SONS OF SITA: Book 8 of The Ramayana Series – Excerpt#5

FOUR

When Luv came sprinting around the outcrop, two pairs of eyes instantly snapped around to stare at him. The two men on the second wagon looked startled to see him. I know that look. They think I’m Kush and can’t figure out how he could have run off in that direction and then appeared again from this direction. He was used to that response. He yelled at them as he sprinted past: “Stay where you are!” They looked too startled to try anything anyway.

Barely had he run past the wagon when he heard the sound of pounding hooves from ahead, around the next spur of rock. A few broken boulders lay on the path, their insides gleaming rusty red where they had broken open after falling in a minor landslide during the last monsoon. Others had been pushed over deliberately to block the path, for this was a popular ambush point on the raj-marg. The sound of hooves and rattling of wagon wheels was very loud by then and he knew better than to run around a blind turn. Instead he swerved and leaped up onto the largest broken boulder. He could smell the iron in the air here, so rich was the vein in the lohit stone. These hills were rife with minerals, good pure ore for making steel.

He stood in the relaxed archer position that Bearface had taught them, waiting.

Don’t call your guru that name, Maatr’s voice said in his mind’s ear, He is Gurudev to you, remember!

Yes, Maa.

The position that Bearface had taught them, the lazy cobra, their guru had called it, was now second nature. He waits, seemingly indolent, swaying lazily, but the instant threat appears, he strikes with lightning-speed.

Luv didn’t know if he moved at lightning-speed, but the instant the wagon came into sight, he let fly. The first arrow hit its mark and the second was flying even before the wagon had rolled fully into view. A man shouted out with pain and tumbled off the wagon, with two arrows sprouting, one from each shoulder – the first had clearly been Kush’s work. The driver screamed like a wounded horse and clutched at the arrow quivering in the meat of his thigh – the head must have struck the thighbone, hence the vibration and the extreme pain. Then the wagon rolled past and the next came into view, and still no sight of Kush.

Damnit, Luv thought, feeling the heat rise in his face, cheeks burning. Where are you?

The men on this wagon were better prepared and better shots. Three well aimed arrows came blurring at Luv and he had to somersault sideways to dodge both. Landing on his bare feet on the rubble of the lohitstone, he felt warmth on his waist where one had nicked the skin just enough to draw a bead or two. He loosed off two quick ones before the men could shoot the second volley, and both hit their marks. Both men dropped their own bows, one grunting, the other choosing the strong silent response.

Then the rest of the grama came into view, riding fast, faster than any grama ought to have been especially on this twisting treacherous neck of the raj-marg, and everything began to move very quickly, so quickly that Luv felt his senses slowing to a crawl as they always did in a fight, the world popping into brilliant crystalline clarity and colour: the veins on every leaf visible, every knothole on the wooden slats of a wagon’s side in view, hearing every grinding creak in a wheel, smelling the raw red odors of freshly spilled human blood mixed in with the pungent smell of horse sweat, man-sweat and the rusty tang of the lohitstone.

The flaps of the following wagons opened and revealed armed men. Burly, hirsute, armoured men in the familiar purple and black of Ayodhya’s inner guard. PFs, or some new extension of the PF regiment – for PFs were meant to guard the inner city, not ride with trading gramas as hired escorts. Whatever they were, whomever they were, there were a lot of them, too many for Luv to simply disarm. He would have to fight them seriously to survive, kill some quite likely. And even then it would be touch and go.

The good warrior knows when to retreat, said his guru’s gruff voice in his ear. The code of the kshatriya means nothing if there is no kshatriya left to fight!

Agreeing with Bearface – sorry, Gurudev – was his mother’s voice in his other ear. Run, Luv, run! You can’t fight them all!

Ji, Maatr, jaisi aagya, he said in his mind as he began the heavy task of fitting arrows to bow and aiming not to maim or disarm but to disable, possibly kill. I would love to run. But not without my brother.

“Damnit Kush, where the hell are you?” he said aloud as he began shooting.

Kush emerged from the wagon to see his twin brother standing on a pile of lohistone landslide, the edges of the outcrop at his back, loosing arrows with concentrated ease. He appeared to be single-handedly battling what looked like at least five quads of armed PFs, even though PFs never ventured armed and uniformed outside the Ayodhya city limits. Clearly this grama was a notable exception to the usual rules.

Which makes sense, considering the cargo they’re carrying, he thought as he sprinted away from Luv and to the other side of the raj-marg, unnoticed by either his brother or the men busy trying to kill him. In three deft leaps and grabs he had climbed a tree and was standing on a near-horizontal branch twice as thick as his own thigh. It would have bent and drooped under a grown man’s weight but it took his own lithe form easily, and he steadied his left shoulder against the trunk, took aim at his first target and loosed. The man took the arrow in the meaty muscle joining shoulder to neck, and it popped out through his collarbone with a small explosion of blood. The man yelped like a pup and dropped the javelin he had been about to fling at Luv.

Without turning to look directly at Kush, Luv cried out with joy. “Kush!” Then added in a disgruntled tone even as he continued loosing and dodging: “Took your time, didn’t you!”

“Had to make a short visit to the royal treasury,” Kush called back, grinning. He continued loosing, and saw his third target drop, roaring with frustration and fury as he tried to clutch at the arrow sprouting from his shoulderblade. Hit the bone, hurts like blazes. That voice was old Nakhudi’s, who always seemed to know how to inflict maximum pain on the enemy without actually killing them. Only male enemies, as she liked to remind them, grinning to reveal her astonishingly white gleaming teeth in her buffalo-dark face.

The fight continued for another few moments, the PFs on and around the halted wagons trying with admirable skill to face an attack on two diagonally opposed fronts with diminishing success. Their leader, an efficient and intelligent-seeming fellow, tried to rally his men to use the wagons as shielding, while attempting to send a pair of quads around to outflank Kush – Luv was bolstered by the outcrop which would have taken hours to cut over and around – but the brothers had them at the deadliest cross-angle two bowmen could take, and the broken stones shielded Luv while the tree and foliage shielded Kush, and while many arrows and javelins were aimed at them, none came closer than a single wayward arrow that thunked into the tree branch between Kush’s big toe and its neighbour.

Then, as fierce fights usually did, this one dissipated like a puddle evaporating under a mid-day sun, and suddenly the captain of the PFs was waving his arms in surrender.

Kush grinned and dropped down from his perch, making his way cautiously towards the halted wagons. He had his eye on some men at the back who might, if still feisty enough, try to fling a javelin or two as he approached. But every one of them and all the others as well had at least one arrow in their arm, leg or back, and one massively built chap who had refused to settle down with just two or even three arrows had four bristling from his extremities, lying on his back and cursing the sky roundly with a raised fist, turning the air blue with his choice of profanities. Kush grinned even wider, making a note of several for future reference. Living in an ashram community as they did, good curses were hard to come by!

Luv had leaped up to the tall broken lohitstone boulder, keeping his weapon trained on the PFs as his brother approached. Kush winked at him as he came and saw Luv shake his head in mock-disgust – complaining about the moments when Kush had disappeared from sight earlier. The PFs quietened as he reached them, holding down their moaning and grunting and cursing as they saw the ‘men’ who had bested them up close for the first time.

Ten years have passed since Rama did the unthinkable and banished Sita. Now, she spends her days in quiet tapasya in the remote forest ashram of Maharishi Valmiki, even as her sons Luv and Kush grow ever more proficient at the arts of war. To the sorrow of many, they seem unlikely to ever cross paths with their estranged father. Yet destiny works in unexpected ways. Rama’s growing ambitions and his war-mongering advisors motivate him to launch the Ashwamedha yojana. The mightiest Ayodhyan army ever assembled follows the sacred stallion in a campaign of conquest that seems unstoppable…until a pair of improbable obstacles arise. Defying the military might of Ayodhya and the emperorship of Rama himself, two young striplings capture the Ashwamedha horse and challenge the great army. To Rama’s chagrin the challengers turn out to be none other than his own estranged offspring: the sons of Sita! Don’t miss the epic conclusion to the internationally acclaimed and bestselling Ramayana Series!

SONS OF SITA: Book 8 of The Ramayana Series
300 Pages/Limited Signed Trade Paperback Edition/Rs 400
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The Penguin Books mass market edition is expected to be in bookstores in early 2011.