The Battle Begins

The army crossed the great causeway and poured onto the shores of Lankā, and the war began, and the tellers now shift the whole character of the story, for we pass from the road to the war, from the long journey toward the enemy to the terrible business of the enemy engaged.

The crossing itself was a thing of thunder, the vast host of the vānaras streaming across the Setu over the sea, wave upon wave of warriors pouring onto the island, until the whole northern shore of Lankā was covered with the encamping army of Rāma, a sea of vānaras where lately there had been only sea. And Lankā, looking out from its walls, saw the thing it had dreaded made real: the enemy across the water, the enemy said to be impassable, encamped now upon its own shore, the war it had refused to avert now come to its very gates.

Rāma established his host and made ready for the siege, and here Vibhīshaṇa’s value proved itself at once, for the righteous brother knew Lankā as no one else in Rāma’s camp could know it: its walls and their weaknesses, its gates and their guardians, its warriors and their powers, the whole disposition of the enemy’s strength.

He counselled Rāma on the fortifications, named the demon champions and their capabilities, advised on the strategy of the siege, and became, as Hanumān had foreseen, an ally of incalculable worth, the insider whose knowledge turned the siege from a blind assault into an informed campaign. The defection that Sugrīva had feared as a spy’s trick proved, exactly as Rāma’s discernment had judged, the gift of a priceless ally, and Vibhīshaṇa repaid the refuge Rāma had given him with a service that would prove essential to the whole war.

And Lankā made ready its defence. The city was a fortress, strongly walled, heavily gated, and Rāvaṇa arrayed his warriors for its defence, posting his champions and his hosts, fortifying the walls, preparing the whole terrible strength of the demon race to meet the assault. For all the anxiety that had crept through the city, Lankā was still a mighty power, its warriors still formidable, its defences still strong, and it did not mean to fall easily.

The demon host arrayed itself behind its walls, champion and army, sorcery and strength, ready to hurl back the vānaras and to make the siege a long and bloody agony.

Rāma, before the fighting began in earnest, made one last offer of peace, for it was his nature and his dharma to seek the just resolution before the violent one, to give even the enemy the chance to avert the war by doing right. He sent an envoy, or made known his terms: let Rāvaṇa return Sītā, even now, even at this last hour, with the armies arrayed against each other, and the war might yet be averted, the city spared, the whole horror avoided; return the stolen queen, and there need be no battle.

It was the same offer that had been made again and again, the offer that wisdom in Rāvaṇa’s own court had urged him to accept; and Rāvaṇa, proud and unrepentant to the last, refused it again, choosing war over the undoing of his crime, choosing the destruction of his city over the humbling of his pride. And so the last chance of peace was refused, by Rāvaṇa’s own choice, and the war became inevitable, and the responsibility for all the blood that would follow rested, by his own decision, upon Rāvaṇa alone.

Then the battle was joined, and the tellers give us the chaotic, thunderous opening of the great war, the first clash of the two hosts. The vānaras assaulted the walls and the gates; the demons sallied out to meet them or hurled down destruction from above; and the whole shore of Lankā became a scene of tremendous violence, the roar of the war-cries, the crash of the assault, the storm of arrows and boulders, the surging and breaking of the two great hosts against each other.

The vānaras fought with their mountains and their trees and their teeth and their boundless ferocity; the demons fought with their weapons and their sorceries and their terrible strength; and the first day of the war raged across the shore and the walls in a chaos of dust and blood and thunder.

And in these first clashes the great warriors began to show themselves and to engage, the champions on both sides seeking each other out amid the general slaughter, the individual combats that would be the true axis of the war beginning to form amid the mass battle.

The vānara leaders, Angada and Hanumān and the rest, hurled themselves against the demon champions; the demon warriors, mighty and terrible, met them; and the war settled into its long and dreadful pattern of general battle punctuated by the great single combats of the champions, the pattern that would hold through all the days of slaughter to come.

Let us pause, at the threshold of the war, to mark what the tellers are doing, for the shift in the story is deliberate and important. Until now, for all its sorrows, the story has been a story of a journey, of individuals and their choices and their sufferings, of exile and abduction and search and alliance. Now it becomes, for a long stretch, a story of war, of armies and battles and slaughter, of champions and their terrible combats, of the vast machinery of destruction set in motion by Rāvaṇa’s single crime.

And the tellers do not glory in it; they render its horror as well as its heroism; for the war, however righteous its cause, is a catastrophe, a vast letting of blood, the price that Rāvaṇa’s pride and lust exacted from the whole world, demon and vānara alike. Thousands would die in it who had no part in the original wrong; the golden city would be drenched in blood before it fell; and all of it flowed from one king’s refusal to undo one crime.

The war is the terrible harvest of Rāvaṇa’s choice, and as we enter it we should hold onto that: that all this slaughter, all this heroism and horror, was unnecessary, was chosen, was the fruit of a pride that would not bend and a lust that would not be governed, and that every death in the long war to come is charged, finally, to the account of the one who refused, again and again, to simply return the queen and avert it all.

So the battle began, and the long agony of the war unfolded, and the story now moves through its terrible middle passage, the clash of the champions, the tide of victory and defeat surging back and forth, the great and dreadful combats that would end, at last, in the fall of Lankā and the death of Rāvaṇa, but not before much blood, and much heroism, and much sorrow, on the long and bloody road to that appointed end.