He weighed the weapon in his hand. It was an excellent dagger.
In his day, the old slave had been a deadly assassin, among many other things. He had not used a dagger in decades, but he had not forgotten the feel of it. Warm, and trusting, like a favorite pet.
He lowered it. He would wait awhile.
All was silent, beyond the walls of the Hagia Sophia. The cataphracts who had stood with Belisarius for one final battle were dead now.
They had died well. Oh, very well.
In his day, the old slave had been a feared and famous warrior, among many other things. He had not fought a battle in decades, but he knew the feel of them. A great battle they had waged, the cataphracts. All the greater, that there had been no purpose in it save dharma.
And, perhaps, the slave admitted, the small joy of a delicious revenge. But revenge would not weigh too heavily on their destiny, the slave thought. No, the cataphracts had shed much karma from their souls.
The slave was glad of it. He had never cared much for the cataphracts, it was true. Crude and boastful, they were. Coarse and unrefined, compared to the kshatriya the slave had once been. But no kshatriya could ever claim more than the dead cataphracts outside the walls of the Hagia Sophia. Arjuna himself would adopt their souls and call them kinfolk.
Again, he thought about the dagger and knew that his own karma would be the better for its use. But, again, he thrust the thought aside.
No, he would wait awhile.
It was not that he feared the sin of suicide. His faith did not share the bizarre Christian notion that acts carried moral consequences separate from their purpose. No, it was that he, too, could not bear to leave this turn of eternity’s wheel without a small, delicious revenge.
The asura’s vermin would need time to find the chamber where the old slave sat. Time, while the Ye-tai dogs and their Rajput fleas slunk fearfully through the great cavern of the cathedral, dreading another strike of the Mongoose.
The old slave would give them the time. He would add considerable karma to his soul, he knew, but he could not resist.
He would taunt the tormentors.
So had Shakuntala taunted them, so long ago, before opening her veins. And now, at the end of his life, the old slave found great joy in the fact that he could finally remember the girl without pain.
How he had loved that treasure of the world, that jewel of creation! From the first day her father had brought her to him, and handed her into his safe-keeping.
“Teach her everything you know,” the emperor of great Andhra had instructed. “Hold back nothing.”
Seven years old, she had been. Dark-skinned, for her mother was Keralan. Her eyes, even then, had been the purest black beauty.
As she aged, other men were drawn to the beauty of her body. But never the man who was, years later, to become the slave of Belisarius. He had loved the beauty of the girl herself. And had taught her well, he thought. Had held back nothing.
He laughed, then, as he had not laughed in decades. At the sound of that laugh, the Ye-tai and Rajput warriors who were creeping beyond froze in their tracks, like paralyzed deer. For the sound of the slave’s joy had rung the walls of the cathedral like the scream of a panther.
And, indeed, so had the slave been called, in his own day. The Panther of Maharashtra. The Wind of the Great Country.
Oh, how the Wind had loved the Princess Shakuntala!
The daughter of the great Andhra’s loins, it might be. Who was to know? Paternity of the body was always a favorite subject of God’s humor. Yet this much was certain: her soul had truly been the cub of the Panther.
She alone of the Satavahana dynasty they had spared, the asura’s dogs, when they finally conquered Andhra. She alone, for the beauty of her body. A prize which the Emperor Skandagupta would bestow on his faithful servant, Venandakatra. Venandakatra the Vile. The vermin of vermin, was Venandakatra, for the Malwa emperor himself was nothing but the asura’s beast.
The Panther had been unable to prevent her capture. He had lain hidden in the reeds, almost dead from the wounds of that last battle before the palace at Amavarati. But, after he recovered, he had tracked the dogs back to their lair. North, across the Vindhyas, to the very palace of the Vile One.
Shakuntala was there. She had been imprisoned for months, held for Venandakatra’s pleasure upon his return from the mission whence the emperor had sent him the year before. Unharmed, but safely guarded. The Panther had studied the guards carefully, and decided he could not overcome them. Kushans, under the command of a shrewd and canny veteran, who took no chances and left no entry unguarded.
The Panther inquired. Among many other things, he had been a master spy in his time, and so he discovered much. But the outstanding fact discovered was that the Kushan commander was, indeed, not to be underestimated. Kungas, his name was, and it was a name the Panther had heard. No, best to bide his time.
Then, time had run out. Venandakatra had returned and had entered his new concubine’s chamber at once, a horde of Ye-tai guards clustering outside. The Vile One was eager to taste the pleasure of her flesh, and the greater pleasure of her defilement.
Remembering that day, the old slave’s sinewy fingers closed about the haft of the dagger. But he released his grip. He could hear the shuffling feet of the vermin beyond. He would bide awhile. Not much longer now, he thought.
Just long enough to torture the torturers.
On the last day of the girl’s life, the Panther had knelt in the woods below Venandakatra’s palace. Knelt in fervent prayer. A prayer that Shakuntala would remember all that he had taught her, and not just those lessons which come easily to youth.
The old slave had been a noted philosopher, in his day, among many other things. And so, long years before, he had prayed that the treasure of his soul would remember that only the soul mattered, in the end. All else was dross.
But, as he had feared, she had not remembered. Everything else, but not that. And so, when he heard the Vile One’s first scream, he had wept the most bitter tears of a bitter lifetime.
Years later, he heard the tale from Kungas himself. Odd, how time’s wheel turns. He had met the one-time commander of Shakuntala’s guard on the same slave ship which bore him to the market at Antioch. The Panther had finally been captured in one of the last desperate struggles before all of India was brought beneath the asura’s talons. But his captors had not recognized the Wind of the Great Country in their weary, much-scarred captive, and so they had simply sold him as a slave.
Kungas, he discovered, had long been a slave. His hands were missing now, cut off by the Ye-tai guards who had blamed him for Shakuntala’s deed. Cut off by the same guards who had shouldered him and his Kushans aside, avid to watch their master at his sport. (And hopeful, of course, that the Vile One might invite them to mount the child after he had satiated himself.)
Kungas was missing his eyes and his nose, as well. But the mahamimamsa had left him his ears and his mouth, so that he might hear the taunts of children and be able to wail in misery.
But Kungas had always been a practical man. So he had taken up the trade of story-telling and mastered it. And if people thought the sight of him hideous, they bore it for the sake of his tales. Great tales, he told. None greater and more eagerly sought by the poor folk who were his normal clientele-though it was forbidden-than the tale of the Vile One’s demise. Sitting in the hold of the slave ship (where he found himself, he explained cheerfully, because his fluent tongue had seduced a noblewoman but his sightless eyes had not spotted her husband’s return), he told the tale to the Panther.
A gleeful tale, as Kungas told it, the more so because Kungas had come to accept that his own punishment was just. He had been responsible for the Vile One’s demise, and had long since decided that it was perhaps the only pure deed of a generally misspent life.