Prince of Dharma (61 page)

‘Hear me then. Even all the mortal souls in the world are not enough to satisfy Lord Yama. You could cleanse the world of all mortalkind as Parasurama cleansed Prithvi of every last living Kshatriya thrice over, and yet it would not pay the bill for your brother’s soul. There is only one life that the god of death will accept in exchange for your brother’s.’ 

‘
Name the unfortunate wretch and he will not live to see the sun set today.
’ 

‘Nay. Even sunset would be much too late. Already, Yama is halfway back to Patal on his red-eyed black buffalo, your brother’s soul cached in his leopardskin pouch. If he consigns Lakshman to one of the many levels of Hell, it will be impossible to buy him back at any price. The exchange must be done quickly enough to make Yama retrace his steps at once. Within moments.’ 

‘
It will be as you say, seer. Now name the victim who will pay for my brother’s resurrection.
’ 

Vishwamitra raised a hand. ‘It is no mystery. There she stands behind you. The one responsible for your brother’s death. Kill the Yaksi demoness Tataka, and I will buy back your brother’s life from the Lord of Death. Do it now, for the sun is at its zenith, or let the moment pass and go about collecting sandalwood for his funeral pyre.’ 

Rama stared at the seer. Then slowly he bowed his head once more. ‘
So be it. Begin the mantra, rishi, I will fulfil my part of the bargain.
’ 

He rose to his feet, and turned. He strode to the spot where Lakshman had fallen and picked up his brother’s rig. He slung it over his shoulders and fitted an arrow to the cord. 

Then he raised the bow and took aim at the giantess looming above the clearing. 

TWENTY-TWO 

Tataka reared up with a cry. ‘Sage! You seers have been my bane for too long. Today I shall destroy you and your mortal accomplices. Your kind can never resist the might and fury of the Lord of Lanka! In the name of Ravana!’ 

Tataka raised her foot, preparing to stamp down on the seermage. Vishwamitra stood his ground impassively, reciting his mantras without heed for the Yaksi. 

Rama loosed his arrow. 

The thin wooden bolt shot up into the sky, and for an instant it was lost to sight, obscured against the blazing noonday sun. Then the giantess cried out with rage and slapped at herself, as if at a mosquito. 

Bejoo saw the tiniest of pinpricks appear on the giantess’s fair skin, high up on her left breast, a faint red dot. She pinched the arrow with her thumb and forefinger and pulled it free. Against her gargantuan bulk, the bolt was a barely visible sliver, like a needle in a grown man’s hand. Tataka tossed it aside. 

‘Foolish mortal. Do you really believe you can harm me with your weapons? I am Tataka! I have the strength of a thousand elephants. It is not for nothing that I am known as gaja-gamini, the elephant-footed!’ 

‘
An elephant can be killed too, as can a thousand
,’ Rama replied, notching another arrow. ‘
But you can try fleeing with the speed of a thousand gaja if you like. It will not save you, demoness.
’ 

Something came over her face then, an awareness that the puny human standing before her was no longer the scrupulous dharma-driven prince of Ayodhya who feared committing the mortal sin of stree-hatya, woman-murder. This was a different being altogether, and there would be no arguing with him. 

‘So be it,’ she said, and raised her hands as Rama lifted his bow again. She spread her arms as wide as she could—
wide enough to encompass most of Ayodhya
, Bejoo thought—and brought her palms together with all her force. The effect was like the most powerful thunderclap he had ever heard. The wind from the impact blasted him and his men off their feet, throwing some up into the air to slam against trees and elephants. The horses shuddered and fell over. The bigfoot shuffled sideways, struggling to keep their footing. 

At the exact same instant, Rama loosed his second arrow. This one flew straight to the palm of her left hand, piercing the mound of Shukra below the thumb. Tataka hardly seemed to feel it; she was already bending down in preparation for her next move. But suddenly she exclaimed, her voice loud and crashing, no longer modulated gently for their benefit. She raised her left hand and examined it closely. She pinched out the arrow and stared at it for a moment before tossing it aside. Then she rubbed the spot where it had struck, dismissed the prick and turned back to the clearing. 

Rama loosed a third arrow. This one struck her right forearm, Bejoo saw, just above the wrist. 

This time the giantess ignored it, wincing as it pierced her but continuing to reach down into the clearing. She picked up an elephant in one hand, clutched between two fingers like a squirming grub, and raised it to her mouth. 

With a single nip, she bit it in half, letting the front half fall to the ground in a mass of bloodied flesh. The back half she aimed and threw at another bigfoot. It screamed as its dead brother fell on its flank with force enough to crush its hip, going down in a heap, bleating helplessly. The lead bigfoot reared up into the air, his eyes white, trumpeting with fury.
This is one battle you can’t win, old friend,
Bejoo thought sadly.
Even a thousand elephants couldn’t face her and live.
Still he gripped his sword tightly, ready to go down fighting. 

The Yaksi raised her foot, causing a riot in the clearing. The horses were reeling and turning, suddenly terrified.
They scent the Yaksi’s hostility now
. And he smelt it too, a low, sour odour that was as distinct as the earlier fragrant aroma had been. This was the Yaksi’s true body odour, not the sweet scent she had deceived them with earlier. 

Tataka brought her right foot down upon three of the Vajra riders with a wordless cry of rage, just as Rama shot his fourth arrow at the same leg. She hardly seemed to notice this one. But Bejoo observed with a start that something strange was starting to happen at the spot where Rama’s first arrow had struck. 

On the Yaksi’s left breast, where there had been the tiniest of pinpricks and a droplet of blood so minute it was barely visible, there was now a dark red patch the size of the Yaksi’s thumb. A tiny plume of smoke rose from the patch, and as Bejoo watched, the skin itself seemed to pucker and peel away from the centre of the wound. 

What wound? A thistle-poke would cause more harm
. 

Yet even as Bejoo watched, raising his free hand to shield his eyes from the overhead sun, he saw the dark patch growing, expanding outward. His first impression of smoke was no sun-haze illusion; the wound was starting to catch fire and burn! 

The Yaksi frowned, distracted from her stomping and smashing of the Vajra Kshatriyas and their beasts. She bent her head and attempted to look at her left breast. She peered at the wound, now the size of her palm and growing with astonishing rapidity, smoke curling up from its puckering edges like a scroll of paper set afire by a piece of glass and sunlight. 

She touched the wound tentatively with her fingertips and cried out as the fire singed her fingers as well. Then a curl of smoke emerged from her left hand and she spread the palm, staring at the spot where Rama’s second arrow had struck. It was growing too, burning blackly. 

Bejoo suddenly began to comprehend what was happening and turned his head to look at the Yaksi’s right forearm where the next arrow had struck, then the left foot and finally the right foot where Rama had just shot his fifth arrow. Each wound was behaving in exactly the same way. 

It’s as if the arrows were pitch-missiles fired into a thatched roof, burning up the skin and flesh like straw. How could such a thing happen? 

He turned to look at Rama again, and saw the answer at once. 

The prince was preparing to fire a sixth arrow, and this time Bejoo watched him closely enough to see everything he did. Just before stringing the arrow, Rama poked it lightly into his own abdomen. Lightly, but hard enough to break the skin and draw blood. 

Bejoo’s eyes widened as he saw the tiny pinprick of fresh blood welling up on the rajkumar’s flat abdomen. Then he saw that there were identical drops of fresh blood on the prince’s arms and legs and chest. 

He dipped every arrow into his own blood before loosing it
. Bejoo had no idea how that could cause the arrows to act on the Yaksi the way they did, but he suspected it had something to do with the maha-mantras he had heard spoken of earlier. Somehow the rajkumar’s own blood was filled with the power of Brahman, and by smearing his blood on to each arrow-tip, he was using not just arrows but the very force of the celestial power against the Yaksi. 

Tataka’s scream diverted his attention back to her. 

Bejoo looked up and saw the giantess’s five wounds burning freely now, the fires tinged with edges of unmistakable Brahman blue, literally eating up the Yaksi’s flesh. The one in her chest was a roaring flame now, and Bejoo saw that her chest itself was exposed, the heart and ribcage clearly visible. As she raised her burning left hand in terror and pain, he saw the fire eat right through the palm, exposing sky and a glimpse of the sun on the other side. It was an incredible sight. 

Rama’s blood, rich with the Brahman shakti of Bala and Atibala, is eating the Yaksi alive. And the sun god Surya, progenitor of Rama’s dynasty, is at the peak of his power, giving the rajkumar the combined strength of mortal and immortal shakti
. 

Rama loosed his sixth arrow, this time piercing the Yaksi’s belly. She screamed, understanding at last what the puny human was doing to her. She pinched out the arrow at once, but already the pinprick was on fire, spreading as rapidly as water seeping across a sloping floor. And then Rama took a seventh and last arrow and pricked his own forehead with it. 

‘
Now die, Tataka,’
he said. And shot the giantess between the eyes. 

Bejoo sent up a prayer to every deva he could think of. With a scream that pierced his eardrums, the Yaksi cried out. Then, with a sound like a waterfall striking a rock, she went up in flames, ringed blue at the edges. She fell to her knees, the impact shaking the earth hard enough to rattle every bone in his body and every tooth in his head. 

For one heart-stopping instant, Bejoo was sure she would fall forward, crushing them all. 

But she groaned, her face a blazing candle oozing molten flesh and running blood, and fell sideways, crashing to the ground in an enormous cloud of dust. 

After a moment, the forest began to burn around her, a fitting funeral pyre. 

TWENTY-THREE 

Lakshman opened his eyes, blinking as he found himself looking up at a bright afternoon sky. 

The ground below him shuddered convulsively. A rattling and roaring filled his ears. From the position of the sun, he guessed it was late afternoon. He sat up slowly, wincing in anticipation of pain, and found himself staring at a curved metal plate not unlike the inside of a battle shield. 

He realised he was in a chariot. The sandalled feet of the charioteer were behind his head, stippled with dried blood and cuts and bruises. Blood stained the charioteer’s hoary right hand as it held the reins tightly. From the steady rhythmic rocking of the two-horse, Lakshman intuited that they were on a path less smooth than the raj-marg yet not as rough as open countryside. 

He tried to sit up and lost his balance, keeling over to the open rear of the chariot, towards the brown earth rushing past at a great speed. A muscled hand gripped his shoulder, steadying him. 

He turned and looked into the sunburned battle-scarred face of a grizzled veteran, recognising the man as the same Vajra commander they had encountered on the cliff south of Sarayu just after they left the raj-marg. 

‘Bejoo-chacha,’ he said, surprised. ‘What am I doing here in your chariot?’ 

Bejoo stared at him silently in response. Lakshman frowned, wondering if the man had failed to hear him above the noise of the chariot. Perhaps he was deafened temporarily by some injury; he looked like he had been in a fierce battle. 

The grizzled Kshatriya blinked at last and looked away, at the road. ‘The sage told me to take you ahead. He and your brother follow us on foot.’ 

Lakshman looked around. He saw they were on a rough but passable dirt path running through lightly wooded scrubland. 

Another two chariots followed them, both badly battered and one wobbling dangerously. Perhaps two dozen horse followed the chariot, riding in single file, and through the cloud of dust rising in their wake, he thought he could make out the raised trunks of two or three bigfoot.