GLUTTONY

By Dale Glaser

Bengal
715 A.D.

The four eunuchs bearing the royal palanquin passed through the ornate gilded gateway in the mosaic-tiled walls surrounding the palace, without a trace of emotion showing on their heavyset, hairless faces. Under a late afternoon sun that hung in the sky like a hot coal, the eunuchs crossed the palace courtyard at a stately pace, the poles of the litter braced on their broad shoulders so sturdily that the palanquin neither bounced up and down nor swayed back and forth. When the eunuchs reached the marbled front terrace of the palace, their charge Prince Sirajul hopped down lightly and proceeded into the royal home.

Prince Sirajul made his way to the royal audience chamber, passing several silk-clad dignitaries who stopped in their tracks and bowed deeply to him before continuing through the corridor. Prince Sirajul nodded appreciatively at each one, as he had always been taught. He could tell by the number of men heading in the opposite direction as his own footsteps that the time of King Mujibur’s receiving of callers for the day was drawing to a close.

In fact, by the time Prince Sirajul reached the audience chamber the huge room was nearly empty. Three of his father’s harem girls were artfully sprawled on the huge, brightly colored pillows that surrounded the throne. A single figure stood before the dais, giving his thanks and praise to his king as they concluded their business. King Mujibur himself sat on the raised throne, and immediately to his right stood his vizier, Lord Lakshman.

King Mujibur was a slender man, and seemed to grow more slender every year. He was not yet frail, but those who had known him for any length of time could see his strength leaving him season by season. His hair was white, the lines of his face were etched in wrinkles, and his dark skin hung slightly loosely from his aging bones. Still, his eyes were clear and his voice was steady as he sent the last supplicant on his way.

Lord Lakshman was, by contrast, a voluminous individual, from his bulbous jowls and triple chin to the flabby girth of his arms and legs to the hugely tumescent belly that preceded him whenever he shuffled his bulk along. Some men said that Lord Lakshman weighed more than a bull, and others said he ate more than a bull’s weight every time he sat down to a meal. Yet Lord Lakshman was also quick-witted and never failed to serve his king in whatever manner was needed.

Prince Sirajul approached the throne and his father bestowed a warm smile on him. “My son returns from studies with the wise men once again,” King Mujibur observed. “You look well-pleased with the knowledge you have gained today.”

“Indeed,” Lord Lakshman added, with a smile less genuine. “Especially considering how little enthusiasm the young prince usually shows for such studies.”

“The wise men say I am learning quickly,” Prince Sirajul said, even though he had not seen the wise men that day at all. He did not meet the gaze of Lord Lakshman, but he wondered how much the vizier knew. Lord Lakshman was shrewd, even though he showed no ambition beyond maintaining his lifestyle of ease and luxury within the palace walls. Although he was only eleven years old, Prince Sirajul knew enough to be wary of such a man.

“No doubt the young prince is as swift a pupil as they have ever known,” Lord Lakshman enthused, his sausage-like fingers twiddling happily. “Now, if I may be excused, Your Highness, I have business of my own to attend to.”

“Business?” King Mujibur asked, raising an ivory eyebrow.

Lord Lakshman nodded. “A rather large bowl of curried goat,” he said, patting his monstrous belly with a chuckle. The king raised a hand benignly, and Lord Lakshman departed. Prince Sirajul breathed a sigh of relief.

“Father, may I go as well?” the prince asked.

King Mujibur leaned back in his throne in a motion that conveyed profound tiredness. “Of course,” he agreed. “Nari and Vula and Reema will help me back to my suite, won’t you, my flowers?”

All three girls on the pillows rose and gathered around the throne to assist their king. Prince Sirajul bowed to his father and left the audience chamber, bound for his own quarters, memories of the day racing around in his mind.

The next morning Prince Sirajul rose early and ordered one of the palace servants to summon the royal palanquin. A minute later Prince Sirajul was climbing through the diaphanous curtains of the litter and then borne by the four silent eunuchs out of the palace courtyard. As the palace fell behind them and the nearby city came closer, Prince Sirajul reclined on the cushions of the palanquin, affecting a regal and dignified composure totally at odds with the excitement he felt in his heart.

When the palanquin reached the outskirts of the city, Prince Sirajul ordered the eunuchs to stop, just as he had the day before. The prince quickly divested himself of his finery—his raiment and his gold and his jeweled turban—and emerged from the litter in nothing but his undergarment. He landed on the dusty ground and began to rub dirt on his arms, chest and face. “Wait near the edge of the jungle, out of sight, and return for me in two … no, three hours,” Prince Sirajul commanded. The eunuchs obeyed.

Prince Sirajul, now indistinguishable from any other street urchin, ran through the alleys of the city as fast as he could, looking for his two new friends. Behind a small hovel he found the younger of them, Dev. “Hello,” Sirajul smiled. “Where’s Gopal?”

“He said he’d be back soon,” Dev answered. “Want to play Crocodile River?”

Sirajul agreed immediately even though he had no idea how to play Crocodile River. He didn’t know any games that he hadn’t learned from Gopal and Dev, with no one to play with at the palace. Dev explained that the only rule of the game was that no one could let their feet touch the dirt of the alley floor while traversing its length, because the alley floor was now a river infested with man-eating crocodiles. Soon the boys were climbing the walls of the shops and homes that formed the alley, jumping on rocks and garbage and balancing carefully to avoid the imaginary reptiles’ deadly jaws.

Gopal appeared some time later with a mischievous grin on his face and a basket woven from reeds in his arms. “Look what I’ve got!” Gopal crowed, and by mutual understanding Dev and Sirajul ended their game and hurried down the alley to meet him.

Inside the basket were steaming hot samosas, fried triangles of stuffed dough that smelled of tamarind and chilies. Dev’s eyes grew wide at the sight. “Where did you get those?” he asked.

“Some fat old merchant,” Gopal shrugged nonchalantly. “He’ll never miss them, either. You should have seen how much food had been laid out on the table outside the winesellers! I helped myself to enough for all of us, go on, eat!”

Sirajul took one of the samosas and bit into a corner. He had eaten many of the pastries before, but standing with his new friends in a dirty alley, the chicken and peas and onion and spices seemed more flavorful than they ever had in the palace dining hall. He smiled as he savored the experience, and he smiled at Dev, who was gulping down his samosa so quickly he could hardly be tasting it at all. Gopal ate his samosa with gusto, but not as wolfishly as Dev, and Sirajul surmised that Gopal had already eaten at least one on the trip from the wineseller’s to the alley.

“There he is,” an angry baritone voice seethed from the mouth of the alley. Sirajul, Gopal and Dev turned with guilty alacrity and found themselves facing two large, surly-looking men, each one armed with a talwar sword. For a long, terrible moment, a heavy silence hung in the dusty air.

Then the men swept into the alley like a cyclone of violence, meeting Prince Sirajul first as he stepped between the men and his friends. The nearer of the two men punched the side of Sirajul’s head so hard that it drove Sirajul’s skull into the rough brick wall he had been climbing along minutes before. Stars danced in front of Sirajul’s eyes and pain wailed directly into his savaged ear as he crumpled to the alley floor, vaguely aware that Gopal and Dev had been knocked down just as violently.

A voice new to the scene spoke, saying “Yes, that’s him. Bring him to me.” A voice that cut through the haze of disorientation in Sirajul’s mind with its familiarity. The voice of Lord Lakshman.

Sirajul weakly forced his eyes open and saw the corpulent vizier waddling down the alley towards Gopal, who was suspended in the grip of the two men who were Lakshman’s personal attendants. Lord Lakshman’s meaty hand shot out and grabbed Gopal’s jaw, heedless of the blood trickling from the corners of the boy’s mouth. “You stole food from me, you regrettable piece of filth,” Lakshman spat. “No one steals food from me! When I sit down to a repast I intend to eat every morsel myself, and the loss of a single component can ruin the entire meal! I will not be deprived!” Lakshman released Gopal’s head and took a step back, then quietly said, “Open him up.”

The attendant on the left placed his talwar sword against Gopal’s stomach and drew it across the trembling flesh like a carving knife. Gopal screamed in agony as fresh blood, bright red, poured from the wound. Prince Sirajul, paralyzed with horror, could only watch as the other of Lord Lakshman’s attendants drew a knife from his belt and worked it into Gopal’s abdomen, slicing apart muscle and probing for the boy’s stomach. Gopal’s screams grew louder.

Lord Lakshman thrust his hand into Gopal’s stomach and pulled out a chewed, partially digested samosa, glistening with digestive juices and blood. Lakshman stared into Gopal’s eyes and held up the stolen food. “This … is … MINE,” the vizier insisted. Gopal’s howls at the excruciating pain faded to pitiful whimpers as he watched Lord Lakshman raise the dripping glob of samosa to his mouth and take a bite. Lord Lakshman never dropped his gaze as he noisily chewed the meat and dough, nor did he bother to wipe the gore from his chins. Through it all, Sirajul was revolted and terrified, wanted to scream, to run away, to make it all stop, but found his body utterly unresponsive, overwhelmed with fear and stunned with the madness of his father’s closest aide.

Lord Lakshman licked blood and spices from his fingertips and gurgled, “I trust that you have learned your lesson about stealing other people’s food. But if not, you will have some time to think on it. Disemboweling usually leads to a very long, protracted—and exquisitely painful—death. Which is no less than you deserve.”

Lord Lakshman turned his back on Gopal, and his attendants let the boy go. Gopal fell to the alley floor a limply as a wet sack. “What about his two friends?” one of the attendants asked.

“They may be complicit, but they did not commit the offense themselves,” Lord Lakshman answered over his shoulder. “Quick deaths.”

Prince Sirajul watched one of the men stride over to Dev and drive the point of his talwar sword through Dev’s heart, a half second before the second man skewered Sirajul’s ribs as well. The world went red, then black.

The sight of the monkey sitting on Prince Sirajul’s chest surprised him, since he had not expected to ever see anything again. It was hard to make out any other details of his surroundings, or even to remember what they should have looked like. All that Prince Sirajul knew was that he should be dead, but instead he was face to face with a monkey. Not just any monkey, but a red-furred monkey with a narrow face, a pointed chin and dark eyes.

“Lord Lakshman must be punished,” the monkey said expectantly.

“He … he … killed an orphan child,” Sirajul answered uncertainly. “He did it with impunity. He will never face the king’s justice.”

“Then he must face you,” the monkey insisted. “You must exact … vengeance. For your friends.”

“But … Lakshman did not break the law … he caught a thief, he had the right …”

“He had no right!” the monkey screeched. “He went too far! He is too cruel! If you will not avenge your friends, think of your kingdom!”

“My … kingdom?”

“Would you have that butcher upon the throne?” the monkey clamored. “For make no mistake, he will be placed there if left unchecked. Your father the king is old, too old to rule according to some, drawing nearer to that distinction every day according to others. And you are far too young to effectively hold the reins of power. Whether your father dies with a child heir or lives on to become enfeebled, Lord Lakshman will ascend! Unless you stop him!”

“I … I am too young … too weak …”

“I can give you strength,” the monkey promised. “I can give you power enough to punish the guilty. To exact vengeance.”

“I …”

“Vengeance!” the monkey bared its fangs.

Against his will, Sirajul thought again of Gopal and Dev and their brutal deaths at Lakshman’s hands. “Vengeance,” Sirajul agreed.

Lord Lakshman sat on the front terrace of his home, his bulk supported by a creaking rattan chair, a large bowl of roshogolla beside him. The moon hung low in the blue-black sky. Lord Lakshman popped another of the syrupy balls into his mouth and luxuriated in the feeling of it melting on his tongue.

At the edge of his property, the royal palanquin appeared as if materializing from the shadows themselves. The eunuchs walked up to Lord Lakshman’s terrace and came to a halt mere feet away from the seated vizier. Prince Sirajul pulled open the curtains of the litter and stood looking down at Lord Lakshman.

“Good evening, young prince,” Lord Lakshman said. “Would you care for a sweet? I may be able to spare one or two …”

“More than you could spare a samosa for a starving orphan boy?” Sirajul demanded.

Lord Lakshman’s round face suddenly soured. “What would you know of that, young sire?”

“Enough,” Sirajul assured him. “More than enough. You must pay for your misdeeds, Lakshman. Your guilt demands punishment.”

“Hah!” Lord Lakshman scoffed. “And who will punish me, little princeling? You?”

Sirajul said nothing as he took off his jeweled turban and set it aside. He jumped down from the palanquin and stood before Lakshman. His eyes flared with an unholy light, and his flesh from the neck up melted away as the fire spread to encircle his entire skull. Soon naked white bone in a wreath of hellfire was all that sat atop Sirajul’s shoulders, while his attire had transformed to glossy black garments that seemed to be made from the skin of cobras. “I will punish you in ways you cannot imagine,” Prince Sirajul said with the unearthly voice of the Spirit of Vengeance.

Lord Lakshman heaved himself to his feet and backed away from Sirajul. “No … no!” the vizier cried out. “I will not let you touch me, demon!” He raised greasy fingers to his lips and let out a sharp, piercing whistle, which brought a huge stallion at a run from the other side of the yard. Lord Lakshman labored to pull himself up the horse’s side, but was atop his steed’s back after a few seconds of difficult struggle. He quickly spurred the horse away, as Sirajul watched with pinpoints of cold light in otherwise empty eye sockets.

Sirajul turned toward his palanquin, and each of the four eunuchs dropped to one knee. Unhurriedly, Sirajul climbed into the royal litter, mounting one eunuch’s muscular thigh and shoulder as if they were steps in a stone staircase. The palanquin itself underwent its own metamorphosis, the poles fading from bronze to bone white, the gauzy silk curtains becoming gray and tattered like burial shrouds left behind in a tomb. As Lord Lakshman’s stallion galloped, putting greater and greater distance between the overfed vizier and the young prince, the four eunuchs stood to their full height, with Prince Sirajul standing in the center of the palanquin floor.

Then the eunuchs burst into flame.

The four thick-limbed, bald men became effigies, burning furiously at the corners of the palanquin. The fiery eunuchs set off at a run after Lord Lakshman’s horse, leaving flaming footprints behind them on the dusty ground of Lakshman’s estate. Prince Sirajul leaned forward slightly into the wind, his hellfire halo swept back, as the palanquin rushed through the dark, inexorably gaining on Lord Lakshman.

The vizier chanced a look back over his shoulder, and screamed in terror at the nightmare swiftly approaching him. Lord Lakshman’s globular mass nearly slid off the stallion’s back as he panicked, but at the last second he righted himself and urged the steed in a different direction. Lord Lakshman raced for a huge storehouse on the edge of his estate, and Prince Sirajul’s infernal palanquin followed.

Lord Lakshman reined his horse to a halt abreast of the wide doors to the storehouse and kicked them in, then edged his mount just inside. He threw himself clumsily to the ground, scrambled to a nearby cask of oil, and smashed it on the hardpacked ground. “Leave me!” Lakshman shrieked, standing in the center of the slowly spreading pool of oil. “Do not follow! You must not!”

Prince Sirajul said nothing, but the charging eunuchs came to an unnaturally sudden stop. Their bodies crackled like funeral pyres as they stood and waited, holding the sepulchral palanquin aloft.

“This storehouse holds almost all of the food tribute given to your father!” Lord Lakshman screamed. He seemed to be regaining some of his usual haughtiness. “This is the kingdom’s proof against famine! If your demon servants enter and set fire to it, all will be lost! The kingdom will have no surplus! The neediest will suffer!”

Prince Sirajul’s grinning skull stared at the vizier. “I will not deprive my father’s subjects. I will not steal from them,” the young prince said. “Unlike you.”

“I take only what I deserve!” Lord Lakshman retorted, his pudgy fingers drumming his expansive belly nervously. “Far, far less than what your fire might destroy!”

“I will not enter,” Prince Sirajul insisted.

Lord Lakshman smiled triumphantly. “Then, begone! Leave me!”

The naked, burning skull glowered. “No.”

Prince Sirajul slid a gleaming steel chakram from his scaly black belt. With the flick of a bony wrist, the chakram was sent spinning through the night air, tiny tongues of hellfire licking its razor sharp edge. Lord Lakshman did not even have time to cry out, only to open his mouth before the chakram slid between his teeth and seemed to disappear down his gullet.

Lord Lakshman lifted his chins, as if he were about to howl at the heavens above. His lips parted, wider and wider, his mouth seeming to extend to the outer curves of each jowl, to his ears, to the rolls at the back of his neck, as blood ran down his soft jawline. The top half of Lord Lakshman’s head flopped back against his shoulders, and the thin strips of skin supporting it tore raggedly, letting the severed cranium splash in the puddle of oil. Lakshman’s lifeless and mostly headless body staggered forward before crumpling.

Prince Sirajul held out his hand and the chakram emerged from the shadows within the storehouse, flying like a thing alive back to Sirajul’s grasp. Sirajul tucked the weapon away, and the infernal flames all around guttered and died. The flesh of Sirajul’s face was restored, and the eunuchs appeared human once more, emotionless as always but physically intact. Sirajul collapsed onto the silk palanquin cushions and uttered a single word: “Home.”

As the eunuchs turned the palanquin toward the royal palace and began their stately march, Sirajul closed his eyes. He could feel a presence in the back of his mind, small but insistent and malevolent: the crimson-furred monkey.

“It is done,” Sirajul thought at the creature. “You may take back this terrible power.”

“Vengeance is never done,” the monkey’s voice hissed in response. Prince Sirajul could imagine its face, but now saw how much it resembled a man rather than a beast. Or a devil in a guise nearer to a man.

“I have no further need of vengeance,” Prince Sirajul insisted. “I want no more of it.”

“And I,” the crimson devil rejoined, “care nothing for what you want, little one. I restored your life. I gave you power to avenge your friends and to save your kingdom. Now your soul belongs to me.”

“For how long?” Prince Sirajul asked, although in his heart he feared he already knew the answer.

“For as long as vile humanity wrongs one another in ways you must revenge,” the monkey-devil laughed. “Forever.”