A queer time is coming, warns the corpse

Back went the king into the darkness, the Baital's weight settling cold and sure across his shoulder, and back came that dry, mocking voice into his ear. There is a queer time coming, O Raja Vikram, said the Vampire — a queer time coming. Elderly men like you are forever praising the good old days, and mourning the wickedness of the days that are. I wonder, mighty king, what you would say if you could look forward only a few hundred years and see what is to become of your beloved Bharat Khanda. Vikram said nothing, only tightened his grip on the bundle at his neck and strode on through the thorns toward the sorcerer's tree, resolved this time, as ever, not to let the creature's talk unseat his purpose — though something in the Baital's tone, sly and gloating as a jackal that has already found the carcass, told him this tale would be stranger than the ten that came before it.

Brahmans turn soldier, and the courts fall silent

Hear me, said the Baital, warming to his prophecy. In that coming age, Brahmans shall disgrace the sacred thread by taking up the soldier's trade and dying in it, while Shudras, born to serve, shall dishonour themselves by refusing to be slaves and binding on the cord of the twice-born as though they had any right to it. Caste shall dissolve into a single confused mouth, high blood mixed shamelessly with low. The courts of justice, where once the wronged found redress, shall stand empty and disused. Wars, that used to be waged with purpose and endurance, shall be settled in six weeks and their very causes forgotten before the blood is dry. Vikram walked on, jaw set, saying nothing, though the picture the Vampire painted — of law without teeth and war without meaning — sat ill with a king who had spent his life keeping both in careful order.

A hospital for destitute kings, and no more Vikramas

The great works of peace, the Baital went on, shall no longer be undertaken, and the useful arts and noble sciences shall starve for want of patrons; there shall be no more Gems of Science gathered at any court, no assemblies of the wise. There shall be, instead, a kind of almshouse for destitute kings — for those, at least, who manage to keep their heads on their shoulders — and never again a Vikrama among them. Here a violent shudder ran through the corpse and stopped the Vampire's tongue a moment, as though the jest had struck too near its own burden. Then it resumed, briskly: building of tanks, feeding of Brahmans, the telling of a lie where a lie was the pious thing to tell, the taking of one's own life for honour, the burning of widows on their husbands' pyres, the burying of infants alive — all this, it said with relish, shall become entirely unfashionable.

Pale strangers from a country without a sun

And the consequence of so strange a falling-away, O mighty Vikram, is this: strangers shall dwell beneath the roof-tree of Bharat Khanda, and impure barbarians shall call this land their own. They come, the Baital said, from a wonderful country, and I marvel that its own people endure it. Its sky, which by rights ought to be gold and blue, is there a dirty grey-white; its sun looks deathly pale, its moon as if he had already died. Its sea, when not a dirty green, glistens with a yellowish scum, and along its shore stand tall ghastly cliffs like the bare bones of giants, as if uncertain whether to welcome a ship or hurl it back. For half the year the ground there is buried under a cold white stuff that dazzles the eye, and the air fills with what looks like a fall of white feathers or drifting cotton; in the other months a pale mist hangs low over everything. Even the people's faces are white — the men white, or else painted blue; the women whiter still; the children whitest of all, some of them born with hair the colour of snow.

Dharma Dhwaj quotes a proverb, and is ignored

Truly, exclaimed young Dharma Dhwaj, riding pressed against his father's shoulder in the dark, does the old proverb not say, whoso seeth the world telleth many a lie? It seemed to the prince a fair judgment on a tale so wild — a country of dead moons and cotton-snow and children born white-haired. But the Baital did not so much as pause for the boy's interruption. At present, it resumed smoothly, these pale people run naked and unlettered in their own forests, mere outcastes among the nations of men. But presently — mark me, wonderful things are coming for these wonderful white Pariahs — they shall change their ways entirely, and not, the Vampire's voice made plain, for the better. Vikram glanced down at his son but held his own tongue, and the corpse on his back, well pleased to have an audience of two now doubting him at once, sharpened its voice for what was to come.

Of frothy drinks, chalk milk, and forbidden meat

These pale outcastes, said the Baital, shall in time eat every kind of flesh without discrimination — the flesh of the barnyard fowl, of onions, of hogs fattened in the gutter, of the donkey, the horse, the hare, and, most horrible of all to any right-thinking man, the flesh of the sacred cow herself. They shall brew a frothy liquid, something like the pulp of the bitter colocynth steeped in water, and a fiercer stuff besides that burns the mouth like fire — for their milk, it seems, will mostly be chalk and the pulp of some grain, and as for the pure sweetness of ripe fruit or sugar-cane juice, they shall have no taste for it at all, drinking clean water only when a physician prescribes it, as though it were bitter medicine. Vikram, who had been raised on milk and sugar-cane and the fruit of his own orchards, found the picture more pitiable than fearsome, and said as much to himself, though not aloud.

Chairs, shaved chins, and the children of Yama

They shall shave their beards, the Baital continued, and let their heads grow shaggy — the very opposite of decent custom — and they shall stand upright where a wise man sits down, and perch upon wooden frames raised off the floor instead of spreading a carpet like civilized people. They shall dress themselves in red and black like the children of Yama, lord of death, and never once pour an offering to the spirits of their own dead ancestors, leaving those poor shades to fry unattended in the hottest of the hells. And yet — mark this well — they shall forever quarrel and come to blows over the article of their own faith, for their tempers will run fierce and hot, as though they might burst if they could not find someone to strike. Even their children, the Vampire said with something like satisfaction, will heap up sand on the shore in play, and always end the game by punching one another's heads — proving early, as the saying goes, that the child is father to the man.

Ruled by a queen who cannot take a head

Stranger still, said the Baital, these pale outcastes shall often be ruled over by female chiefs, and it is likely that the habit of bowing before a woman who has not so much as the power to strike off one single head accounts for the peculiar uncleanness and degeneracy that follows them. Among them, no occupation shall be reckoned nobler than tearing across the countryside on horseback in pursuit of a jackal; their men shall take pride in dancing, arms about the waists of strange women in full public view, and shall boast of playing sweetly upon instruments of music, as though they were girls trained for a nobleman's entertainment rather than warriors. Vikram, hearing this, could not help but picture such a scene — bearded men fluting and prancing while their queen looked on unchallenged — and found it, despite himself, more baffling than any battlefield the Baital had yet described to him.

Woman obeys one only word, her heart

And their women, said the Baital, relying on the example of their own female chieftains, shall throw off every rule of modesty. They shall sit at meat with their husbands and with other men besides, yawning and lounging carelessly before them, showing even the naked backs of their heads without shame. They will quote, brazenly, the old saying that a woman locked away, even by loving guardians, is not thereby made safe, but that only she is truly safe who is guarded by her own inclination — as the poet sang it, woman obeys one only word, her heart. They shall not suffer their husbands to keep more than the one wife, nor will that single wife be his slave when he wants her service; instead she will busy herself with the gathering of wealth, with her own purifications, and with what she judges to be a wife's duty — the daily meal, the household pots and pans — measured now by her own lights, and no longer by his.

What Rama once said of Sita his wife

Consider, by contrast, said the Baital, what Rama himself said of Sita, his wife: that when he was angry she bore his temper as the patient earth bears all things, without a murmur; that in need she cherished him as a mother cherishes her child; that in idle hours she was his lover, and in gladness his true friend. So too it is written of the truly religious wife — that she assists her husband's worship with a devotion equal to his own, gives her whole mind to his happiness, is faithful to him as a shadow is faithful to the body, and esteems him alike whether he be poor or rich, comely or plain, good fortune or bad clinging to him. In his absence or sickness she renounces her own pleasures; at his death, it is said, she dies with him in spirit, and he enters heaven on the strength of her virtue alone — while if she has been wicked and he dies first, the demerit of her sins falls back upon him. Such, the Baital sighed, was once the measure of a wife.

Scolding louder than the braying ass

But these coming women, the Baital went on, shall talk loudly and scold like the braying ass, filling the house with discord as the snake quarrels with the ichneumon or the owl with the crow — for they will have no fear left in them of losing a nose or an ear to punishment. They shall converse freely with strange men and take them by the hand; they shall accept gifts from them; and, worst of all, they shall show their bare white faces in open daylight without one flicker of shame, riding publicly in carriages, mounting horses whose finer points they will pride themselves on judging, eating and drinking in crowded public places while their own husbands look on — sometimes even leading them there by the arm. And she shall be counted the very pinnacle of perfected womanhood who most excels in wit and shamelessness, and who can turn the livers of the greatest number of men to water with a glance.

A woman who may marry four times or five

These women, said the Baital, shall dance and sing rather than tend their own children, and when those children are grown they shall send them out of the house to shift for themselves, caring little whether they ever set eyes on them again — a want of natural feeling that will astonish every right-minded person who witnesses it. But the greatest sin of all shall be this: when widowed, such a woman will look about at once for a second husband, and it will be no rare thing to hear of one who has fearlessly married three times, four times, even five. You would suppose, the Vampire said dryly, that so much license would content them. It will not. The more such women are given, the more their restless minds shall covet — having been granted equality by their men, they will reach next for outright superiority, forever raising storms about their own rights, and should any husband dare to correct them as they deserve, they will call him a coward before the whole street and run straight to the magistrate.

Leading women into temptation, then crying scandal

As for their men, said the Baital, they shall be every bit as wonderful in the matter of their women as in all else. The sage of Bharat Khanda guards the frail sex closely, knowing its frailty, and does not teach it to read and write for fear it be turned to mischief, since women are ever subject to the flower-armed god of desire, and when human caution fails at last, the wise man bows to fate and tries to forget the past. But this race of pale outcastes will do the opposite — they will purposely lead their own women into every kind of temptation, and then, when the inevitable accident occurs, will rage at them and accuse them, killing ten thousand reputations with a single word, raising an uproar, gossiping and being gossiped about in turn, and hauling the whole shameful business before a magistrate for all the world to see. One would think, the Baital said with heavy irony, that they had in every way done their full duty by their women.

Locusts falling on the land of Bharat

And when all this change has come over them, said the Baital, a restlessness will seize this people, and they shall take flight and fall upon Aryavartta like a plague of locusts. Starving in their own country, they will find more than enough to eat here, and plenty besides to carry home. They shall be as mischievous as the very saw with which ornament-makers trim their shells, cutting on the upstroke as freely as on the down; to cultivate their friendship will be like trying to make a gap in standing water, for it closes again the instant the hand is withdrawn, and their partisans will always fare worse in the end than their declared enemies. Selfish as crows they shall be, too — crows that will eat any flesh in the world, yet will not suffer another bird to touch the flesh of a crow. Vikram, listening, thought grimly that he had met such allies before, though never yet a whole nation of them.

A shop by the Ganges, and a witch named Company

In the beginning, said the Baital, they shall do nothing more alarming than hire a shop at the mouth of Mother Ganges, and sell there lead and bullion, coarse and fine woollen cloth, and every material of intoxication a man could want. Then, little by little, they shall send overseas for soldiers, and begin enlisting warriors from among the very people of Zambudwipa. From shopkeepers they shall turn soldiers — beating and being beaten, winning one day and losing the next — yet the power of their star, and above all the enchantments of their Queen Kompani, a daina, a witch who can draw the very blood from a man and strike him dead with one look, shall turn every reverse, in the end, back to their advantage. Vikram frowned at the strange name — Queen Kompani — turning it over as though it were a riddle in itself, though the Baital, intent on its tale, gave him no chance to ask.

Their armies roar louder than the sea

Presently, the Baital went on, the noise of their armies shall be as the roaring of the sea, and the flash of their weapons shall blind the eye like lightning; their battlefields shall resemble the dissolution of the very world, and their killing-grounds shall look like a garden of plantain trees after a storm has torn through it. In time they shall spread across the land like the endless march of a column of ants. And all the while they shall swear solemn oaths — by Mother Ganges herself — that they hate nothing so much as being forced to destroy an army, sack a city, or annex one more rich slip of territory to their rule. And yet, the Baital said, its voice thick with contempt, on they shall go regardless, killing and capturing and adding region to region, until the Himalaya hems them in on the north, the Indus on the west, and the sea everywhere else — and even there they shall behave as lords and masters, scarcely allowing poor Samudradevta to rule his own waves in peace.

The king's silence, and the Baital's sour mood

Raja Vikram was in a silent mood that night, or he would surely not have let so ill-omened a discourse run on so long uninterrupted. Again and again the Baital had paused, hoping the royal carrier would break in with some curious question of his own, as he had done in ten tales before this one — but no question came. So the Vampire took up its recital once more, this time in a voice gone dissonant and plainly dissatisfied. By my feet and your head, O warrior king, it swore — the crudest oath it knew how to lay upon a mortal monarch — it will fare very badly indeed for the Rajas of Hindusthan, when the red-coated men of Shaka come at last among them. Now listen well, it said, to what befell one king in particular.

In the Vindhya hills, a king named Mahabul

In the Vindhya Mountain, said the Baital, there stood a city called Dharmapur, and its king was named Mahabul. He was a mighty warrior, thoroughly schooled in the dhanur-veda, the ancient science of the bow, and unlike lesser princes who send others to fight in their name, he always led his own armies into the field with his own hand upon the reins. Proud, old-fashioned, devout in the manner of kings from a better age, Mahabul stood — in the Baital's telling — as everything the pale conquerors were not: a man who trusted the omens of heaven and the strength of his own arm above gold, above cunning, above the terrible new engines of war that were even then being carried toward his mountains in strangers' ships.

Reading the omens before the army marches

Before any march, said the Baital, King Mahabul studied every sign heaven cared to send him. A storm rising as the army set out, an earthquake underfoot, a weapon slipping unbidden from a soldier's grasp, vultures screaming as they wheeled above the marching column or stalking too near its camp, clouds and sun turning an angry red, thunder cracking from a cloudless sky, the moon shrunk small as a single star, blood said to drip from the clouds themselves, the fall of a shooting star, darkness pressing in from every quarter of the heavens, a corpse or a jar of water carried past on the army's right hand, a dishevelled beggar-woman in red crossing ahead of the vanguard, an unbidden shiver over the general's own left ribs, horses weeping or wheeling back when driven forward — every one of these he watched for, and heeded, as a pious king should. It was, the Baital allowed, a fine old faith. It would prove no shield at all against what was coming.

Wrestlers who could break a man in two

Mahabul's men were bred for glory in the old style, the Baital said. He set his warriors to single combat and drilled them hard at wrestling and the games of strength, until some among them grew powerful enough to drive an enemy's own limbs back into his body, or snap his spine, or tear him bodily in two. He promised heaven itself to any man who died facing the front rank of battle, and taught his soldiers the fierce ritual insults that were exchanged with an enemy before the true fighting began. He heaped honour upon those who never once turned their backs in an engagement, who scorned death and dismissed fatigue, who proved unbeatable against the fiercest opponent, and whose courage, rather than faltering, rose to meet danger the way the climbing sun gathers its full blaze toward noon. Such was the army Mahabul had built with a lifetime's care — an army made, the Baital noted with a certain grim relish, for a kind of war that was already passing out of the world.

Gold, fire, and steel against an old-world king

But the white Pariahs, when at last they turned against King Mahabul, brought against him the three weapons they always brought: gold, fire, and steel. With gold they bought over his very best men, persuading them to desert him openly the moment his army stood drawn up for battle. With fire they brought their terrible new engines — tubes both great and small that spat flame and smoke and hurled bullets as heavy as those flung once from the fabled bow of Bharata. And where an honest soldier carried sword and shield, these men fixed a naked dagger to the muzzle of their tube and drove it home like a lance. Against courage bred for a fairer contest, the Baital said, they brought bribery and machinery — and courage, however old and however true, does not stop a bullet.

The army marches out beneath its old banners

Mahabul marched out of his city to meet the pale foe in the full old pageantry of war. Before the column went the ensigns, the bells, the standards of cows'-tails, and flags painted with the bird Garuda, with Shiva's own bull, with the flowering Bauhinia tree, with Hanuman the monkey-god, with lion and tiger and fish, with an alms-dish and with seven palm trees. Behind these came the footmen bearing fire-tubes, swords and shields, spears and daggers, clubs and bludgeons; behind them the mounted men on horse and ox, on camel and swaying elephant; and last of all came the musicians, the water-carriers, and the long train of baggage-carts that fed the whole host. It was, the Baital said, as fine and as ancient a sight as Bharat Khanda had to offer — banners bright, drums sounding, every god of the old faith riding somewhere in that procession of cloth and paint.

A thin red line, vomiting fire

The white outcastes came on, the Baital said, in a long thin red thread across the field, spitting fire like the burning springs of Baku. Mahabul met them with all the old cunning of formation: one division drawn into a circle, another curved to a half-moon, a third massed like a cloud, and others still shaped to resemble a lion, a tiger, a carriage, a lily, a giant, a bull — every pattern the old masters of war had ever devised to confuse and enfold an enemy. It was a beautiful thing to see, the Baital allowed, this wheel of ancient shapes turning to meet a thin red line — and it meant, in the end, nothing at all against what that line carried in its hands.

Elephants turn on their own masters

For when the fire-tubes spoke, the elephants — Mahabul's pride, the living towers of his host — could not bear it. Maddened by the flame and the smoke and the shrieking of the bullets, they wheeled about where they stood and came crashing back through Mahabul's own ranks, trampling the very men they had been bred to protect. In the same moment the cavalry, drawn up so proudly in front of the whole army, simply broke formation and galloped away across the open ground, bought men riding for their bought lives, leaving a gaping wound where the host's strongest arm should have been. Mahabul, in the space of a few terrible minutes, found himself a king without an army, without resource, without any road left open to him but flight.

Into the palanquin, and away by night

So Mahabul did the only thing left to a beaten king with a wife and a daughter to protect. He climbed into his palanquin under cover of darkness, his queen and their one daughter beside him, and fled the ruin of his own battlefield for the cover of the forest. What remained of his small escort scattered before the night was through, and the mighty warrior of Dharmapur — the man who had read every omen heaven sent him, who had built an army fit for the old songs — went into the jungle with nothing left to his name but the two women he loved and whatever the trees themselves might offer him to eat.

A king reduced to foraging for roots

For days the three of them lived on whatever the jungle would yield — wild fruit, dug roots, and at last, when even these grew scarce, whatever small game Mahabul's own hand could bring down. A king who had commanded elephants now stalked hares to keep his family fed. At length, worn thin with hunger, they came within sight of a village, and Mahabul, setting aside pride he could no longer afford, went forward alone to beg or buy what victuals he could find, leaving his queen and daughter waiting anxiously at the tree line for his return.

Surrounded by the long-eared Bhils

But the village was no refuge. The wild Bhils, famous through those hills for their long ears and their fierce jealousy of any stranger, came out and surrounded the fallen king where he stood, and bid him throw down his weapons like a common outlaw caught trespassing on their ground. Mahabul, ruined king though he now was, still carried a warrior's pride in his own two hands, and he had no intention whatsoever of laying down his bow before men he considered no better than forest brigands.

A bow that answered arrows with arrows

Instead he fought. Skilled beyond any man in that country at aiming, at drawing, at wheeling his bow to strike in every direction at once, Mahabul loosed his shafts so quickly, one driving the next forward before the first had struck home, that not a single Bhil could close near enough to touch him. For a moment, alone against a ring of enemies, the old king of Dharmapur fought like the hero of a much older story. But in his flight from the battlefield he had left behind the one thing that might have saved him — his enchanted quiver, some of whose diamond-tipped arrows, once loosed, returned again of their own accord to the case, giving their bearer an endless store of shafts. Without it, every arrow he spent was an arrow he could never recover.

Three hours of battle, and a shaft finds him

For three full hours the fight raged on, and many a Bhil fell to Mahabul's unerring aim before his ordinary quiver at last ran dry. Then, in the space of a single breath, a shaft found its mark and clove clean through the old king's skull, and he dropped where he stood, dead before he touched the ground. One of the wild tribesmen strode up over the body and, with a single stroke, struck off Mahabul's head — the last indignity visited on a king who had, to the very end, kept faith with every omen and every old law of honourable war his ancestors had ever taught him.

The queen and princess flee into the dark

From the tree line, the queen and the princess saw it happen — saw Mahabul fall, saw the Bhil strike off his head — and turned at once and fled back into the forest, weeping aloud and beating their breasts in grief, putting what distance they could between themselves and the men who had just killed husband and father before their eyes. In their flight and the tribesmen's momentary distraction over the fallen king, they escaped notice, and after some four miles of stumbling through the dark trees they could go no further; they sank down together on the ground, exhausted, and sat turning over in silence all that had befallen them in a single terrible day.

Two women lovely even in their ruin

They are very lovely, said the Baital, and I see them plainly with the eye that pierces distance. Such hair, falling like the tail of the cow of Tartary, or like thatch upon a fine roof, black as the clouds and shining as though oiled. Such faces, like water-lilies opening, with eyes the colour of an unripe mango's stone, noses shaped like a parrot's curved beak, teeth like pearls set close in coral, ears like the red-throated vulture's, mouths like the very water of life itself. And such forms besides — breasts like caskets holding rare essence, waists no wider than the span of a hand, legs shapely as an elephant's trunk, feet like the petals of the yellow lotus. Even torn and starved and grieving as they were, the Baital said, no poet in Bharat Khanda would have found a flaw to mend in either of them.

A jungle of thorns, and a fear worse than thorns

And a fearful place indeed was that jungle around them — a dense dark tangle of thorny shrubs and ropy creepers, of tall canes and matted brake, of huge gnarled trees that groaned aloud in the night wind's grip, as though the forest itself grieved with them. Yet a wilder horror than the jungle drove the two women on even so: the dread of falling back into the hands of the Bhils, and suffering at their touch some pollution worse to a queen and a princess than death itself. So, spent as they were, they rose once more from the ground and pressed on, deeper still into the black heart of the woods, choosing the thorns they knew over the men they feared.

Dawn breaks over a field of the dead

The day dawned, said the Baital, and the white Pariahs had by then finished their usual work upon that battlefield. Hands lay severed from some of the fallen, feet and heads from others; many bodies had been crushed into shapeless ruin, or scattered in pieces across the trampled ground. The field lay strewn with corpses from one end to the other, and the river beside it ran so red that the dogs and jackals waded in blood to drink, while carrion birds perched in the branches above, drinking man's life out of the stream below and relishing, in their own fashion, the sickly reek of burning flesh that hung over everything. Such, the Baital said, its voice flattening to something almost gentle, are the scenes that shall be acted out again and again in the fair land of Bharat.

Two hunters find a trail of small footprints

Now it happens, the Baital went on, that two of the white outcastes — a father and his son, out with a party scouring that same forest and slaying whatever crossed their path — come upon the very trail the queen and princess had taken only a little while before. Footprints, small and clear in the soft ground, lead off toward a stretch of jungle thick with tigers, leopards, bears, wolves, and wild dogs, and the two men are brought up short, thoroughly puzzled, the moment they crouch to examine the marks and realize whose feet made them.

How comes a woman's foot into this forest

How is it, says the father, staring down at the trail, that the footprints of mortal women should be found in this stretch of forest? Sir, replies the son, these are certainly a woman's marks — no man's foot would ever run so small and delicate. It is passing strange, the father admits after a moment, but you speak truly; so soft and fine a print can belong to no one but a woman. And already, the Baital noted dryly, two grown men who had spent the morning slaying strangers in a foreign wood were bent over a footprint in the dirt like a pair of matchmakers.

A wager is struck over the shape of a foot

They have only just left this spot, the son says, crouching lower, and look — this print belongs to a married woman, see how she treads upon the inner edge of her sole, from the way a married woman's ankle bends with long habit — and he points to what is in truth the queen's footprint. Come, then, cries the father, let us search them out — what luck, to have wives fall into our hands this way in the middle of a forest! But no, he says a moment later, examining the second print more closely, you are mistaken in calling that one the matron's mark; look here instead, at this longer print, where the toes have barely touched the ground and the heel has pressed in deep — this, surely, is the married woman's foot. And he points, though neither man can know it, to the princess's own footprint. Then, says the son, who has taken a liking to the smaller, daintier print, let us find them together, and when we do, give me the one with the short feet, and take the other for yourself. And so, over a guess about the shape of a footprint in the mud, two strangers settle in advance whose wife each of them is about to take.

Two exhausted women are carried off on horseback

Bargain struck, the two men follow the trail deeper into the wood, and before long they come upon the very women they seek, lying on the bare earth half dead with fear and exhaustion, their legs and feet scratched raw by brambles, their ornaments long since fallen away, their fine garments torn to rags. The first shock of the encounter over, the white outcastes find little trouble at all persuading the broken, friendless women to come away with them, and — true to their private wager — each man lifts his prize onto his own horse and rides back toward the camp: the son carrying off the queen, and the father carrying off the princess.

The long foot and the short foot are wed

In due time, the Baital said, two marriages came to pass exactly as the wager had promised. The father, keeping to his word, took to wife the long foot — the princess, daughter of the fallen King Mahabul. The son, for his part, took to wife the short foot — the queen, the very woman who had once ruled at Mahabul's side and had now, by a stranger's guess at a footprint, become his own son's bride. Vikram, hearing this laid out so plainly, felt the first threads of the coming riddle already beginning to knot themselves together in his mind, though the Baital gave him no pause to work it out yet.

A son to one house, a daughter to the other

After the proper interval, said the Baital, the elder white outcaste — he who had married the daughter, the princess — rejoiced at the birth of a son. And the younger white outcaste — he who had married the mother, the queen — was gladdened in his turn by the birth of a daughter. So it stood: a boy born to the father and the princess, a girl born to the son and the queen, each family content, and neither, perhaps, giving much thought to how strangely their two households were now bound together by a single guess about a footprint in the mud.

Now, by my feet and your head, answer me this

Now then, said the Baital, its voice suddenly sharp again with the old challenge, by my feet and your head, O warrior king Vikram, answer me one question, if you can. What relationship shall there be between these two children — the boy born to the father and the princess, and the girl born to the son and the queen? Tell me plainly, mighty Vikram, what tie of blood or marriage binds the one child to the other.

Vikram turns the tangled riddle over in his mind

Vikram's brow went black as a charcoal-burner's at the crude oath flung at him yet again, but the question itself caught and held his attention fast. He turned the Baital's words over and over in his head, trying to trace the threads clear — the father who was also, through his son's marriage, bound to the very woman who was his own son's wife's mother; the son who had married his father's mother-in-law; the boy who was grandson to the queen through his own mother the princess, yet somehow kin as well to the daughter born of his own father's son. Filiation, brotherhood, marriage, and blood ran together in his mind like threads dropped into a single tangled skein, and the harder Vikram pulled at any one strand to see where it led, the more hopelessly the others drew tight around it.

Hem, said the king, and said no more

Round and round it went, and for the first time in eleven tales Vikram found no thread anywhere in the knot that he could follow out to a clean answer. And then, in the very instant an answer might almost have formed on his tongue, he caught himself — remembered, with a jolt sharper than the riddle itself, that to speak now, whether rightly or wrongly, was to lose the Baital back into its tree and begin the whole long walk again from nothing. So the warrior king, thoroughly perplexed and thoroughly determined not to show it in words, let out only a low, strangled Hem! — and clamped his jaw an instant later on a second, quieter ahem, and said not one word besides.

I think your majesty spoke

I think your majesty spoke? asked the Vampire at once, its voice honey-sweet and needling in the same breath, plainly delighted to have caught some sound at all out of the king after so long a silence. Hem! ejaculated the monarch again, and nothing more — no word, no syllable that might be twisted into an answer and cost him everything. Vikram fixed his eyes on the dark path ahead and walked on, breath coming hard, jaw locked tight against the temptation to explain himself even that much.

The Baital coughs, suspicious, and tries again

The Baital held its peace a few moments, coughing once or twice with poorly hidden impatience, plainly suspecting that the sheer strangeness of this last tale — a prophecy cast entirely in the future tense, of pale conquerors and tangled marriages yet to come — had struck the warrior king dumb in a way none of the ten tales before it had managed. Surely, it asked at last, in a tone of exaggerated concern, his majesty would like to hear another little anecdote instead, since this one seemed to have proved so troublesome? But Vikram, for the first time in the whole long night's journey, did not even trouble to answer that with a Hem.

Perhaps the young prince can answer, then

Since your majesty is so thoroughly dumbfounded by it, the Baital ventured after a few more minutes of anxious, suspicious silence, perhaps this quick-witted young prince riding at your ear might answer my question in your stead? But Dharma Dhwaj, who had listened to every word of the pale conquerors and the tangled footprints and the two strange marriages without once losing his own composure, answered not a single syllable either — as loyal, in his silence, to his father's unspoken lesson as any son could be.

Firelight at last, and not a word spoken

And so, for the first time in eleven journeys through that haunted forest, no answer came from Vikram at all, right or wrong, and the Baital's riddle hung unresolved in the dark behind him, the tangled kinship of two nameless children left forever unsolved. Vikram had kept up, all this while, an unusually rapid pace, driven half by dread of what he might blurt out and half by simple will, and now, breathless and footsore, he caught sight at last of a fire glimmering far off through the black trees — the very flame the waiting ascetic had kindled to mark the meeting place. He hurried toward it with what little breath the effort had left him, unable to speak even had some fatal answer still tempted him, the corpse silent and heavy and, for once, entirely his own upon his shoulder — carried whole, at last, to the very edge of the firelight.