PRINCE IN EXILE (75 page)

Rama’s people held true to the command, their makeshift spears, rusting swords, rough-carved arrows all pointing outwards, ready to meet the nightmare looming out of the soggy mist-soaked jungles of Janasthana. Beads of moisture that might have been sweat rather than rain, an occasional twitch of a nerve, the flicker of an eye: these were the only clues to how much it cost them to maintain that rigid determined stance. 

The rakshasa frontline approached the rim of the clearing, their heavy feet sinking into the loamy mud. Suckholes appeared when they raised their hardened hooves, issuing a sound like a thousand leeches letting go at once. They came with a measured martial tread, baleful eyes fixed on their intended mortal victims, unhurried for once in their lives, secure in the knowledge that the slaughter was theirs for the wreaking. Slowly, they marched forward until they were within a few dozen yards short of the point where the forest ended and the mossy atoll of the clearing began. They came from all directions, enclosing the oval-shaped clearing completely, until, to an observer watching from the skies above—or from a rain-glistening oak tree on the southern rim of the clearing—they were as the outstretched fingers of a closing fist. It remained but to exert one final squeeze, and the insects within the circuit of that fist would be crushed to death. 

‘Steady,’ Lakshman called again, louder this time. He raised his right hand, pointing a finger skyward. 

The rakshasas gazed deep into the eyes of the mortals before them, seeking out suitable victims, choosing not only their opponents, but their bloodmeals. There was now no more than ten yards between the rakshasa line and the nearest humans. 

Trisiras appeared at the northern end of the clearing, striding forward through his frontline. His huge legs churned up mud and spattered it for yards around. He stopped, stared at the mound in the centre of the clearing where Rama stood, some fifty yards from the rakshasa frontline. He looked this way, then that, sniffing noisily, his piggish nostrils sucking up their own dripping effluents. He looked up at the tree beneath which he stood, sniffing suspiciously. Then turned his right and left heads around to gaze at the surrounding thicket. Finally, he looked down at the ground before his hooves with all three heads, grunting noisily. 

Rama waited. Lakshman waited, his right arm still raised. Sita waited, her clutch of arrows bristling before her. Bearface waited, his eyes flicking to Lakshman’s right hand, then to the three-headed rakshasa leader at the rim of the clearing. The mortals waited, sweat oozing down their foreheads and necks. 

The rakshasas waited, dribbling in anticipation. Diamantine droplets of rain dripped steadily, creating an orchestra of sounds. 

The family of parrots left the shelter of a tall bloodwood tree at the southern edge of the clearing and flew westwards in a high curving flight, calling raucously. The high branches of the tree swayed in their wake, discharging a shower on the rakshasas below. 

Trisiras grunted, then emitted a loud, choking sound, somewhere between a sneeze and a bark. He repeated it thrice, like a signal. Instantly, a rumbling rose from the rakshasa frontline, the sound of a thousand bellies churning with disappointment. Reluctantly, resentfully, the line of rakshasas began to step backwards, fading back into the mistbank. 

Lakshman turned sharply to his brother, making no attempt to hide his dismay. ‘They’re retreating. They suspect!’ 

From his position at the foot of the mound, Bearface spat an elaborate long-winded Sanskrit curse upon the ancestors of all rakshasas. At the edge of the clearing, a young tow-haired boy, no more than fifteen summers old, shivered violently as if with fever, and lowered his stiffly-held bow. The expression that covered his pale, thin face could have passed for either relief or regret. 

A ripple of unease passed through the mortals. Bearface turned to look up at Rama, his eyes pleading. The fresh wounds on his face and body affirmed his desperation. 

Rama responded by calling out in a loud insolent tone: ‘Trisiras.’ 

The three-headed one paused briefly, half in and half out of the mist. The vaporous fugue steamed around him, revealing patches and swathes of his body and face, the grey enhancing the beams of his six eyes, the bulges of his powerful torso. An Ayodhyan court painter could not have envisioned a more dramatic image.
Demon Undecided
. His three heads flicked back towards the centre of the clearing, the multibranched neck elongating, raising the heads to allow them a better view of the elevated Rama. 

A single disdainful snort curled from his heavy lips. 

Rama spoke again. ‘Craven.’ 

The word hung heavily in the still, wet air. A chorus of outraged rakshasa howls erupted from all around the clearing. 

The mist grew denser, but glimpses of bulging iron-encircled arms, snouts, eyes, limbs, and the dull gleam of battered armour left no doubt that the horde had only retreated, not left. 

Rama spoke again, scornful. ‘Now that we are face to-face at last, you fear to test my strength. So you retreat without even attempting an assault.’ 

Trisiras glared resentfully at Rama. His three pairs of eyes burned like live embers in a bed of grey ash. But he emitted no response to the mortal’s challenge. 

‘Go then,’ Rama said disdainfully. ‘Skulk back to your lair, tail between your legs, and sip on warm breastmilk. When you have grown some courage and chest-hair, I will seek you out and end your line.’ He flicked a hand dismissively. ‘Chirra.’ 

Trisiras roared, tearing a hole in the thick silence that followed that last epithet. ‘
Chirra
?’ he howled. ‘
Chirra
?’ 

A thin smile curled Rama’s lips. ‘
Holar
chirra.’ 

With a bellow that shook rainwater from leaves for a dozen yards around, Trisiras issued a single-word command to his horde, repeating it over and over. ‘Attack! Attack!’ 

The rakshasa frontline surged forward, baring their tusks and fangs, and gaping wide their purple slime-strung mouths as they roared their fury. As one, they left the misty shade of the forest and thundered towards the clearing, straight at the mortals. 

The watcher in the trees stared wide-eyed as the rakshasa rank broke cover and charged into the clearing. He cringed, covering his eyes to avoid watching the slaughter that must surely follow. Was this what Rama had desired? To provoke the leader of those brutes? Why else had he stopped him in his retreat and insulted him by calling him a ‘chirra’, a hairless pre-pubescent child! And then, to add salt to the injury, by calling Trisiras ‘holar chirra’, literally, a hairless breastfeeding infant! Few insults could provoke a rakshasa more effectively. 

But still, the tree-dweller’s faith in the mortal was unshakeable. He clung excitedly to his treetop and watched as the rakshasa circle closed in upon the clearing, seeking to squeeze the life out of every last mortal trapped in that open, defenceless space. Surely Rama had some plan in mind. 

Trisiras roared with white-hot rage as his ranks charged the few dozen yards that separated them from the mortals. The humans were pitifully few compared to his numbers. And most of them appeared to be younguns and olduns. It was barely worthy of a fight, but he could not stand by and brook being insulted by the Ayodhyan. Now he was owed blood-due. Supanakha would surely get her ‘husband’, but only after Trisiras had extracted the price for calling him that name. Holar chirra indeed! 

He roared again and drove his horde onwards, only his iron sense of discipline compelling him to stand back and observe the first assault as befitted a general. 

The mortal ranks were engulfed by the very shadows of the bellowing, towering hulks bearing down upon them. Although several of them were armed with arrow-ready bows, none of them had sense enough to raise them and unloose the arrows. Instead, Trisiras observed with malicious pleasure, they merely stood and gaped with white-eyed terror at the approaching maelstrom. Even those with swords let their blades hang limply by their sides, unable to summon the strength to raise them in their own life-defence. Why, this was a slaughter fit only for cubs! 

Trisiras’s snouts twisted in a sneer. He would make Rama squeal for mercy now. 

This thought passed in the fraction of a moment, in the mere breath of time it took his rakshasas to sprint the yards to the green, grassy ground of the clearing. Even as he took in the utter unpreparedness of the mortals, a pair of his eyes swung towards the mound, to the man who was at the heart of this whole conflict. 

He was just in time to catch Rama shouting a single command, audible even above the bellowing cacophony of the rakshasa charge, and to glimpse Lakshman’s right hand falling sharply, as if fulfilling a preset signal. 

The word Rama shouted was, ‘Release!’ 

And then everything was transformed to madness. 

The instant Rama yelled and Lakshman dropped his hand, a hundred pairs of human hands working in tandem let fly axes, chopping knives, swords, and every other available blade from the exiles’ meagre store of resources. The mortals were all up in the trees that rimmed the clearing, concealed from the eyes of the rakshasas whose attention had been riveted only upon the humans in the open clearing until now. Their blades cut deep and true into thick vine-made ropes, slicing through them instantly. 

The ropes swung free of the trunks of the trees to which they had been bound, their strength strained to the limit by the weight of the enormous loads that they carried. These loads were sawed-off trunks of trees, enormous chunks of oak and ash that had been cut with painstaking labour and carried down from the higher thickets on the sides of the redmist mountains, five miles distant. There were some fifty of them all round the clearing, each one raised up laboriously by rope-pulleys and secured in preparation for this exact moment. As Rama watched now with pounding heart, the rain-soaked ropes screamed as each of the halfton-heavy loads fell in a crescent arc, swinging outwards from the clearing. They swung low, to barely a foot above the ground, like battering rams at a fortress gate. 

Rama watched as one of the rams swung directly at a line of ferociously charging rakshasas, striking them with the impact of a hammer pounding nails. The rakshasas were smashed to near-pulp, launched backwards as if shot from bows, and flew crashing through the woods to land dozens of yards away, shattered to pieces. The same scene was repeated fifty times around the clearing, as each swinging ram found its mark, taking two or three, and in some cases where the charging ranks were bunched up closer, as many as a half-dozen rakshasas out of the fray. The combined sound of this onslaught echoed through the clearing like fifty hammers being pounded at once, accompanied by the wheezing, gasping sound of air being knocked out of a couple of hundred rakshasa lungs. 

But still the charge came on. As a boy, Rama had heard it said by the Purana Wafadars who were the sole surviving veterans of the last Asura Wars, that only one thing could stop a rakshasa charge—annihilation. To the rakshasas who had been untouched by the swinging oak-loads, the tactic only served to make them angrier. They roared on, snouts spewing boarish bellows and gooey effluents. 

It was exactly what Rama had counted on. 

He needed to give no command this time. For, the second line of defence he had created needed only one thing to be activated—the weight of the charging rakshasas. 

Trisiras snorted suspiciously as the gloomy mist-laden woods darkened further. His heads swung upwards just in time to see oak-loads swinging towards his ranks like malicious pendulums. He watched with roaring disbelief as the swinging hammers pounded gaping holes in his frontline, decimating scores of his warriors in the blink of an eye. But while the sheer unexpectedness and effectiveness of the tactic stunned him, it did not stop him or his charging horde. 

He ignored the bloody offal spattered across his right and centre heads and twisted his body out of reach of a swinging ram that passed a foot or two to his right. As the ram reached the end of its trajectory—and before it could start to swing backwards—Trisiras had grasped it in his powerful arms. He roared to the rakshasas around him and they joined him, adding their weight to his own. Pulling together, they ripped the length of the tree trunk out of its sling. The chunk of ashwood spattered mud upon Trisiras and he roared even louder, turning to show his horde his contempt for the mortals’ petty tactics, urging them on towards the slaughter that was still theirs for the taking. That was the essence of the rakshasa way: to turn each loss into a goad to fight back harder. 

The losses did not worry him. In a way, it was only honourable to lose some of his own in exchange for the blood-harvest they would reap here today. 

The rakshasa frontline, momentarily disoriented by the unexpected ploy, followed Trisiras’s example, tearing down the swinging rams, bringing down several humans with them as well—one unfortunate fellow fell screaming into a mass of rakshasas and was torn limb to limb in an instant. Then they turned back to face the clearing and resumed their charge undeterred. As they sucked in the blood of their fellows, spattered across their snouts and visages, they roared with rage and the longing for revenge. At Trisiras’s call, they pounded forward with greater force than before. The rakshasa horde came swarming out of the misty jungle, hearts bloated with bloodlust. 

Their pounding hooves left the cloying mud of the forest and fell heavily onto the firm turf of the clearing.