IT WAS SEVERAL MONTHS into Kewri’s pregnancy. A pall of dread hung over Arrgodi. As people of the land, the Arrgodi put great store in signs and omens.
All the signs were ominous.
Calves had been delivered stillborn or deformed. Milk had curdled everywhere in the kingdom; even freshly drawn milk lay in frothy lumps in the pail.
A mysterious illness had swept the kine population; many believed it was engendered by the vile effusions the giant Tyrak exuded. Hundreds of thousands of heads of cattle died, and more continued to die in the weeks that followed.
Sown fields were picked clean of seeds by birds. Crops ready for harvesting were suddenly devastated by rodents, vermin, or fungi.
Yokes cracked, uks broke legs and had to be put down, horses went mad and attacked their minders, elephants went into heat outside of season, rampaging through the villages, causing havoc.
One moment the sky was densely overcast; the next moment it was bright and cloudless.
A river broke its banks and washed away a village—even though it was late summer, almost autumn, and there was no logical explanation for the deluge. Other rivers dried up overnight, leaving fish gasping and dolphins flailing pitifully on the riverbeds, the villages they served reaching drought-like conditions despite a record monsoon.
Strange phenomena appeared in the western and eastern skies, as if the sun was about to rise at midnight, or had just set at midday. Priest acolytes who had been able to recite thousands of Ashcrit verses perfectly found themselves blank-headed, barely able to stammer a few lines.
Water drawn from the sweetest wells came up foul and rancid.
Newborn babes found no milk in their mothers’ breasts; others choked in their cribs and died of unknown ailments.
People saw their dead ancestors move amongst them, warning of impending doom, urging their descendants to migrate to distant lands.
Soothsayers, astrologers, priests, madmen, philosophers, poets, cowherds . . . all agreed that a great and terrible disaster was imminent.
Many predicted the extinction of the Arrgodi race was nigh. Nobody laughed or disagreed.
The reign of Tyrak had begun.
Tyrak smiled as the masons worked. He had reduced himself to his normal size again, but he still seemed somewhat larger than before. Vasurava had observed that each time he expanded into his giant form and then regained his original human body, he appeared a little changed. Once, he had seen something creeping beneath the skin of Tyrak’s arm, sluggishly, as if unable to move as energetically in human flesh as it had in the urrkh body. Slowly, as Vasurava had watched discreetly, it seemed to be absorbed back into the arm. Another time, Tyrak’s eyes reduced to normal human size along with his body, but remained urrkh eyes, the contrast between the human face and urrkh orbs horrific to behold.
Vasurava wondered if each transformation changed something in his substance. If, perhaps, eventually, Tyrak would become all urrkh, with no trace of the human left.
It was a chilling thought. Already, Tyrak was the terror of the land. After the day of his execution—“the day of my rebirth!” he called it, demanding that it be made a public holiday to be celebrated by all the Arrgodi people henceforth, on pain of death—he had initiated a pogrom of terrible efficiency. His aides-de-camp, Bane and Uaraj, had miraculously survived the battering by the crowd on Vasurava’s wedding day and had been scheduled for execution following Tyrak; they were freed and reinstated; he had proclaimed them generals. He had executed all of Ugraksh’s ministers, leaving Bane and Uaraj to manage the kingdom’s day-to-day affairs. He had also slaughtered the rest of the court’s officials, nobles, and other Arrgodi who had either opposed him in the past, disagreed with him privately or publicly, or otherwise looked cross-eyed at him. Each one was brought before him for “trial and sentencing” under his new expedited “justice system.” He seemed unable to recognize several, but simply shrugged and gave the command for execution anyway.
The new execution platform, constructed overnight to replace the one Tyrak had shattered as a giant, soon turned red with the blood shed over its planks. Nobody came to witness executions anymore, for often Tyrak would point randomly at the crowd and say he recognized a woman who had once giggled when he was passing through the streets, or a boy who reminded him of a long-ago playmate who had won a race against him, or some such whim, and the person would be dragged up to the platform and executed there and then. All grist for the mill.
Now he was overseeing what he termed the “restriction of facilities” for the “former” king and queen Ugraksh and Kensura. Since he had declared himself King Eternal, Ugraksh and Kensura were redundant, their very presence an offense to the current sovereign. Arrgodi tradition required raj-warriors to retire to spend the third autumnal season “in the shelter of the forest.” In point of law, he was correct. By tradition, Ugraksh ought to have retired to a simple hermitage in the forest by now, Kensura accompanying him voluntarily, available to his children and former citizens as a mentor and advisor, the physical remove from active politics and prohibition against owning property or accumulation of wealth ensuring that the retired king could never become a political rival to his heirs. He was well past the age; in fact, he was on the verge of the age of complete renunciation, when the raj-warrior devoted his entire living energies and remaining lifetime to the contemplation of godhead, preparing himself for union with the infinite power of Auma, the all-pervasive. The only reason Ugraksh had remained on the throne until now was because he had known Tyrak was ill prepared to take on the task of running the kingdom. That, and the enduring strife between the Arrgodi had kept him on the throne, draining his dwindling strength in statecraft when he ought to have been enjoying the fruits of his long life and considerable accomplishments.
Tyrak reasoned, in the roundabout manner he had developed since his “rebirth,” that since Ugraksh had failed to retire himself at the prescribed time, regardless of his reason for flaunting tradition, he had thereby consumed part of Tyrak’s birthright. At this point, Tyrak reminded those listening sullenly that he was of course not Ugraksh’s son, but Kensura’s. Since Arrgodi dynasties and society were matriarchal, he was nevertheless the heir to the throne and, as Kensura’s eldest son, entitled to his reign. Because Ugraksh had deprived him of his entitlement, he had committed treason against Tyrak, the rightful king. And as such, Tyrak was justified in doing with him whatever he pleased.
Tyrak had chosen instead the sentence he was now overseeing.
Vasurava watched with great sadness as a hundred masons, bricklayers, stone workers, and other artisans and craftsmen worked feverishly to complete their given tasks. They were building a wall around the private chambers of Ugraksh and Kensura—not the entire palatial mansion, a veritable palace in itself, which they had formerly occupied, but a tiny section of the same, barely more than an apartment. It was in fact the apartment that had housed Kensura’s maids and, as such, was grossly unfit for a queen, let alone both king and queen. It had been stripped of any “luxuries” and filled instead with dirt, assorted plants, and even insects and rodents especially brought from the woods and set loose inside the rooms. The roof had been painted half blue and half black. A hole had been made high upon one wall, and a pipe trickled water from this hole into one chamber, where it spattered on the muddy floor beneath, turning it to mush. It was apparently up to the occupants to provide a pathway so that this “river” would flow neatly through their “domain.” There were no facilities for the two occupants to use as a toilet, merely the two medium-sized chambers filled with this assortment of filth and vermin. Two tiny windows set high near the ceiling provided whatever little and air could find its way into that claustrophobic space.
This, Tyrak said proudly, was to be their idyllic forest world!
And to ensure that they remained within this space as surely as they would have remained in the actual forest, he was having it walled in. An elephant would have had a hard time breaking through the two-foot-thick stone barrier rising from floor to ceiling. No door remained to enter or exit the “forest world.” From time to time some raw vegetables, mainly herbs and roots and tree bark, and the occasional fruit, would be pushed in through the high windows or the water pipe to perhaps be found and eaten by the residents—or if they were not quick enough, their fellow inhabitants.
Now Tyrak turned to Vasurava and said cheerfully, “There, it is done. Isn’t it marvelous? They shall be so happy in their forest world. So restful. I think they shall become true yogis in no time at all.”
Vasurava had already tried his best to plead on behalf of the imprisoned king and queen, begging with Tyrak to give them even just a clean apartment with daily meals and facilities for their toilet. But Tyrak had simply acted as if he did not hear him and had extolled the virtues of his own “brilliant” plan in a succession of self-aggrandizing compliments. Vasurava had known that were he to press the point, it would only turn Tyrak’s anger upon himself, yet he had tried and tried again, risking his own life and not caring. Tyrak was executing a death sentence upon his parents, a slow, agonizing death through starvation, disease, pestilence, deprivation, or all of the above.
Tyrak had neither budged an inch from his plans nor lost his temper at Vasurava. If anything, he seemed to have grown remarkably fond of Vasurava, treating him like his own family, displaying a disturbing warmth and affection that was a stark contrast to his earlier hostility. This itself was enough to make Vasurava’s stomach churn with disgust. He hated to have to stand by and watch Tyrak commit these atrocities, let alone be treated as if he were complicit in them. But for Kewri’s sake, he held his peace.
Now Tyrak clapped a hand on Vasurava’s shoulder. “Come now, brother-in-law, let us retire in private. I wish to have words with you. It is time for us to resolve our situation.”