KRISHNA CORIOLIS#4: Lord of Mathura by Ashok K. Banker Read Free Book Online

base and the tree trunk cracked with a resounding sound, the tree toppling over to crash down heavily. Monkeys and birds and animals screamed and chittered from elsewhere in the woods, but no animal or birds sounds were audible in the region of the bucking demon. 
     
    Krishna understood that the creature must have emerged from the ground and insinuated itself into the woods slowly, gradually, moving perhaps a few feet at a time, then waiting for hours before moving again. Over the course of days, perhaps even weeks, it had taken up position in the darkest areas of the woods, then lain still, waiting. Like a serpent, it had intertwined itself between trees, looping and twisting sinuously until it covered a considerable area. He could only imagine the length of the beast from mouth to tail: miles certainly. Perhaps a whole yojana long? The bulk of its body was still inside the ground, he saw, and that was why it was moving so violently now. It was trying to retreat into its hole, to return underground where it could travel more easily through the subterranean caverns to which it was accustomed, there to consume its meal at leisure. 
     
    He already knew what its meal consisted of: the calf herds and child cowherds. With the power of his inner eye he could see little Radha and the other young gopas and gopis alongwith their calf herds and mother cows, all inside the belly of the beast. They had been startled when the ground began moving underfoot and the world around them began to shake. Now, they were terrified, for they understood that this was no earthquake or tremor; they were inside some great creature’s maw and were about to be consumed. 
     
    He could see them screaming and crying out plaintively, scared despite their inherent brave outlook, for how could they fight such a creature once they were within its body? They could hardly guess at what it even looked like and the fetid rank air within the beast’s body was already choking and sickening the children as well as the cattle. 
     
    The question was why the creature had not consumed them already. All it had to do was gulp and swallow and every last child in Vrindavan old enough to mind the herds would be digested alive, slowly, agonizingly. The most merciful death would suffocation for lack of air. The most terrible would be a slow acidic digesting over days. 
     
    ‘I will not let that happen,’ Krishna said grimly. 
     
    He raised his voice, raising his cowherd’s crook and shaking it at the towering beast. ‘I will not let you take them!’
     
    At the sound of his voice, the beast ceased its shuddering. 
     
    Suddenly, a section of its vast body rose up in the air, exactly like the head of a snake rising to open its hood. Except that the segmented body resembled a worm more than a snake and when the head rose up, it did not widen into a hood, merely opened to reveal a great maw, some fifty yards wide, and perfectly round. Blind and lacking any other sense organs, its maw opened in sections to reveal interlocking overlapping flaps of dusty grimy leathery hide that resembled an iris spiralling open. Within that giant maw, he saw an immense terrifying darkness, and within that darkness, several yards deep, he saw his friends and their herds, struggling to stay upright, leaning against one another or against the more sure-footed bovines, pale and very scared, crying with fear and incomprehension. Many were indignant or upset too: Krishna saw some of the bolder young gopas wield their slings, looking for a target. There was none. They could hardly fling stones about in the beast’s mouth; they would only hit their own friends or cattle. They were eager to fight but had no way to fight such a creature. Helpless and angry, they shouted to Krishna to do something. 
     
    ‘Release my friends!’ Krishna shouted. 
     
    A deep rumbling awoke from inside the earth. It began from underground, and Krishna knew that it was coming from the part of the asura’s