The Mountain Goddess

by Shelley Elizabeth Schanfield

  “Your majesty!” Nanda cried out. “There are Kosalan deserters in her army’s ranks. How do we know they’ll stay loyal to her? How do we know that there aren’t spies among them that have informed Prince Virudha of the outlaw army’s position and intentions?”

  “Doubtful,” Suddhodana said. “You know how traitors are treated in her army.”

  There was silence. Everyone had heard the tales. It was said the outlaws practiced human sacrifice, that a dark priestess gave Angulimala’s enemies to the Great Mother, soaking the earth with their blood.

  No matter what Mala had become, Dhara could not help wanting to make her former guru proud. She retired to her tent for a sleepless night.

  The morning air chilled Dhara through the light Maghadan armor the cavalry favored. It was so finely wrought that it draped like silk, and though supple and thin, it repelled arrows. Some said this was by aid of spells, but Nalaka maintained that it was metallurgy, not magic. “Maghadans have unlocked many secrets of the forge,” he had told her. “They spin alloys into thread like flax.”

  Magic or metallurgy, the armor lacked warmth, and goosebumps rose on her arms. A thick mist hid everything from sight and the shouted orders of unseen Kosalan commanders seemed to come from every direction. Enemy harnesses jangled, wooden wheels groaned as chariots moved into place, and an elephant trumpeted. Too close; it all sounded too close. If the enemy were deployed right across the river, they would decimate the Sakyas.

  Suddhodana’s officers had agreed on their formations last night. Their troops stood ready. To form the shape of an eagle, Suddhodana arrayed one entire battalion and half of the second into units that formed a wingspan facing the river. Each unit was composed of a combination of modern light chariots; one huge old-style chariot carrying seven archers; cavalry and foot soldiers; and three elephants. The cavalry and the light chariots would advance as quickly as they could, surround the enemy, and weave in to shoot, then dash away beyond the Kosalan archers’ range. Whether they were in the turtle or the trident formation, the Kosalas would be slower. As the vanguard progressed, the heavy Sakyan chariots and battle elephants would charge.

  Dhara’s elite cavalry was divided among the units that made up the beak and head of the eagle. She was positioned in the head. The remaining half battalion formed the eagle’s body, which protected the king’s white elephant upon which Suddhodana, barely visible through the fog, sat in the carved and gilded wooden turret with his page, who stood behind him holding the white parasol.

  Dhara’s horse tossed its head and whinnied. Her cavalry’s mounts nickered in response. Only when the fog rose would the Sakyas know the enemy’s formation. Suddhodana’s plan had included an attack from the Kosalan rear by Angulimala’s forces, but another rumor had swept the camp that no word had come as to her army’s whereabouts. It would be a disaster if the outlaws came too late, and a massacre if they didn’t come at all.

  The sun tried to burn through the mist, but the grey curtain descended thicker than ever. Dhara could barely see Satya a mere foot or two away. The cold seeped into her bones. She tried to still her mind. Never had she been in the midst of so many men intent on killing. Single-pointed clarity eluded her. Chaotic images tumbled past her mind’s eye. Siddhartha atop her, silhouetted by the starry sky, making love in a fragrant garden. Mala on a black horse, the infamous garland of bloody, severed fingers around her neck as she led a thundering charge. Sakhi and her curled under the skins of her bed in her father’s hall—but Sakhi was screaming in agony.

  A sign that Sakhi was in trouble.

  “What am I doing here?” Dhara whispered. She should be with her heart’s sister, ushering in new life, not here, poised for slaughter.

  The mist broke as if some celestial being had whisked it away like a cook at a palace feast whipping back the white muslin to reveal a roasted peacock. Across the river, red and black Kosalan banners floated over a mass of men and beasts. All thoughts of Sakhi vanished. Only the battle mattered.

  “By the gods, what formation is that?” Satya’s question ended in an absurd squeak. Dhara half laughed, half-sobbed. Terror distracted her. This was no skirmish where excitement tinged with fear served to focus her attention and make her blood sing. At this moment, she couldn’t have summoned any yogic power even if she wanted.

  What formation was it? The Kosalas were scattered in the distance, without any apparent discipline. Or were they in the lotus, the impenetrable wheel formation, the legendary strategy that meant death to Abhimanyu, the hero Arjuna’s beloved son?

  The high-pitched Sakyan conch sounded. Cavalry and light chariots sprang into the shallow water. White spray rose under their hooves and seemed to hang in the air, some glinting with rainbows. It fascinated Dhara, and Swift halted, as if sensing his rider’s distraction.

  She couldn’t tear her eyes from the foaming spray. The river was full of vehicles and riders on their horses, milling about in helpless confusion. Where the Sakyan army had camped on Yamuna’s eastern side, the land sloped gently to the water, but the other side was a low bank. Horses with riders mounted it easily, but chariots tipped crazily as they tried to climb over, and several of them had already landed on their sides in the water, spilling charioteers and archers.

  A charioteer called out, “This way!” He was threading his way through the melee of confused Sakyas to a spot downstream where a little tributary entered the river and there was a narrow beach, easy to maneuver. Meanwhile many cavalry had managed to extricate themselves and mount the bank, lessening the congestion on the river. They charged ahead, shouting, “Jai, Vivasvat!”

  Kosalan cavalry fell upon the Sakyas as they lurched up the bank and onto the battlefield. An enemy plunged into the river near her and drew his sword. As she met the blow, he looked at her in surprise. “You’re nothing but a woman.”

  Dhara thrust her sword into his stomach, toppling him from his mount into the river. Red rivulets floated away from his body, drawn by Yamuna’s gentle caresses, expanding and dissipating into the muddied water.

  Dhara had wounded enemies before, but this was the first to die by her hand. She nearly dropped her bloody weapon.

  “Jai, Vivasvat,” Dhara gasped, then louder as she caught her breath, “Victory, warriors of the Sun God! To the enemy!”

  She charged up the bank into the melee. Sakyas swarmed around the Kosalan cavalry. The Sakyas were famed for becoming one with their steeds, thighs gripping thin pieces of shaped leather tied with braided hemp rope. The Kosalas sat without grace on their gilded and bejeweled but clumsy wooden saddles.

  Despite being outnumbered, the Sakyas overwhelmed the Kosalan cavalry, and soon the vanguard reformed into units that galloped toward the enemy army, which was waiting in seeming disarray.

  Dhara paused for a moment. This was odd, this quick Kosalan retreat. Before she could think why, the grey command elephant in the formation’s center transfixed her. In the beast’s turret sat Prince Virudha—the man who destroyed her clan, Rani’s killer. She wanted to ride right through the heavy chariots and massed infantry, past the war elephants, slash the ropes that held the turret atop the elephant, impale the prince on her sword.

  But the appearance of chaotic disarray was a Kosalan feint. They were using the lotus formation. Swarms of red-and-black-clad infantry surrounded the Sakyas and dragged them from their horses.

  Dhara was caught in the trough of a wave between the slow-moving Sakyan infantry, heavy chariots, and elephants, and the cavalry and light chariots that hurtled past in pursuit of retreating Kosalas.

  “After her,” she heard someone cry. The very air was working against her, and it seemed as if she was tangled in a web, like the web the sorcerer Yajna had cast around them in Varanasi. Time stopped. She had no control over it, no power to cry out, to think. Her arms lacked the strength to rein in and turn Swift. Her own cavalry had galloped far ahead. She was alone, with a half doze
n Kosalas within bowshot. One notched an arrow and drew his bow. The others urged their horses toward her.

  Why did everything seem to move so slowly, when her heart was racing like a rabbit’s? The sticky web loosened and she wheeled her horse to the left. There was the stream that joined the Yamuna. It flowed from a copse at the east end of the floodplain. She touched her heels to Swift’s flanks and broke the invisible web’s last strands.

  Dhara raced up the stream bed through the copse as fast as she dared. Swift’s hooves sent spray in every direction. “Watch for rocks, watch for rocks,” she shouted to him. She glanced back. The Kosalas were gaining. She cursed herself for choosing this path. She was alone, chased by six enemy warriors on horseback. Swift’s every stride took her farther from the Sakyan army.

  She burst from the woods into a glade and cantered pell-mell into a group of armed riders. Everything slowed again. Trapped. But these riders were dressed in plain antariyas, not Kosalan colors. Were they Angulimala’s troops?

  Swift reared. Dhara’s legs could not grip his heaving flanks and her hands were slipping from the reins. Sukesa had drilled it into her: “In the unlikely event that you can’t stay on your steed, don’t land on your back.” Dhara twisted as she fell and caught her weight on one arm. There was a crack and pain shot through her. She lost consciousness.

  The Peacock

  “Kosalas and Sakyas,” Gada called over his shoulder in a soft voice. The youth wiggled backwards from the ridge overlooking Yamuna’s waters. “There’s a fortified village about a half mile away, at the steepest rise.”

  Chandaka frowned. He had meant to skirt Kalamas territory. It was plain he’d made a wrong turn. They should have taken that fork to the west a few miles back. He’d been in too much of a hurry.

  Gada scrambled down the hill to where Chandaka and Prahlad waited in a little copse. He brushed damp earth and leaves from his clothes.

  “Many dead on the battlefield,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “They’ve been fighting a while.” He wiped a dirty hand across his forehead, leaving a dark smear. It made him look even younger, barely old enough to fight.

  “No need to whisper, girlie,” Prahlad said, washing down a piece of dry chapatti with a squirt from his waterskin. He poured some water over his sun-reddened face and it dribbled down his muscular chest. “Or are you afraid we might finally see a little fighting? Me, I’m itching to kill me some Kosalas.”

  “Shut up, Prahlad,” Chandaka said. When he was assembling his troop for this venture, Prince Ajata had endorsed Prahlad as a fine warrior. Immediately Chandaka had become suspicious. Ajata had been scheming against him since his early days at the Maghadan court, even though Chandaka had made every effort to convince his half-brother that he had no designs on the throne. “Take him along, son,” King Bimbisara advised. “He’s a good man in a fight.” Maybe so, but Prahlad was also sullen and insubordinate and arrogant.

  Prahlad rose and slung the waterskin over the wooden saddle and tugged at his plain garb. On this assignment they were not wearing the Maghadan clan’s copper and silver colors. Chandaka and his father had agreed it was best to look like they were mercenaries serving no master.

  “They’re making enough noise down there that we could all three blow a conch, and no none would even look up here,” Prahlad said.

  “But we don’t all three have conchs,” Gada said.

  Chandaka suppressed a sigh. Gada was a magician around horses, but he was so literal.

  “Of course we don’t, you stupid, sister-fucking fool,” Prahlad grunted.

  It appeared for a moment that Gada might cry. He was just a boy, really, an orphan. Chandaka had wrested him from a couple of nasty slavers on his last visit to his mother in the Licchavi capital.

  “Don’t let him get to you,” Chandaka said. Prahlad snickered and they. They exchanged glares.

  “The Sakyas look to be losing, Lieutenant Maurya,” the boy said, collecting himself.

  When Chandaka arrived at court, everyone called him the Peacock—Mayura in the sacred tongue—for the fine plumage he purchased with the largesse his father showered on him. In the peculiar Maghadan accent, Mayura became Maurya, and the mispronunciation stuck.

  “It’s not our fight,” Chandaka said, meaning to be kind, but sounding a little sharp.

  Gada dropped his eyes and untied his horse from the slender trunk of a young tree covered with dry, brown leaves. “Yes, sir.”

  “Could be our fight,” Prahlad said. “You once served the Sakyan prince. Besides, they are our allies.”

  Chandaka didn’t want to think about that, but he couldn’t keep from asking, “How many on the battlefield?” Odd that the Sakyas would have trouble with the Kosalas. Once almost invincible, the Kosalan army had in recent years suffered major defeats.

  “I counted fifteen elephants on the Kosalan side. Three battalions. Elephants, infantry, and chariots are deployed in the lotus formation.”

  “Lotus Formation?” Chandaka asked, incredulous.

  “Yes, sir. Don’t you know the story of how Prince Arjuna’s son broke the formation?” he said, mistaking Chandaka’s incredulity for ignorance. “My father would tell us the tale. He would draw the battle lines on the dirt floor of our hut.” For a moment, the boy stared at the ground, unseeing. Then he cleared his throat. “Of course, there was witchcraft involved… but that’s the situation, sir. The Kosalas have caught quite a few Sakyan cavalry in the spiral.”

  “I know, I know,” Chandaka said irritably. Modern armies never used that ancient strategy. It was damned tricky. The commander’s elephant was in the lotus’s center and troops deployed in a spiral around him. Enemy cavalry and chariots rode into its midst and were trapped as the formation shrank into itself like a lotus closing its petals. It had been the death of Abhimanyu, though he saved the day for the Pandava army. “Who rides the Kosalan command elephant?”

  “It’s not a white one, sir.”

  Only a king could ride a white elephant. It must be Prince Virudhan. “How many Sakyas?”

  “Maybe two battalions, sir. They have their white elephant with them.”

  So Suddhodana was in command. Why on earth would he have attacked the Kosalas in their own territory with only two battalions? “It’s not our fight,” Chandaka muttered, though the Sakyan king had once been like a father to him. But that was long ago.

  “Lieutenant Maurya?” Gada said.

  “Think your precious Prince Siddhartha is with them, Chandaka?” Prahlad said. “Think his dear old bapu let the future world emperor out of the palace this time? They’re all mad, that Sakyan royalty.”

  “What do you know about it?” Chandaka snapped.

  Prahlad shrugged and smirked. Gada pulled his short braid over his shoulder and tugged at it.

  Chandaka vaulted into his saddle. “We have a mission to complete. I want to get back to my father’s territory with the Gandharan steeds while the weather holds.”

  The three of them rode single file through the copse to where the rest of the troop waited. They had stopped by a stream to water the desert-bred horses they bought in Taxila. If they managed to get the small herd back to the Maghadan capital, King Bimbisara would use them to show his officers the virtues of the light chariots the Sakyan army favored, the sort Chandaka used to drive for Siddhartha.

  Those years back in Kapilavastu, Chandaka and Siddhartha studied the maneuvers and practiced technique endlessly. They won every competition and war game, yet it was not the same as if they had been tested together on a real battlefield.

  Chandaka’s shoulders slumped. Even after all this time in his father’s capital, it pained him to remember those carefree days as the Sakyan prince’s charioteer.

  They had barely escaped the foolhardy Varanasi adventure with their lives. Nalaka swept Siddhartha and Dhara away to Kapilavastu, leaving Chandaka behind with Harischandra.
Chandaka took a more prosaic route to his father’s court: the fisherman Matsya and his wife took him and the rishiki Bhadda to Rajagriha, the Maghadan capital, in their rather smelly boat. Not long after his arrival, he learned that Siddhartha and Dhara had circled the fire seven times to become man and wife.

  “I fear nothing good will come of their marriage,” Kirsa had written to him. It was not difficult to read between the lines and see that her heart was broken. It would have been the perfect time for Chandaka to be there to comfort her, but he had to consider that King Suddhodana would not forgive him for helping Siddhartha slip away to Varanasi. Or that’s what he liked to tell himself. In truth, it was because Kirsa still loved Siddhartha more than him, even if her childhood sweetheart belonged to someone else.

  They emerged into the cool glade where the others were waiting. A nameless stream that fed into Yamuna’s river ran through it, its clear waters muddied by the hooves of the thirty horses his troop rode and the fifty they were guiding back to Maghada.

  “We should keep as far as we can from Yamuna’s waters,” Chandaka said to his men. “We can cut a little west, then go south until we’re past Surasena and Avanti territory. Then head due east to Maghada.”

  Just then, a trim female warrior appeared across the stream. “Lieutenant Maurya!” she called, gesturing behind her. “This path runs into a kind of trail that runs south-southwest. It’s rutted and half-overgrown. Probably won’t meet up with anyone if we take it.”

  Chandaka smiled at her. “Then we’ll follow you, Shalini. Mount up, everyone.”

  Shalini’s face remained impassive. The Maghadan warrior’s code stated that for the sake of discipline, there were to be no sexual relations between male and female warriors, but she came to Chandaka at night. Punishment for this was anything up to and including death, if the troop commander deemed it necessary, but Chandaka was the troop’s commander, and Shalini was willing. He ignored the regulation.