The Queen's Play Read Free Page B

Anjaneya was opening his arm for a swing at his opponent, but just then the moan of the conch shells signalled a close of the day’s battle, and his hand slowed in mid air, but in the infinitesimal space born outside time, a space in which forms dissolve into one another, where the club touched thechest the bones bayoneted the heart, the victim falling to the ground as the first banners heralding the night’s rest were going up.
    At last a bone-white moon rose slowly over the trees, where the forest suddenly opened onto the vast beach, the very theatre of this
danse macabre
. Here and there embers glowed in dying campfires about which bodies lay huddled together for warmth, traversing a darkness deeper than night, a spectacular stillness born of drink, food, and an excruciating fatigue. Near the grove where he had retired with his two aides, the fire was still burning. Moonshine was returning valour to their faces, causing glints in the lesions over them. Somewhere someone was crying from toothache, one misery gaining ground on another. Polishing the round fruit on his tunic till it shone red and golden, catching the fire in its skin, he sat unwashed in the shadow of a fig tree, black with grime, beard matted, hair clotted with blood, the metal guard still fastened to the left leg. The fruit was slowly transmitting its fire to his eyes, in their dark depths a tiny flame was now blazing. From the far side of the world came a slow sound of a hollowed-out antelope horn being played.

IV
    WHEN THE final betrayal had taken place, when one act of honour had been traded for a second, when the death-dealing arrow had been delivered to the enemy by the king’s own brother, when the iron tip had pierced the king’s navel at twilight, when the lord of three worlds lay writhing on the ground, spattering the sap of his hard-won immortality everywhere, when our confused, weary troops had been eventually routed, the war was at last over. Then I climbed down the back of my wound-ridden elephant into an immense lake of silence. A curiously fluid world from before the birth of sound. For days, I carried this emptiness in me, and the emptiness carried me in it.
    Soon we had a king. He who was next of kin to the deceased ruler, he who having been wrongly banished for speaking his mind, hitting straight at the king’s pride, had walked over to the exiled prince and offered his confidences, an act some claimed was righteous, others, no less rightly, anctimonious, was deemed fit for the throne by the victors.
    I was, of course, at the court, amid the oboes, cymbals, and kettledrums sneaking behind the unceasing chants and invocations of the priests, to pay my obeisance to our king upon his crowning. Seeing everything, hearing nothing, not even my own voice. And yet by some miracle was heard and understood by all.
    Now that peace was upon us, the work of rebuilding from the debris of battle commenced in full swing. What did I care for it? To the one born in the streets, this business of building and wreckingand building again was the very essence of living. Indeed, it seemed, if one took a true stock of our miserable condition, that we could fight and kill simply to relieve the tedium of days or to stroke our own, when not the sovereign’s, foolish, insatiate pride at the first opportunity. If one was not combatting an enemy on the battle- field, one was trying to get killed in drunken brawls, knife-fights, and duels in the street. And what men could not finish among them, the vagaries of fate did. After all death from syphilis or cracking your skull in the wash was not inconceivable, while an innocuous remark slipped over drinks could estrange a loved one forever. Just when you were looking the other way, a scaffold was being readied for you. Alas, who could tell where you would end up for letting your gaze wander a moment? And so it took you not long to see that each peaceful day was a carrier of untold silent cruelties,