Free The Queen's Play by Aashish Kaul Page B

cases calamitous for the parties involved. Better it wouldhave been for the poets to never sing of love, for then maybe we would not have discovered it within ourselves. Soon anyway the events took a turn for the worse and war was upon us. Yet I was glad to have come now, if only alone and vaguely grieving.
    Three men had emerged from the pavilion’s dim interior onto the main landing to see about the traveller. This was what remained of life here. Maybe this was what always remained once the king and his escort had departed after the excursion. Three shadowy forms floating in a parallelogram of flames issuing from the half-damaged, serrated urns on sills and parapets that had yielded their colour piecemeal to time and the elements, time which here was nothing but the elements. Solitary men getting by in age, half slaves, half hermits. What did it mean to them, the war and the subsequent change of power, the weariness of loss? Probably they were not even aware of it, content with collecting food and wood in the forest, watching the sky, listening to the streams, brewing their ale, and smoking and drinking each evening round the low fire. Days alike, empty and peaceful. At most a careful barter of words and movements to sustain them. A bare life, a routine life, a robust life.
    One man came down the steps and led the horse away to the stables at the rear of the building, another rushed inside to light the fire and prepare a meal, while the third stood right there, calmly waiting for me at the edge of the steps. They seemed to behave most naturally, as if they had been expecting me, after these many years, on this of all evenings, when the night was bursting with thunder and rain.
    On the landing under the roof, the attendant took the dripping cloak off my shoulders. Did he recognize me? I turned and from the sanctuary of softly waving flames watched the sheets of water being ruffled by the wind and charge leaking from the sky and flaring up the night with its deep staccato roar. I could have stood there for hours, watching and hearing the rain, not thinking about anything, forgetting the past and its ties to me.
    I changed into dry clothes and settled by the fire, supping froman earthen bowl a hot creamy broth made of goat’s fat and hooves along with unleavened bread with burnt rings that left a faint taste of ashes on the palate. It was an appetizing fare. Afterward, someone handed me a pipe stem and I settled down with the others drinking and discussing, in words that barely broke away from the long pauses that held them, the day’s few and common happenings prior to my arrival. The rain drummed lightly afar and the fire crackled from the twigs bursting in flames, releasing a smell of juniper in the spreading warmth. I knew not when sleep levelled with me and when it left me far behind.
    Sometime before dawn, the first dawn, the second or the fifth, it was forever dawn, a pallid, rain-sodden dawn, I had a dream. I saw my elephant, not dark and lacerated in the shed when I had last laid eyes on him, but snow-white, like Indra’s ride Airavata, with three, four, even five heads, falling from a bluff into a cold blue luminosity, spinning as it fell in slow motion, without a sound, trailing away in his vast bulk into the gap opening under my feet.
    We were four friends, all warriors, what else could we be, men chained to their humble, uncertain origins. Men who, to begin with, did not possess even the comforts of a blacksmith or a potter. Men who had taught themselves early the art of survival in the street, who only knew how to handle weapons or swing their limbs fast in combat. To then be recruited into the king’s army seemed like good fortune. Food, handsome weapons, a roof over the head, however temporary, some coins to buy drinks each evening, and fresh clothes on the back. This was no small fortune. In return for which we were simply to practice the one skill we knew, and this time without fear of