Prince of Dharma (90 page)

As they approached the site of the disturbance, Lakshman watched Rama crouch low like a cheetah preparing to spring, then leap impossibly high into the air. He watched in admiration as Rama flew through the trees, sword slashing at obstructions, and disappeared from view. 

Lakshman put all his effort into one final burst of speed, and exploded into the clearing ahead just in time to see his brother standing half crouched in the midst of a bizarre tableau, the air swirling angrily with the dust and disturbed leaves of his landing. 

The reverberations of Rama’s war cry rang through the air and Lakshman echoed him. 

‘Ayodhya Anashya!’ 

NINETEEN 

Prime Minister Sumantra scrutinised the young Vajra Kshatriya standing before him. The soldier was clearly the worse for wear, his face revealing the rigours of his long, hard ride and his slashed uniform and blood-spattered limbs leaving no doubt that he had recently been at arms. He bore the three bands that marked his lieutenant rank, below the jagged lightning-slash symbol of the maharaja’s Vajra regiment. 

Sumantra didn’t know Bheriya personally. His duties as prime minister of Kosala covered the entire gamut of administrative and governmental matters. Military affairs were only one part of his enormous responsibility, and while he was aware of every nuance of the overall picture, he could hardly be expected to know every soldier on sight. But Mantri Jabali, the minister for defence and military administration, recognised him and that was good enough for Pradhan Mantri Sumantra. 

‘Well met, Lieutenant Bheriya,’ Mantri Jabali was saying now. ‘Your appearance testifies to your need for rest, refreshment and, um, hygiene. But circumstances demand that you delay those graces and deliver your missive first.’ 

Vajra Lieutenant Bheriya inclined his head formally. ‘Mantriji, I would have it no other way. My message is of far greater urgency than my personal needs. I am grateful to you and to Pradhan Mantri Sumantra for granting me this immediate audience.’ 

The prime minister nodded, acknowledging the man officially. ‘Go ahead then, Lieutenant. Deliver your message. We are as eager to hear your words as you are to speak them.’ 

Bheriya looked up at Sumantra, who was standing at his formal post to the right hand of the sunwood throne of Ayodhya. 

The throne itself was empty, and the vast parliament hall nearly so. Sumantra, Jabali, Bheriya himself, Rajkumar Bharat, Rajkumar Shatrugan and an unusually large number of palace guards were the only persons present. 

Bheriya bowed his head regretfully. ‘Pradhan Mantriji, forgive my inability to fulfil your command. My message is for the ears of Maharaja Dasaratha alone. This was my captain’s explicit command. To disobey it would be to dishonour my caste-oath.’ 

‘Lieutenant,’ Sumantra said with a trace of impatience, ‘I understand that you would violate the oath of the Kshatriya by not following your superior’s orders. But Mantri Jabali is the minister in charge of military affairs, which makes him superior in authority to your Vajra captain. And I myself am prime minister of the kingdom of Kosala, entrusted by the maharaja as well as the people of this nation with the governance not just of the seat of Ayodhya, but of the entire Kosala nation. Your captain would not regard giving us your message to be a violation of his orders, let alone your caste-oath! Come now, time is wasting. Speak your message and I shall act on it immediately if so warranted. This is a direct command, good Bheriya. Speak!’ 

But the lieutenant shook his head regretfully. ‘Pradhan Mantriji, once again, I beg your forgiveness. My master’s orders brook no re-interpretation. Either I speak with the maharaja alone, or I do not speak at all.’ 

Sumantra was growing angry, a condition that wasn’t common to his calm, measured disposition. Rajkumars Bharat and Shatrugan, who had escorted the lieutenant from the first gate to the palace for this audience, exchanged a glance. They had already told Sumantra about the man’s refusal to speak to anyone but the king. But Sumantra’s orders were equally clear: until prince-in-waiting Rama returned from the Southwoods, or Maharaja Dasaratha recovered enough to attend to his courtly duties, he was the one charged with governing the kingdom. Of course, he would not take any major action without consulting the maharaja himself, or at the least Guru Vashishta, to whom Dasaratha invariably turned for advice, but it was ridiculous to expect the maharaja to rise from his sickbed to attend to everyone who brought a vital message meant for his ears only. 

‘Kshatriya,’ Sumantra said sharply, ‘do you know how many couriers arrive with messages for the maharaja daily? Today alone four other riders have arrived since daybreak, bearing messages of the greatest urgency directly from the maharajas of four Arya nations and intended solely for Maharaja Dasaratha. All four messengers willingly entrusted their missives to me without delay or argument.’ 

Sumantra pulled out an ornately carved gold seal-ring from a pocket in his robe. ‘I dictated the replies myself and sealed them with the maharaja’s own seal-ring. As you can see, I am fully empowered to act and speak on his behalf. I command you for the last time, deliver your message to me, or face a trial for treason under martial law.’ 

He held up the hand bearing the seal-ring before the lieutenant could respond, and added, ‘Think carefully before replying. Your honour as well as your life could well depend on what you choose to say.’ 

Mantri Jabali broke in hastily: ‘I am sure the prime minister does not intend to impose this harsh penalty on you without cause, my good Bheriya. Pray, speak freely and trust us to bear your every word to the maharaja as if you spoke them directly into his very ears.’ 

The Vajra lieutenant glanced around the hall as if trying to collect his thoughts. 

Sumantra added as an afterthought: ‘One last point. I am willing to let you speak your message in private, to me alone if you prefer.’ He gestured towards the rajkumars and the palace guards, including even Mantri Jabali. ‘That is the last concession I make to you, soldier. Now speak.’ 

Bheriya looked up at the prime minister. ‘Forgive me, Pradhan Mantriji. I cannot violate my orders.’ 

Mantri Jabali stifled a groan of dismay. 

Sumantra nodded, seething inwardly. Stubborn Kshatriya fool! ‘Very well then. You leave me no choice. Guards, take this man to the city jail. He is to be charged with treasonous disobedience of the maharaja’s law.’ 

A quad of guards marched forward and took charge of the Vajra lieutenant. Bheriya made no move to resist. 

Mantri Jabali sighed. ‘Most regretful. Pradhan Mantriji, I will go along with the arrested man to see to his arraignment.’ 

As Bheriya was led out of the hall, Rajkumar Bharat approached the prime minister. 

‘Sumantraji,’ he said, a frown creasing his handsome features, ‘that man has word of Rama and Lakshman and the outcome of their mission to the Southwoods. They may require our aid urgently, or …’ He paused. ‘Or worse.’ 

‘I am aware of that, Rajkumar Bharat, and am as eager to learn of their condition. But you saw the man’s stubbornness. He left me no choice under the law.’ 

The young prince chewed his lip anxiously. ‘Yes. But perhaps if you speak to Guru Vashishta, he may find some way to release the man of his oath-obligation. The guru is wise in finding solutions to impossible problems.’ 

Pradhan Mantri Sumantra nodded. ‘An excellent suggestion, young Bharat. That is exactly what I intend to do right away.’ 

A disturbance outside the hall attracted their attention. They turned to see Mantri Jabali returning with an uncharacteristic smile on his normally austere features. The guards and their prisoner followed in his wake. 

‘The devas are with us today,’ Mantri Jabali said to Sumantra. ‘The situation has been resolved.’ 

He turned and bowed his head to greet the person following close behind. 

Maharaja Dasaratha, seated on a travelling chair carried by four palace guards, entered the parliament hall. 

‘Sumantra,’ the maharaja said in a tone far softer than his usual booming baritone, but nevertheless as commanding, ‘this messenger wishes to deliver an urgent missive to me personally. I will hear him without delay. See to it that we have complete privacy for a few moments.’ 

Pradhan Mantri Sumantra smiled. ‘With pleasure, your majesty.’ 

Addressing the other occupants of the hall, the prime minister clapped his hands. ‘You heard the maharaja. Everybody except Maharaja Dasaratha and the Vajra Lieutenant Bheriya is to leave at once.’ 

He descended the steps of the royal dais, passing the maharajah, who was carried up to the level of the throne and assisted in seating himself. In seconds, the hall was clear and Sumantra himself backed his way to the large, ornately carved wooden doors. 

‘Aagya, maharaja,’ he said, taking leave formally. ‘We shall be without these doors until you send for us.’ 

Sumantra emerged backwards from the hall and issued an order to the palace guards standing by to shut and bar the massive doors. 

The stubborn Kshatriya has his wish, he thought, relieved. He’s alone with the maharaja and can do as his captain ordered. 

The doors thundered shut. As the reverberating echoes faded away, Sumantra was reminded for some reason of the sound of the city war-gong. It was meant to summon citizens to the walls to prepare for battle, to announce the approach of an invading army. Ayodhya had never sounded that gong because the city had never been attacked or besieged. But if that relic were to be struck, Sumantra was certain it would make a sound not unlike the doors of the parliament hall had just made. 

*** 

Bejoo controlled his horse with a nudge and a twitch of the reins. Her nostrils flared as she smelt the pungent scent of one of the large predators nearby, but she held steady as her master surveyed the scene in one quick sweep. Behind him, the solitary remaining scout reined in his mount as well. 

‘By the gods,’ Bejoo muttered under his breath. What had the princes got themselves into this time? 

The scene in the clearing was as exotic as any Ayodhyan artist could have imagined. Two different species were frozen in a tableau of brutal violence and hatred. On one hand were the humans, a motley assortment of men and women clad in garments roughly woven from bark and hemp-rope. They all looked much alike, as if they might be members of one vast family; this illusion owed more to their similarity in appearance than their features. 

Their coarse henna-red hair was matted into knotted locks, their faces and bodies were uniformly filthy and unwashed, shiny with sweat, badly healed scars and more recent wounds. Their beggarly garments clung to ill-fed bodies taut with the aggressive, jumpy tension typical of lives lived in constant fear of violence. 

A pathetic assortment of weapons were clutched in their fists– chipped swords, longknives, twisted daggers, sharpened rods, rusting tridents, a battered mace or two, and in the massively muscled arms of two enormous bearded brutes, solidly cast ironwood hammers each almost a yard long. They were about thirty-odd in number, and Bejoo had seen enough bandits to know a gang when he saw one. 

The leader of the group seemed to be a man with a face uglier than any Bejoo had seen before: the flesh had been mauled brutally in some old encounter, gouged too deeply to allow regrowth. The man’s teeth were clearly visible through three gaps in his left cheek; the cheek itself, if you could call it that, consisted of just three stringy strands of flesh hanging loosely. You can probably see his food being chewed when he eats, Bejoo thought, disgusted. He knew only one animal that could inflict such a wound: bear. But he had never seen a man clawed by a bear that badly who had survived to tell the tale. 

As if in mute confirmation, the scarred leader of the gang wore an iron chain around his neck sporting at least a dozen bear claws, and predictably, his main garment was a faded chewed-up bearskin. 

The other group in the fight were, not surprisingly, rksas. Bejoo, like all other Vajra Kshatriyas, had a family totem which gave him his clan-name and was his protective mascot in life and battle. This totem was the black mountain bear, or Bejoo. Quite naturally, he had been brought up to regard rksas as a kind of guardian deity. Yet he was sensible enough not to let his reverence for the furry predators overcome his natural human wariness of their short-sighted, hard-of-hearing, bad-tempered natures. At this moment, however, his clan loyalty was calling out to him like conch-shell alarms, driving the blood through his veins and making him eager to join the fray. 

There were four bears in the clearing. Ten if you counted corpses. The six bears that lay dead were horribly maimed and wounded, their black fur slashed with gaping flesh-bright wounds. Their snarling snouts testified to the struggle they had put up before yielding to superior numbers and metal weaponry. With every fallen bear, at least five bandits lay fallen too. Some were clasped in the crushing embrace that humans mistakenly called bearhugs. 

In fact, the so-called ‘hug’ was the bear’s way of swivelling its torso from the hips, putting all its considerable upper-body bulk into a cuffing slash of its inches-long claws. The resulting force with which those lethal claws struck usually saw them embedding themselves deep within the victim’s flesh, so a watcher would see the rksa appear to be hugging its prey closely. Each fallen bear had at least two humans apiece caught in its claws in this fashion. Even seeing the gruesome wounds on the bandits brought down by the dead bears didn’t evoke any sympathy in Bejoo. It was clear who was the real predator here.