KRISHNA CORIOLIS#4: Lord of Mathura (2 page)

The younger gopis returning from the pastures, herding their calves before them, were proof of this adoration: every last one smiled and waved and greeted him as they went by, praising his flute playing. He smiled enigmatically as he always did, saying nothing, but acknowledging them all and somehow making each one feel as if it were
she
alone that he had smiled at so fetchingly. They ran giggling, happy, to pen their calves for the night. 

Lazy summer was working its way slowly towards autumn and the cowherds of Vrindavan spent the evenings indulging in their favorite ras-lila pastime. When the work was done for the day, everyone looked forward to a few hours of companionship and respite. The cowherd’s life was a simple one: hard-working, responsible and honest  with no unendurable hardships or glamorous highs, merely an endless series of routine repetitions, day after day, season after season. After the first traumatic year of exile, the idyllic hamlet of Vrindavan now seemed like home itself to the Vrishni and they had already come to love and enjoy its bounty. 

Krishna wandered down the dales and glens, pastures and pens, hills and dips, lakesides and wooded areas, playing his flute. At the meadow where the community played ras-lila, every gopi waited and hoped to see him appear. More than one dreamed romantic dreams of herself with Yashoda’s dark-hued son. But today Krishna was not in the mood to play. Today he felt his heart ache with a peculiar sadness, a commingling of the dusky languidness of evening and the satisfaction of a long day’s hard work mixed with the certainty that this season of peace and calm would not last, that it was but a lull before the coming storm, and when that storm came, it would be terrible in rage. 

He did not feel fear exactly for despite his mortal form, he was Himself incarnate and as such immune to the weaknesses and injuries of flesh and mortality. But he had come to care deeply about the people amongst whom he lived and he knew they would pay a price for sheltering him—were already paying a price indeed, for here they were, in exile from their beloved home pastures. Many mortals believed that to be able to see the future would be a wondrous gift but those immortals who
did
see the future knew that it was no gift, nor wondrous. For the future, like the past, like life itself, contained not only good, wonderful things and events, but also many dark, terrible, painful things. What person could
want
to know all the bad that would befall them before it happened? Mere knowledge of it alone would cast a backward shadow over all the rest of that person’s existence. And so, in Krishna’s case, that shadow loomed long and large, for he could see all the way into Eternity. 

In a manner of speaking, it was grief that Krishna was experiencing at this moment. For time could keep no secrets from him. And he saw the terrible wages of death and suffering that had been endured since his birth on this mortal plane, the deaths and suffering that were being endured even now, at this very moment, and the many yet to come. And the burden of all this pain lay heavy upon his heart. 

And so he wandered the hills of Vrindavan and played his flute, filling the world with melody, the sweet-sad beauty of his song, trying to lighten his burden through music. 

He was not wholly successful. 

But it helped. 

It helped a little. 

And that was enough. 

Even a god could not will away pain entirely. At best, he could try to transmute it into something else: painting, music, katha, dance, any of the many ways in which mortals and gods and yes, even demons, transmuted their emotions into art. 

In its own way, the song was Krishna’s own form of ras-lila.

2

WAR
was an art. 

Kamsa was a master of the art. 

He charged through the enemy ranks, flailing, pounding, battering, bludgeoning, hammering…. 

Though he wielded swords and weapons when required, his new method of attack relied more on brute force than technique or finesse. Under Jarasandha’s guidance and aided by the Magadhan’s ayurvedic elixirs, his body had grown even harder and become more invulnerable than before. Finely honed Mithila steel blunted when in contact with his skin, a javelin thrown by a bull-strong giant shattered without leaving the tiniest scratch, and even arrows with special steel heads designed to punch through armour splintered on impact with his impenetrable hide. 

But more amazing than his ability to withstand damage was his ability to inflict it. 

As he was demonstrating so ably right now. 

He was working his way through a throng of enemy foot-soldiers. There had been perhaps four or five hundred when he had made first contact. Two score or more had been killed at that very instant, bodies crushed and smashed to bloody pulp like ripe berries under the impact of his weight and forward momentum. The huddled mass of the remainder, no doubt believing that by concentrating their strength together they might resist him, swayed for a moment then held their line like a hemp rope strung taut between trees. Perhaps half a score more were then crushed between their own comrades behind them and Kamsa when he pushed forward. 

He saw men wheeze bloody spray from their mouths and nostrils as their lungs collapsed or were punctured in the killing crush. He heard bodies crumple and lose their very shape as he exerted strength. Others exploded like bulging wine bags bursting under an elephant’s foot, spraying bloody remains everywhere. 

He was coated in blood and guts and bone chips and offal. 

It stank of victory to his flaring nostrils. 

He roared and heard his own roar resonate, the increased density of his body somehow altering the sound of his voice to sound lower-pitched, gutteral, hard enough to assault those unfortunate enough to be within his proximity and cause actual physical pain: he saw men clutch at their ears and blood ooze from their auditory orifices. 

He spread his arms, bent forward in a bull’s charging stance, locked his knees, and shoved forward with a mighty effort. 

The ranks of enemy soldiers rippled like grass before wind. At the back of the huddled ranks, men were thrown yards away, tumbling madly head over heels. 

He heaved again, then pushed forward, feeling his feet sink into the hard packed earth, the earth yielding beneath his weight and force. 

The entire battalion of enemy soldiers were pushed backwards as if struck by a battering ram. Soldiers at the edges and rear went flying in all directions, bodies flung through the air like straw scarecrows in a storm gale. 

Kamsa grasped hold of as many of the nearest unfortunates as he could get a hold of—perhaps a score of enemy soldiers—picked the whole mass up bodily, and
shoved
them. 

The soldiers whom he grasped and used as purchase were crushed like ripe grapes, their organs and bodies spattering in his iron grip. The combined mass of their bodies served as a cudgel with which he bludgeoned the battalion itself. He shoved this way then that, pushing forward until the whole mass began to give way like a laden wagon once inertia is overcome, and he walked forward slowly, steadily, step by step shoving five hundred massed men backwards. 

It was a sight to behold. 

Many of Kamsa’s own men stopped to watch. Even the
enemy
stopped to watch, unable to believe their eyes!

At the rear of the enemy battalion, men were being thrown onto their backs, then trampled underfoot by their own comrades as they were pushed back by the power of Kamsa’s onward momentum. Men were being pressed brutally hard against each other, some pierced or penetrated by their comrades’ weapons or armour, others merely caught in the press and crushed to death. 

It was a grape-press and Kamsa the vintner pressing living men into blood-wine. 

By the time he had pushed ahead a hundred yards, every last man in the battalion was dead or dying from fatal wounds. Not a man remained whole in the entire lot. 

Finally, Kamsa stopped and let go of the men he had been holding onto. They fell like wet sacks to the bloodied ground. Ahead of him, the mass that had been an assembled battalion of some five hundred enemy soldiers, clad in gleaming armour, had been reduced to half a thousand pulped and mangled corpses. 

He glanced back and saw the gory trail of his death walk: two score yards of the battlefield painted crimson with the blood, gore and offal of crushed bodies and body parts, like a great mark of death upon the face of the enemy’s ranks. It reminded him of a freshly ploughed field, the dark just-turned earth contrasting with the unploughed side. Except that what he had done here was better compared to reaping, not sowing. He had reaped their lives like wheat cut by a harvest blade. 

He looked around the field. The battle was still continuing to either side of his position. But not a single other enemy soldier approached him or dared to attack. If anything, they had pushed back and away to stay clear of him. It was one thing being before him in battle and compelled to fight; it was another thing to witness the mayhem he caused and still wish to fight him. 

He stood alone, alive, in a clearing of corpses within a forest of battle. 

He grinned and thumped his own chest twice to mark his victory. There was no need to issue the typical chauvinistic roar of triumph. 

The sound of his chest-thumping itself was louder than a full array of tom drums. It resonated across the field, louder even than the mangled screams and clash of weaponry, like a giant drumbeat tolling the defeat of the enemy. 

A movement caught his attention, out the corner of his eye. It was a single warrior, racing towards him on foot, sword held up like a javelin. It was a senapati of the enemy army, probably the commander of the battalion he had just threshed like bloody maize. The man must know that he stood no chance yet he came straight at Kamsa, striking down diagonally as if dealing with any normal human opponent. Fool! To think he could attack Kamsa with a single sword. 

Credit to the fool, he was fast. 

The sword raked Kamsa’s waist, the blade crumpling like tinfoil, and with his other hand, the man tried to stab Kamsa with a dagger, aiming for his throat. Kamsa was impressed by the man’s courage and folly and permitted him his attempt. When the blade point shattered and the blade itself shattered with each successive stab, the man was left with no weapon and no hope of success. Still, he hammered at Kamsa’s iron body with his fists, kicked out, jabbed and slapped, breaking his own ankle, his wrists, his forearm, and dislocating both his shoulders out of sheer fury and desperation.

And yet he fought on, audaciously, hopelessly, pitifully. 

Kamsa grasped hold of him with a single hand, holding him up by the throat, the broken body still flailing desperately. 

Kamsa was curious. ‘Why did you throw your life away? You knew you could not best me.’

The man stared down at Kamsa with hate burning in his black pupils. ‘You slaughtered my entire tribe today, Childslayer. What is a chieftain without a tribe? Kill me now and let me die with honour like my kith and kin!’ 

Kamsa cocked his head, glancing sideways at the grape-pressed bodies of the men he had killed. An entire tribe? Had he really done that? In just a short while, no more time than it might take him to eat a meal or defecate. 

‘Fight me now, Monster of Mathura!’ the chieftain cried hoarsely. ‘Fight me or die!’

Fight me or die?
Kamsa almost smiled at that absurd threat. 

Then, without even looking at the man, he closed his fist around the man’s throat, feeling his fingers meet as the bones and tendons and flesh crumpled in his fist. The flailing and threats ceased at once. Kamsa let the corpse drop to the ground heavily, blood spurting from the severed throat. 

He did not like that phrase though he had heard it often before and knew he would hear it again. Not the first one:
Childslayer
. That one he did not mind for he had slayed children and enjoyed doing so. He didn’t mind being called what he truly was, after all. 

It was the second name he didn’t care for. 

Monster
of Mathura. 

He was no monster. 

He was Kamsa, King of the Yadava nation. 

Lord
of Mathura.

When would the world accept him as such? 

3

Jarasandha
was pleased. Watching the battle from a high promontory, he viewed Kamsa’s rout of the enemy with pride and pleasure. 

His protégé had come a long way. Kamsa had done him proud. 

His son-in-law’s prowess on the battlefield today and in the preceding months, had been nothing short of formidable.