KRISHNA CORIOLIS#6: Fortress of Dwarka (17 page)

He came out onto a ledge large enough for a dozen men to stand or a chariot to be turned. Not that a chariot could be brought all the way up here. He glanced back down. From the antlike specks that his army had turned into far down below, he estimated that he was some ten thousand yards above ground. The mountainside was dotted with only a few thousand of his men, those still able to climb after the long and brutally wearing chase and journey. The nearest ones were still a hundred yards below and struggling, their upturned white faces pinched and ruddy with effort.
 

He smiled and turned back to the ledge. A few steps, crunching underfoot because there was frost here at this height, and swirls of powdery snow in the chill winds that wafted, curling icy fingers down his neck and licking the warm fat sweat drops, and he found himself at the mouth of a cave.
 

It was pitch dark inside and curved. Once he went in, he would not return without having accomplished his purpose. Nor would the Indian prince-god. Only one of them would come out alive.
 

The Yavana believed it would be he.
 

He hefted his sword in a powerfully muscled hand and started walking. Yards inside, the cave swallowed him whole. Snow swirled on the ledge outside as the wind quickened. In moments, there was nothing to indicate any living being had ever been here or would be again.
 

8

The Yavana
prince gave himself time to let his eyes adjust to the gloom inside the cave. Only when his eyes had fully adjusted to the darkness did he proceed deeper. The cave walls curved and turned inwards upon themselves and he might have knocked himself senseless or injured his limbs had he just gone on without caution. But as a mountain boy, he knew well enough not to rush in. He used his sword as a probing device, holding it out and turning it this way and that, using its tip to feel for the walls and roof of the cave.
 

Before long, he found the curved walls straightening and then all of a sudden found himself in a straight stretch. Although there was no light here, he found he could make out the outline of things dimly. He knew that there were lichen and mosses growing in deep caverns that exuded a kind of luminescence that might be used for light. Not enough to see by clearly but sufficient to make out one’s surroundings. He guessed that some must grow here on these walls, kept warm by some inner current of moist air.
 

He could make out the curved upper portion of the cave, some yards above his own head. It opened wider and taller here, and he guessed that this was the largest part of the cave. He sensed rather than saw a dark background some ten yards further on and knew that it was the back wall of the cave. He did not know if there were tunnels or passageways leading further inside or doubling back. But from what he could see now, it appeared that this was the extent of the cave.
 

He moved slowly through the darkness, sword raised. Ready for anything. For he knew that the child-god who had slain his own uncle would not lure him all the way here merely to converse. He did not expect words, only violence. It was the language he spoke most fluently.
 

His foot struck something.
 

Something soft and yielding yet firm enough that it remained unmoved.
 

He pushed at the object again with his foot, trying to feel it out.
 

His sword remained ready to strike.
 

The object remained still as a stone.
 

But it was no stone. He could feel it yield beneath his sandaled sole.
 

It was flesh or something akin to it.
 

It could not be an animal or he would surely have smelled it. He knew bears hibernated in these caves and although it seemed too soon for a bear to retreat, it was possible that it was merely sleeping. But no bear would fail to react to an intruder for so long, nor would it permit the intruder to kick it the way he was kicking it now.
 

It could not be a dead bear or any other dead animal because it would not only have smelled then, it would have stunk to high heaven within this enclosed and almost airless space.
 

What was it then?
 

He kicked harder this time, feeling the satisfying softness of another part of the thing that lay there.
 

Then he used the trip of his sword to probe carefully. He expected at any moment to feel the violence of retaliation as the boy-God fought back viciously, suddenly, with the powerful sorcery he was reputed to deploy.
 

The Yavana was not afraid of sorcery. In his land, he was considered a god too. All kings were. For every extraordinary thing that men do not witness for themselves, they assumed to have some element of supernatural power. When it came to kings and priests, they assumed it even when it was witnessed with their own eyes. What else were gods, they felt, if not powerful men and women who lived above the reach of normal law and limitations?
 

The Yavana considered himself no less a God than this Krishna fellow.
 

If Krishna had his tales of derring-do, so did the Yavana. If Krishna could be known as a God, so could the Yavana.
 

Once he had slain the Slayer, the Yavana would proclaim himself God of India. So much better than mere Prince of India.
 

He raised his sword and pointed it directly at the person lying on the ground before him, for he was certain it was a person now. Nothing else felt that way when kicked. He had kicked enough prone men and women to know what it felt like and enough children too to know that this was not one.
 

“Rise and fight me, coward,” he said, his voice loud and echoing in the cavern. “I have come across the world to do battle with you, at least do me the courtesy of lifting your weapon and defending yourself!”

The person on the ground stirred. The Yavana’s heartbeat increased pace. He hefted his sword in a new posture.
 

“Who?” muttered a voice, speaking a language whose words were incomprehensible to the Yavana but whose meaning was crystal clear. “
Who?
”

“It is I!” the Yavana cried out. “Prince-God of the Yavanas. I have come to end your stay on this earth. Rise up and face me one final time. Let me kill you with dignity.”

Suddenly, light leaped into being in the darkness.
 

The Yavana leaped back, more startled by the light than he would have been by the flinging of a weapon or striking of a limb.
 

The light glowed within the eyes of a man, he saw. Deep blue iridescence, exuded from within the man’s being, released through his eyes. The light had always been within the man’s eyes. All the man had done was open his eyes to release it. It had been the faint effervescence from his closed eyes that had enabled the Yavana to see a little in this space, not some luminous lichen or glowing moss.
 

Now, as the man’s eyes opened fully, the light that shone forth was formidable, terrible, blinding. As was the man’s deafening cry of rage.
 

“
WHO?
” cried the man with a blasting tone that shook the very spine of the Yavana and echoed endlessly off the walls of the cave. Even the aides following up the mountainside, some about to reach the ledge of the cave, heard the voice and saw the blue glow burst from the open cave mouth. One of them exclaimed and released his hold on the cliff face to clutch at his ears, face contorting with pain as he was assaulted by the shrill sound of the single word.
 

The Yavana screamed, dropping his sword and reaching for his ears too. Blood spurted from both ears as his eardrums burst.
 

“
WHO?
” asked the man in the cave.
 

And this time the fire from his eyes blazed out in a great fireball of blue light, enveloping the Yavana and scorching him to a skeleton instantly. The skeleton was charred to fine ash which swirled and settled on the cave floor with a faint spattering sound. The Yavana was dead even before he knew what was killing him.
 

9

As
the Yavana perished in a burst of blue brahman shakti, the reverberations set off by the
“Who?”
of the One in the cave shuddered throughout the mountain, spreading like spider cracks across a glacier. Millions of tons of snow, ice and rock accumulated over centuries lay undisturbed in that Himalayan wilderness. So immense was the power of that voice, so deep its booming vibrations, that the very depths of the Himalayas shuddered.
 

As the motes of blue shakti evaporated at the cave entrance, leaving no trace of the perished Yavana except a few footprints in the powdery snow, the Yavana’s followers paused, sensing something amiss. They had heard the booming
“Who?”
and were climbing as quickly as they could to reach their master but now they hesitated, feeling the unease that comes before the crisis. Attached to the face of the mountain, they felt its being tremble in sympathy to the great cry of power.
 

Farther down, stretching across the mountainside, the valley below, and across the craggy slopes of the Himalayas for yojanas, the army of the Yavanas paused as well. Every
 
soldier, cook and aide in that great force felt the deep reverberations within the mountain range’s belly. Everyone turned to glance at his fellow, feeling that something terrible was to follow.
 

In response, the snow began to crumble at the peaks of the mountains. It fell like powdery cotton, floating down to drift into the valley. In its wake came the mounds of packed snow from the past months of winterfall. This fell harder, in chunks and pieces. Then the harder snow, then the ice and finally, the very rock itself began to yield and tumble. Even before the first flurries of dislodged snowflakes from the peaks could reach the ground, the avalanche was in full spate, a great army of nature roaring down from those tremendous heights. Like a hundred akshohini of elephants, riding the chariots of gravity, propelled by the horses of acceleration, bearing the spears and swords and maces of jagged edges, blade-sharp ice shards and bone-crushing boulders, the avalanche descended on the Yavana army.
 

First to die were the Yavana’s followers, swatted off the mountainside like ants washed away by a waterfall. Their mangled bodies joined the onrush as, in moments, the great roaring wall of stone and ice and snow fell upon the main body of the army. Even the shrillest screams of brave men were drowned out completely beneath the gargantuan roaring of the avalanche.
 

No army’s charge could have wreaked such destruction or demolished that great force as completely and swiftly.
 

In the moments that followed, the bestial fury of the avalanche wiped out the entire Yavana army, carrying a storm of bodies miles away to land in a distant valley where the tail end of the army was still arriving, fighting bitterly over their disappointment at not finding any spoils of war in this mythic land of the Indus.
 

A cascade of other avalanches followed. In an hour, the only trace left of the greatest army ever assembled were the occasional spear or wagon wheel or broken limb sticking out between fallen boulders and jagged shards of glacial ice. Great mountain crags watched and listened impassively, unmoved by the epic scale of human destruction wrought with such facile ease.
 

Still later, as the dust and snow began to settle, the great ancient mountain ranges returned to their eternal state of stillness, resuming their long cold sleep.
 

The Yavana invasion had ended. For all time afterward, the legend of the lost army would remain a mystery. Back home in the Grekos islands and mainland, other Yavanas would speculate and wonder at what might have happened. Eventually, the belief would settle, like the dust of the avalanche, upon the opinion that the Yavana conqueror had been too young, too brash, too bold. That he had ventured too far beyond the edge of the known world, into the fabled perils of the Land of the Indus. And as could only be expected, he had fallen off the edge of the world, alongwith his great force.
 

For a great age thereafter, no Yavana would dare venture in this direction, though many would dream of it, emboldened by the myth of their forebear who had “fallen off the edge of India”, as the story came to be told. And eventually, another equally young, brash, bold Yavana would arise and vow to follow in those very same steps, bringing another even greater force of his countrymen to attempt to conquer the wealth and mysteries of the Land of the Indus, seeking to be remembered as the conqueror of the known world.
 

But that is another story for another time.
 

10

“Who?”
the voice had asked in the blackness of the mountain cave. The Yavana had been unable to answer. As a result, he and his great fighting force had been extinguished from the earth as easily as a cascade extinguishing a swarm of fireflies. As the last echoes of the final avalanche died away, the cave returned to its perennial silence. Silence so palpable that it rang in one’s ears as clearly as a bell, filling the void of eternity.
 

The One in the cave was appeased by the Yavana’s extinguishment. For hours after the last motes of the intruder’s body had evaporated into the icy air, he remained standing in the pitch blackness of the grotto, his preternatural senses probing outward. In his mind’s eye he was able to view the destruction of the great army more vividly than a man looking out from the peak of mighty Himavat might have envisaged. He saw every death, every last man fall, ever horse and mule broken, every last life extinguished. Fireflies. Cascade.