The Ape at the Gates

There were creatures left over from the elder age, and Dvivida was one of them.

He had been born in the time of the great wars of the gods, brother to Mainda, and there had been an age when his name was spoken among the allies of heaven. He had thrown mountains at the enemies of the world when mountains were what the fighting called for. He had been strong past the reckoning of any weapon then in the world, and he had been, by every account that survived, a cheerful monster: loud, vain, fond of company, a lifter of boulders for the pleasure of being watched lift them.

He outlived his age, as a few of them did, and he went on into a later world with nothing much to do in it.

What he found there was Narakasura. Whatever else the demon lord of Pragjyotisha was, he was a friend, and the two of them suited one another the way the very strong sometimes do, each glad of a companion he could not accidentally break. For years Dvivida came and went at that court and was made much of.

Then Narakasura fell at Pragjyotisha, in a war that has its own telling, and the ape came back one morning to a city under new government and a friend under a heap of stones.

He sat with it for a while. Then he went away west, and by the time he came out of the hills he was no longer grieving in any way a man would recognize.

He had worked out an argument, of the kind grief works out when it is left alone too long, and the argument ran like this. The Yadavas had done it. The Yadavas lived by the sea in a city full of ships and orchards and children. Nothing in the world could touch him. Therefore the coast of Dwaraka would pay, in installments, for as long as it took, and there was no one anywhere with the strength to send the bill back.

He began with the boats, because the boats were easy.

The fishing fleet went out of the Dwaraka roads before dawn and came back on the tide, and a wave took them one morning that had no wind behind it. The men who swam ashore said the same thing and were not believed until it happened twice more: that something had come down off the headland into the water and put its shoulder under the hulls, one after another, working along the line the way a boy walks along a row of pots.

After the boats, the orchards. He came inland at night and pulled the trees out whole, the coconut and the mango and the old jamun that had been planted three generations back, and left them lying with their roots in the air in rows, which was worse than breaking them, because rows take time and time means somebody enjoyed it.

He learned quickly that the mockery hurt more than the damage, and after that the mockery was most of what he did. He would sit on a village roof with his arms folded and watch the men come out with their spears, and let them get close, and then flatten the roof and go up the hill screaming with laughter. He drank the offerings out of temple courtyards. He pulled the platforms out from under the priests at the fire sacrifices and scattered the vessels down the slope. He would take a man's cow, hold it above his head where the whole street could see, and carry it away over the rise, and bring it back three days later unharmed, and put it down in the same spot, and wait to be thanked.

What the coast learned in that season was that there was nothing to be done. Arrows went into him and stopped. Spears turned. A troop of Yadava horse rode out and came back on foot, laughed off the field rather than killed, which the young men found harder to survive than wounds.

And then, in a village north of the harbor, the joke went one step further than a joke, and there were dead to bury; and the coast stopped calling him a nuisance.

Balarama had gone up into the groves of Raivataka.

This was a thing he did. The mountain rose behind the city with its old woods on the shoulders of it, and there were springs up there, and shade, and no petitioners. He lay at his ease under the trees with a garland on him and the cup of Varuni beside him, and there was music, and women of the Yadava houses singing, and the whole scene had the settled sweetness of a strong man at rest who has nothing in the world he needs to do.

The first tree came down across the clearing.

It landed short, which was deliberate, and the branches came apart over the singers, and the music stopped in the middle of a line. The second one came from higher up the slope, end over end, and struck the spring and put the water out of it in a sheet.

He was on the ridge above them, hunched, enormous, with his arms hanging. He was grinning, and he began to make a noise that was not laughter and was meant to be heard as laughter.

"The plough-bearer," he said. "The mighty Rama. Lying in the grass with a cup and a garland while your fishermen drown. Get up, farmer. Come and dig something."

He pulled a slab of rock off the ridge and pitched it down. Then he came halfway down the slope, and he took the wine jars and broke them over the stones one by one, and he pulled the clothes off the branches and tore them, and he went among the women grabbing at them and shoving them and hooting, because he had learned by then that this was the shortest road into any man's blood.

He was doing all of it while watching Balarama out of the corner of his eye, waiting.

Balarama sat up. He took the garland off over his head and laid it on the rock beside him with some care, the way a man puts down a thing he intends to pick up again.

"Come down off the hill," he said.

The ape came down off the hill.

He came in a rush with a palm trunk swung two-handed, and the trunk broke over Balarama's shoulder and left him standing. Balarama hit him under the ribs, once, and Dvivida went backward through a stand of young trees and took all of them down with him, and got up, and was still laughing, and that was the beginning and not the end.

What followed was not a duel of weapons. Balarama did not lift the plough or the pestle. He fought the way the ape fought, because that was what had been offered him, and the mountain paid for it. They tore the trees out and used them until nothing was left standing in the clearing but stumps. When the trees ran out they went to the rocks. Dvivida broke a boulder off the cliff face with his shoulder and rolled it down and Balarama put his fist through it in the air and came on through the dust of it. The ape leapt clean over him, twice, and came down on his back with all his weight, and was thrown off into the hillside hard enough to open a seam in it.

He was not a fool. He was very old and he had fought gods, and he had craft in him that no animal has. He fought dirty and he fought clever. He threw dust. He went up into the branches and dropped from above. He got behind and got both arms locked around Balarama's chest and squeezed with a strength that had put mountains into the sea, and held it, and held it, and felt the ribs he was crushing simply refuse to move, and understood something in that moment that took the laughter out of him for good.

They went down the slope locked together and through the trees at the bottom.

The villages below stood in their doorways and watched the mountain shake. Birds came off Raivataka in one sheet and did not settle again that day. Down in the harbor the water in the anchorage stood up in rings, over and over, from the blows.

It ended in the open ground above the shore.

Dvivida had begun to bleed at the mouth and would not stop, and his blows were coming slower, and he knew it. He did what such a creature does at the end. He tore the crown off a spur of the mountain, a mass of rock the size of a house, got it up over his head with both arms and everything he had left, and stood there for a moment holding it, roaring, in the last posture of the elder age.

Balarama stepped inside it and struck him at the base of the skull with his open hand.

The rock came down on the empty slope. The ape went over the way a cliff goes over, all at once and without any bending, and struck the ground, and the ground took it badly. They felt the shock in Dwaraka. It is said that Raivataka itself shuddered from its roots to its crown and let a rain of stones down its western face, as though the mountain had been asked to accept something it did not want.

Then there was nothing on the whole slope but dust going up slowly into the light, and one man standing with his hand still open.

The coast came out afterward and looked at what was lying there. It was very large, and it had been very beautiful once, in the way that great strength is beautiful, and there was not a person on that shore who had not lost something to it.

He had been a companion of the gods. He had fought on the right side in wars whose names had gone out of memory. None of that had been taken away from him, and none of it had weighed anything at all against the fishermen, because the reckoning is kept in conduct and not in credit, and there is no age old enough to be exempt from it. His grief for his friend had been real. He had simply never once turned to face it, and it had gone bad in him, and made him the thing that had to be put down.

Balarama went back up the hill in the evening, and picked up the garland from where he had laid it on the rock, and put it on, and did not speak of the matter again.