Fires of the Old World XII — The Brother’s Shadow
On brotherhood, kingship, and the bargain that does not end with the shot.
Valin’s death is often remembered as a necessary act in the service of a greater war. The older pressure is harder to settle: a brother wronged, a king transgressing, a vow entered in need, and an arrow that answers one fracture by creating another.
In the old forests south of the stone cities, where the trees stood so thick that noon could darken toward dusk, mothers sometimes drew their children nearer the lamp when the wind moved in the leaves and said, Listen now. There are battles that end when one king falls, and there are battles that go on after the body is still. The oil smelled faintly of sesame. Smoke climbed in a blue thread. Beyond the threshold, the night insects rasped in the grass, and the cool air touched the ankles like water.
So it was told of Valin, king of the vanaras, whose arms were like young trunks, whose chest shone with the gold gift of the gods, and whose name was enough to trouble sleep in those who feared him.
He had once gone into a cave after an asura and did not return when he was expected. Blood came out. Foam came out. The day lengthened and then broke. His brother Sugriva, waiting at the mouth, believed the mountain had swallowed him. He sealed the opening with stone and went back among the vanaras with ash on his face and grief in his throat.
A kingdom does not stay empty long.
They raised Sugriva up.
Then Valin came back alive.
From that hour the world bent.
Valin heard not the fear in it, only the wrong. He saw the stone that had shut him in. He saw his brother seated where the elder should sit. He saw the court bow to another name. Fury entered him like fire entering dry cane. Sugriva fled before it. Ruma was taken from him. The mountains learned his footsteps. Exile became his meat and drink. And because one wound is never enough in such tales, fear sat on him even where he slept.
There was one place where fear loosened a little.
Rishyamuka.
Matanga’s curse lay there like an unseen wall. Valin could not cross it and keep his life. So Sugriva stayed among those slopes, waking at every cry of bird or monkey, sleeping with one hand on stone, watching each path. Hanuman stood near him, wise-eyed and patient, reading both the sky and his master’s breath. There it was that Rama came with Lakshmana, wandering in bark-cloth, carrying exile on their own bodies like a second skin.
The first sight between them was wary. Then words were spoken. Then griefs were set beside griefs like bowls on the ground between men still deciding whether they might eat together.
A wife stolen.
A kingdom taken.
A brother feared.
A promise needed.
Rama listened. Sugriva listened. The forest listened with them.
No man enters another’s sorrow without asking a price. The price need not be named at once. It may wait in the roots awhile. It may move under leaves and lie still. But it is there.
Sugriva wanted back what had been torn from him. Rama wanted Sita found across the breadth of the world. Each held what the other lacked. Between them, under branches thick with parrots and pale blossom, a bargain came into being.
It was not spoken as merchants speak.
It was bound in need.
Help me win back my wife and kingdom.
Help me find the wife taken from me.
Stand with me against the elder who hunts me.
Stand with me until the road to Lanka opens.
Hanuman stooped and set flame to the wood. Lakshmana steadied the stack with one hand. Sugriva reached to lay flowers by the fire and had to still his fingers before he could let them go. Rama touched water, then the bow at his shoulder. For a moment neither man looked directly at the other. Then they walked about the flame, smoke rising between them through the leaves.
Thus the bargain was sealed.
If it had ended there, the tale would be kinder.
But there was Valin.
Sugriva feared even the sound of his brother’s name. Rama, hearing of that strength, said little. He asked instead for proof. A great skeleton lay nearby, a buffalo demon long dead, its bones weathered grey. Rama moved it with his foot as another man might move driftwood. Then he sent an arrow through seven sal trees, and the shafts sang in the trunks before passing into earth. Sugriva saw. Hope did not enter him fully, but it came nearer.
Still he trembled when the hour arrived.
They went to Kishkindha, city of the vanaras, where banners moved over the walls and the stones remembered older feet. Sugriva stepped forward and called Valin out. His cry struck halls and pillars and went through the courtyards like a thrown spear.
Valin came laughing.
Not because he did not know danger.
Because he did.
Tara heard that laugh and rose in dread. She was wiser than joy and quicker than pride. She came to Valin and laid her hand upon his arm.
Do not go, she said. Something has changed. I hear it in the cry. I smell it in the air. There is a stranger behind this challenge. There is bow-wood in the wind.
Valin looked at her, and for a moment the king was only a husband listening to the one voice he ought not to have brushed aside.
Then pride came back.
What stranger matters, he said, if I am myself?
He went out golden in the sun, the necklace bright upon his breast, each link burning like poured fire. Sugriva saw him and faltered. Then rage remembered him. The brothers struck.
Forest tales speak often of equals. This was not one of them.
Valin hit like falling timber. Sugriva gave back what he could, but the elder’s strength closed over him. Dust rose around their feet. Blood showed at the mouth. Rama stood concealed among the trees and did not loose.
He could not tell them apart.
The same rage.
The same shape.
The same forest speed.
To send the arrow blind would have been to break the bargain with the same hand that made it.
Sugriva fled bleeding into the trees, shame following him harder than pain. On Rishyamuka he turned on Rama with the despair of a hunted thing.
You let me go to him, he said, and watched.
Rama did not answer in haste. Some silences are not refusal. They are measure.
Then he said, I could not know you from your brother in the whirl of combat. Go again. Wear this.
Lakshmana placed upon Sugriva a garland of creeper and blossom, green and white against the chest. It looked slight as any forest thing. Yet kingdoms have turned on marks no heavier than that.
Hanuman tied it firm.
Again they went.
Again Tara felt the dread before others did. She tried once more to hold Valin back.
Something waits, she said. Not only your brother. A hand beyond him. Do not trust the shape of this quarrel. It has deepened.
Valin smiled then, but there was iron under it.
If death is in the doorway, he said, shall I hide behind my wife?
He stepped into the day.
The second duel struck harder than the first. Sugriva fought with the fear of a creature already cornered twice. Valin fought with contempt, strength, and the old right he believed still sat upon his shoulders like a mantle none could strip away. They crashed against one another. Branches shook. Monkeys cried out from parapets and walls. The garland flashed and vanished, flashed and vanished. Rama stood behind a sal tree with the bow drawn.
He had given his word.
Sugriva had bound himself in fire.
Sita was still far away.
Valin still wore the god-gift that turned open challenge into ruin.
The arrowhead was dark with a red stain, rubbed there with blood before dawn. A mark for the vow. A mark for the cost.
Rama drew until the bow curved like the moon in the first clear night after rain.
Then he loosed.
The shaft crossed the air with a sound so thin it seemed at first no more than a single insect-note lost in all the blows and shouting.
Then it entered.
Valin staggered.
For one instant he stood as though the world had only touched him. Then the strength went out of him all at once. Dust lifted at his feet. The gold necklace flared once in the broken sun.
He fell, and the forest went quiet.
Not wholly quiet. No forest ever is. But the cry of birds thinned. The leaves seemed to wait. Even the monkeys upon the walls drew breath and held it.
Valin lay on the earth with the arrow in him, one hand clawing at leaves, the other opening and closing on nothing. Blood ran along his side and darkened the dust beneath him. Sugriva stood apart, gasping, staring not like a victor but like a man who had come farther into his own fear than he meant to go. Rama stepped from the trees.
Valin lifted his head.
So, he said, this is the hand behind the bargain.
There are deaths that are all pain, and deaths that become accusation. This was the second kind.
What honour, Valin asked, lives in the hidden shot? What righteousness waits behind bark and lets brothers close before it enters? If I had wronged, why not call me? Why not face me?
He did not speak softly. Blood stood on his teeth. Yet the words came clear. They struck harder because he was already fallen.
Rama answered with the gravity of one who has chosen and cannot return to the hour before choosing. He spoke of law. Of the elder who had transgressed. Of Ruma taken against right. Of kings who may punish where disorder spreads. His voice did not shake.
Neither did the wound close.
Tara came then.
Her cry crossed the courtyards and terraces and entered the trees like a blade. She fell beside Valin and lifted his head into her lap. Dust stained her knees. Her bracelets struck one another with a small broken sound. Angada came too, young and bright with terror, and stopped when he saw the king upon the ground, as though childhood itself had ended between one step and the next.
Valin looked first at Tara, then at his son.
The wrath had gone out of him now. Not the hurt. Not the knowledge. But the heat of striking back.
To Angada he gave no long sermon, only a father’s burden: stand upright, remember whose son you are, and do not let grief make you foolish before men who are watching. To Sugriva, after a long silence, he gave something harder than pardon and nearer than blessing. Not peace. Perhaps only the laying down of refusal because breath was thinning and the body knew it.
Then he asked that the necklace be taken.
When they lifted it from him, the light changed.
Gold can hold more than splendour. It can hold the shape of invincibility in other eyes. Removed from the dying chest, it became only metal again, though bright still, bright enough to sting the sight.
The wind moved.
Somewhere beyond the city a langur cried.
A leaf turned over.
Blood found the root of a grass-blade and reddened it.
Valin looked once toward the canopy above, where the high branches crossed and crossed again until no straight road could be seen through them. Perhaps he saw nothing there. Perhaps he saw the cave mouth, the stone, the first wrong, the brother who had waited too long or not long enough. No man beside him could tell.
Then the king of the vanaras breathed out and did not take breath again.
After that came the things that follow and are seldom remembered by those who love only the moment of the arrow. The body had to be borne. The son had to walk. The widow had to rise though her limbs would not obey her. Sugriva had to come near what he had asked for and see its full weight. Rama too had to stand within what his vow had made.
The way back was not long, but it cost.
On the path men slipped where roots broke through damp earth. A stone turned under Sugriva’s foot and sent pain up his leg. Tara stumbled once, catching herself on a branch rough with lichen, and the bark tore the skin of her palm. No one spoke of it. No one needed to. The forest does not let the living carry their dead without payment.
By evening the pyre was raised.
Flame took the dry wood first, then cloth, then hair. Smoke thickened and rose through the darkening branches. It smelled of sandal, sap, and the bitter last sweetness of things given over. Angada stood with his fists shut. Sugriva stood with his head bowed low, as if the crown that might soon come near him were already heavier than gold should be. Rama watched the fire and said nothing.
What could he have said that would not have come too late?
When all was ash, the night had deepened. The lamp in the women’s chambers burned steadily. Outside, the forest had begun again: insect-hum, leaf-stir, the small furtive life of dark things in grass. Yet Kishkindha was not as it had been that morning. A kingdom may be decided in one duel. It is not cleansed there.
And so the mothers by the lamp would lower their voices and touch the hair from a child’s brow.
Remember this, they might say, if the child were old enough to hear it. A vow may be kept. A wrong may be answered. A throne may pass. Even so, there are acts after which the leaves never sound quite the same.
Then the child would listen to the wick’s soft hiss, and to the wind moving outside through unseen branches, and would smell the warm oil and faint ash in the room, and would know that somewhere beyond the circle of light a forest was still holding its breath.