Chapter 5 — The Forest of the Sages

Vishvamitra led the brothers south along the Sarayu. After they had gone some distance, he stopped beside the river and called gently to Rama.

“Take water,” he said. “Receive Bala and Atibala.”

They were two sacred disciplines, vidyas: forms of knowledge whose power was held in memory, speech, and practice. Vishvamitra said that they would guard Rama from weariness and illness, from hunger and thirst, and from danger when sleep or inattention might otherwise leave him exposed. They were called the mothers of knowledge.

Rama touched the water and received them. Lakshmana stood beside him, but Vishvamitra bestowed these two disciplines on Rama alone.

That night the three rested on the riverbank. At dawn Vishvamitra woke Rama from his bed of leaves. The first light was spreading across the sky, and the morning observance had to be done. Rama and Lakshmana bathed, made their offering of water, and repeated the prayers the day required. Then they set out again.

They crossed the Ganga and travelled into country whose stories Vishvamitra unfolded as they went. Rivers met there with a sound so deep that Rama asked where it came from. The sage spoke of waters that had their source in the world of the gods and of a place said to have absorbed the pollution of a god's violent act and later to have been cleansed. The explanations were not lessons in a map. They were the old stories by which a landscape carried its past.

Beyond the river, the forest changed.

It was not a place untouched by people. It was a place from which people had been driven. The trees stood thick and dark; old paths had gone back into thorn and brush; no smoke rose from a settled hearth. Even the silence seemed to hold the knowledge that no ordinary life could remain there.

Rama asked why.

Vishvamitra told him of Tataka.

She was the daughter of Suketu and had been born a yakshi, a female yaksha. The yakshas were powerful beings of the forest world, keepers of wild places and of the wealth hidden under the earth. Brahma had granted her the strength of a thousand elephants. She became the wife of Sunda and the mother of Maricha. After Sunda was killed, Tataka and Maricha went against the sage Agastya. Agastya cursed Maricha into the form of a rakshasa and turned Tataka's beauty into a terrible shape. Enraged by the curse, she had laid waste to the country around them.

Rama listened, then asked what he had not been asked to question before. If yakshas were not known for such strength, how could a woman bear the force of a thousand elephants?

Vishvamitra answered that a divine gift had made it so. Then he gave the command: Tataka had to be stopped. Her violence had emptied the land and threatened those who lived and practiced there. A prince charged with protection could not leave such harm unchecked merely because its author was a woman.

Rama did not answer with eagerness. He said he would strike away her power and her movement. He would disfigure her and make her unable to do further harm; he did not wish to kill her.

Then Tataka came.

Her cry tore through the forest. She rushed at the brothers with an anger that seemed to shake the trees, and she used bewildering changes of form and darkness to hide her approach. Vishvamitra urged Rama not to wait for night, when her power to confuse and attack would grow harder to meet.

Rama drew his bow. He struck her as she charged, after the hesitation he had spoken aloud and the command Vishvamitra had repeated. The arrow entered her chest. Tataka fell and died.

The gods praised Rama, and Vishvamitra was pleased. But the forest did not become simple because its terror had ended. Rama had questioned the command, and then he had killed Tataka.

That night Vishvamitra stayed with the brothers near the place where Tataka had fallen. In the morning he gave Rama a gift beyond the weapons of a royal training ground.

He summoned divine astras: weapons empowered by sacred knowledge and called into action through that knowledge. There were discs and nooses, weapons of fire, wind, and water, weapons that could stupefy, restrain, or destroy. The names came in a long procession. Rama received them with reverence, and their powers appeared before him as living presences that acknowledged his command.

Rama then asked for something as important as the power itself: he asked how they could be recalled.

Vishvamitra taught him the disciplines of withdrawal. A weapon that could be sent forth could also be brought back. Rama received those teachings too.

They travelled on until they reached a hermitage known as Siddhashrama, the Hermitage of Fulfillment. Vishvamitra linked it to an older sacred story. Vishnu, the great deity described earlier as the protector of the worlds, had appeared there as Vamana, a small-bodied form. With that form he had checked King Bali, a ruler whose power had become a threat to the gods. Now it was Vishvamitra's place of observance.

The sage began the rite and entered silence. The brothers were told that they must keep watch for six days and nights.

They did.

On the sixth day the altar flame rose as it should, and the ritual words moved forward without interruption. Then a terrible sound came from the sky. Maricha and Subahu descended with other rakshasas, covering the space above the rite as storm clouds cover the sky. Blood fell toward the altar.

Rama looked at Lakshmana.

“See these destroyers of the sacrifice,” he said.

He chose the Manava weapon for Maricha. An astra was not an ordinary arrow: it was a weapon-form called into force by sacred knowledge. The Manava, named for Manu, the ancestral human lawgiver, struck Maricha with enough force to hurl him across a vast distance, until he fell into the ocean. The blow did not kill him.

Then Rama used the Agneya weapon against Subahu: its name connected it with Agni, the deity of fire, who receives what is offered into the flames and stands witness to what is sworn before them. It killed him. Against the remaining attackers he sent the Vayavya, associated with wind; it drove them apart and destroyed them.

The rite was completed.

The sages gathered around Rama with joy. Vishvamitra told him that he had done what he had been asked to do: Siddhashrama was safe, and the charge entrusted to him had been fulfilled.

The next morning, Rama and Lakshmana came before the sage together.

“We are here,” they said in effect, “to do what you command.”

Vishvamitra told them that King Janaka of Mithila was holding a great rite. There, he said, they would see a bow of terrible power, once given among the gods. No god, gandharva, asura, rakshasa, or human being had been able to string it, and many powerful kings had tried and failed. Gandharvas were beings of the courts of the gods, known above all as their musicians. Asuras were the elder beings who contended with the gods for rule of the worlds.

Rama listened. The protected rite lay behind him. Ahead was a road north, a king's sacrifice, and a bow he had not yet seen.