Vengeance of Ravana: Book 7 of The Ramayana Series – Excerpt#5

FOUR

Bharat saw the sword turn at the very last instant.

His mace was already deployed, held in an overhand grip and swinging downwards and to the right, aiming for his opponent’s right shoulder. It was impossible for him to stop the momentum and swing it again in time to thwart the oncoming sword thrust. Nor would the bulbous head of the mace make contact with its target in time to prevent him, Bharat, from being pierced. His opponent had gambled his own right shoulder, possibly more, on delivering this thrust; Bharat’s mace would meet its mark and certainly wound, maim, disable, perhaps even permanently cripple the man. But not quickly enough to prevent him from sticking Bharat in a vital organ. For by turning that blade at the last instant, he was aiming precisely at the fleshy area between Bharat’s ribs and hipbone. And from the angle at which the blade was aimed, the point would enter Bharat’s flesh just below his lowest rib, penetrating sharply upwards, deeply inwards, slicing through his liver. A fatal wound. All the vaids in Ayodhya would not be able to save him from succumbing to that one. Bharat had seen enough men stuck in the liver to know their fate from just the shade of blood that seeped out: rich, liver-dark blood, fecund with the body’s densest nutrients and life-energy.

All this he realized in the flash of an instant when he glimpsed the sword turn: it unreeled before his mind like a long scroll abruptly unfurled, the permutations, combinations, possibilities. It all added up to one simple conclusion, reached almost instantly: Bharat was a dead man.

Even as his veteran warrior’s instincts flashed this conclusion on the unrolling reel of his thoughts, the prince of Ayodhya still found himself admiring the audacity of the move.

It was a bold, impudent action: the man was willing to have his own shoulder, possibly even his collarbone and part of his rib cage, shattered by a direct, brutal blow from a twenty kilo mace. All in order that he might despatch Bharat with a fatal wound. Even in that split second it took him to size up the threat, to weigh the possibilities and outcome, Bharat found himself admiring the man’s gumption. A mace blow to the shoulder was nothing to shake off; it would be far more painful than Bharat’s own wound, if considerably less life-threatening. In short, the man had won the fight. He had put himself out of action, but he had finished off Bharat. No question about it at all.

Or at least, he would have done so. If he had been able to follow through on his bold action.

To the men watching the fight–several dozen of them, all burly, powerfully muscled macers and swordsmen, all sweaty and mud-caked from their own sessions in the fighting field, for they had been at it since before dawn–there was no conceivable way that Bharat could avoid the lethal sword strike now. Several of them winced, grimaced or otherwise failed to conceal their distaste at the sight of a fellow kshatriya suffering such an awful blow, that too their own prince as well as their guru in warcraft–even as they admired the swordsman’s brilliant last-second twist and turn. None of them, certainly not Bharat himself, had seen that sudden twist of the sword coming, or deemed it possible. But that was because no hale and hearty soldier willingly risked certain bodily harm to his own person, possibly even permanent disability, merely to despatch a single opponent. It was one thing to be brought down by a superior opponent; it was a completely different thing to bring down an opponent by a manoeuvre that caused grave bodily harm to oneself. If this had been a battlefield bout, after wounding Bharat fatally the man would have been down on the field, gravely injured, unable to move or fight thereafter. For him, the battle would be over, possibly even the war. There was no point to such a desperate manoeuvre. It was not the way of a kshatriya.

It was the way of an assassin.

A fanatical attacker with one mission and one only: to slay his opponent. Whatever the cost.

That was the reason why the attacker didn’t care about being injured, crippled even. He was here to die anyway: to sacrifice his life in order to achieve his mission, to kill Bharat.
All this happened in the blink of an eye: the turn of the blade, Bharat’s grasping of the inevitable consequence of this tactic, the watching crowd’s realization of the same deadly fact, and Bharat’s realization of what this implied.

And then the blade struck. Flesh.

Bharat’s flesh.

Pierced. Blood. Spurting. Skin. Tearing. Pain. Blazing. Muscle. Crying Out.

Time fragmented into shards, like shattered glass frozen at the instant of explosion. A stream of water being poured from a skinbag into a horse trough seemed to stay suspended in mid-air. A bird in flight, overhead, glimpsed from the corner of Bharat’s eye, seemed locked into immobility. A horse neighing and starting to buck, froze motionless. The wrangler pouring water into the trough, staring wide-eyed, mouth parted to reveal gawky, misshapen teeth. A bar of sunlight, reflecting off the armoured shoulderpiece of one of the mace-men watching from the sidelines, seemed to halt before touching the ground. Motes of dust dancing in the bar of sunlight, a horsefly, particles of bloodspray–my bloodspray, he realized with a distant, dim detachment–hung in the stunned silence of the moment, and Bharat felt the cocoon of pure, perfect warlust grip the universe itself in a tight godlike fist, slowing down time to a crawl, freezing nature herself, until he felt as if he alone could move through this silent tableau at will, slicing sunlight into strips if he desired, piercing a drop of water with the tip of a blade, sending an arrow whirling into the eye of a bird…felt in this sacred moment of moments as if he ruled time, gravity, and all forces of nature, and was master of atoms and elephants alike, lord of creation–and destruction.

It was sorcery, pure and simple.

Yet it had not been achieved by the recitation of any ‘magic’ mantra. Or by the infusion of any potion, the recitation of any spell, the casting of any runes.

It was a feat he had acquired mastery of through fourteen long years of hardwon practice, combat, warfare…fourteen long, hard, bitter years. Even more, if you counted the years of training under Maha-guru Brahamarishi Vashishta in the gurukul as a young boy, the adolescent years of constant practice in the palace courtyard and fighting fields. The years he had spent struggling to keep pace with, match, and then outmatch the undisputed champion of Ayodhya, winner of every individual event in every sporting contest he participated in, his own brother. Rama. And struggle he did, not because he resented his brother’s inherent superiority in all warriorlike activities and sport, but because he desired to be Rama. To see the same light in his father’s eyes when he looked at the eldest of the four sons of Dasaratha. To hear the crowd roar as deafeningly as it roared for Rama. It was not that Maharaja Dasaratha, or anyone else, loved Bharat, Shatrugan or Lakshman any less than they did Rama, it was simply that they adored Rama more than they could possibly adore any other being. The irony was, so did Bharat himself. How could he not? Rama was perfection incarnate, or as close to it as it was humanly possible to be, and yet call oneself human.

And so he had striven to become more than human. In all things, but most especially, in the realm of the warrior. Not just on the playing field, but on the battlefield.

And in these past years, since Rama’s exit into exile, as Bharat had resided at Nandigram, preferring to manage the day-to-day affairs of the kingdom of Kosala from that humble village rather than from the great seat of political power that was Ayodhya, he had had occasions innumerable to hone those skills, to polish the edge of that blade into perfection. For the time for playing fields had passed with the passing of Rama into exile. And Ayodhya had entered into a new age, a darker, more daunting age of constant threat, fears, doubts, internal strife, external assaults and more physical threat and challenge than was usual for an apparent time of peace. It had been the hardest fourteen years of Ayodhya’s existence, even harder than the time of the Last Asura War, because the threat was not as obvious and externalized as it had been then, it was an insidious, internalized, constant and unceasing stress that had at times threatened to tear apart the very fabric of this great city-state and the kingdom at large. The enemy within.

And it was that same enemy that had now struck at Bharat again.

In that instant when the blade penetrated Bharat’s flesh, he slipped instantly into this private space, this shell of invisible armour he had designed and crafted himself over the past near-decade and a half that he had acted as regent of the kingdom in Rama’s stead, withstanding everything a king could be expected to endure, and then some, all without even the privilege of wearing the crown whose thorns pierced his head. He had learned how to do this and had done it over and over again, to great effect. In a way, he was known for it. And feared. They called it “Bharat’s Wall”, and kshatriyas who had watched him fight, even Shatrugan who had watched him at such times, spoke of it afterwards in reverential, glaze-eyed terms, as if wishing they could attain such a lofty level of skill themselves.

And now, as Bharat moved as easily as a bird through smoke in the extreme superstate of awareness that he attained at such instants, he saw that same glazed look on his opponent’s face. For the man had come so far, achieved so much more than what the other assassins before him had achieved–the closest before had merely been able to fire an arrow from a rooftop ten yards away the last time–and had executed a move so brilliantly conceived and executed that even Bharat had been admiring it ruefully only a moment ago.

But now, the man knew, and his face reflected this knowledge, he had failed.

Bharat moved through the silence like a knife through silk, cutting time and space as easily as that polished blade sliced fabric, and felt the tip of the sword pass through the outermost layer of the skin over his ribcage, scraping agonizingly against and scoring his lowest two ribs–a tiny spurt of blood, a searing heat as the tight band of muscle was severed at that point–and emerged without having penetrated through the flesh itself, without having attained its intended goal, his vital organ.

And the man’s eyes had widened, his mouth opened wide in dismayed snarl, even as he realized he had been thwarted. Impossible. Undoable. And yet. And yet.

The moment unfroze. Time unlocked. Gravity reclaimed her rightful power.

And Bharat let the hand carrying the mace complete its trajectory, the weight of the heavy weapon, specially customized, engraved and tooled for him according to his precise specifications based on years of mace-fighting experience, carrying his arm into an angle impossible for any human body to sustain, and he felt the agonizing wrench of his right shoulder dislocating from its socket, a sensation like hot knives tearing their way out of his shoulder, screaming to break free. The mace lost its momentum and slumped, thumping the assassin lightly on the muscled bicep of his arm, hard enough to hurt and leave a bruise for days, but not hard enough to smash bone and rend flesh. Then his hand, already falling to hang limply by his side, lost its grip on the handle of the beautiful hand-crafted weapon, made in a tiny hamlet near Nandigram by an old PF veteran with only one arm and one functional eye, and the companion of many combats fell with a dusty thud to the ground. The assassin, who by rights ought to have been sprawled on the same ground with a shattered shoulder at least, remained standing, staring in disbelief at Bharat. For all his shrewd ingenuity and boldness in that manoeuvre, the one thing the man had not come prepared for was the possibility that his target would risk a move as bold, as audacious as his own, and allow himself to suffer injury in order to accomplish his mission: to survive.

The assassin had turned his blade, risking being maimed or crippled, in order to deal Bharat a fatal wound.

Bharat had countered his attempt by turning his mace, a far heavier, unwieldier, and more difficult weapon to manoeuvre in such a fashion, and had knowingly dislocated his own shoulder, in order to avoid the assassin’s fatal strike. It had been a breathtaking counter-move, the more so for the speed with which Bharat had seen the unexpected threat–an assassination attempt by a familiar practice partner in the middle of a practice bout–had sized it up precisely, and had then executed a counter-manoeuvre that perfectly thwarted the attempt. It was one the kusalavya bards would be reciting verses about in wayside ashramas for decades to come.

The assassin had failed. His blade had merely nicked Bharat’s skin and scored his ribs lightly, a mere trifle for a kshatriya of Bharat’s veteran status and record. He had suffered worse injuries during practice sessions, which this was supposed to have been before his opponent turned out to have a different agenda.

Bharat had succeeded and though his shoulder screamed agony at this moment, he knew he had no time to waste. The other warriors, alert enough to have seen exactly what had happened, and to have reacted instantly–even now they were leaping the rope ring and swarming to Bharat’s aid–were too far away to be of real use in the few instants he knew he had left to act. Shatrugan was at their head, bellowing a cry of rage and vengeance as he sped with frightening swiftness, dust churning in the wake of his bare feet, his javelin held menacingly low by his side, his eyes wide and furious, his teeth bared and flashing in the early morning sunlight, sweat-oiled muscles working powerfully, for he had just finished his own session with another practice partner. But they would all be too late, much too late. For such matters were decided, like all truly important matters usually were, in the space of a blink of an eye. Already, Bharat sensed, the assassin’s sword was moving again, turning now to the most inevitable next target: not Bharat himself, for that horse had fled already, that opportunity lost, but towards his own naked throat.

Bharat turned and with one smooth motion, grasped at the man’s wrist. But both men’s bodies, naked except for grimy once-white langots, were slippery with sweat and dust, and his grip slid inches upwards, to the man’s forearm. Bharat’s intention was to twist the wrist, break it if possible, and cause the sword to fall. Instead, his hand slipped up to the forearm and succeeded only in shifting the angle of the blade by an inch or so.

The man’s sword, instead of penetrating his throat dead centre as intended, slashed it diagonally. Close enough to serve its purpose. The result was instantaneous. An explosion of blood from the abruptly severed artery splattered Bharat and then Shatrugan, who reached them only a moment after, and the man fell to the ground, already shuddering in his death throes. Bharat tried to bunch his arm into a fist and failed, feeling only a sense of helpless agony in the disabled limb. He had wanted the assassin for questioning and that was impossible now. The man would be dead in moments with that wound.

Shatrugan and he watched helplessly as the assassin bled to death, his blood spreading to stain the dust of the fighting field. Shatrugan knelt down to examine the man more closely, in case he may bear some clue to his identity or affiliation – unlikely, but still worth giving a once-over. The other kshatriyas who practised routinely with them daily, their closest and most trusted war-comrades, stood around, watching. Several of them spat in disgust. The assassin was well known to them all, had caroused and drunk and fought beside them on a dozen occasions over the last year and a half; this had been a long-planned and meticulously executed infiltration and assassination attempt. Only the new buck-toothed novice to the royal syce came running to gawk. Others on the practice field, after a brief pause to take in what had happened, continued as before. This was, after all, not the first time this had happened. Ever since Rama had gone into exile fourteen years ago, Bharat had experienced his share of assassination attempts. There were always people who blamed Bharat for Rama’s banishment; not entirely incorrect, since it had been for Bharat’s sake that his mother Kaikeyi had demanded that Rama be banished. But once he had settled in at Nandigram, making it clear that he had no intention of seating himself on the throne until Rama’s return from exile, the attempts had reduced in frequency and had finally ceased. If anything, over time, he had come to earn the respect of Rama’s supporters, who held up his example as the story of the ‘perfect brother’, whatever that might mean. And in time, even those supporters had begun to attend him at Nandigram, accepting him grudgingly as Rama’s regent.

But since Rama’s return from exile, the assassination attempts had begun again. This was the third in as many days. And it was certainly not the last.

He bent down, wincing at the sharp knife of pain in his shoulder, picked up the fallen mace, and was about to turn away when Shatrugan called out softly.

He frowned at the expression on his brother’s face. “What?”

Shatrugan glanced around briefly then moved his head closer to Bharat, close enough so that only he could hear him. “He’s an Ayodhyan.”

Bharat stared at him, trying to think through the implications of that simple assertion.

He did not ask Shatrugan how he could be so certain of the fact; the how of it was less important than the fact itself. It meant that the people of Ayodhya – or some of them at least – wanted Bharat dead. Which in turn meant…he didn’t even like to speculate on what it meant. It was the legacy of fourteen years of infighting, politicking and a messy mix of resentment, accusation, allegation, commercial rivalries, old tribal feuds and internal dissension.

Shatrugan held out something, an amulet of some sort dangling from a black thread.

“This was around his neck.”

Bharat didn’t touch or take the charm, merely glanced at it. Even so, it sent a chill through his body. Despite the warming morning sun, the throbbing heat in his shoulder, the searing rakes where the blade had scored his flesh, he still felt a chill when he looked at the iconography of the little amulet. He had seen its like before, if not this exact same design. It was based on ancient symbols from an earlier age; an age before civilization, cities and sanatan dharma. This particular combination of symbols was easy enough to read if unusual. It merely inverted the usual honorific of the Suryavansha Ikshwaku dynasty, piercing it with a ragged blade. The meaning was crude but clear: Death to the Dynasty that rules Ayodhya. Death to Bharat and Rama and all their bloodline.

He realized he had been wrong. The assassination attempt was not directed at him alone: it was directed at his entire family, clan, and by extension, the entire nation-state that they governed and protected. It was only one part of a far larger mission of total annihilation.

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