and there can be little doubt that she intends to do battle with you, Your Highness, on behalf of the devas!’ the leader of his spy network informed him, with less than his usual impassivity. ‘This virago does not carry weapons, nor will she don armour. Some are saying that the devas offered her their most potent weapons from their personal arsenal, but she accepted nothing, not even the gift of a lion, offered by Himalaya. This woman declared she needed no implements to deal with the great Mahishasura!’

The buffalo demon laughed out loud, secretly wondering if his mirth really sounded as uneasy and forced as it did to his own ears. He glanced at Rakhtabija, who looked back at him stony-faced, before addressing his informants, ‘Obviously, this creature would not need the celestial weapons that have proved as impotent as their wielders! I find her impertinence charming, though. Capture this madwoman and take her to one of the breeding farms, where she can make herself useful in the manner intended for the fairer sex, instead of disturbing the peace!’

Noting the unusual reluctance evinced by his crack troops towards carrying out his orders, he had one of the stragglers beheaded on the spot to inspire the rest. They raced off at once. He waited impatiently to hear from this contingent of his most reliable soldiers, but only a lone survivor returned, throwing himself at his feet. ‘My king, I implore you to have mercy, but there was nothing we could do in the face of such black sorcery! They came at us from nowhere and we could not even see the things that killed so many so quickly… It was over before
I even knew what was happening. They are all dead!’ the battle-hardened veteran gibbered in paroxysms of extreme terror.

Mahisha felt his rage mounting at the sight. He aimed a kick at his head, hoping to shake some coherence out of him. ‘If you wish to remain alive and in possession of your wretched tongue, you will quit that infernal blubbering. Tell me exactly what happened in a lucid, coherent manner, as befitting a soldier of the finest army the three worlds have seen!’

‘Of course, sire!’ he began, gulping down his tears. ‘She was so beautiful! None of us had seen anyone like her; she was the very prototype of the ideal woman, conjured up from fragments of our dreams and intimate longings. It was inconceivable that we harm a hair on her head! As men, we were incapable of advancing on her with the intent to harm her divine person. The last thing I remember was her bewitching smile, which held us all transfixed!

‘The weapons came out of nowhere. She must have conjured them using witchcraft, as there was nobody else. The last thing I remember was that my unit had been decimated to the last man. In fact, I don’t know how I came to be spared!’

‘You say that she was beautiful?’ Mahisha enquired of the wretched soul at his feet, who smiled foolishly despite himself as he recalled the vision of loveliness that had annihilated an entire division of Mahisha’s best men without even getting her hair mussed up.

The love-struck grin did it. The buffalo demon barked out his next order, ‘Make sure that lover boy here does not tarry too long before catching up with his departed comrades! My mercy will ensure that the witch he is besotted with will join him as well.’

Mahisha watched dispassionately as the snivelling creature
was dragged away. But with a sudden air of resignation he reflected that witchcraft capable of depriving his best men of their judgement and killing them with ease was no laughing matter. He was well aware of the boon, which his father had won for him, according to which he was not destined to meet his end at the hands of a male. The devas had long prayed for a female god who would destroy him and the unwelcome thought that their improbable wish had been granted gnawed away at him incessantly.

Not willing to assign mere menials to take care of the pesky woman, he sent for Ciksura and Camara. While he waited impatiently for them to show up, the exigency of the situation impressed itself upon him. For brief moments, he wanted to hasten his meeting with the woman warrior. He transported himself to the hospitable realms of fantasy, where a woman clad in red lay dead under his hooves, drenched in her blood after being eviscerated by a marauding pair of deadly horns. The vision made the buffalo demon smile.

He almost got to his feet, meaning to perform the deed, but hesitated. The shilly-shallying, so alien to his nature, brought back his acute unease a hundredfold. To his relief Ciksura and Camara arrived just then. ‘Don’t bother to capture the witch!’ he snapped at them, biting out the words, which had to be extricated with all the force he could muster, as they seemed to be stuck in his throat. ‘Tear her to pieces and feed her flesh to the curs!’

Suddenly, the din of battle could be heard in every corner of the sabha where Mahisha had been ensconced with his cabinet. Before the eyes of the astonished courtiers appeared the warrior goddess, mounted on a lion. She wore impenetrable armour and every one of her thousand arms brandished a
deadly weapon, in clear contrast to her reported disdain for warlike paraphernalia. The awful clanging sounds they made— the twang of a drawn bowstring, the dull thump of an axe being hefted—as well as the deathly tolling of bells rung in anticipation of mass slaughter and the harsh blare of conch shells could be heard clearly.

It was as though they were all victims of a mysterious illness that was producing terrifying hallucinations. Their comfortable surroundings suddenly changed to a hostile land, where they found themselves in a fight for their lives, with the odds stacked impossibly against them. Single-handedly, they saw the thousand-armed goddess slay them all, allowing no quarter. They closed their eyes to shut the abominable sightings, unable to believe that the grisly end projected in front of their disbelieving eyes was real—until it overtook them. They willed themselves to wake up, but nobody managed the feat. All too soon there remained only scattered and bloodied remnants of the formidable asura hordes, which had formerly captured every inch of the three worlds

The asuras had not gone down without a fight, as even in a dream they would not quit. They fought her with every one of the weapons in their possession, but their swords, lances, spears, javelins and clubs did them little good. The goddess broke them as if they were toys, barely batting an eyelash when they charged at her en masse. Billions of strange unidentifiable missiles descended on them, burning them up from within. They fell to the ground, with their insides scooped out, leaving nothing but hollow husks.

In blind panic, the asura hordes turned on each other, imagining themselves under attack by thousands upon thousands of legions that had emerged from the she-devil’s
husky little sighs of exasperation. More asuras fell by their hands as they lost control of their besieged senses, using their preferred sharp-edged weapons to cut off their heads and lay their grisly little sacrifices at her feet. Their lolling tongues seemed to lap at the blood that flowed freely everywhere. Headless corpses littered the battlefield. The sight seemed to excite the goddess, who had thus far been an island of tranquillity while she meted out gruesome death on all sides.

Seeming to bestir herself, Durga rode out into the press of men on the back of her lion, which was on a rampage of its own, determined to match its mistress’s impressive death tally. Her thousand arms were a whirlwind of destruction as they cut, sliced and hacked their way past the collapsing defence put up by the demons. She lopped off many a head and sliced bodies open from end to end with her long sword. Her club smashed into skulls, spilling a mess of grey matter on the bloodied ground, and smashed chests to puncture the lungs or hearts.

Great numbers were impaled with her spear, adorning the battlefield as grim symbols of inevitable death, all the while looking on lifelessly at more bodies pinioned to the ground with tridents, the puncture marks still oozing blood. A great axe hacked off many a limb, festooning the place with severed body parts that continued to flop around like a multitude of ghastly fishes.

Mighty asuras who had never before been at the receiving end of such a relentless onslaught of senseless violence, and thought they had seen it all, fell to the ground in a swoon. Before they could reassure themselves that none of it was real, they realized the nightmare was far from over and would culminate only when their hearts stopped beating. They fell
to their knees before Durga, the worst of oppressors who had somehow bedevilled them, crying piteously and begging her for mercy, only to be cut down remorselessly.

Mahahanu, one of the key players in Mahisha’s evil empire, had built his fortune on the bones of his enemies whilst feasting on their flesh. He had not achieved his high station and stomach for carnage by fleeing from a fight. As far as he was concerned, there was nothing to match the thrill of a fresh kill, even if the circumstances were somewhat beyond his comprehension.

Durga represented a delicious challenge. He was filled with excitement at the idea of wrestling her to the ground before overpowering her. He flaunted his arousal at her, hoping to goad her into making a fatal error. He need not have bothered. His death was destined to come about too quickly for his enemy’s taste but was deservedly gruesome. Mahahanu of the deathly jaws was wiped out when his heart exploded mid-pelvic thrust. He died with blood spurting forth from every one of his orifices.

Tamra, Parivirata and Bidala attempted a three-pronged attack on the warrior, who sat astride a lion with nary a hair out of place. What followed could hardly be called an epic contest; the goddess seemed to do nothing more than yawn delicately and raise her bow. Faster than the eye could follow, every inch of the bodies of the three villains, including the heavily armoured parts, were pierced through with arrows. They swayed momentarily like grotesquely overblown pin cushions before landing heavily on the prickly bed that supported their dead weight.

Ciksura and Camara stood side-by-side and watched in cold fury as their forces threw themselves at the lone warrior with the same results that may be expected if they had dived off a
steep cliff into a rocky outcrop below. Determined to do their duty by their king, they had begun to put their forces together to capture and kill Durga; instead, they now found themselves in the midst of a raging battle that was going really badly for them.

The bemusement vanished with their doubts when they saw their forces decimated by a power greater than any they had ever encountered. There was no mistaking the metallic scent of blood and the rank odour of urine, liquid faeces and perspiring armpits. The unmistakable sounds of war—neighing horses, trumpeting elephants, clashing chariot wheels, cries of savagery and exhortation, grunts of pain, agonized wailing and cries of the dying and the pleas of those who would follow the dear departed—could be heard. The feel of thronging bodies or the hide of an animal excited by all the blood and adrenaline— none of it could be denied.

Ciksura and Camara’s sharply honed survival instincts kicked into gear, even as their rage found its head at the sight of so much carnage. They were the heralds of death, appointed by Mahisha, and they would be damned if they allowed a mere female to beat them at their own game. In silent agreement, they decided to charge at her together.

Ciksura would go in for a full frontal attack, stun her with a lightning-fast blow that she would be unable to defend herself against and yank Durga off her mount by the hair, before hacking off her scalp. Camara would dive under the great beast and plunge his dagger between its ribs and into the heart, stopping it forever in its tracks. Then they would drag her corpse back to Mahisha, minus the entrails.

Ciksura dealt a savage blow to the lion’s jaw to incapacitate it before aiming his spear at Durga’s heaving chest. The attack
should have stunned the mount and the rider, for his aim had been true, but both appeared unaffected, whereas his own forearm appeared to be shattered from the impact. He could only watch spellbound and with blank disbelief as the devi released her lance. From a great distance he saw that it had shattered his shield and ribcage with a single thrust. He died even before the lance was plucked out from his chest cavity.

Mahisha’s other lieutenant saw Ciksura go down and hurled his javelin at the goddess’s exposed flank. It bounced off her hip chain and fell powerlessly to the ground. Camara gaped in speechless wonder—the exact same lance had felled a rampaging rhino at fifty paces only a few short days ago and now a woman’s ornament had proved too much for it. It was impossible! His thoughts were interrupted when Durga’s beast slit his throat with a single swipe of its sharp claws. He bled to death in seconds.

Mahisha’s army from hell was in full rout, but there was nowhere to run except into the clammy embrace of impending doom. Most of their generals were gone and there was no sign of Mahisha or the terrible Rakhtabija. The end was near; for that at least the survivors were thankful. Thick rivulets of blood broadened into a red river in spate as more and more emptied the contents of their heart to add to its volume, until the endless outpouring threatened to drown the three worlds in a flood of red liquid.

The End of the Buffalo Demon

I
N THE MIDST
of the bloodletting, Durga looked off into the distance. Mahisha realized with a helpless start that her eyes were boring into his soul; the heat of the gaze seared his insides and he welcomed the excruciating pain, rather than recoiling from it. He needed it to fan the flames of his fury. The anger would give his vaunted strength the extra edge.

The buffalo demon had been buffeted by the same symptoms of mass hysteria or whatever the hell it was that had afflicted his followers. All he could do was watch in impotent frustration as his inner circle disappeared from the sabha where they had been conversing and was ruthlessly stamped out before his eyes on a distant battlefield. His mighty armies seemed to have met the same fate. There was no way of knowing what was real and what wasn’t.

He could feel his throne as it hugged the contours of his backside and he registered the comforting presence of Rakhtabija, who alone stood somewhere near him, a stolid
and comforting presence as always. Then, with a wrenching suddenness, the tenuous link to a constantly shifting reality vanished and every prosaic reminder of his life was snatched away. Instead he found himself in a scooped-out hollow of land, with massive blocks of volcanic rock dominating the entire landscape to the north and south. The ground beneath his feet was stony and as he took a few steps, the jagged edges seemed intent on cutting his feet to ribbons. But he was the buffalo demon and he could outrun the swiftest steeds in the land with his bare feet. Besides, they were so toughened that a few sharp rocks certainly could not hope to pierce them or give discomfort. He plodded on, grimly reconnoitring his surroundings, noting the craggy heights of the massive boulders that towered over his own immense physical stature.