RAMAYANA SERIES Part 4_KING OF DHARMA (56 page)

Wretched bearkillers attacked the ashram and killed everyone! 

He raised his bow again, pulling the arrow tighter than before, taking aim not on the pockmarked woman’s shoulder as he had earlier but at her throat now. One more incensing word from her and she would be dead before the air left her lungs. 

But before he could loose, a sound came to them from across the tree tops. A sound that he knew well, for Luv and he had often produced that same sound too, practising it until Maharishi Valmiki was satisfied that they could do so even under duress and at a sufficiently loud volume to be heard miles away from the ashram. 

It was the sound of a conch shell trumpet, issuing the call that signaled the ashram was in mortal distress. 

FIVE

Nakhudi fought the rising sense of outrage and fury that threatened to engulf her as she walked through the settlement. The rational part of her mind reminded her that she ought to have been more circumspect and circled the village first, making sure that none of the attackers were still around. But once she had seen and smelled the horror that was all that remained of her people, all rational thought had fled her mind. 

And if they were still around, she would dearly love to meet them face to face! And to do more than simply ask them how and why they could massacre an entire settlement—her grama, as Bejoo had aptly called it—of impoverished forest dwelling people, the majority of whom were women, children and elderly. Barely a fourth of them had been men of fighting age and fitness, and even those had been no match for the strength and weaponry of trained Ayodhyan soldiers. The hundred-odd people with whom she had resided here in this little clearing, sharing food, clothing, shelter, resources as readily as members of one large extended family, had been outcasts—some literally out-caste, forced out from Ayodhya itself following the rise of the subtle but increasingly belligerent bias against lower castes and mixed castes that had begun in recent years, others criminals and outlaws with broken bodies and battered minds who had been released from the dungeons and prisons of the great shining capital city in some generous fit of amnesty, yet were unemployable due to the years or decades of disease, privation and abuse endured in their incarceration. 

The irony of the system of justice meted out by the current regime was that while the hardened criminals stayed on in the city to pursue illicit trades, those who had had their bellyfull of crime and punishment, and were therefore rehabilitated in the truest sense of the term, preferred to leave the city that had been so harsh to them and retreated into self-imposed exile from the glories of Arya civilization. Each year, more and more severely punished people, some brutalized for the most minor of offenses, ended up in ashrams or settlements such as this one. Sometimes, a few found companionship, camaraderie, even love and kinship over time, and slowly, painfully, the wounds of their own past misdemeanours and the terrible dandas initiated, enforced and inflicted under the iron rule of the King of Dharma, healed partially. They were hardly people in the proud ‘Arya’ sense of the word, but they had been people once, and they were human still. And most of all, alive. Or at least they had been until a few days ago, when she had left this settlement, filling the crisp forest air with the spicy aroma of their cookfires, their laughter and rough talk. These had been simple people; broken people even, bent down and battered by the might and power of Rama’s rigid interpretations of dharma and the consequences of straying from that hard path, but still people. 

Now, they were just corpses. Food for the vermin and the worms. 

She walked through the smoking, scorched, broken, cracked and battered ruins of the score of humble thatch-and-mud huts that had served as the domiciles of those dregs of society. Each reluctant step took her past a new horror: children lying in one another’s arms or their mother’s embrace, eyes open and filled with blood, faces splattered with the effluents of their own or loved ones’ gaping wounds, severed limbs, speared bodies, butchered corpses…Tears slipped past her iron veil of self-control and spilled from her eyes as she recognized faces, profiles, or, in some awful cases, limbs and tattered garments. From the way the bodies were strewn and cut down, it was obvious that the attack had been sudden, brutal and swift. Many of the fatal cuts had been inflicted on the backs of the heads and torsos of the victims, suggesting that they had been turning away or running from the attackers. Around her, the looming trees and lush forest seemed to echo with the memories of screams and pitiful cries that must have rung out only hours earlier. She could almost hear familiar voices, crying out in anguish and mortal terror. 

She paused when she saw a living figure up ahead, her sword already out and ready, rising to deal out the vengeance she ached to deliver, but realized at once that it was only Bejoo. The vajra captain looked sallow faced and as grim as she felt, his grizzled jaw tight with his own anger. His eyes met her’s then cut away at once in shame. She might not think of herself as Ayodhyan, or even as “Arya” in the purest sense of the term, but he did, and she could see that it pained him greatly to witness such dishonourable butchery committed by fellow Aryas, let alone fellow Ayodhyans. 

He had circled around as instructed by her—she could see the other men holding back in the trees, probably on his orders—and was examining a dozen-odd corpes laying in a ragged line on the ground. This was the rough pathway that led eventually to the raj-marg, or Mithila Road, as it was called by her people, and it was the direction from which the attackers had surely come. 

He crouched down beside one body, which she recognized with a small shock as having been Nandu, the white-haired elder who functioned as a kind of roughshod chief of the little community. He was examining the footmarks on the ground and reading the trail. She crouched beside him, steeling herself to ignore the stench of the corpses, left out in the open for at least a day and already ripening, and read the signs as well. 

“There were a great many of them,” she said, “at least a hundred healthy heavily armed men on horseback.” 

She rose and walked further up the winding trail that led through natural gaps in the trees. Forest folk followed an unwritten covenant not to cut down healthy trees merely to make way for themselves; they respected the forest too much for that. As it was, the forest made way for them to live in it and supported their existence. The least they could do was protect and serve it as best as possible. This meant that the trail was a long winding one that did not follow any of the usual geometrical patterns of man-made roads. It also made riding along it on horseback a challenge—unless one knew the way intimately. 

“They came down the trail, riding quickly without stopping.” She glanced at Bejoo as she spoke, walking quickly as she continued to read the signs on the trees and ground—snapped branches, cracked twigs, hoofprints embedded in mulch, chipped bark on a tree trunk where the edge of a sheathed weapon had nicked it accidentally while passing, a hundred other indicators that she could read as clearly as a brahmin could interpret Sanskrit neatly printed on a scroll. 

Bejoo nodded to show he understood: for such a large group, so heavily burdened, to have come through this winding forest “path” on horseback at such a speed, meant that they had a guide who knew the way. Her grama had been betrayed. By whom? And why? 

“They were here for one reason only, to slaughter,” she said, for it was evident that the attackers had left as soon as they were done killing every last man, woman and child in the settlement. “The men of the grama tried to mount a resistance, to draw the attackers away from their families, but were encircled in a chakravyuh and slaughtered to the last man.”

Bejoo nodded. As a veteran ex-military man, he knew that a chakravyuh—a complex encircling attack technique—was unique to Arya military forces. It confirmed that the attackers were not merely some armed gang of bandits or marauders passing by, but heavily armed and healthy soldiers on well-fed mounts come here for the express purpose of murdering the entire village. 

Nakhudi’s trail-reading had taken the better part of an hour and led her on a winding route around and to the south-west of the settlement. She was aware of Bejoo’s men following them discretely, spread out through a wide swathe of forest, the better to ensure that they were not encircled and trapped or ambushed by the same attackers. She was glad for his presence and his military acumen, for right now, her entire consciousness and being were filled with only the raging desire for vengeance. 

“And once their butchery was done,” she said, pausing beside a tree with a low-hanging branch on which several twigs had been snapped and lay, freshly broken and trampled by horse hooves on the beaten ground below, “they did not go back the way they came. Instead, they took this route, towards…”

She broke off, her eyes widening, heart racing. Her sword hand rose, fist tightening on the pommel. She sensed Bejoo react, turning to look at her in evident alarm. 

“What?” he asked. “Speak, woman!”

“Guru Valmiki’s ashram,” she said. “They are headed for the ashram!”

And then she began running. 

***

Sita knew better than to go running out of her hut—straight into the waiting blades of the enemy. For no matter who or why they were, the screams and unmistakeable sounds of weaponry and slaughter from outside clearly announced that enemies were in the ashram. She had faced violent opposition frequently and regularly enough in her life not to waste time questioning the how, why and wherefore of it, merely to act in a manner designed to ensure her own survival and the survival of those she loved. 

Which was why she did not run across the threshold of her hut.  

Instead, she kicked aside the earthen pot of water she used for drinking and cleaning hands and faces, shattering it with one expert blow, and pushed at the thatched panel at the bottom of the back wall. It rose up on a hinge made from two sections of half-bamboo ingeniously interlocked to allow just so much movement in one direction, opening an exit just large enough for her to crawl through – more than sufficient for her sons to slip through. 

She went through with practiced ease, her slender form in better physical condition than it had ever been in her life. Not quite the hard, overworked lithely muscular form of her days in Janasthana or Chitrakut, but nevertheless slim, fit and strong enough to fight to save her own life and the lives of her sons if they needed saving. 

Or the lives of others. 

The back of the hut looked out upon a steep fall-off that in turn overlooked a narrow winding path that led down to the river Sona. She had built her hut in this location for this precise reason: Isolated from the rest of the ashram, discretely tucked away just behind a line of trees, its natural materials and the artful construction made it appear to be a part of the hillside rather than a man-made structure. Even if the enemy knew where to look and found it, they could only approach it from the front. The steep fall-off at the back was unclimbable because of the soft yielding earth, dampened by rain part of the year and deliberately dampened by Sita herself in the dry seasons. 

She glanced out over the edge, careful not to step too close to the mushy rim, and was relieved to see no armed soldiers rushing up the path from the river. That suggested that the attack was not directed at her or her sons. That was good, that was very good. No matter how artful or expert she might be in the ways of survival, there was no true way to defend oneself from direct, sustained assault. Especially not when one was genuinely a penniless penitent living in a hermitage in the forest. 

That meant that this was some random attack by brigands or dacoits. Or unknown forces with an unknown agenda. 

She had torn off the lower part of her modestly flowing garment to free her legs for quicker movement. Now, she unwrapped the tribal blanket and extracted its treasures. In the aranya, weapons were more precious than gold or jewels. One could use weapons to ensure one’s survival, or to hunt and feed, which was the same thing; however, there was nothing here to be buy even if one possessed all the gold and precious gems in the world! 

She slung the rig, packed tight with carefully crafted arrows, made by herself, Nakhudi and the twins and replenished weekly after their training sessions. Each of them had their own cache, although Nakhudi and the boys took their’s around openly, while she kept her’s stored secretly and only brought it out for her daily practise sessions. 

She strung the bow with quick expert actions, slinging it over the same left shoulder as the rig. Then she unsheathed the sword and the short iron pike with the specially designed grip-guards that doubled as shortblades, and she was ready. 

But she took a moment to listen and orient herself to what was going on, or at least what she could discern by way of hearing at least. Once she went around the hut and exposed herself, she might be fighting for her life, and it was worth taking a moment or two to learn as much as she could about whom she was fighting and what they might want. 

The entire process until now—from reacting to Dumma’s wife’s screams to this moment of total readiness —had taken only a few moments. The shouts and yells and sounds of men and metal and horses had continued unabated. The ashram housed over four dozen inhabitants, and there was a party of another two dozen just arrived from Thiruvanthapuram. And if there was one thing brahmins were well versed to doing, it was raising their voices. All those years of chanting and reciting nonstop all day long had conditioned them to be able to raise a great hue and cry in this time of crisis. The sheer sound level from across the ashram suggested a few hundred people rather than merely six dozen. From what she could make out, all that noise and uproar was not merely screams and crying out; many of the brahmins, particularly the senior rishis and maharishis, were not men or women to fear kshatriyas and their violence. They were berating the attackers loudly and unequivocally, several issuing shraaps and eternal curses in the names of various deities. It was a bold and godless dacoit who could withstand such an onslaught of priestly curses, she knew, and the fact that she could still hear sounds of violence and screams of agony punctuating the cacophony meant that whomever these men were, they were dangerous, deadly men come here with the express intention of committing the crime of brahmin-hatya. Priest-killing was not something most kshatriyas did lightly and it meant that the men were most likely mercenaries working for coin, and with no scruples or attachment to any nation, liege or other loyalties. That was not good, not good at all.