Palace Of Assassins

by Aditya Iyengar

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Please Read Notes: Brand New, International Softcover Edition, Printed in black and white pages, minor self wear on the cover or pages, Sale restriction may be printed on the book, but Book name, contents, and author are exactly same as Hardcover Edition. Fast delivery through DHL/FedEx express.

Release date: December 20, 2016

Publisher: Hachette India

Print pages: 232

Sample

One

When Ashwatthama woke up, there were boils all over his body. Thousands of them, or at least a number that was impossible to count. He felt ill, but tried to get up anyway. When you had trained your life for war, the only time it was permissible to lie on unknown ground for more than a few moments was when you were dead.

The boils on his body squeezed against the earth. He winced. The pain was intense. His eyelids opened slightly but were pinned back by the sharp light. Maybe it would be wise to take it slow. He rubbed the ground around him gently with the palms of his hands. The rough, grainy texture felt like sand.

Once more then.

He forced his eyes open slowly, pushing away the heavy brightness that tried to assert itself, and peered around. As the initial blurriness cleared, he saw nothing but sand. He tried to pick himself up once more, slowly this time, but the pain overpowered him again. He gave up for the moment and tried to orient himself.

It was noon, or close to it, as the intensity of the sunlight revealed to him; he was probably in the middle of a desert. He took a deep breath, clenched the sand around him, and willed his entire body to rise. The boils throbbed, almost in unison, and his body shuddered with pain. He collapsed back into the sand.

Calm down.

He exhaled and controlled his breath, pushing it gently out of his nostrils. Once all the air had been evacuated, he drew it back, like an archer drawing a bow. Slowly. Steadily. He controlled the path of his breath and guided its motion, through his neck, chest, arms and legs and down into the pit of his belly.

Think of your breath as a wall, his father had told him – a wall between your skin and nerves, and the pain that seeks to enter their sanctum. Pain is contemptible. It is a minor inconvenience. It must not be allowed to penetrate the sanctity of your body. The pain does not exist within you, it comes from the outside and like footwear at a temple, must be left outside, he had said.

Ashwatthama drew in another breath and concentrated upon spreading it through his body as his father had taught him. The pain grew weaker and then left the surface of his skin, unannounced as it had arrived. He sat up on the sand, and his mind crept back to alertness.

The bastard cowherd had placed a curse on him. The Amrityuvar – the immortality blessing.

The sages had a sense of humour for sure – to call the curse of eternal life a blessing. A sequence of words that stopped the churn of time inside your body and froze the youth in your sinews for as long as you wanted and more, much more. Youth without restriction or restraint; youth not hemmed in by the fencings of time; youth that would reinvigorate and rejuvenate whenever threatened or depleted. Youth without end.

Youth without meaning.

The cowherd had placed the Amrityuvar on him with the added blight of eternal leprosy. For what reason? Perhaps as an additional cruelty? There was no shortage of it these days, and the cowherd was one of those who dealt it out liberally.

He tried to form a mental picture of what he looked like but lost the desire almost instantly when he glided his palm down his arm and felt a thick, sticky film of pus on it. Horrified, he stuck his hand in the sand and tried to wipe it off but the sand stuck to his palm. Flies swarmed about him trying to land on the red-yellow layer of pus and blood that had formed on his body.

He realized that he had been left lying in the sand with nothing except his loincloth. No robes, not even a shawl to clean the foul-smelling pus.

How did the cowherd know how to place a curse? Was he a tatvakarman in disguise? Did he really know how to manipulate tatva?

He calmed himself. Curses required a great deal of concentration and mental rigour. Men who had studied the ways of tatva for centuries had trouble mastering it. There was a chance that the curse wasn’t fully in effect yet, or hadn’t been placed properly. Many times, curses that were pronounced in a state of anger and high emotion could be misguided and were known to work at less than their full potency. Maybe the curse hadn’t taken effect? It had only been a few hours since the cowherd had placed it on him. He had heard that powerful blessings or curses took a full day and night to take effect. Was there still time to escape its shadow?

There was only one way to escape the Amrityuvar.

He turned around slowly. A sharp object tugged at his dhoti. Tentatively, he groped with his hands. A weapon was half buried in the sand. He pulled it out. It was his own weapon – Anamika. A heavy war scythe joined by a chain to a large metal crusher ball with spikes. There had been none like it on any battlefield. His eyes lingered over the scythe, pausing awhile at the black-red stain on its edge – the last trace of the Pandava bloodline.

He had disembowelled people before. Using the outside of his curved scythe to carve up the underside of a belly just between the hips where the skin was at its softest. A fairly easy stroke if there was no armour between blade and skin.

He had never disembowelled himself before.

The casualness with which the idea occurred to him would have surprised him on another day. In the light of what had happened before he found himself in the desert, there were only two alternatives left to him. He could wait and hope that the cowherd’s emotions had overwhelmed him, and the curse would never take full effect. The other alternative was to kill himself and be rid of all doubt. Even if he wasn’t immortal now, there was no point living in a leprous state for the rest of his days. Besides, curses were highly unpredictable. If this came into force later, he would have to live like this forever. There was no time to think. Every moment lost was a moment closer to immortality.

It was easier to die than to live anyway, as his father used to say.

There were no guidelines to what he was about to do. His ancestors had not given any instructions on how to take one’s own life under these circumstances, away from a battlefield and without assistance, with the threat of immortality looming.

‘Mother…Father…’ he mumbled to the desert at large.

His last thoughts must be happy ones, he decided. He closed his eyes and tried to form a narrative of his life. He was a child. His earliest memory was of being lifted by his mother and the feeling of weightlessness as he left the world beneath him. He remembered being squashed in her long delicate limbs and then being passed over to his father and his short, hairy ones. He felt a deep and sad longing for his mother and father and his childhood. He remembered Duryodhana. He had never had a brother, but Duryodhana had loved him like one. He would leave out Kurukshetra, the death of his father and the death of Duryodhana from this final recollection of his life. He tried bringing his father and mother and Duryodhana together in a single thought and took a deep breath, as if to suck them into his body forever.

Slowly, he raised himself to his knees and brought the scythe to his belly.

He looked around; apart from the sand and a great yellow boil of a sun on the sky, there were no witnesses.

He took a deep breath and held the point of the scythe against his left hip. He pushed the blade deep into his stomach and pulled it slowly but firmly across the flesh and skin and hair of his belly to his right hip. A thick, warm spray of blood traced the path of his scythe. He could feel the hard metal gnaw through his innards and his intestines slink towards the ground borne by his blood. He pulled out the scythe with a sharp jerk and placed it on the sand next to him. Then, he lay down slowly.

‘This is not the end, Ashwatthama.’

That wasn’t a thought, at least not a thought from him. It almost felt like a sound, a voice, like someone was talking to him inside his head. His own thoughts stopped immediately when the voice started speaking. The voice sounded familiar too. What kind of hallucination was this?

‘Not the end…not the end…not the end…’

‘Yes! Yes it is!’ he shouted into the desert with all his remaining strength before losing consciousness.

Two

‘Don’t try that again, Ashwatthama. It serves no purpose’.

The voice in his head was alive.

Something swept over his torso. Cloth. Rough cotton. It grazed the boils on his bare skin. He was naked. He opened his eyes slowly and instead of the blinding light of the morning, was greeted by soothing darkness. A woman’s voice spoke gently through the black.

‘You’re lucky. Your stomach had nearly poured out. If it wasn’t for the vaidyas, you would not be here. I don’t normally trust healers, but it looks like they did a good job this time.’

Ashwatthama groaned.

‘Stay still.’

The pain overwhelmed him and dragged him back into unconsciousness.

When he woke again, he thought he saw several figures hunched over him, probing him with knives and sticks. He thought he saw the face of a lady peering at him. He saw the face of his father and mother begging him to put down arms and come home.

He found himself at the little neck of forest beside the lake in Hastinapura, the city he called home.

There was a man. His hair was dishevelled, his face a mess of lines, and his eyes unfocused. He was wearing a short white dhoti with gold embroidery that was stained black with blood, cradling a dying man who trembled violently against his breast as his life slipped out of him. He recognized the dying man as he took his last breath. Duryodhana. He tried to make out the man who cradled him. He felt he had seen him before, knew him well. Perhaps better than anyone else he knew. Then why couldn’t he recognize him? A moment later he realized that he was looking at himself.

He saw himself inside a tent. He was standing over a bed, his hand pulling gently at a blanket that covered a sleeping figure. His other hand held his war scythe. Turning over the sleeping figure, he put the scythe to his throat. He recognized the man’s face. His father.

‘Are you awake?’

The sound of the voice pulled him out of his dreams. A woman’s voice. Was it the same that had spoken to him before? He couldn’t be sure. Was there only one? He’d seen other figures too.

He opened his eyes slowly. A gentle light illuminated the premises around him now and he looked around and saw jagged grey stone all around him. The smell was that of wet mud, leavened by the stench of his pus.

He took another slow and deep breath to calm his limbs. He looked around and tried to stitch together a panorama. He was inside a small hollow of rock about the height of two men, and the width of six. The light in the cave was due to the two torches that were nailed to the stone walls. He stretched his arm, ignoring the pain that came with the action. He could feel a lumpy mattress underneath and a thin blanket draped across him.

‘Are you awake?’

He groaned.

‘Stay still. You’ll be fine if you do. Most of your stomach’s packed inside. You should be able to eat in some days…three, the vaidyas tell me.’

He took a deep breath to still the pain and exhaled as he spoke.

’Where am I?’

‘You’re in a cave near the Marusthali desert. I was travelling to Indraprastha when I found you lying in the desert. Your stomach was cut open and there was a weapon in your hand. I brought you back here with the help of some merchants and vaidyas and stitched you up.’

He was silent for a few moments. The effort of speaking drained him. When he had mustered enough strength, it was only to express his disappointment.

‘You should have left me.’

She was silent. After a moment’s hesitation, she replied.

‘It’s good you’re awake, I must be doing something right. And here I was thinking my rusty knife would cause an infection.’

He closed his eyes and groaned.

‘That was a joke,’ she said, ‘but it’s probably best to avoid humour. Lord knows what’ll happen to your stomach when you laugh.’

‘Quiet!’ He struggled to push the word out of his throat.

‘I slave day and night over your belly, and what do I get for it? No thank you, no appreciation. Manners have died with the Great War. Tcha!’

He didn’t reply. She didn’t resume the conversation.

So the disembowelling did not work. Or maybe the lady saved him before it did. He’d never died before, but there was the inexorable sense of an ending when the weapon had finished its work and the blood began to leave his body. He had felt so close to death. Maybe if he tried again.

‘Knife…please?’ The words needed too much effort.

‘No. Why?’

‘Need a knife,’ he croaked, the words sticking to his dry throat.

‘Calm down. You’re drugged, that’s all. Your mood will change. Just lie down.’

Ashwatthama marshalled all his strength and rolled off the mattress on to the soft muddy ground of the cave. In the dim torch light, he could see a bloodstained cloth and a bowl containing bloody water. A scalpel lay in the bowl.

‘You’re only making it worse.’

The voice, again. He ignored it and slowly placed his hand into the bowl and took out the scalpel. His hand trembled with the effort as he rotated it and brought it down to his hip. He didn’t have the strength to stab himself again, but if he could cut open the stitches, he could still bleed to death.

‘This is not going to help.’

He clenched the scalpel tightly and plunged it with all his might into his belly. The sharp edge of the scalpel bounced harmlessly off his skin. His arm was not strong enough to thrust the scalpel through the stitches.

Another way presented itself. He lifted the scalpel towards his face and took a deep breath. When the scalpel was level with his eye, he thrust it hard towards his eye socket.

A pair of hands stronger than his arrested its path.

‘Please don’t do that, at least not while you’re here. When you’re feeling better, you can leave the cave and do what you want.’

The woman removed the scalpel easily from his hand and went away muttering, ‘At least then I won’t have to clean up after you.’

He lay on the cold floor breathing heavily, drained and defeated.

Three

A day after the incident, she sat next to him and pressed a spoonful of some hot liquid against his lips. He felt its scalding heat and twisted his face away. She blew on the liquid to cool it down and scolded him for being a baby, pushing the spoon against his lips once again. In response, he pursed his lips and twisted his head away to the other side. She sat there for a while and then with a sigh, got off the stool and went away. An hour later she was back. When he refused again, she went away but returned after a short while. Ashwatthama refused the food once again. She sighed and went away and didn’t come back.

In his sleep, which was disturbed and crowded with dreams, Ashwatthama saw his father and Duryodhana standing inside the fighting pit of the gurukul looking intently at him, inviting him to come to them. It was a huge pit dug into the centre of a large courtyard filled with sand and surrounded by weapons. Ashwatthama could see all the weapons clearly. Bows of wood and leather, swords of different shapes – long, two-handed ones, wavy-bladed ones, and short ones that one could hide in one’s dhoti – there were maces with round and flat heads with rude carvings on their bronze faces by students from years past. Duyodhana winked at him and his father laughed. He hadn’t seen his father laugh in such a long time. Ashwatthama felt a sudden urge to run up to him and hug him. Something held him back. He felt a burning sensation pass over his mouth.

The woman was trying to feed him.

If he had had a little more strength, he would have pushed her back. Instead, all he could do was close his mouth and turn his head away. The act exhausted him; as he drifted off. . .