RAMAYANA SERIES Part 4_KING OF DHARMA (7 page)

He looked down. The king’s chambers were at the top of the main palace complex, and the drop that lay below him was easily a hundred feet down. At the bottom lay the closely set flagstones of the innermost courtyard, each a quarter ton of solid rock hauled by elephants all the way from the Karakoram principality. The lights of mashaals gleamed dully on the buffed stone, and he glimpsed sentries patrolling diligently, in larger numbers than was usual owing to the presence of so many high personages tonight, most of all, their long-awaited king and queen. The nightwind carried the scents of the city, sometimes pungent, sometimes intriguing. The perfumes of Ayodhya, dressing to celebrate her king’s return.

“Jump?” he asked. But it was a rhetorical question. He knew the voice that gave the command would not explain or provide reasons; it was a voice accustomed to being obeyed by armies, that spoke to devas and asuras in the same level tone. Jump, it had said. And he grinned wolfishly and decided he would obey. Whatever mystery lay here, it was clear he would not resolve it without taking bold action. As the moments passed and the voice did not speak again, he knew that he had no other choice, no other means of learning what Ravana meant, except to do as he bade and follow this nightmare through to its very end. He resisted the urge to glance back into the chamber where Sita lay asleep. He would not weaken his resolve. Better to draw the asura away from her. Reaching a decision, he nodded once to his invisible foe, inhaled sharply, spread his arms like a bird about to take wing and sprang out from the balustrade, his strong legs carrying him yards out into the empty darkness, high above the solid ground, his body arching like a diver leaping into oceanic depths.

He hung suspended in the air a moment, then slowly, inevitably, began the long quick fall to the courtyard.

TWO

He fell up instead of down. It felt so natural that it took him a moment to realize what was happening. But his senses already knew what his mind had yet to comprehend.

The weight of the earth, the incessant loving tug of Prithvi Maa, keeping her children close to herself, was gone. In its place was another pull, drawing him up to the sky. He looked down and saw the courtyard far below, receding fast. He saw the balcony on which he had stood a moment ago, diminishing at astonishing speed, then the top of the palace, gleaming quietly resplendent in the moonlight, the Seer’s Tower beside it, then the palace complex whole, and then the entire royal enclave…soon the city itself was falling away far below, reduced to a sprinkling of fireflies upon a green patch surrounded by darkness. The speed at which he was falling— if falling was the right word—was astonishing. He felt the wind rushing past, drumming in his ears, felt the night grow colder around him, enveloping him in its dark embrace, his unclothed skin giving up its hard-won warmth reluctantly.

He looked up. And saw the sky. But it was not the sky he had seen above the palace only moments earlier. That had been dark in the usual natural way, a deep midnight blue, almost the exact shade used to portray his black skin, a smattering of cottony clouds drifting majestically, backlit by a resplendent moon. That had been placid, peaceful, almost languorously lazy.

This was something else altogether: a carpet of boiling, raging black smoke—an ocean, really, for it stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction. He turned his head and saw that the moon, his other namesake, had been banished beneath the ocean of roiling cloudwaves.

As Rama meant black and Chandra meant moon, so Rama Chandra could be interpreted to mean black moon or dark moon. And so his mother had teased him as an infant in arms, singing lullabies to him of her own casual composition, weaving the words ‘dark moon’ into the homespun lyrics. He had carried those lullabies and the memory of her love and warmth and maternal perfume with him through some of the darkest nights of his life. Yet it was only now, for the first time, that he saw a true dark moon, submerged beneath the ocean of clouds, yet still blazing luminously, like a gleaming silver coin caught by a ray of sunlight at the bottom of a murky pool. It seemed to pulse sporadically, like a heart filling and emptying with pale white light instead of blood, and even through the raging cloudstorm-ocean, its light illuminated everything, searing through the dense frenzy of the smoke waves. As he looked directly at it, it blazed now, like a maddened jewelled eye set deep in the flesh of the forehead of some vengeful deva. The air, Himalaya-cold now, made his skin prickle apprehensively. He shivered and brought his arms closer to his body, clasping them to his bare chest. It made no difference to the pace of his falling—rising—which was so rapid now that he could barely look up without blinking, so great was the force of wind buffeting him. It roared in his ears like the ocean on the shores of Lanka.

He glanced down again and saw that the lights of Ayodhya had vanished entirely, and the very bowl of the earth itself lay revealed beneath him now, like a dark ball veined with emerald and sapphire threads thickly intertwined. His breath, smoking now as it left his shivering lips, caught in his chest to see it so far removed. Surely even garudas never flew so high. Far in the north, he could glimpse the peaks of mountains as well, and he was much higher than the loftiest peak now…and still flying upwards at tremendous speed. Except, he was not actually flying. There was no conscious volition in the act, nor was he doing anything to make this miracle of flight possible. Unlike Hanuman, who could pound the ground, take a mighty leap skywards and shatter the protective shackles of Prithvi Maa, he had no power to soar bird-like. He was simply falling, it was just that he was falling upwards instead of down.

He sensed a change in the pace of his falling, a slowing down. It felt like the opposite of falling now, for at the very end of a fall, the earth seemed to rush up to meet you, flying at you like a rushing mass. But as best as he could make out, the cloud-ocean, boiling and raging with purple and gold veins showing through the morass of smoky chaos, seemed to be approaching slower than before rather than faster. A moment later, he was certain of it—his pace had definitely slowed. Shutting his eyes momentarily from the wind, now cold enough that he could feel the prick of icy particles needling his naked skin, he heard it change from a roaring whirlwind to a growling giant, then fade out gradually to a numbing silence. He opened his eyes again to see the cloud approaching closer as he reached the end of his descent—ascent? He felt himself slow until he was almost floating. He opened his arms, bracing himself for impact even though a part of him knew no impact was forthcoming. With an eerie absence of sound or sensation, he saw his body execute a perfect somersault, feeling no pressure of the earth’s pull—or cloud’s pull, either—and as gently as a feather touching ground, he saw his bare feet come to rest upon the dark purple-black cottony surface of the cloud ocean.

He released a long deep breath and continued looking down for a moment. The substance beneath his feet had no substance to speak of. It was like standing on ground wreathed in dense ankle-depth fog, except that he could feel no ground beneath his bare soles, only a vague sensation of cold wetness. Like standing on dew-wettened grass? No. It was more like the sensation of placing one’s bare foot on the surface of a pond of cool water, feeling the water slap against the sole of the foot, yet holding the foot in mid-air so it did not immerse itself into the water. Yes, that came closer to describing how this felt, except that he was standing with all his weight on both feet, and even so, he was not being pushed down through the skin of the water. He was in fact, impossibly, able to stay suspended, standing on water—or a cloudbank filled with it.

He took a step or two, mentally bracing himself again, and confirmed it. He could even sense the upsurges and downsurges in the mass of smoke-wreathed fluid through the soles of his feet—for these were monsoon clouds, he felt certain, even though monsoon clouds this pregnant with rain should not have been able to rise this high above the land. Yet the whole thing was incredible. How was he able to walk upon the belly of a cloud? To traipse upside down on the underside of a monsoon cloud, looking up—down?—at the earth itself, far, far below, faintly illuminated by the light of the dark-shrouded moon, a silver-limned orb now hanging suspended in a vast pit of darkness. He had arrived here by falling
up
, like a wingless bird. Even the unbearable cold, for he could hardly imagine how frigid it must be at this height, had grown bearable somehow; he felt a chill wind wafting across his bare chest and limbs but he was neither freezing nor severely inconvenienced. It was as if he had simply acclimatised. Even more curious was the fact that he was able to breathe and move as normal, as if he was on any earthly surface. It was impossible, a dream surely…or a nightmare.

Then he looked around and saw the shapes coalescing around him across the seascape of cloud for as far as the eye could see, an army of writhing, threshing, frenetic forms locked in the ugliest dance of all. After a lifetime spent locked in the frenzy of that same mad dance, he knew at once what it was. He was looking at a theatre of war.

Not just any war.

The war of Lanka.

His war. Against the rakshasa hordes of the lord of asuras. The war he had fought to regain his abducted wife Sita.

He was standing on what seemed to be a hillock of cloudy mass, elevated over the rest of the cloud-field. Several yards below him, ranged on every side for as far as he could see, ghostly shapes thrashed and writhed and engaged in mortal combat. His heart clenched as he recognized familiar companions and fallen foes, and identified enough familiar details to know that this was indeed the battle of Lanka taking place once more, this time fought by ghostly replicas of the original combatants but otherwise perfect in every detail. Rakshasas and vanars, bears and rakshasas, and in the distance, even a silhouetted Rama and Lakshman, arrows flying from their two bows as if from a single arrow-machine, raged in blood-lust. It was unnerving, unsettling, to see the carnage that had cost him so dearly repeated once more. The blood and gore and ichor might be vaporous, the figures mere simulacra, but the action and the memories it evoked were all too real, and awoke terrible dread in his heart. He heard himself moan softly, agonized.

A soft chuckle reverberated in his left ear. He swung around, startled and ready to lash out, bare-handed if need be, prepared for anything except the apparition that appeared.

A man stood beside him. Not a rakshasa with ten heads and legendary sorcerous powers. Not the king of asuras, conqueror of devas and yaksas, terror of the three worlds. Not He Who Makes The Universe Scream.

Not Ravana.

The man who stood before him was no rakshasa or asura. He had two arms, two legs, two eyes, one head … he appeared normal and mortal in every way. He was well-built in a way that clearly indicated he was a kshatriya by profession, with well-developed musculature and sharply indented angles that suggested an active and vigorous lifestyle. His bristling, oiled moustache was matched by unruly, long hair, tamed by a wooden clasp behind his head. He was clad in a simple yet well-woven dhoti and anga-vastra. Even at first glance, there was something about him that instantly caused Rama to associate him with the specific sub-varna of kshatriyas called rakshaks. A sense of coiled power in those heavily muscled limbs and torso, coupled with a relatively less developed lower body suggested that he was more suited to house guarding and site protection than the leaner, wirier physique suited to the rigours of long travel required of any serving soldier. At best, he could be a mace-wielder, but he lacked the exaggerated shoulders and back muscles that macers were known for. No, Rama thought, all in the space of the time it took him to take in the stranger’s appearance, this was almost certainly a rakshak.

“Who are you?” he asked, on his guard, but not adopting a fighting or defensive stance. There was no sense of threat from the man, no suggestion of impending violence. Still, he was prepared for any sudden move, any sign of treachery. “Where is Ravana?”

The man smiled. There was something not unpleasant about his features, something vaguely familiar, like a family resemblance. He arched his thick eyebrows, his broad, high forehead creasing with a trio of horizontal lines. “After all we have been through together, do you still not know me?”

Rama frowned. He glanced down briefly at the war raging below—or above, depending on your perspective. It was still in furious progress. “I don’t understand. What is this place? How are we able to witness events that have gone before. Why have I been brought here? I heard a voice…Ravana’s voice…it summoned me …” He indicated the ghostly conflict raging around them. “What
is
this? Sorcery or illusion?” And, with a sudden ferocity that surprised even himself, “Who
are
you?”

The man’s face recomposed itself into a conciliatory expression. “Patience, Ayodhya-naresh. All will be revealed.”

The man turned and walked away, up the sloping side of the cloud-hillock on which Rama stood. Rama saw now that the hillock rose sharply behind him to ascend upwards into a mist-wreathed darkness. He looked upwards, where the convex bowl of the earth had been only moments earlier, and saw only darkness wreathed in mist. He looked back and saw that the ghostly images of warriors had vanished, leaving only an undulating ocean of dark monsoon cloud, pregnant and heavy with the promise of rain. Apparently, the stranger intended to take him someplace higher up, up some kind of cloud-mountain, the top of which was obscured in the strange mist that had sprung up unexpectedly and was curling around Rama’s ankles and feet now. Rama remained where he was, surprised, and more than a little chagrined. He did not like what he felt; did not want any of this. It felt strange, like a dream that was surreal, exotic, enticing, yet with a constant sense of dread, of mortal threat, lurking behind the strange exoticism. The man stopped when he realized Rama was not following him, and looked back. He was already several yards up the mountain.