1 · 2

Chanda and Munda were dead, their heads carried off the field by Kali, and army after asura army had been whittled away before the Devi. The rishi told the king what that news did to Shumbha, lord of the asuras, who had sent them. His mind passed wholly into the keeping of his rage, and he ordered every daitya force he possessed down into the field.

3 · 4 · 5

His command went out loud and terrible, and he called his clans by name, as though every asura in creation were being summoned at one stroke. “Today let the eighty-six daityas march out with their weapons raised and all their forces behind them. Let the eighty-four Kambus go, each ringed by his own troops. Let the fifty asura clans whose valor is past counting go out at my word, and the hundred clans of the Dhaumras with them. The Kalakas, the Daurhridas, the Mauryas, the Kalakeyas: let them arm, and let them hurry.”

6 · 7 · 8 · 9

The order given, Shumbha, who had held his empire together by terror, marched out to battle himself, ringed by many thousands of great soldiers. Chandika watched that appalling host advance, dust to the horizon and iron glinting through it, and answered with her bow. One pull of the string, and the whole space between earth and sky rang with the sound. Her lion loosed a roar on top of it, and Ambika drove the noise higher still with the clangor of her bell. Bowstring, lion and bell filled every quarter of the sky, and over all of it Kali, her mouth stretched wide, raised cries so terrible that the field was hers before a blow had been struck.

10 · 11 · 12 · 13

At that din the daitya armies came seething in from all four directions, mad with anger, and closed around the Devi, her lion and Kali. In that same moment a marvel unfolded. For the destruction of the gods’ haters and the good of the lion-hearted immortals, shaktis of immense valor and strength came forth. Out of the bodies of Brahma, Isha, Guha and Vishnu, and out of Indra, their own powers stepped free, the force that acts whenever each of those gods acts, now standing on its own feet and wearing the god’s very form, and went to take their places beside Chandika. Whatever form each god bore, whatever his ornaments and his mount, in exactly that guise his shakti arrived to fight the asuras.

14 · 15 · 16 · 17

First came the shakti of Brahma, at the front of a chariot drawn by swans, the rosary of seeds and the water-pot in her hands, the whole quiet gear of the creator carried into a war; she is called Brahmani. Then Maheshvari arrived astride her bull, gripping the finest of tridents, a great serpent wound about her for a bangle, the crescent moon bright upon her brow. Spear in hand, mounted on a peacock, wearing the very form of Guha, the young general who leads the armies of heaven, Kaumari rode out against the daityas. And in the same way came the Vaishnavi shakti, throned upon Garuda, her hands filled with conch, discus, mace, the Sharnga bow and the sword.

18 · 19 · 20

The shakti who bears Hari’s peerless boar-form, the form that rises in the yajna, came wearing the body of Varahi. Narasimhi came in a shape the very image of Nrisimha, half lion and half man, and a single toss of her mane flung the star-clusters loose across the sky. And Aindri arrived, thunderbolt in hand, seated on the king of elephants, a thousand eyes open at once: exactly as Indra himself is, so was she.

21 · 22 · 23

The shaktis of the gods had gathered in a ring around Ishana, who is Shiva, and he said to Chandika, with affection, “Let the asuras be slain, and quickly, for my pleasure.” At that word there came forth from the Devi’s own body a Chandika-shakti utterly fierce and terrible to see, her cry like the voices of a hundred she-jackals raised at once. And she, the unconquered one, said to Ishana of the smoke-dark matted locks, “Go as my messenger, to the side of Shumbha and Nishumbha.”

24 · 25 · 26 · 27

A messenger carries terms, and the terms she sent were iron. “Tell the over-proud Shumbha and Nishumbha, and every danava mustered there for battle: the three worlds return to Indra, and the gods take back their share of the yajna. If you wish to live, go down to Patala. And if the pride of your own strength leaves you hungry for war, then come, and let my she-jackals be glutted on your flesh.” Because the Devi made Shiva himself her messenger, that shakti became famous through the world as Shiva-duti.

28 · 29 · 30

When Shiva’s own mouth delivered the Devi’s words, fury flooded the great asuras, and they stormed the very ground where the Devi, Katyayani, stood. Proud and burning, those enemies of the gods opened at once with a downpour of arrows, javelins and lances upon her. And she, with the great shafts loosed from her drawn and humming bow, cut apart every arrow, trident, javelin and battle-axe they sent her, lightly, as if the whole exchange were play.

31 · 32

Kali ranged ahead of her. Here she split an enemy open with a stroke of her trident, there she pounded one shapeless with her khatvanga, and so she moved across the field. And Brahmani, wherever she ran, flung drops from her water-pot, and every enemy the water touched was left emptied of valor and strength, standing in his armor with nothing inside it.

33 · 34 · 35 · 36

Maheshvari killed with the trident, Vaishnavi with the discus, and Kaumari, blazing with anger, with her spear. Under the fall of Aindri’s thunderbolt, daityas and danavas split open by the hundred and dropped to the earth, pouring out rivers of blood. The Varahi-form wrecked some with blows of her snout, gored the chests of others on the points of her tusks, and tore still others apart with her discus. And Narasimhi prowled the battle, ripping great asuras open with her claws and swallowing them down, her roar crowding every quarter of the sky.

37 · 38

At Shiva-duti’s dreadful laughter the asuras broke from within and dropped to the earth, and the fallen she devoured where they lay. And when the enraged band of Mothers had ground the great asuras down by one means after another, the soldiers of the gods’ enemies perished where they stood.

39 · 40

The daityas, harried by the band of Mothers, were breaking into flight, and the sight of it brought forward the great asura Raktabija, whose blood was seed, swollen with rage and ready to fight. Inside him lay a secret that set him apart from every other asura on that field, and it made every weapon the Mothers carried into a gift to him. Whenever a single drop of blood fell from his body to the earth, in that same instant another great asura of his exact build stood up out of the soil.

41 · 42 · 43 · 44

Mace in hand, that great asura closed with Aindri, and Aindri struck Raktabija with her thunderbolt. The bolt struck home at once, his blood poured out in streams, and where the streams reached the ground the ground stirred, and from that blood rose warriors of his own form and his own prowess. As many drops as fell from his body, so many men sprang up, each carrying his valor, his strength, his might. And those blood-born men threw themselves into the fight as well, pressing the band of Mothers with savage strokes of their weapons in a battle grown utterly fearsome.

45 · 46 · 47

Then the thunderbolt found his head, and from the blood that streamed down, men were born in their thousands. Vaishnavi struck the asura-lord with her discus, Aindri battered him with her club, and from the body the discus had opened so much blood flowed that thousands of great asuras of his same measure filled the whole world.

48 · 49 · 50 · 51

Kaumari drove her spear into Raktabija, Varahi her sword, Maheshvari her trident. And the daitya, possessed by wrath, answered each Mother in turn with strokes of his mace. Wounded by weapon after weapon, spear and trident and the rest, he bled in sheets, and wherever the stream of it met the ground, asuras formed from it by the hundred. Those asuras born of asura blood overran the world entire, so that wherever the gods looked from the sky they saw his face repeated, and they sank into the utmost terror.

52

Every weapon had failed. Every wound bred a fresh crop of asuras, and the very blood the Mothers spilled came back at them as an enemy; the earth itself kept renewing him. One remedy was left, to deny the blood its landing, to put a mouth between the wound and the earth and catch every drop before it came down. Chandika saw the gods sunk in despair, and she turned at once to Kali. “Chamunda, stretch your mouth wide.”

53

And then she gave the command that would cut Raktabija’s deathlessness at its root. “Whatever drops of blood my weapon-strokes draw from him, and whatever great asuras rise out of those drops, take them all into this swift mouth of yours.”

54

“Roam the field, and devour every great asura that springs from him. Drained of blood drop by drop, the daitya himself will waste to his end; and with you eating each fierce asura as it rises, no new one will find its way into birth at all.” The blood was to be drunk before it could touch the earth.

55 · 56

With these words the Devi struck him with her trident, and in the same breath Kali caught Raktabija’s blood in her mouth and let none of it reach the earth. Stung, he swung his mace at Chandika with the whole weight of his arm, and the blow cost the Devi not one particle of pain.

57 · 58

Every weapon of the Devi fell upon him now, and wherever blood leapt from his torn body, there Chamunda’s mouth was already stretched to meet it. The great asuras that budded from the blood-drops inside her mouth she chewed up where they formed, and all the while she drank on at Raktabija’s blood. The blood had no earth left to find; each drop, in the instant of its falling, vanished into Kali’s vast mouth. No new army rose, and Raktabija, who had grown an army from every wound, drained away from within.

59 · 60

When Chamunda had drunk the last of his blood, the Devi struck Raktabija with trident, discus, arrows, sword and lance, and this time not one drop reached the earth to raise an enemy from it; the field around him stayed bare. Pierced by that mass of weapons, wholly emptied of blood, the great asura Raktabija crashed to the ground, the rishi told the king.

61

The instant he fell, a joy without measure swept the gods. And the band of Mothers born of those same gods, drunk on the asura’s blood, began to dance across the field of war, the lion-faced and the boar-faced and the thousand-eyed together, over the ground that had refused him.