The music became louder as flutes and strings joined the throbbing drum to trace a haunting, regal melody in the night air. A point of light began to burn on the face of the Rock; abruptly, it expanded, and suddenly it seemed that a magic window had opened into the past, to reveal a world more vivid and colorful than life itself.
The dramatization, thought Morgan, was excellent. He was glad that, for once, he had let courtesy override his impulse to work. He saw the joy of King Paravana when his favorite concubine presented him with his first-born son—and understood how that joy was both augmented and diminished when, only twenty-four hours later, the Queen herself produced a better claimant to the throne. Though first in time, Kalidasa would not be first in precedence; and so the stage was set for tragedy.
“Yet in the early years of their boyhood, Kalidasa and his half-brother, Malgara, were the closest of friends. They grew up together quite unconscious of their rival destinies, and the intrigues that festered around them. The first cause of trouble had nothing to do with the accident of birth; it was only a well-intentioned, innocent gift. . . .
“To the court of King Paravana came envoys bearing tribute from many lands—silk from Cathay, gold from Hindustan, burnished armor from Imperial Rome. And one day a simple hunter from the jungle ventured into the great city bearing a gift that he hoped would please the royal family. . . .”
Morgan heard, all around him, a chorus of involuntary “oooh”s and “aah”s from his unseen companions. Although he had never been fond of animals, he had to admit that the tiny snow-white monkey that nestled so trustingly in the arms of young Prince Kalidasa was most endearing. Out of the wrinkled little face two huge eyes stared across the centuries—and across the mysterious, yet not wholly unbridgeable, gulf between man and beast.
“According to the chronicles, nothing like it had ever been seen before. Its hair was white as milk, its eyes pink as rubies. Some thought it a good omen; others, an evil one, because white is the color of death and of mourning. And their fears, alas, were well founded. . . .
“Prince Kalidasa loved his little pet, and called it Hanuman, after the valiant monkey god of the Ramayana. The King’s jeweler constructed a small golden cart, in which Hanuman would sit solemnly while he was drawn through the court, to the amusement and delight of all who watched.
“For his part, Hanuman loved Kalidasa, and would allow no one else to handle him. He was especially jealous of Prince Malgara—almost as if he sensed the rivalry to come. And then, one unlucky day, he bit the heir to the throne. . . .
“The bite was trifling; its consequences, immense. A few days later, Hanuman was poisoned—doubtless by order of the Queen. That was the end of Kalidasa’s childhood. Thereafter, it is said, he never loved or trusted another human being. And his friendship with Malgara turned to bitter enmity.
“Nor was this the only trouble that stemmed from the death of one small monkey. By command of the King, a special tomb was built for Hanuman, in the shape of the traditional bell-shaped shrine, or dagoba.
“Now this was an extraordinary thing to do, for it aroused the instant hostility of the monks. Dagobas were reserved for relics of the Buddha, and this act appeared to be one of deliberate sacrilege.
“Indeed, that may well have been its intention, because King Paravana had come under the sway of a Hindu swami and was turning against the Buddhist faith. Although Prince Kalidasa was too young to be involved in this conflict, much of the monks’ hatred was now directed against him. So began a feud that in the years to come was to tear the kingdom apart. . . .
“Like many of the other tales recorded in the ancient chronicles of Taprobane, for almost two thousand years there was no proof that the story of Hanuman and young Prince Kalidasa was anything but a charming legend. Then, in 2015, a team of Harvard archaeologists discovered the foundations of a small shrine in the grounds of the old Ranapura Palace. The shrine appeared to have been deliberately destroyed. All the brickwork of the superstructure had vanished.
“The usual relic chamber set in the foundations was empty, apparently robbed of its contents centuries ago. But the students had tools of which the old-time treasure hunters never dreamed. Their neutrino survey disclosed a second relic chamber, much deeper. The upper one was only a decoy, and it had served its purpose well. The lower chamber still held the burden of love and hate it had carried down the centuries—to its resting place today, in the Ranapura Museum.”
Morgan had always considered himself, with justification, reasonably hardheaded and unsentimental, not prone to gusts of emotion. Yet now, to his considerable embarrassment—he hoped that his companions wouldn’t notice—he felt his eyes brim with sudden tears. How ridiculous, he told himself angrily, that some saccharine music and maudlin narration could have such an impact on a sensible man! He would never have believed that the sight of a child’s toy could have set him weeping.
And then he knew, in a lightning flash of memory that brought back a moment more than forty years in the past, why he had been so deeply moved. He saw again his beloved kite, dipping and weaving above the Sydney park where he had spent much of his childhood. He could feel the warmth of the sun, the gentle wind on his bare back—the treacherous wind that suddenly failed, so that the kite plunged earthward. It became snagged in the branches of the giant oak that was supposed to be older than the country itself, and, foolishly, he tugged at the string, trying to pull it free. It was his first lesson in the strength of materials, and one that he was never to forget.
The string had broken, just at the point of capture, and the kite had rolled crazily away in the summer sky, slowly losing altitude. He had rushed down to the water’s edge, hoping that it would fall on land; but the wind would not listen to the prayers of a little boy.
For a long time he had stood weeping as he watched the shattered fragments, like some dismasted sailboat, drift across the great harbor and out toward the open sea, until they were lost from sight. That had been the first of those trivial tragedies that shape a man’s childhood, whether he remembers them or not.
Yet what Morgan had lost then was only an inanimate toy; his tears were of frustration rather than grief. Prince Kalidasa had much deeper cause for anguish. Inside the little golden cart, which still looked as if it had come straight from the craftman’s workshop, was a bundle of tiny white bones.
Morgan missed some of the history that followed. When he had cleared his eyes, a dozen years had passed, a complex family quarrel was in progress, and he was not quite sure who was murdering whom. After the armies had ceased to clash and the last dagger had fallen, Prince Malgara and the Queen Mother had fled to India, and Kalidasa had seized the throne, imprisoning his father in the process.
That the usurper had refrained from executing Paravana was not due to any filial devotion, but to his belief that the old King possessed some secret treasure, which he was saving for Malgara. As long as Kalidasa believed this, Paravana knew that he was safe. At last, however, he grew tired of the deception.
“I will show you my real wealth,” he told his son. “Give me a chariot, and I will take you to it.”
But on his last journey, unlike little Hanuman, Paravana rode in a decrepit oxcart. The chronicles record that it had a damaged wheel, which squeaked all the way—the sort of detail that must be true, because no historian would have bothered to invent it.
To Kalidasa’s surprise, his father ordered the cart to carry him to the great artificial lake that irrigated the central kingdom, the completion of which had occupied most of his reign. He walked along the edge of the huge bund and gazed at his own statue, twice life-size, which looked out across the waters.
“Farewell, old friend,” he said, addressing the towering stone figure that symbolized his lost power and glory and that held forever in its hands the stone map of this inland sea. “Protect my heritage.”
Then, closely watched by Kalidasa and his guards, he descended the spillway steps, not pausing at the edge of the lake. When he was
waist-deep, he scooped up the water and threw it over his head, then turned toward Kalidasa with pride and triumph.
“Here, my son,” he cried, waving toward the leagues of pure life-giving water, “here—here is all my wealth!”
“Kill him!” screamed Kalidasa, mad with rage and disappointment.
And the soldiers obeyed.
* * *
So Kalidasa became the master of Taprobane, but at a price that few men would be willing to pay: as the chronicles recorded, always he lived “in fear of the next world, and of his brother.” Sooner or later, Malgara would return to seek his rightful throne.
For a few years, like the long line of kings before him, Kalidasa held court in Ranapura. Then, for reasons of which history is silent, he abandoned the royal capital for the isolated rock monolith of Yakkagala, forty kilometers away in the jungle.
There were some who argued that he sought an impregnable fortress, safe from the vengeance of his brother. Yet in the end he spurned its protection. If it was merely a citadel, why was Yakkagala surrounded by immense pleasure gardens whose construction must have demanded as much labor as the walls and moat themselves? Above all, why the frescoes?
As the narrator posed this question, the entire western face of the rock materialized out of the darkness—not as it was now, but as it must have been two thousand years ago. A band, starting a hundred meters from the ground and running the full width of the rock, had been smoothed and covered with plaster, upon which were portrayed scores of beautiful women, life-size and from the waist upward. Some were in profile, others full-face, and all followed the same basic pattern.
Ocher-skinned, voluptuously bosomed, they were clad either in jewels alone or in the most transparent of upper garments. Some wore towering and elaborate headdresses; others, apparently, crowns. Many carried bowls of flowers, or held single blossoms nipped delicately between thumb and forefinger. Though about half were darker-skinned than their companions, and appeared to be handmaidens, they were no less elaborately coiffured and bejeweled.
“Once, there were more than two hundred figures. But the rains and winds of centuries have destroyed all except twenty, which were protected by an overhanging ledge of rock. . . .”
The image zoomed forward. One by one, the last survivors of Kalidasa’s dream came floating out of the darkness, to the hackneyed yet singularly appropriate music of “Anitra’s Dance.” Defaced though they were by weather, decay, and vandals, they had lost none of their beauty down the ages. The colors were fresh, unfaded by the light of more than half a million westering suns. Goddesses or women, they had kept alive the legend of Demon Rock.
“No one knows who they were, what they represented, and why they were created with such labor, in so inaccessible a spot. The favorite theory is that they were celestial beings, and that all Kalidasa’s efforts here were devoted to creating a heaven on earth, with its attendant goddesses. Perhaps he believed himself a god-king, as the Pharaohs of Egypt had; perhaps that is why he borrowed from them the image of the Sphinx, guarding the entrance to his palace.”
Now the scene shifted to a distant view of the Rock, seen reflected in the small lake at its base. The water trembled; the outlines of Yakkagala wavered and dissolved. When they had re-formed, the Rock was crowned by walls and battlements and spires, clinging to its entire upper surface. It was impossible to see them clearly; they remained tantalizingly out of focus, like the images in a dream. No man would ever know what Kalidasa’s aerial palace had really looked like, before it was destroyed by those who sought to extirpate his very name.
“And here he lived, for twenty years, awaiting the doom that he knew would come. His spies must have told him that, with the help of the kings of southern Hindustan, Malgara was patiently gathering his armies.
“And at last Malgara came. From the summit of the Rock, Kalidasa saw the invaders marching from the north. Perhaps he believed himself impregnable; but he did not put that belief to the test.
“He left the safety of his great fortress and rode out to meet his brother on the neutral ground between the two armies. One would give much to know what words they spoke, at that last encounter. Some say they embraced before they parted. It may be true.
“Then the armies met, like the waves of the sea. Kalidasa was fighting on his own territory, with men who knew the land, and at first it seemed certain that victory would go to him. But then occurred another of those accidents that determine the fate of nations.
“Kalidasa’s great war elephant, caparisoned with the royal banners, turned aside to avoid a patch of marshy ground. The defenders thought that the King was retreating. Their morale broke. They scattered, as the chronicles record, like chaff from the winnowing fan.
“Kalidasa was found on the battlefield, dead by his own hand. Malgara became king. And Yakkagala was abandoned to the jungle, not to be discovered again for seventeen hundred years.”
5
Through the
Telescope
My secret vice,” Rajasinghe called it, with wry amusement but also with regret. It had been years since he had climbed to the summit of Yakkagala, and though he could fly there whenever he wished, that did not give the same feeling of achievement. To do it the easy way bypassed the most fascinating architectural details of the ascent. No one could hope to understand the mind of Kalidasa without following his footsteps all the way from pleasure gardens to aerial palace.
But there was a substitute, which could give an aging man considerable satisfaction. Years ago, he had acquired a compact and powerful twenty-centimeter telescope. Through it he could roam the entire western wall of the Rock, retracing the path he had followed to the summit so many times in the past. When he peered through the binocular eyepiece, he could easily imagine that he was hanging in mid-air, close enough to the sheer granite wall to reach out and touch it.
In the late afternoon, as the rays of the westering sun reached beneath the rock overhang that protected them, Rajasinghe would visit the frescoes, and pay tribute to the ladies of the court. Though he loved them all, he had his favorites. Sometimes he would talk silently to them, using the most archaic words and phrases he knew, well aware of the fact that his oldest Taprobani lay a thousand years in their future.
It also amused him to watch the living, and to study their reactions as they scrambled up the Rock, took photographs of each other on the summit, or admired the frescoes. They could have no idea that they were accompanied by an invisible—and envious—spectator, moving effortlessly beside them like a silent ghost, and so close that he could see every expression and every detail of their clothing. Such was the power of the telescope that if Rajasinghe had been able to lip-read, he could have eavesdropped on the tourists’ conversations.
If this was voyeurism, it was harmless enough, and his little “vice” was hardly a secret, since he was delighted to share it with visitors. The telescope provided one of the best introductions to Yakkagala, and it had often served other useful purposes. Rajasinghe had several times alerted the guards to attempted souvenir hunting, and more than one astonished tourist had been caught carving his initials on the face of the Rock.
Rajasinghe seldom used the telescope in the morning, because the sun was then on the far side of Yakkagala and little could be seen on the shadowed western face. And as far as he could recall, he had never used it so soon after dawn, while he was still enjoying the delightful local custom of “bed-tea,” introduced by the European planters three centuries ago.
Yet now, as he glanced out the wide picture window that gave him an almost complete view of Yakkagala, he was surprised to see a tiny figure moving along the crest of the Rock, partly silhouetted against the sky. Visitors never climbed to the top so soon after dawn; the guard wouldn’t even unlock the elevator to the frescoes for another hour. Idly, Rajasinghe wondered who the early bird could be.
He rolled out of bed, slipped into a bright batik sarong, and made his way out to the veranda and thence to the stout concrete pill
ar supporting the telescope. Making a mental note, for about the fiftieth time, that he really should get the instrument a new dust cover, he swung the stubby barrel toward the Rock.
I might have guessed it! he said to himself, with considerable pleasure, as he switched to high power. So last night’s show had impressed Morgan, as well it should have done. The engineer was seeing for himself, in the short time available, how Kalidasa’s architects had met the challenge imposed upon them.
Then Rajasinghe noticed something quite alarming. Morgan was walking briskly around at the very edge of the plateau, just centimeters away from the sheer drop that few tourists ever dared to approach. Not many had the courage even to sit in the Elephant Throne, with their feet dangling over the abyss; but now the engineer was actually kneeling beside it, holding on to the carved stonework with one casual arm, and leaning right out into nothingness as he surveyed the rock face below. Rajasinghe, who had never been happy with even such familiar heights as Yakkagala’s, could scarcely bear to watch.
After a few minutes of incredulous observation, he decided that Morgan must be one of those rare people who are completely unaffected by heights. Rajasinghe’s memory, which was still excellent but delighted in playing tricks on him, was trying to bring something to his notice. Hadn’t there once been a Frenchman who had tightroped across Niagara Falls, and even stopped in the middle to cook a meal? If the documentary evidence had not been overwhelming, Rajasinghe would never have believed such a story.
And there was something else that was relevant here—an incident that concerned Morgan himself. What could it possibly be? Morgan . . . Morgan . . . He had known virtually nothing about him until a week ago. . . .
Yes, that was it. There had been a brief controversy that had amused the news media for a day or so, and that must have been the first time he had ever heard Morgan’s name.