The two gourds shot into the air with the crack of snapping branches.
The high gourd sailed upward toward the pine tops, tumbling in a wide arc against the pale mountain sky.
The low gourd skimmed flat and fast over the scree, whistling barely a meter above the jagged boulders.
Inside both shells, hundreds of dried river beans rattled like dry teeth.
Vidhar did not blink.
He didn’t have time to step back, set his hips, or measure his breath.
If he took two seconds to admire his first shot, the low gourd would smash against the cliff wall and he would spend his afternoon carrying river rocks until his knees cracked.
His right hand was already moving.
Before the Teacher had fully lowered his arm, Vidhar’s fingers reached down to his hip.
He pulled two ironwood arrows out of the leather quiver together, trapping one shaft between his index and middle fingers while pinching the other between his thumb and palm.
Two targets.
Different speeds.
Different heights.
He spun his hips to the right.
The low gourd was already past the halfway mark, diving toward the scree at twenty meters a second.
Vidhar dropped his weight onto his rear leg, keeping his center of gravity low to avoid sliding on the loose shale.
He laid the first shaft across his thumb, backed the tail into the braided silk bowstring, and hauled thirty-five kilos of horn back to his ribcage.
He didn’t draw to his jaw; there was no time for a full anchor.
He shot from the chest.
TWANG!
The bowstring lashed forward.
The heavy ironwood shaft cut flat across the clearing, tracing a straight black line through the dust.
CRACK!
The steel arrow head slammed into the low gourd just thirty centimeters above the ground.
The dry shell blew apart into jagged shards.
A thick cloud of bean meal burst over the gravel, sending river beans rattling against the stones in all directions.
The arrow didn’t slow down; it skipped off a flat boulder, sparked against the rock, and buried its point into the base of a pine trunk.
One.
Vidhar didn’t watch the dust settle.
His right hand was already turning.
His thumb flicked the second arrow over the horn stave, rolling the shaft into place on the silk bowstring.
The high gourd had reached the peak of its climb and was now plummeting toward the thorny brush at the far edge of the clearing.
It was forty meters out, spinning through a cross-draft rolling off the peaks.
Vidhar pivoted on the ball of his left foot, swinging his chest toward the sky.
His right heel hit a patch of loose river pebbles.
“Down goes the scholar!” Kakbhushundi’s thought screeched across his mind.
Vidhar’s core tightened.
Instead of fighting the slip and locking his knee, he bent both legs, dropping straight into the dirt.
He slammed his left knee into the gravel, using the hard bone of his leg as an anchor against the slope.
The sharp stones bit into his skin, but his upper body stayed level.
He hauled the silk bowstring back, this time pulling all the way to the corner of his ear.
The falling gourd caught the midday sun, spinning end over end through the wind.
Through Kala-Drishti (seer’s sight), Vidhar saw the curving line of its drop.
The wind was pushing the shell two inches to the left.
He shifted the three-cornered steel head slightly into the breeze, aimed at the empty air beneath the falling shell, and released.
THWUMMM!
The horn limbs whipped forward with a sound like a cracking timber.
The heavy arrow punched upward through the air, screaming into the open blue.
SMASH!
Thirty meters high, right above the pine branches, the steel head drilled clean through the center of the gourd.
The shell broke into four large pieces.
The beans burst outward like a small firework, clattering harmlessly into the thick pine needles below before any could touch the bare stone.
The arrow head carried the top half of the broken shell straight into the mountainside, pinning the wood to the cliff face.
Vidhar remained on one knee in the dust.
His left hand held the horn bow steady, the black limbs unmoving.
His right hand stayed back by his ear, fingers open.
His bare left knee pressed firmly into the sharp gravel, blood welling from a shallow cut on the kneecap, but the rest of his frame was motionless.
Silence settled over the gully.
Only the faint wind rustled through the stunted pines.
A few stray beans rolled to a stop against the stone wall near Bhagavan Parashurama’s bare feet.
From his branch, Kakbhushundi fluttered down, landing on a flat boulder near the scattered yellow shell fragments.
The crow hopped closer, inspected an unbroken river bean in the dirt, and let out a dry rattle from his throat.
“A double release from a broken knee,” the bird croaked silently, sounding almost disappointed that he didn’t get to watch Vidhar haul rocks.
“He dropped like a sack of turnips, but the wood didn’t waver.
The Solar princes used to take five years to learn the double-nock.
The scribbler does it in three weeks because he’s terrified of manual labor.”
Vidhar pushed himself up from the gravel, wiping stone dust and a smear of red blood from his knee.
“Do not flatter yourself.
Your form on the turn looked like a dancing bear trying to avoid a bee.”
Bhagavan Parashurama walked slowly across the clearing.
He didn’t look at the high cliff where the arrow was pinned, nor did he look at the shattered shell on the brush.
His eyes stayed fixed on the trail of disturbed gravel where Vidhar’s foot had slipped.
He stopped three paces away.
“You slipped,” the Teacher said, his voice deep and calm.
“The gravel gave way beneath my heel, Gurudev,” Vidhar replied, keeping his head bowed respectfully.
“The earth does not give way,” Bhagavan Parashurama said.
“The stone was there before you took your stance; it will be there after your bones are dust.
You stepped without feeling the weight beneath your foot.
You were in a hurry to turn your chest.”
He tapped the ground with his bare heel.
“A warrior does not balance on his heels.
He grabs the earth with the pads of his toes, like a leopard on a wet branch.
But when the ground slipped, you did not freeze.
You took the fall, dropped your center, and loosed from the knee.”
The Teacher’s broad hand came down onto the upper limb of the horn bow, resting over Vidhar’s fingers.
“You hit both targets before a bean struck the rock.
That is acceptable.”
Vidhar let out a quiet breath.
“No river rocks today, Gurudev?”
“No,” Bhagavan Parashurama replied, a faint shadow of a smirk touching the corner of his lips under his thick beard.
“Today, you clean the ash from the sacrificial pit, grease the bows with boar fat, and grind the edges of thirty arrow heads on the slate.
Then we walk to the northern gorge.”
Vidhar blinked.
“The northern gorge?
For more shooting?”
“No,” the Teacher said, turning his back and walking toward the ashram path.
“For the axe.
An archer who only knows how to loose shafts from a distance becomes helpless the moment a foe closes within five paces.
Tomorrow, you learn how to split wood when the wood swings back.”
Vidhar looked down at the horn bow in his hand, then at the blood on his knee.
He unstrung the heavy thirty-five-kilo stave against his ankle with a practiced, smooth motion, slipped the weapon into its greasecloth wrap, and followed his Teacher up the path.