The Rakshasa at the Gate of Kamyaka

They went out of Hastinapura on foot in the late afternoon, and the city came to its doors to watch them go. There was no procession and no escort. Yudhishthira walked with a cloth drawn over his face so that his eyes would not fall on anyone and burn them, which was the reason he gave, though it also spared him having to see who had come out to look. Bhima walked with his arms swinging loose and his shoulders set, showing the strength of them to every window on the street. Draupadi came behind with her hair unbound, exactly as it had been left in the hall, in a single garment, and she did not cover her face at all.

Dhaumya went at the head of them with kusha grass in his hand, singing the hymns that are sung for the dead when they are carried out, and no one who heard it needed the meaning explained.

Behind them, at the gates, a crowd of brahmins and citizens tried to follow, and Yudhishthira spent an hour turning them back. The road bent west and the fields gave out into scrub and then into forest, and by the time the light began to fail they were on the track that runs into Kamyaka, five men and one woman and a priest, carrying what they had been permitted to carry.

They walked into the trees because there was nowhere else to sleep. Kamyaka in those days was a real forest and not a garden, dense and unlit, full of things that hunted after dark, and the Kurus had chosen the direction knowing that. It was the first night. The count of twelve years had not yet run a single day, and every one of them was tired in a way that had nothing to do with the walking.

Then the road ahead of them caught fire.

It began as a light in the branches a hundred paces off, and then the light was in the branches on both sides, and then the whole gallery of trees over the track was burning without any of the wood falling, which is not how fire behaves. The birds went up in one sheet. The horses of the two small carts screamed and had to be cut loose.

Out of the middle of it a shape came down onto the road and stood there, and the road was not wide enough for it. It was the height of a sal tree. Its hair stood out from its head like a second fire and its eyes were set deep and copper-coloured, and it had planted its feet across the track in the manner of a man closing a door.

'Who walks in my hour?' it said, and the sound came through the ground as much as through the air.

Dhaumya put himself in front of Draupadi. Yudhishthira, who had been a king that morning, answered it as a king answers, giving the names plainly: the sons of Pandu, going into the forest by the terms of a wager, harming nothing on the road.

The thing on the road began to laugh, and the laughing went on for a long time.

'The gods have kept an appointment for me,' it said at last. 'I am Kirmira. Baka, whom your brother broke over his knee at Ekachakra so that the town could keep its rice, was my brother. Hidimba, killed in the woods near Varanavata over a woman, was my friend. I have eaten travellers on this road for years hoping one of you would be careless enough to walk it, and tonight you come to me in rags with a woman and a priest and no army behind you at all.'

'Which of you is Bhima?' it said. 'I want him. The rest of you I will take afterwards, at leisure.'

Bhima did not answer with his name. He walked forward past his elder brother, took Draupadi by the shoulders and put her behind Dhaumya, and said, without turning around, that she was to stay there and that the priest was to keep saying whatever it was he was saying.

Dhaumya was already saying it. He had taken up the mantras that break the strength of a rakshasa, the ones the ritual manuals keep for exactly this, and he stood between that fire and Draupadi and did not stop reciting for the whole of what followed. Yudhishthira spoke once more into the noise, telling the creature that it had a quarrel with one man and that it could still walk away with its life, and the creature spat into the road and told him to send the one man forward.

What began then began, as those fights always begin, at a distance and with the things that came to hand. Kirmira tore a slab of rock out of the bank and threw it, and Bhima went aside from it and threw back a stone he had to lift with both arms. Kirmira flung fire, whole burning branches wrenched down out of the canopy and hurled flat along the road, and Bhima beat them out of the air with a length of trunk and came on through the smoke.

He uprooted a tree. He set his hands around a sal at the edge of the track and pulled it out of the earth with its roots trailing and used it the way another man uses a club, and Kirmira uprooted one to answer him, and for a while the two of them wrecked that stretch of forest tree by tree, until the road was a clearing and there was nothing left standing within reach of either.

Then the rakshasa began to change shape and to vanish, which is the last art such creatures have, and the mantras behind Bhima took that away from it too.

Stripped of illusion, unable to go invisible, out of rocks and out of trees, Kirmira did what was left and came in bodily, and that was what Bhima had been waiting the whole fight for.

They closed in the middle of the burnt road and went down together, and for a long while there was nothing to see from where the others stood but a single mass rolling in the ash, and nothing to hear but breathing. It was not quick. Kirmira was enormously strong and it fought the way a thing fights that has spent years imagining this exact meeting. It got Bhima under it twice. Both times the ground shook when he came back up.

Draupadi watched from behind the priest, standing very straight, in the one cloth she had been left with, and did not once look away.

Bhima worked his way behind the creature, got an arm across its throat and his knee into the base of its spine, and simply held there, taking whatever it could reach back to do to him, until he felt the strength go out of its arms. He held on past that point. Then he broke its neck across his forearm the way a man breaks a stick over his knee, and set the body down, and stood over it with his chest heaving and blood running from a dozen places, waiting to see if it would move.

It did not move.

He dragged it off the road by one leg so the others would not have to step over it. That was the only ceremony the thing received.

The fire in the trees, having nothing behind it any more, went out. What was left was ordinary night, a wrecked stretch of forest, the smell of burning, and a man bleeding quietly in the middle of it while his brothers came up the road to look at what he had done.

Yudhishthira did not celebrate.

His brothers were ready to. It was the first thing that had gone their way since the dice, and Bhima stood in the middle of the road wanting to be told what he had just done was worth something. What his eldest brother said, when he finally said anything, was that they should go on and find water before the moon set, because the wound in Bhima's shoulder needed washing.

Later, further into the forest, with the fires lit and Draupadi asleep at last, he said the rest of it.

'We were told this was a sentence to be served,' he said. 'Twelve years in the forest, as if the forest were a room with a door on it. That thing had been waiting on that road for years. Not for a traveller. For us. Every man we have ever killed has a brother somewhere, and the brothers are not in the cities where the law would restrain them. They are out here. We have not been sent somewhere safe to wait. We have been sent to where the people who hate us live.'

Bhima said that then they would kill those too, and Yudhishthira said yes, they would, and that this was precisely his point.

Word of the night went back to Hastinapura the way everything did. It was Vidura who told it in the hall, standing in front of a blind king who had asked for news of his nephews and did not want this news, and he told it in detail: the fire, the priest, the woman behind him, the tree pulled out of the ground, the neck broken by hand in the dark.

'The man who did that,' Vidura said, 'is walking your forests now with nothing to lose and thirteen years to think in. Your sons should sleep badly.'

Dhritarashtra thanked him for the report and changed the subject, and the court agreed among themselves afterwards that Vidura had always been a gloomy man.