KRISHNA CORIOLIS#6: Fortress of Dwarka Page 14

  His foot struck something.

  Something soft and yielding yet firm enough that it remained unmoved.

  He pushed at the object again with his foot, trying to feel it out.

  His sword remained ready to strike.

  The object remained still as a stone.

  But it was no stone. He could feel it yield beneath his sandaled sole.

  It was flesh or something akin to it.

  It could not be an animal or he would surely have smelled it. He knew bears hibernated in these caves and although it seemed too soon for a bear to retreat, it was possible that it was merely sleeping. But no bear would fail to react to an intruder for so long, nor would it permit the intruder to kick it the way he was kicking it now.

  It could not be a dead bear or any other dead animal because it would not only have smelled then, it would have stunk to high heaven within this enclosed and almost airless space.

  What was it then?

  He kicked harder this time, feeling the satisfying softness of another part of the thing that lay there.

  Then he used the trip of his sword to probe carefully. He expected at any moment to feel the violence of retaliation as the boy-God fought back viciously, suddenly, with the powerful sorcery he was reputed to deploy.

  The Yavana was not afraid of sorcery. In his land, he was considered a god too. All kings were. For every extraordinary thing that men do not witness for themselves, they assumed to have some element of supernatural power. When it came to kings and priests, they assumed it even when it was witnessed with their own eyes. What else were gods, they felt, if not powerful men and women who lived above the reach of normal law and limitations?

  The Yavana considered himself no less a God than this Krishna fellow.

  If Krishna had his tales of derring-do, so did the Yavana. If Krishna could be known as a God, so could the Yavana.

  Once he had slain the Slayer, the Yavana would proclaim himself God of India. So much better than mere Prince of India.

  He raised his sword and pointed it directly at the person lying on the ground before him, for he was certain it was a person now. Nothing else felt that way when kicked. He had kicked enough prone men and women to know what it felt like and enough children too to know that this was not one.

  “Rise and fight me, coward,” he said, his voice loud and echoing in the cavern. “I have come across the world to do battle with you, at least do me the courtesy of lifting your weapon and defending yourself!”

  The person on the ground stirred. The Yavana’s heartbeat increased pace. He hefted his sword in a new posture.

  “Who?” muttered a voice, speaking a language whose words were incomprehensible to the Yavana but whose meaning was crystal clear. “Who?”

  “It is I!” the Yavana cried out. “Prince-God of the Yavanas. I have come to end your stay on this earth. Rise up and face me one final time. Let me kill you with dignity.”

  Suddenly, light leaped into being in the darkness.

  The Yavana leaped back, more startled by the light than he would have been by the flinging of a weapon or striking of a limb.

  The light glowed within the eyes of a man, he saw. Deep blue iridescence, exuded from within the man’s being, released through his eyes. The light had always been within the man’s eyes. All the man had done was open his eyes to release it. It had been the faint effervescence from his closed eyes that had enabled the Yavana to see a little in this space, not some luminous lichen or glowing moss.

  Now, as the man’s eyes opened fully, the light that shone forth was formidable, terrible, blinding. As was the man’s deafening cry of rage.

  “WHO?” cried the man with a blasting tone that shook the very spine of the Yavana and echoed endlessly off the walls of the cave. Even the aides following up the mountainside, some about to reach the ledge of the cave, heard the voice and saw the blue glow burst from the open cave mouth. One of them exclaimed and released his hold on the cliff face to clutch at his ears, face contorting with pain as he was assaulted by the shrill sound of the single word.

  The Yavana screamed, dropping his sword and reaching for his ears too. Blood spurted from both ears as his eardrums burst.

  “WHO?” asked the man in the cave.

  And this time the fire from his eyes blazed out in a great fireball of blue light, enveloping the Yavana and scorching him to a skeleton instantly. The skeleton was charred to fine ash which swirled and settled on the cave floor with a faint spattering sound. The Yavana was dead even before he knew what was killing him.

  9

  As the Yavana perished in a burst of blue brahman shakti, the reverberations set off by the “Who?” of the One in the cave shuddered throughout the mountain, spreading like spider cracks across a glacier. Millions of tons of snow, ice and rock accumulated over centuries lay undisturbed in that Himalayan wilderness. So immense was the power of that voice, so deep its booming vibrations, that the very depths of the Himalayas shuddered.

  As the motes of blue shakti evaporated at the cave entrance, leaving no trace of the perished Yavana except a few footprints in the powdery snow, the Yavana’s followers paused, sensing something amiss. They had heard the booming “Who?” and were climbing as quickly as they could to reach their master but now they hesitated, feeling the unease that comes before the crisis. Attached to the face of the mountain, they felt its being tremble in sympathy to the great cry of power.

  Farther down, stretching across the mountainside, the valley below, and across the craggy slopes of the Himalayas for yojanas, the army of the Yavanas paused as well. Every soldier, cook and aide in that great force felt the deep reverberations within the mountain range’s belly. Everyone turned to glance at his fellow, feeling that something terrible was to follow.

  In response, the snow began to crumble at the peaks of the mountains. It fell like powdery cotton, floating down to drift into the valley. In its wake came the mounds of packed snow from the past months of winterfall. This fell harder, in chunks and pieces. Then the harder snow, then the ice and finally, the very rock itself began to yield and tumble. Even before the first flurries of dislodged snowflakes from the peaks could reach the ground, the avalanche was in full spate, a great army of nature roaring down from those tremendous heights. Like a hundred akshohini of elephants, riding the chariots of gravity, propelled by the horses of acceleration, bearing the spears and swords and maces of jagged edges, blade-sharp ice shards and bone-crushing boulders, the avalanche descended on the Yavana army.

  First to die were the Yavana’s followers, swatted off the mountainside like ants washed away by a waterfall. Their mangled bodies joined the onrush as, in moments, the great roaring wall of stone and ice and snow fell upon the main body of the army. Even the shrillest screams of brave men were drowned out completely beneath the gargantuan roaring of the avalanche.

  No army’s charge could have wreaked such destruction or demolished that great force as completely and swiftly.

  In the moments that followed, the bestial fury of the avalanche wiped out the entire Yavana army, carrying a storm of bodies miles away to land in a distant valley where the tail end of the army was still arriving, fighting bitterly over their disappointment at not finding any spoils of war in this mythic land of the Indus.

  A cascade of other avalanches followed. In an hour, the only trace left of the greatest army ever assembled were the occasional spear or wagon wheel or broken limb sticking out between fallen boulders and jagged shards of glacial ice. Great mountain crags watched and listened impassively, unmoved by the epic scale of human destruction wrought with such facile ease.

  Still later, as the dust and snow began to settle, the great ancient mountain ranges returned to their eternal state of stillness, resuming their long cold sleep.

  The Yavana invasion had ended. For all time afterward, the legend of the lost army would remain a mystery. Back home in the Grekos islands and mainland, other Yavanas would speculate and wonder at what might have happened
. Eventually, the belief would settle, like the dust of the avalanche, upon the opinion that the Yavana conqueror had been too young, too brash, too bold. That he had ventured too far beyond the edge of the known world, into the fabled perils of the Land of the Indus. And as could only be expected, he had fallen off the edge of the world, alongwith his great force.

  For a great age thereafter, no Yavana would dare venture in this direction, though many would dream of it, emboldened by the myth of their forebear who had “fallen off the edge of India”, as the story came to be told. And eventually, another equally young, brash, bold Yavana would arise and vow to follow in those very same steps, bringing another even greater force of his countrymen to attempt to conquer the wealth and mysteries of the Land of the Indus, seeking to be remembered as the conqueror of the known world.

  But that is another story for another time.

  10

  “Who?” the voice had asked in the blackness of the mountain cave. The Yavana had been unable to answer. As a result, he and his great fighting force had been extinguished from the earth as easily as a cascade extinguishing a swarm of fireflies. As the last echoes of the final avalanche died away, the cave returned to its perennial silence. Silence so palpable that it rang in one’s ears as clearly as a bell, filling the void of eternity.

  The One in the cave was appeased by the Yavana’s extinguishment. For hours after the last motes of the intruder’s body had evaporated into the icy air, he remained standing in the pitch blackness of the grotto, his preternatural senses probing outward. In his mind’s eye he was able to view the destruction of the great army more vividly than a man looking out from the peak of mighty Himavat might have envisaged. He saw every death, every last man fall, ever horse and mule broken, every last life extinguished. Fireflies. Cascade.

  Slowly, by degrees, he returned to himself. His consciousness drew inwards until once more it was contained within the limits of his own flesh, blood and bone. The cage of his body re-established its temporal dominance over his brahmanic essence, restraining it. His breathing slowed to the hibernation pace that had enabled him to survive the long stay in the cave. His mind sensed no further threat, no other presence. He began to prepare himself to return to the long slumber from which the Yavana had so rudely awakened him. His basal metabolic rate reduced steadily, controlled through the yogic science of pranayam breathing, the blood slowed in his veins and arteries, the heart itself beat less frequently. In moments, he was ready to lapse back into the deep dreamless sleep that had enveloped him earlier. He was still lying supine on the cave floor, his body still partially in hibernation, and now he allowed himself to drift back in unconsciousness.

  But even as his eyelids began to droop and he started to fall into the well of sleep, something alerted his senses. Through his closed eyelids, he sensed illumination within the darkened cave. He reacted. Opening his eyes he looked out angrily, ready to blast any intruder into ash again. His lips parted to utter the same challenge he had issued earlier to the Yavana.

  But before he could mouth the single word, he saw the being that stood before him.

  This was no mere mortal, like the Yavana.

  This was a being of superior ilk. Jet black as a monsoon stormcloud, with flashes of deep blue light within his body, under his skin. Clad in a garb of yellow silk that contrasted with his crow black complexion yet enhanced his beauty. His face benevolent and beatific, glowed with a deep blue luminescence that could not be matched by any source on earth. Earrings shaped like alligators glittered and dangled from his sensually shaped ears. The One in the Cave observed the earrings stirring and realized that they did not merely resembled alligators, they were alligators. Life-size and very much alive. He could not fathom how life-size alligators could be dangling from a man’s ears until he realized that this was clearly no mortal man. Scale and relation had no meaning where this being was concerned.

  His body was lithe, athletic, beautifully shaped, his chest broad and sloping, his neck adorned with a vaijayanti garland. He took a step toward the One and his gait was slow yet powerful, like a predator in his element.

  And he glowed with an effulgence that bathed the entire cavern in brilliant blue light. Not merely a light that exuded from his pores but an illumination that simple filled every particle of space around him, leaving no shadows or unilluminated crevices. It produced an ethereal unearthly effect.

  The One knew at once that he was in the presence of a great superior being. Reawakened and invigorated by the appearance of this person of power, he rose to his knees and bowed deeply, joining his palms in respectful greeting.

  “Namaskaram, great one,” he said. “Welcome to my grotto.”

  In response, the being merely smiled back at him, a teasing enigmatic coyness on his effeminate lips. The One found it difficult to look at him directly, so blinding was his effulgence. He kept his eyes lowered as he continued to speak.

  “What brings a great being such as thee to this remote cavern?” he asked humbly. “You are barefoot yet you have climbed this great height with no scarring to your feet, as if you walked on rose petals rather than the thorny crags of this great precipice. You are lightly clad yet seem to feel not the extreme cold of this high snow-bound peak. Surely you cannot be a mortal. You are most certainly a Deva descended to earth for some great purpose.”

  The yellow-clad one smiled silently, listening without speaking yet.

  The One continued his eulogy: “Are you perhaps Surya, the sun god, for you give off an effulgence no less potent than the sun itself? Or perhaps you are Soma, the god of the moons, because your divine illumination is blue and cooling rather than heated like the sunlight? Or perhaps you are Indra himself? Or some other deva or celestial body in human guise?”

  When the dark-skinned one remained cryptically silent, the One continued: “In any case, there is no doubt that you are supreme even among the three gods of gods, highest in the trimurti of Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva, Creator, Preserver and Destroyer of Creation. I say this with full confidence for I have seen all three of the supreme godheads and I recognize your greatness by its effusion of brahmanic power.”

  The being with alligators for earrings tilted his head slightly, as if acknowledging the One in the Cave’s eulogy. The One bowed his own head in thanks then waited for the Being to respond.

  11

  When the Being did not respond for another period of time, the One in the Cave felt compelled to speak again rather than remain silent. He had experience with devas before and knew that to them, a few hours or days of human life were no measure of time at all: an entire mortal lifetime was as a flicker of an eyelid to a deva. He could remain waiting here for millennia before his celestial visitor spoke. So he continued the one-sided conversation in an attempt to hasten a response.

  “Permit me to introduce this humble self, sire,” he said. “I am Mucukunda, son of Yuvanasva of Mandhata, of the line of Ikshwaku. An eon ago, the asuras struck terror into the hearts of their immortal foes, the devas. The devas solicited aid from all kshatriyas. Ever mindful of my kshatriya dharma, I, among many others, willingly provided protection to the race of gods and fought fiercely on their behalf. The campaign raged for an untold time until even I lost all sense of age and date, place and presence. Finally, a day came when I saw that I was alone on the field of battle surrounded only by corpses and gore. Then the devas descended from the sky in flaming chariots and blessed me for my efforts on their behalf. They said they had obtained the One named Karttikeya, he of supreme prowess, and henceforth Karttikeya could continue the work that not only I, but a thousand thousand other kshatriyas like myself, had done for countless years.”

  “‘You have served us with great honor and efficacy,’ the Devas said unto me,” Mukucunda continued, keeping his hands joined and his aspect demure as he addressed the Shining One. “‘You put aside all personal desires and responsibilities, renounced the world of mortals, abdicated your own kingdom which was rich and filled with pleasures. You ha
ve given up everything a man could desire from a mortal existence in order to serve us. You have honored kshatriyas throughout time and have been true to your word. Ask any boon of us and it shall be your’s.’”