Himalayas and the delicate fragrance of nightqueen blossom, raat ki rani, from the palace gardens.
Your women ravished, your children enslaved, your city sacked and razed to ashes.
His eyes widened. Full alert instantly. Turn, turn, slash, clear first circle, second, third, turn, turn, slice, jab, breathe, always breathe. In moments, he had covered the seven circles of personal safety. If this had been a battlefield, a dozen men would lie dead or dying around him. Nothing could survive the seven-circle asana. Nothing human at least.
But still, there was nobody there. Neither man, beast, nor asura. What was going on here?
Then he felt it.
A foul presence, like the nostril-clogging stink of wild Southwoods boar five days rotted and worm-infested. Maggots seeping out of blood-encrusted orifices. Mulch and mildew. The raw, fetid stench of deep jungle.
He felt the heat of a living breath on his face, heard the rasping gravel of a voice in his ear. A voice like rock scraping across glass. It isn’t my imagination. Someone—something—is here with me. Invisible, unseen, venomous as a stepped-on cobra.
You will watch your birth-mother savaged beyond recognition, your clan-mothers and sisters impregnated by my rakshasas, your father and brothers eaten while still alive, your race massacred, your proud cities pillaged and razed—
‘Who’s there? Show yourself, you coward! Face me and fight!’
—and when you think you can endure no more, when the horror is over and every living mortal is enslaved or converted to my cause, when you have suffered as much torture as any of your kind can endure and still live, then I shall snuff you out and start all over again. The samay chakra, your sacred wheel of time, will repeat the cycle of birth and suffering infinitely. You will wish you were in hell then, for even the underworld of Narak will seem a blessed escape from the living nightmare of mortal existence.
‘Damn you! Show your face!’
Boy. You still do not understand. See for yourself then. See the future and tremble.
And in a flash of blinding light, Rama was transported.
TWO
He stood in the Seers’s Tower, the highest point in Ayodhya. The stone tower rose like a sword in the sky, an awe-inspiring achievement of Arya architecture as well as a perfect lookout post. Such a tower existed in every Arya city from Gandahar to Ayodhya, to alert the citizens to an approaching enemy host. But it had been more than two decades since the Arya nations had tasted the bitter salt of war. And Ayodhya itself had not once in its proud history been under siege. Hence its title, Ayodhya, literally, the Unconquerable. Even the seven legendary seer-mages who had raised the tower with the mystical power of Brahman had not found reason to assemble within its impregnable walls for hundreds of years.
This circular chamber of the tower’s topmost level, nicknamed the Seers’s Eye, was damp and musty with disuse, the grey flagstone floor frosted over by night dew beneath Rama’s bare feet. He turned and turned again, sword prescribing the arc of the first circle. The elements were wilder here in this edifice of sorcerous architecture, carrying a sense of ancient times when war was a way of life and places like this were all that kept the Arya nations a sword-length ahead of their mortal enemies. He listened carefully, but at first all he heard was the whistling breath of Vayu, the wind god, blowing through the windowless openings and the distant growling of Indra, the god of lightning and thunder, threatening to unleash a storm even though the monsoon season was months away.
Then he heard it.
There. Below the howling of the wind and the distant growling of thunder. A sound like nothing he had heard before in his fifteen years of mortal life. Yet he knew at once what the sound meant.
War.
It was the sound of war.
Within Ayodhya.
For the first
Your women ravished, your children enslaved, your city sacked and razed to ashes.
His eyes widened. Full alert instantly. Turn, turn, slash, clear first circle, second, third, turn, turn, slice, jab, breathe, always breathe. In moments, he had covered the seven circles of personal safety. If this had been a battlefield, a dozen men would lie dead or dying around him. Nothing could survive the seven-circle asana. Nothing human at least.
But still, there was nobody there. Neither man, beast, nor asura. What was going on here?
Then he felt it.
A foul presence, like the nostril-clogging stink of wild Southwoods boar five days rotted and worm-infested. Maggots seeping out of blood-encrusted orifices. Mulch and mildew. The raw, fetid stench of deep jungle.
He felt the heat of a living breath on his face, heard the rasping gravel of a voice in his ear. A voice like rock scraping across glass. It isn’t my imagination. Someone—something—is here with me. Invisible, unseen, venomous as a stepped-on cobra.
You will watch your birth-mother savaged beyond recognition, your clan-mothers and sisters impregnated by my rakshasas, your father and brothers eaten while still alive, your race massacred, your proud cities pillaged and razed—
‘Who’s there? Show yourself, you coward! Face me and fight!’
—and when you think you can endure no more, when the horror is over and every living mortal is enslaved or converted to my cause, when you have suffered as much torture as any of your kind can endure and still live, then I shall snuff you out and start all over again. The samay chakra, your sacred wheel of time, will repeat the cycle of birth and suffering infinitely. You will wish you were in hell then, for even the underworld of Narak will seem a blessed escape from the living nightmare of mortal existence.
‘Damn you! Show your face!’
Boy. You still do not understand. See for yourself then. See the future and tremble.
And in a flash of blinding light, Rama was transported.
TWO
He stood in the Seers’s Tower, the highest point in Ayodhya. The stone tower rose like a sword in the sky, an awe-inspiring achievement of Arya architecture as well as a perfect lookout post. Such a tower existed in every Arya city from Gandahar to Ayodhya, to alert the citizens to an approaching enemy host. But it had been more than two decades since the Arya nations had tasted the bitter salt of war. And Ayodhya itself had not once in its proud history been under siege. Hence its title, Ayodhya, literally, the Unconquerable. Even the seven legendary seer-mages who had raised the tower with the mystical power of Brahman had not found reason to assemble within its impregnable walls for hundreds of years.
This circular chamber of the tower’s topmost level, nicknamed the Seers’s Eye, was damp and musty with disuse, the grey flagstone floor frosted over by night dew beneath Rama’s bare feet. He turned and turned again, sword prescribing the arc of the first circle. The elements were wilder here in this edifice of sorcerous architecture, carrying a sense of ancient times when war was a way of life and places like this were all that kept the Arya nations a sword-length ahead of their mortal enemies. He listened carefully, but at first all he heard was the whistling breath of Vayu, the wind god, blowing through the windowless openings and the distant growling of Indra, the god of lightning and thunder, threatening to unleash a storm even though the monsoon season was months away.
Then he heard it.
There. Below the howling of the wind and the distant growling of thunder. A sound like nothing he had heard before in his fifteen years of mortal life. Yet he knew at once what the sound meant.
War.
It was the sound of war.
Within Ayodhya.
For the first
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