Chapter One
Ramm held his stance for twenty breaths, rock steady. His
right bicep glistened with sweat in the sun, swollen to twice its size as it
held the bow string taut and still.
A pigeon cooed in the distance. A butterfly flapped its wings
not ten paces from him. Ramm looked at them without looking at them. He
understood the rhythm of the butterfly’s flapping wings, the space between the
pigeon’s cries, the pace at which glistening drops of dew slunk to the ground
and became nothing. He measured his heartbeat with them, felt the coos, the
flaps and the dewfall synchronize with his heartbeat. His breathing slowed and
as his sight became vision, he saw his target as the tip of his arrow saw it.
He saw the blades of grass arch slightly to the left and
pegged the wind at half a horse-length per breath. Gentle enough but at fifty
horse-lengths from the target, enough to make his arrow miss by one horse. He
coaxed his aim off the mark – one horse to the right and half a horse above his
mark. All that remained now was to ease his breath to the point of being barely
alive.
Then, with an extreme effort of resolve, Ramm shut off his
senses as every Snipera tribesman worth his salt had been taught to. He felt
every sense slowly become one. The smell, the touch, the hearing, the sight,
even taste became one giant many-weaponed soldier as they focused on his mark
for him (a phenomenon of focus the
Snipera called ‘awakening of the all-sense’). And finally, he held his breath – almost like those fish-baiters did
underwater; except for the fact that he still inhaled one breath savored in
lieu of twenty. He saw the dew now fall ten times in a single breath, the wings
flap five times as much, the coos punctuated by a gap that was one tenth as big
as the original and with his all-sense, and he saw the wind and felt the gentle
curves in the path that he was to take through his arrow. He saw what the men
of science called gravitas – a mysterious force that pulled all arrows, once
released, to the ground eventually. His heart beat slowly, almost languidly –
one beat for twenty – and between heartbeats, he released his arrow.
He did not so much as fire his arrow as entrust it to the
care of the wind and the earth. Because were it not for the gentle care of
both, it would land a horse to the right and half a horse above the target. But
the wind carried it gently and gravitas tugged at it until it curved and bent
and hit with a gentle, almost polite thud. The arrow made a tiny hole in the
exact centre of the target.
It took a few breaths for his all-sense to disperse and his
breath to un-submerge from their underwater like bearings. When he came to, he
heard raucous applause from all round. His senses returned to their full and
normal use and he turned to see his king, Vikramadetya giving him a standing
ovation. To the king’s right, the princess sat expressionless, unmoved by the
archer’s brilliance. The five other kings from all the other kingdoms of Hind,
applauded politely while choosing to stay seated.
**********
Chapter Two
Ramm wore a flowing white beard – a fake one commissioned for
him by the army barber. He had stuck it to his face using the sap of the apple
tree and the sickly sweet smelling sap not only made his face itchy, it attracted
mosquitoes.
But, even for all its discomfort, Ramm loved disguising
himself and mingling with the common folk. It had been a pastime of kings to
disguise themselves as common men and roam their kingdoms to hear what their
men thought of them. But Vikramadetya had been too lazy and preoccupied with royal
luxuries (which comprised mostly of
entertainment in his harem – three hundred women strong) to care what his
kingdom thought of him; so the pastime had fallen unto Ramm.
Ramm walked slowly through the bazaar as an ageing mendicant
would and took in his surroundings. Normally he would have ordered the Marshall
from his spy corps to organize a survey and report to him. But this was one of
his own contacts– a contact he had carefully cultivated over a couple of
winters– and he was loath to give her identity away to anyone; not even to a
seasoned Marshall from his army. Besides, he enjoyed the art of the disguise
and the inner thrill that arose from not being recognized in a disguise
particularly well done.
As he walked, he took in the virtually endless stream of
haggling shopkeepers and shoppers. From what he could hear and see, the prices
of rice and rice-wine had fallen while horse meat had become dearer. Given it
was rice harvest season, it was only natural that the glut of rice in the
market was taking prices down. The horse meat prices were always an indicator
without visible rationale, since the prices depended solely on the availability
of sick and infirm horses (Healthy horses
were forbidden to be killed by law) and there was no regular horse-harvest
season. Prices of other items such as sugar and the spices and the vegetables
seemed to be stable, some of them moving up marginally; but there was nothing to
be read into that.
He looked up and saw the distinctly white peaks of Parbat far
in the distance, almost invisible. He felt a sort of caged implosion in his
chest – an anger that he felt every time he looked towards the mountains,
something he had never quite understood.
Walking slowly, Ramm came upon an inn that called itself Sadaabahaar
at the end of the market and began the mendicant’s ritual of asking for alms.
He began to sing a particularly soulful bhajan tugging at the strings of his
small handheld veena.
“Praise
the glories of Vishnu
A god unto gods
At the fingertips of
his divine hand
Our story unfolds.”
The innkeeper came out of the building and sought to drive
him away, “Go away baba,” he said calmly,
“you know how high the king’s taxes are? You would be making more money than me,
brother!”
Ramm ignored him and continued to sing– a ploy used by most mendicants.
The sage who had written this particular bhajan,
had most likely had the welfare of future mendicants in mind, for the song was
long enough to be sung from sunrise to moonset, in the face of reluctant alms-givers.
“We
are thankful for your kindness
Grateful for your mercy
Unworthy of your magics
Worthy of your curses.”
The innkeeper grew agitated, “Go away! Are you deaf baba?”
Unperturbed, Ramm continued to sing, his pitch growing
louder.
“The
moon is your watchful eye
The sun…”
“Rajaratnam!” a female voice interjected with finality, “must
you be so miserly to men of prayer?”
The innkeeper shrugged and turned his back to Ramm, towards
the woman who had just stepped out of the inn.
“Fine woman, you pay him,” he said, shrugging with
nonchalance, “but don’t you ask me for a paisa when your month runs out.”
The woman flicked her hair behind her ears before she spoke.
She was of the complexion of an evening with dimming light and radiated a diminishing
beauty. “Must you go to hell, Rajaratnam?” she said.
“All that is heaven and hell is here and now,” Rajaratnam
replied philosophically and went back inside his establishment.
The woman walked up to Ramm and in a voice loud enough for Rajaratnam
to hear said, “Baba, we are not of
good means but we will pay for our sins in food grain. Will that please you?”
Ramm smiled and nodded.
The kind lady asked Ramm to sit and wait for her to bring him
his food. Ramm sat on the thin grass – a couple of horselengths off the
entrance and waited.
After about a hundred breaths, the lady returned, with a banana
leaf laden with plain rice in her hands. She sat down beside Ramm as he began
to eat.
“Seeing as you are here, I assume you got my message?” she
asked quietly.
Ramm nodded. He swallowed the bite of rice he had taken
before he spoke. “So, this is important?” he asked.
“Well, importance is for kings and generals to worry about,”
the lady replied sagely. “I am but a messenger for the gods.”
Ramm carefully picked out a grain of rice that had affixed
itself to the apple-sap on his face before he spoke. “Shabree, tell me why I am
here.”
Prostitutes heard things – things that the best spies and
scouts did not. There was something about being in the arms of a beautiful
woman that made men reveal their deepest darkest secrets. It was said that possession
by demonic spirits or a grave illness of the mind drove women to prostitution. That,
of course, was a myth. What drove women to prostitution and men to crime were
the taxes that they had to pay to the royal treasury whether or not they had the
ability or the means to pay them. Not paying taxes was a crime in itself –
punishable by death in most of the kingdoms of Hind, including Ayodh.
“The Persisi minister of trade entertained himself with Komal,
one of Rajaratnam’s girls during the war games festival,” Shabree said. “But
before I reveal the inner workings of Persis’s foreign trade to you, I have
something far more interesting to tell
you.”
**********
Chapter Three
Contrary to popular belief, monkey, and not horse, was the
first animal to be enslaved by man.
In the land of Hind, being a monkey was the worst sort of existence
possible. Monkeys were devoid of the right of ownership of money or horse or
land – or any items saleable in the markets of Hind, of education, of food and
of life. What that meant was that man or
demon was well within his rights to, say, kill a monkey on sight.
Monkeys were hunted for their meat but since their meat was
coarse and hard to chew, monkey meat consumption by man was a rare usage of the
species.
The most common use of monkeykind was as slaves of man– toiling on men’s farms,
pulling hand-carts, breaking stones to build roads for caravans and virtually
any other imaginable form of hard physical labor. And as it often happens with systematically
persecuted species, the monkeys had themselves come to believe in their
inferiority and their fate as slaves of man.
There were men of science who had argued against this
treatment, warning of instances of sentience and intelligence or scientific
thought displayed by monkeys. But mankind had always placed monkeys on a
pedestal below horses and birds, most likely because what man saw in monkey was
an inferior mirror image of himself.
Ramm was aware of the poor monkey-man relationship or more
accurately put, the absent monkey-man relationship. He was also aware of the
very recent militarization of monkeys in certain regions – a fact that King Vikramadetya
and the upper echelons of his royal advisors considered a baseless rumor. What Ramm
was staring at now, however, should have been enough to drill some sense into his
fat king’s head.
The monkey called Hanohman sat upright on the bed of his room
in the inn Sadabahaar, his hands tied tight behind him and his legs bound
together. Two of Ramm’s trusted bodyguard stood at attention, tense and alert,
the blades of their swords a fly’s whisker away from the monkey’s throat.
A gag hung loosely around the monkey’s throat, something that
Ramm had removed a couple of breaths ago to hear the monkey’s voice. Hanohman
looked blankly at him as if seeing through him.
“Do you understand Hindustani?” Ramm asked, referring to the
language most spoken in Ayodh. Monkeys were known to pick up the language of
the country or region where they were held as slaves – not enough to speak but enough
to respond with hand gestures and grunts and nods.
The monkey nodded.
“Do you have a name?” Ramm asked softly in Hindustani, half
expecting a meaningless grunt in response.
The monkey took a couple of breaths to respond as if
processing the answer in his head. “Hanohman,” he grunted, finally.
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