The Leap — A Shadow Over the Sea
Chapter 1 — A Shadow Over the Sea
Hanuman grew until the mountain beneath him groaned.
The vanara, son of the Wind God, stood on the highest crest of Mount Mahendra with both hands and both feet planted against the rock, and each time his frame swelled larger the mountain answered with a deep rumble from its belly. Every tree shook down its blossoms at once until the slopes lay blanketed in color. Jets of water spurted from clefts in the cliffs. Boulders streaked red with realgar broke loose and tumbled smoking down into the ravines. Giant serpents writhed out of their holes with hoods flared wide, sinking their fangs into the stones that pinched their coils, and wherever their venom touched, the rock caught fire and split into shards.
High on the upper ridges, ascetics and vidyadharas thought a rakshasa was rending the mountain apart. Rising into the sky with their women, they left everything behind. Their golden cups and pitchers still lay scattered across the flat stones where they had been drinking.
Voices drifted down from where they hovered in the air.
“That is Hanuman, son of the Wind,” they called out to one another. “He is about to cross the sea for Rama’s sake.”
Hanuman bristled from head to heel and let out a roar that rolled booming out over the surf. His tail lifted and cracked against the wind. Rama’s ring, which he had kept pinched between two fingers ever since leaving the beach, he tied fast once more to the bark cord around his neck, pulling the knot tight. He braced his forearms against the stone, drew his waist in lean, tucked his neck between his shoulders, and folded both ears flat against his head. His eyes measured the skyway to the south, and he held his breath.
Down along the white ribbon of the beach, the vanara host craned their necks upward. He spoke to them without looking down.
“As swift as an arrow loosed from Rama’s bow flies through the wind, so swiftly will I fly to Lanka, city of Ravana. If I do not find Janaka’s daughter there, with the very same speed I will ascend to the halls of the gods.” The stone beneath his heels cracked. “And if she is not in heaven either, I will bind the rakshasa king hand and foot and drag him back here. Either I return having accomplished my errand, or I uproot Lanka with Ravana inside it and carry the whole island back across the sea.”
Then he leaped, without weighing the matter a second time.
The trees crowning the summit flattened in every direction under the thrust of his feet. Those standing closest were torn up by the roots and dragged skyward in the wake of his thighs, still heavy with blossoms, birds still clinging to their boughs. For a short way they flew behind him through the air like friends accompanying a traveler setting out for a distant land, and then one by one they dropped back. The heaviest trunks plunged into the sea first. The lighter ones glided a little farther, shedding petals over the waves before they too sank out of sight.
The wind rushed under his arms with a roar. His chest parted the sea far below without touching the water. Swells reared up toward the clouds, and in the deep troughs where the waves peeled back, the dark backs of whales, crocodiles, great fish, and sea-turtles lay exposed to the sun. Sea-serpents craned their necks from the foam, taking him for Garuda, lord of birds.
His shadow fell across the sea. It was as wide as a province and longer still, bluish-white against the reflected clouds, racing over the rollers beneath him.
The sun did not scorch him. The Wind, his father, blew steady at his back and never once shifted quarter.
Dead ahead of him, where the water lay smooth between swells, the ocean began to heave and bubble.
The water domed upward, spilling down on all sides, and up out of the depths rose peaks of solid gold, one first, then three, then scores of them, wooded with tall trees and hung with creepers dripping brine. The sky overhead turned golden from their glare. The mountain rose straight into his path, climbing higher and higher, and Hanuman did not slacken his pace. He slammed his chest into those peaks. Under the blow the golden mountain sank halfway back into the sea while white foam boiled around its flanks.
Up from the foam came a shout of joy.
The mountain rose a second time, slowly now, and on its highest pinnacle stood a man drenched to the hair, lifting both hands in greeting.
“Foremost of vanaras! Come down and rest upon my crest.” He pointed down his slopes toward boughs bending low with ripe fruit. “I am Mainaka. Long ago this ocean was widened by the sons of Sagara, a king of the house of Raghu, and now it sees you flying across it on Rama’s errand, who comes of that very same line. The Ocean sent me up to welcome you. Eat your fill, shake off your weariness, and then fly on.”
Hanuman hovered in the air above him and did not set foot on the stone.
“I struck you down,” he said.
“And now I know the measure of your arm.” Mainaka laughed, reaching back to rub his own shoulder. “There is another debt that brings me up to meet you. In the old days mountains had wings. We flew wherever we pleased, and all creatures trembled for fear we would drop out of the sky and crush them. Indra sheared off the wings of hundreds and thousands of mountains with his thunderbolt. When he came at me with his bolt raised, your father the Wind caught me up in a sudden gust and flung me down into this sea, hiding my wings safe beneath the salt water.”
Hanuman’s thumb rose to touch the ridge along his left jaw, where Indra’s bolt had struck him as an infant.
“To repay a kindness done is the eternal law of the good,” Mainaka said. “Today it falls to me to repay your father. Do not refuse me, and do not slight the Ocean.”
“Your goodwill is hospitality enough for me.” Hanuman reached down and touched the stone of the mountain peak with the tips of his fingers. “Do not be angry that I do not alight. My errand brooks no delay, and the daylight is running out. Besides, I swore an oath before I leaped that I would not halt anywhere along the way.”
He smiled at the man on the peak, and shot forward again.
When he glanced back from high among the clouds, the golden summits were sinking slowly beneath the waves, and out of the upper sky a deep voice called down to the mountain that Indra was pleased with his courage and he need never fear the thunderbolt again.
He had not flown much farther when the sea ahead of him split open once more, and what rose from the water this time was a rakshasi.
Her bulk towered as high as a mountain, her fangs were long and curved, her eyes glared copper-red, and her crown brushed the clouds. Planting herself squarely across Hanuman’s path, she opened her jaws.
“Vanara, the gods themselves have sent you to me as my meal.” Her tongue lolled between her teeth. “Walk into my mouth. Such is the boon Brahma granted me.”
Hanuman checked his flight before that face.
“Rama, son of King Dasharatha, entered the Dandaka forest with his brother Lakshmana and his wife Sita. There he fell into war with the rakshasas, and while he was drawn away from his cottage, Ravana carried off his wife.” He pointed south. “At Rama’s command I am flying to Sita as his messenger. You dwell within the realm of Rama’s house yourself. Aid him in his work. Or else let me find Sita and carry word back to Rama first, and I swear to you by truth itself that I will return and walk into your mouth.”
“No creature passes before me without entering my jaws.” Her mouth stretched wider. “That is the word Brahma gave me.”
Hanuman spread both arms wide.
“Then open your mouth wide enough to swallow me.”
The rakshasi opened her jaws as wide as a bay of the sea, and Hanuman swelled until he was too broad to fit inside. Her jaws stretched wider still. Her lower lip dropped into the waves, and seawater poured roaring down her gullet like a river over a cataract. Hanuman grew larger yet, his shoulders punching through the cloud-wrack. Back and forth they went, jaws and body, until the rakshasi’s upper teeth scraped the highest clouds and the corners of her mouth stretched left and right farther than the eye could take in at a single glance.
At that instant, within the span of a single breath, Hanuman shrank to the size of a man’s thumb.
He darted in between two fangs, touched the slick roof of her palate, wheeled around, and shot back out into the sunlight before her jaws could snap shut. Hovering in the air before her nose, tiny as a bee, he pressed his palms together.
“I have entered your mouth. Your boon is fulfilled.” From his tiny perch he pointed south. “Now I go to where Sita waits.”
The giant form before him shrank away. Her fangs drew back, the blood-red glare faded from her eyes, and standing above the waves in her own shape was Surasa, mother of the nagas. The gods themselves had sent her to test the vanara’s wit.
“Go in peace, gentle one,” she said. “Accomplish your purpose, and bring Sita back together with Rama.”
Hanuman returned to his leaping stature and flew on, plunging into the cloud banks and bursting out their far sides. Red, yellow, and dark rain-clouds scattered before his chest, hiding him for a breath before he flashed out into the clear blue again.
Then his body jerked to a halt in midair.
His arms were still stretched before him, the wind still blew steady at his back, yet he was no longer moving forward, held fast like a great ship caught by a headwind in mid-ocean. He looked up, down, left, and right. Far below him on the water, his shadow was no longer running over the waves. It lay pinned to the surface, and up from the middle of it something with a twisted face was hauling itself out of the sea, its claws sunk deep into the edges of his shadow on the water.
He remembered the tip of Sugriva’s twig scratching the dirt on Prasravana, and the vanara king’s warning. In those southern waters dwells a rakshasi who takes her prey by pinning its shadow on the waves.
“Here she is,” he said to himself.
Simhika, that ancient rakshasi, had gone a long while without a meal as large as this. Seeing Hanuman swell his chest overhead, she unhinged her jaws from sea to sky and lunged upward with a roar like rolling thunder. Hanuman measured that gaping maw, the joints of her limbs, the hollow of her ribs. In the blink of an eye he contracted his frame and dropped straight down her throat.
Deep inside her belly, he raked outward with both sets of sharp claws, tearing his way into the light. He burst free of her chest, swelled back to his full size in midair, and watched the rakshasi splash lifeless into the waves below.
Beings drifting through the upper air called down to him from the clouds. “Terrible and swift is the deed you have done today. Whoever holds four things in his grasp as you do, steadfastness, keen sight, wit, and skill in action, never fails in his undertaking.”
Near the far rim of the ocean, a thin green line rose along the horizon.
The line thickened into forest. Soon he could make out a densely wooded island, beaches fringed with coconut palms, and river mouths where fresh water met the sea and stained the waves brown and gold. Hanuman glanced down at his own frame, which blotted out half the sky and cast a shadow like a storm cloud across the distant shore.
“If the rakshasas see a body this huge dropping out of the sky at this speed,” he said, “they will all come running to see who I am.”
He shrank down, smaller and smaller, until he wore his ordinary shape once more, a vanara with a copper-red face and a long tail, and alighted on the wooded crest of a mountain called Lamba.
The bark cord around his neck was still tight, and his hand closed briefly over the ring hanging at its end.
Across the belt of forest, perched upon the triple peak of another mountain, stood a city. Its golden walls caught the last red light of the afternoon sun. Mansions rose white and pale gold, story upon story toward the clouds, with hundreds of banners snapping above its gates. Along the top of the ramparts, tiny from this distance, sentries paced back and forth with bows slung over their shoulders.
That was Lanka. Inside one of those roofs, if she still drew breath, was a woman who would know this ring.