Free The Queen's Play by Aashish Kaul

children’s tales. Maybe that was why wars were fought, so that at some remote point in time they could be told as tales to children. Everything was possible here where no matter how slowly the wheel rolled it would get from blood to laughter soon enough.
    Just the other day, while he sat above a huge rock beyond thespray of the falls, he had heard coming down the opening in the hills the voice of a woodcutter reciting the story to his little son astride a burro, utterly pared and simplified, as is the case with stories or the telling of them, the story of the demon king’s death at the hands of the prince-in-exile, the former, in his telling, the embodiment of pure evil and the latter of pure good, a moral tale, a tale of morals. As if there ever was such a thing in life, as if what was cruelty to one was not kindness to another. Now all that remained was for a bard to come along singing it from village to village, improvising and embellishing it as he sang into history, Rama’s journey or Rama’s story, for one’s journey was also one’s story, the only story, no matter how and in how many ways one chose to tell it.
    But not a word passed from father to son about that death on the battlefield at the very cusp of night, much like that of the demon king at the end, but nowhere near as significant to this story, the death on the close of the first day, the death from my hand, the death which occurred outside time, the unaccounted death, the death that could have been avoided if I had not been entirely beside myself clearing my way all day through bones, blood, bodies.
    What to think of it? We are but trailing phantoms in another’s story to say nothing of those who trail in ours.
    The child turned suddenly to look at something. His pet puma had materialized on the branch as if out of thin air, and was now watching him with its yellow-green eyes. The child spread his arm round its neck to caress it from below. A low mist was rising over the trees in the east, but here the sun shone clear and the rays left a reddish tinge in the animal’s coat. Far into the distance, at the rim of the world, blazed the immense, metaphysical wall of ice.

X
    IT RAINED without cease for several days. The heavens were making good for the longest dry spell in years, for the most part of which the war had raged on.
    Had it happened, we would probably not have noticed the gradual grading of the sky from blue to white to grey, the world darkening above us and feral sparks renting the cloudbank and the thunder rumbling DA, DA, DA, DA, DA, that a golden light was falling in bands far out in the sea, while here amidst the turmoil rain was upon us, churning and loosening up the mud under our feet, so that the solid ground beneath was soon a quagmire where mud not water dripped from our hair, silting in any cavity it could find, even working as a salve for our wounds.
    But, of course, it did not rain, and the soil was kneaded solely with the sweat and blood from our teetering, faltering bodies. The sun burned stark and incandescent in the skies and drew out of the humid air a terrible effluvium of death and decay, against which bracing ourselves we went on thrusting and parrying until night fell, provisionally or for good.
    Within hours from the start of the day’s fighting, vultures were alighting on the corpses that lay strewn along the war ring. The birds would settle on the still bleeding warm flesh and begin at once to peck at the softer skin around the neck and the face or scoop out the eyes clean from their sockets and suck on them for all their worth. If the breath of war moved closer, they lifted their wings, even flapped them in slow, deliberate strokes a few times, but then having barelyrisen would come down instantly to the free and generous repast before them.
    And rain it did not when the war was over, not when the throne was no more vacant, nor when I took my siesta day after day, smoking my pipe and