The Vengeance of Indra

by Shatrujeet Nath

  They were all rising from the table, preparing to disband, when Dhanavantri approached the king. “With Amara Simha going off, we should call Vararuchi back,” he said. With a meaningful pause, he added, “Just in case something comes up.”

  The samrat pondered the suggestion. “No, let’s not,” he shook his head. “Brother spends so much time working for the palace that he rarely goes to meet badi-maa. It’s unfortunate on both of them, but I guess it can’t be helped. Now that he has made time for her, let us not force the needs of the palace between mother and son — at least for as long as we can help it.”

  * * *

  A deep sense of dissatisfaction afflicted Shukracharya as he crouched on his haunches and drew a mandala with rice flour. Unlike charcoal, rice flour was easily swept and washed away, and left no detectable stains on the white marble floor of the palatial summerhouse that the devas had put at his and Hiranyaksha’s disposal. Even though the devas had left him free and unsupervised for the most part, the high priest had closed all the windows of his chamber as a precaution against prying eyes.

  Settling down before the mandala, Shukracharya muttered his mantras and cast the six pieces of human vertebrae, asking the question that he always asked first of the bones these days. ‘Where is Veeshada’s dagger?’

  It is in the banyan that holds up the field of endless pyres.

  Though tediously repetitive, the answer was reassuring in its familiarity — at least no one else had got to the dagger first. This was a status quo the high priest was happy with until he cracked the enigma of the Halahala’s whereabouts. He asked his next question, one that he had also started asking often of late: ‘Where are the mantras to awaken the serpent-dragon Ahi?’

  The bones dutifully told him that the mantras were secure in Brihaspati’s possession.

  Grimacing at Jayanta’s foolishness that had inspired him to hand the mantras over to Brihaspati willingly, Shukracharya posed a few more questions to the bones. Once he had an update on everything of concern to him, he cleared the floor of all traces of the mandala before stepping out onto the balcony that abutted his chamber. Outside, the night was cool and quiet and filled with the scent of devadaru. A sedate mist rolled down the face of Mount Meru, plunging the valley in a diaphanous shimmer of moonlight. Far to the right were the lights of Amaravati, reflected off a misty sky.

  His eyes on the diffused glow on the horizon, Shukracharya reflected, not for the first time, that since his arrival in Devaloka, he had achieved practically nothing of significance. Yes, the human king had lost his friend and most trusted councilor, but that had been inevitable and was not entirely his doing. Yes, his next move was a masterstroke that would put a permanent end to Vikramaditya, but it was up to Indra and Gandharvasena to deliver that blow — and they were both still some distance away from achieving that objective. What had he done beyond that?

  He had hoped to lay his hands on the mantras to raise Ahi, but Jayanta had already stupidly parted with them. He had flirted with the prospect of sneaking into the palace of Amaravati to retrieve the mantras, but as he didn’t really fancy his chances of dodging an army of alert devas, he had to rely on Jayanta stealing it back from Brihaspati, something the wayward prince would do only with the right kind of incentive — such as a method to win Urvashi’s affection. Shukracharya knew Urvashi well enough to realize that Indra’s wimp of a son stood no chance of attracting the apsara, yet he had to contrive a way to make that happen. Failing which, he would have to hoodwink Jayanta with a plausible-sounding plan to seduce the apsara, so the fool would nick and trade the mantras. All very shaky, the high priest thought.

  Then there was the Halahala itself, still mysteriously hidden in the banyan outside Ujjayini. For now, its secret was safe with the asuras, but who was to say the devas wouldn’t learn of it? What if they did, and Indra beat him to it? Indra would be in Avanti — what if the human king inadvertently gave away the dagger’s hiding place? And even if the devas didn’t get wind of it, what would happen once Vikramaditya had been broken? This truce wouldn’t hold. Who would first take the human kingdom apart in the quest of the dagger — the asuras or the devas? The answer to that was self-evident; the asuras had to have a head start in this race. That was the reason he had sent Hiranyaksha back to Patala, to prepare the asuras for war. But when would it be right to attack Vikramaditya, and what would be the ideal strategy to hold off the devas?

  Even as he fretted over these uncertainties, something completely different occupied one corner of the high priest’s mind, nagging him incessantly. It was something he had seen in the human councilor Vetala Bhatta’s mind the morning the councilor had tried reading his mind near the bath. He had seen the human king in the chief councilor’s mind, he had seen Narada, he had seen the young girl speak of him as the Healer… He had also seen a flash of something hidden in dense, white fog…

  That vision had stayed with him ever since, and came back to him often when he was least expecting it. A curtain of white fog drifting past something huge and shadowy — something that seemed to suggest gigantic proportions. Something surrounded by fog, concealed by fog. Something vaguely familiar, reminiscent of… what?

  Shukracharya had tried pushing his way through the fog to get a better view, but every time, he had been thwarted. Still, some instinct told him this was important.

  An instinct that kept insisting this elusive thing in the fog was the key to everything.

  Frontier

  Daybreak was still a few hours away when the moon finally tore free of the black, scudding clouds and shone down on the little ship making its solitary progress over the dark, undulating expanse of sea. The upward sweep of the ship’s prow pointed straight at the pale half-disc, which had made an appearance for the first time since the vessel had set sail from the estuary east of Tamralipti a couple of days earlier. The silence about the ship was complete, except for the occasional flap of the single, large sail, braced against the brisk, freshening breeze.

  After two days of being battered by rain and gale-force winds, the calm of the moon-bathed night should have come as a relief to Chancellor Sudasan, but the chief of Vanga’s erstwhile Grand Assembly shifted nervously from one foot to the other as he stood on the ship’s deck in the company of a small knot of men. The group of seven stood in a tight huddle, the moonlight on their faces betraying the anxiety that they kept relaying back and forth and round and round through an exchange of uncertain glances.

  “I wish the moon would go back into the clouds,” one of the men muttered, throwing a fearful glance over his shoulder, his eyes sweeping the dark recesses of the sea in the ship’s wake. “It is too bright and we run the risk of being sighted.”

  “This is a very large sea, brother, and anyway, we are too far south of the coast to be seen,” answered another. “I don’t think we have anything to fear.” For all his confidence, the speaker cast a wary eye around the ship.

  “But we have everything to fear,” retorted a third man with a thin, squeaky voice. “Have you already forgotten the market square of Tamralipti?”

  The reminder of the market square ushered a discomfiting silence over the group. It had happened the day after the army of Magadha, led by Prince Kapila and General Daipayana, had marched into Tamralipti. The General Assembly of Vanga had taken a near-unanimous decision to fight the advancing army — near unanimous because three chiefs of the republic’s eighteen principalities had abandoned the Assembly and sought Magadha’s amnesty by means of surrender. The battle for Tamralipti had barely lasted half a day. Magadha’s forces had broken Vanga’s brittle defence, sending the members of the Grand Assembly into hiding. In a matter of hours, seventeen members of the Assembly — including the chiefs of four principalities — had been apprehended, and the next morning, seventeen bodies hung in Tamralipti’s market square as a gruesome reminder to those who dared challenge Magadha.

  “I have forgotten nothing,” the man who had tried to allay everyone’s fears snapped in resp
onse. Nerves were fraying on account of the tension, suspense and uncertainty they had endured. “All I am saying is that at this rate, we will end up being afraid of our own shadows.”

  “That is different from saying we have nothing to fear,” the third speaker shrilled. “Look at us. From eighteen, we are now down to just six chiefs. Seven, if we include the chancellor. This is all that is left of the Grand Assembly of Vanga. Our homes have been taken by Magadha, and we have nowhere to go. Still you say we have nothing to fear?”

  The old man’s voice rose hysterically before quavering and breaking into sobs. Sudasan put a comforting arm around the man’s shoulders.

  “We are already on our way to reclaiming our homes. Do not worry, for we shall take back from Magadha all that was ours.” The chancellor gently turned the man in the direction of the ship’s stern. “Why don’t you get some sleep?”

  Three of the chiefs escorted the man away, leaving the others on deck to contemplate the quiet sea. Once it was clear that Tamralipti had been overrun, Sudasan and the fifteen chiefs had fled the city and sought refuge in the surrounding countryside. After the capture and public hanging of four of them, Sudasan had continued eastward, with Magadha’s soldiers hot on his trail. The chancellor had finally given his pursuers the slip in the dense, tiger-infested mangrove swamps that formed a broad belt around the delta of the Yamuna and the Lauhitya, and it was here that the surviving chiefs of Vanga had regrouped.

  Although the mangroves offered excellent cover from detection, staying indefinitely in the malarial swamp was not an option; venturing west towards Tamralipti wasn’t one either. So Sudasan and the chiefs were faced with the option of crossing the estuary and making a long trek north to Pragjyotishpura, or sailing to the distant shores of Sribhoja and Srivijaya.

  The third choice facing them was to seek asylum in the court of Abhirami or that of her brother Veerayanka.

  “Do you think we will be welcomed with open arms?” the chief who stood to Sudasan’s right asked.

  The chancellor shrugged. The question had plagued them as they had sat inside the huts hidden among the mangroves, sheltering from the rain and the coming storm. They had asked themselves over and over again if it was worth approaching Queen Abhirami and King Veerayanka, but had found no satisfactory answer.

  The fact was that Pragjyotishpura, being too remote and far removed from the rest of Sindhuvarta, had never really interacted with Vanga — all contact between the northern kingdom and the republic was limited to the initiative of small, unorganized traders. Therefore, there was no real basis to believe that Pragjyotishpura would entertain them. With Sribhoja and Srivijaya, the prospects dimmed even further, as the two kingdoms depended extensively on trade with the port of Tamralipti. The rulers of Sribhoja and Srivijaya knew Sudasan and were likely to be moved by Vanga’s plight. However, it was uncertain whether they would risk antagonizing Tamralipti’s new rulers by extending support to Vanga’s fugitive chiefs.

  That only left the mountain-bound kingdoms of Odra and Kalinga. Unfortunately, as with Pragjyotishpura, neither kingdom had made efforts to establish relations with the other kingdoms of Sindhuvarta — and all efforts at building friendship with them had been quietly rebuffed. For as long as anyone could remember, Kalinga and Odra had existed in splendid isolation, protected by the Riksha Mountains to the north, the Aanupa or the Ghost Marsh to the west and the Dandaka Forest to the south.

  Deadlocked between three discouraging alternatives, Sudasan and his chiefs were at their wits’ end when one of their informers brought a stray piece of news from Tamralipti — Magadha was apparently drawing up elaborate plans to march its army against Odra.

  Sensing the slenderest of opportunities in this development, Sudasan had chosen the ragtag group’s destiny. Two small ships had been smuggled into the delta, and taking advantage of the brewing storm, they had set sail, steering far south to put distance between them and the coast, before veering west. The gamble seemed to have paid off as they had escaped the notice of Magadhan ships and vessels, but it had also exacted a heavy price. The terrifying storm had claimed one of the ships along with its entire burden, which included five of the fleeing Vanga chiefs.

  “We bear news that is of importance to Odra,” the chancellor said. “We can only hope that would be adequate to get us an audience with Queen Abhirami. After that, our fate is in her hands.”

  The moon chose that moment to hide behind a bank of clouds. The wind picked up, sending a whispering chill across the ship’s deck. Sudasan felt goosebumps crawl up his exposed forearms. With a shiver, he gazed into the western horizon, in the direction of Uttara Tosali.

  * * *

  After half a night spent tossing and turning, the Mother Oracle finally gave up on trying to sleep. She stared at the blank wall in front of her for a while, before deciding that since she was awake, she might as well look at something a little more pleasant. Such as the yellowing half-moon that hung outside her window like a lantern.

  Sleep had eluded her a lot recently — in fact, within a day or so of her arrival at the palace on the samrat’s request. She had always had grave doubts about coping in such a large and cluttered city as Ujjayini; unfortunately, her worst fears were coming true. Every day she felt less inclined to eat, her digestion was troubling her, and she was constantly fatigued because she didn’t eat well and couldn’t sleep. After her bout of illness, when the members of her tribe had come to look her up, she had been tempted to leave the palace with them. It was only her word to the king, and the thought of disappointing Shanku by not aiding the throne at its time of need, that had held the oracle back.

  Blinking what little sleep there was out of her eyes, she now watched the moon, her mind on the conversation with her granddaughter earlier that evening. The girl was heartbroken by Kalidasa’s departure, though she did an excellent job of keeping her feelings to herself. Yet, for all her loss, she was too proud of her king and too loyal to the throne (and too stubborn for her own good, the oracle’s mind interjected) to let her love for Kalidasa colour her decisions. And for the very same reasons, the Mother Oracle realized, Shanku would never forgive Brichcha, who was pining for a pardon in the palace dungeons.

  Though her own hatred for the man — who had caused her daughter to take her own life — was fierce, the oracle worried for Shanku. The girl was already an introvert, and without a shoulder to lean on, the oracle believed Shanku would end up even more lonely and embittered. Whatever his faults, Brichcha was her father and a repentant one; in his old age, he could give her the emotional support that he had never provided her as a child. She wished the girl would stop running away from her past and come to terms with —

  The Mother Oracle blinked and stared. Then, raising her head a little, she refocused her eyes and stared, fully alert, out of the window, at the small, stray patches of clouds floating across the face of the moon.

  Yes, something was there, she was certain.

  Scrambling up as best as her advanced years would allow her to, the oracle hobbled over to the window and peered up at the sky. There were more clouds coming from the west. As they slipped past the moon, she read a pattern in their tattered bodies and ragged tails. Sketchy, veiled, but a pattern nonetheless.

  She read a message in the clouds, a message coming from the west, from the direction of the Great Desert.

  * * *

  Dawn was a faint blush on the horizon as Amara Simha and his escort, a group of eight soldiers, rode out of Ujjayini’s northern gate. The councilor had promised the king’s sister that he would leave for the frontier by dawn and he had kept his word, not because Pralupi would hold him to it if he didn’t, but because he was in as much of a hurry to get to Udaypuri. Despite everyone else’s assurances to the contrary — and despite knowing they were correct — Amara Simha still felt indirectly responsible for having left Ghatakarpara behind at the frontier. He intended to find the boy and return him to the palace if it was the last thing he did.

  Th
e sun was still not free of the horizon and they had ridden not more than a couple of miles, when one of the soldiers at the rear of the escort heard the high-pitched bleat of a horn coming from somewhere far away and behind them, from the direction of Ujjayini. Looking over his shoulder, the soldier saw a horseman riding hard in pursuit, so he passed the word along and the company drew to a halt, waiting for the rider to catch up. When the rider arrived, he rode straight up to Amara Simha and bowed.

  “Greetings, councilor. The Samrat has asked me to escort you back to the palace.”

  “But I just left the palace,” replied Amara Simha, frowning.

  “I have orders to bring you back, your honour,” the rider looked apologetic. “I was told it is of utmost urgency.”

  Thoroughly mystified, the brawny councilor addressed his escort. “I have no idea how long this will take, so you might as well return with me.” Then, wheeling his horse around to face the city, he spurred it to a gallop. To the rider, he said over his shoulder, “You’ve done your job. You’re free to go now.”

  When he strode into the council chamber, Amara Simha saw the samrat’s face lighten with relief upon seeing him, although his jaw was set, firm and grim. At the same time, he felt the tension pressing down on the shoulders of those in the room — his fellow councilors and the Mother Oracle, all looking grim and deprived of sleep.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, studying the faces around the table. He reserved a lingering look for the oracle, intuitively knowing she had something to do with all of this. “Why did you call me back?”

  “The Mother Oracle just brought something to our notice,” said the king. Addressing the old woman, he added, “Could you repeat what you saw, mother?”

  The oracle nodded and turned to face the councilors. “I wasn’t able to sleep well — I haven’t been able to for many nights now,” she added pointedly. “But never mind that. I was lying staring out of the window at the moon and the clouds drifting by. The wind had borne the clouds from the west, and I saw a sign in them, a message.”