The Baital begins his first tale

Through the black jungle Vikram strode on, the vampire's corpse slung in its cloth across his shoulder, cold and unnaturally heavy, and against his ear a dry chuckle stirred. Since you will neither speak nor let me go, said the Baital, I shall shorten the road with a story — of a prince who deceived a woman, and of a riddle you will have to answer before we part, if you can. Vikram said nothing. He only quickened his stride between the twisted siras roots and the black shapes of the deodars, and behind his back, patient as a spider spinning its web, the voice began. In Benares once reigned a mighty prince, by name Pratapamukut, and to his eighth son, Vajramukut, there befell the strangest adventure of all his father's sons. It began plainly enough, with a morning's hunt — the young prince riding out with the son of his father's prime minister, the two of them pushing deeper into the wild jungle than either had meant to go.

A ruined tank appears out of the trees

The jungle broke open before them without warning, and there lay a tank of prodigious size, walled in fine baked brick, its flights of cut-stone steps adorned with turrets and pendants and carved finials that had once been someone's pride. Now the plaster crumbled and the masonry gaped, and from every crevice great trees had forced their way skyward, their shade cool and their branches loud with birdsong. Grey squirrels chased each other up the gnarled trunks chirruping with delight, and long-tailed monkeys swung lazily from the hanging vines. The autumn rains had dressed the earthen rampart in a carpet of soft grass and wildflowers of every hue, thick with droning bees, and on the narrow green verge of the pool wild geese, Brahmini ducks, herons, and cranes fed among the broad lotus leaves, splashing through water clear as glass and basking in the mild sun. The two young men reined in their horses, astonished, and fell to wondering aloud how so fair and secret a place could lie forgotten in the heart of a wilderness.

Two travelers pause to give thanks

They dismounted, tethered their horses to a low branch, and set their weapons down upon the grass. Then, washing the dust of the road from their hands and faces at the water's edge, Prince Vajramukut and the minister's son climbed to a small shrine of Mahadeva that stood half-swallowed by creeper near the ruined steps, and there began their devotions, murmuring the old words of praise with the unhurried piety of men who had nowhere else they needed to be. Neither of them had any notion, as they bent their heads before the god, that the tank's true wonder had not yet shown itself — that within the hour the quiet pool and its crumbling steps would witness the first spark of a passion that would carry the prince across a kingdom, into disguise, into deceit, and very nearly into his own grave. For now there was only the murmur of prayer, the hum of bees in the wildflowers, and the patient, ordinary stillness of a forest that kept its secrets well.

A bevy of maidens comes down to bathe

While the two young men were still deep in their offerings, a bevy of maidens descended the opposite flight of steps, laughing and trailing a crowd of female slaves behind them. They lingered at the water's edge, chattering and peering into the pool to be certain no alligator lurked beneath its calm surface, and only when satisfied did they begin, with much shrieking and splashing of palmfuls of water over one another's heads, to bathe. It was truly a splendid spectacle, the Baital said, warming to his description — Concerning which the less said the better, snapped Raja Vikram, in a tone of real offense, cutting him off before he could go further, for light talk of women is no small insult to a serious-minded man. The Baital, sighing theatrically at being denied his poetry, allowed only this: that the foremost of the maidens, laughing loudest and standing tallest among them, was no ordinary girl at all, but the daughter of a king.

The princess withdraws from her companions

That princess did not linger long at play. Leaving her maidens to their splashing and their gossip, she performed the rites of purification, bowed in quiet meditation, and offered her own worship to the presiding deity of the place — a girl, it seemed, of more grave and private feeling than her companions. That done, she took the arm of a single friend and wandered off beneath the cool shade of a small mango grove that grew along the water's edge, the two of them talking low, out of earshot of the others, while bees moved lazily among the blossoms overhead and the light fell dappled and green across the path. It was the most ordinary of moments — a princess taking the air after her bath — and neither she nor anyone else at that ruined tank could have guessed that a pair of eyes, restless and wandering, was about to cross her path and undo the ordinary shape of both their lives.

Eyes meet across the ruined tank

The prince, his prayers finished, had left his friend still kneeling in the shrine and wandered idly toward the trees, thinking of nothing in particular. Then, quite without warning, his eyes met hers. She started back with a small, startled scream, one hand flying to her collarbone; he stood transfixed, struck through in that instant by a beauty he had no words ready for, and found himself thinking, half in despair, half in wonder: O thou vile Kama, why worriest thou me — cursing the god of love even as he surrendered to him utterly, on the spot, without a single word exchanged. It was the kind of moment poets are fond of and philosophers distrust: two strangers, a ruined tank, a shaft of ordinary sunlight, and something in each of them turning over forever. The princess did not run. She stood a moment longer than modesty required, watching the tall young stranger stare at her as though he had forgotten how to breathe.

A smile, and a paralyzing modesty

Seeing him so struck, the princess smiled at him — a small, encouraging, deliberate smile, the kind that invites a man to speak. But poor Vajramukut, caught between the pounding of his own heart and utter uncertainty of what to say, found his tongue cleaved fast to his teeth, and said nothing at all. She raised an eyebrow, faintly disappointed, for — as the Baital began to observe, with evident relish — there is nothing in the world women despise in a man more than modesty, for mo-des-ty — here a violent shaking of the bag on Vikram's back cut the sentence brutally short, and the offended king did not relent until the vampire swore, sulkily, to keep better decorum in his remarks. Even so chastened, the prince remained rooted where he stood, downcast and flushed, while the maiden, half amused and half stung by his silence, called out crossly to her friend, wondering why so strange and rude a man was permitted to simply stand and stare.

A threat to throw him in the pond

The friend, who had been picking jasmine blossoms nearby with her back turned so as not to witness the awkward scene, came hurrying over in hot indignation and threatened, quite seriously, to call the slaves and have the impudent stranger pitched bodily into the tank unless he removed himself at once. It was, by any reasonable measure, a fair and pointed threat. But Vajramukut heard none of it — he was rooted to the spot as if by some enchantment, his ears full of nothing but the rush of his own blood, and had not in fact registered a single word either woman had said to him. Left with no choice but to abandon the argument to a man who plainly could not hear it, the two young women turned at last and made their way back toward the water, the princess's friend still muttering about slaves and ponds and the shamelessness of hunting parties who wandered where they were not wanted.

A silent language spoken in a lotus

Yet as they neared the tank the princess turned her head once more to look back at the poor, modest fool still standing where she had left him — and Vajramukut, it must be said, was formed in every particular to catch a woman's eye, and this second look half forgave him his offense. She smiled again, showing two rows of teeth like little opals, then stooped at the water's edge and plucked a single lotus. What followed was a small, deliberate pantomime: she worshipped the flower, set it in her hair, touched it to her ear, bit it lightly between her teeth, trod it once beneath her foot, lifted it up again, and finally tucked it into her bosom — after which, without another glance, she mounted her palanquin and was gone, leaving the prince standing alone by the ruined steps, utterly undone, and entirely ignorant of the fact that she had just told him, in perfect and precise code, everything he most wanted to know.

The minister's son, unmoved, reads on

Females! muttered the minister's son to himself, careless and unbothered, when his own prayers were finished and he came out to sit on the sun-warmed steps and enjoy the breeze. He drew a roll of manuscript from his waist-belt and was soon lost in study, and though the bathing women exerted every wile they knew to catch his eye, they succeeded only in making him roll his head with a faint smile — man's bane, as ever — before he calmly turned the page. He wondered once, briefly, what had become of his master the prince, but did not so much as lift his eyes from the manuscript to look. He was, the Baital observed dryly to Vikram, a philosopher, that young man — but what, after all, is mortal philosophy, but another name for indifference? Who was ever philosophical about a thing truly loved, or truly hated? No one. A born philosopher, said the fiend, is merely a man of cold desires; a bred one, a man who has outlived his own.

The prince pours out his ruined heart

When at last Vajramukut returned to him, dazed and half-sick with longing, the friend set aside his manuscript and asked him plainly to describe her. And the prince, sighing, obliged: her face was the full moon, her hair a swarm of bees hanging from acacia blossoms, the corners of her eyes reached almost to her ears, her lips were sweet with lunar ambrosia, her waist was slender as a lion's, and her walk was the walk of the king-goose. As a garment she was white; as a season, spring; as a flower, jasmine; as a perfume, musk; as a beauty, the love-god himself; and as a being, she was Love entire — and if she did not come into his possession, he declared with the absolute conviction of a very young man, he would not live; this much he had certainly determined. The minister's son, who had heard his prince pronounce identical death sentences over identical strangers more than once before, did not find the announcement especially alarming.

A silent ride back through the forest

He only remarked, mildly, that unless they mounted at once, night would overtake them in the jungle, and the two young men gathered their horses and their weapons and rode home at a slow pace toward the Raja's palace. For the whole three hours of the return hardly a word passed between them; the prince, sunk in his own thoughts, would not answer even when addressed three times over in the loudest voice his friend could manage. The minister's son, for his part, asked nothing further — for, he told himself, borrowing a rule his own father held sacred, when the prince wants my counsel, he will ask for it — and so he rode in silence beside his silent master, chewing over what he privately called his day-thought, the habit of reflection that had, over some years of practice, made him into a remarkably crafty young man. Neither of them spoke again until the palace gates rose up before them in the dusk.

Grief curdles into a fever

By the second day the prince, restless with the ache of separation, had fretted himself into an outright fever. He gave up writing, reading, drinking, sleeping, the affairs of state his father had entrusted to him, and everything else besides, and sat down, in his own dramatic phrase, to die. He took to painting the lotus-gatherer's portrait over and over from memory, lying for hours with tearful eyes fixed upon the likeness, only to leap up without warning, tear it to shreds, beat his own forehead in despair, and begin the whole business again on a fresh sheet — each new portrait, he insisted, somehow more beautiful and less adequate than the last. His attendants whispered of it in the corridors; his father sent physicians who could find no fever in his blood that any herb might cure. It was, in every visible particular, the behavior of a man drowning in something no one around him could see, let alone treat.

Feed a cold, but starve a fever

As the minister's son had privately foreseen, he was soon summoned to the young Raja's bedside, where he found his master yellowed, hollow-eyed, and complaining bitterly of headache. The two of them had often enough discussed the tender passion in the past, always with one or the other speaking of it too disrespectfully for the subject to be raised again easily — and so, testing the ground, the friend advised a course of bitter herbs and careful diet, quoting the old physician Charndatta's line: a fever starve, but feed a cold. It was the wrong medicine entirely. Vajramukut's fortitude collapsed at once; he burst into tears and cried out that whosoever sets foot on the path of love cannot survive it, and that even should he somehow live, his life would be nothing but a prolongation of misery. The minister's son, recognizing his opening at last, quietly set the herbs aside and asked, more gently, what exactly had happened.

The road of love has no beginning nor end

The road of love, the minister's son quoted, not unkindly, hath no beginning nor end; take thou heed of thyself, man, ere thou place foot upon it. And the wise, knowing that a man cannot foretell his own reaction to desire of woman, the dice-box, or strong drink, find total abstinence from all three the safest rule. Then, relenting, he added: yet after all, if there is no cow, we must milk the bull. Vajramukut, past the point where proverbs could comfort or wound him, only sighed from the bottom of his heart and confessed that he had ventured onto that dangerous road already, come pain or pleasure, happiness or ruin. She is the one who appeared to us at the tank? the minister's son asked, moved despite himself by his master's evident wretchedness. The prince only nodded, and hung his head, unable even now to speak her name aloud.

Half confidences are worse than none

At the time of going away, the minister's son pressed, did she say anything to you? Or you to her? Nothing, the prince admitted, and his friend told him bluntly that this made the whole business exceedingly difficult. Then I am doomed, Vajramukut groaned, to an early and melancholy death. Impatient now, the young statesman demanded to know whether she had made any sign at all, any hint — half confidences, he said sharply, are worse than none. So the prince told him everything: the meeting of eyes, the paralysis of his own tongue, the friend's threat to drown him in the tank, and finally, in careful detail, the strange little pantomime she had performed with the lotus flower before she left. The minister's son fell silent and thought for a long while, turning the sequence over in his mind — hair, ear, teeth, foot, bosom — like a man solving a puzzle he already half suspected the answer to.

Brazen your face, my prince

Before revealing anything, the minister's son took the opportunity to lecture his master on the evils of bashfulness where women were concerned, and urged him — if he wished ever to be a happy lover — to cast off modesty entirely and meet his next encounter with a brazen face. Vajramukut, in the fervor of the moment, promised faithfully to do exactly that, though anyone who knew him could have predicted how well that promise would hold under the pressure of an actual princess's gaze. And now, said the friend, allowing himself a small, satisfied smile, be comforted, my master. I know her name, and I know her dwelling-place. The prince sat bolt upright at this, his fever apparently forgotten in an instant, his whole ruined body suddenly alive with hope, waiting — as a drowning man waits for a rope — for his friend to explain exactly how a few gestures with a flower could possibly contain that much information.

The minister's son reads the secret code

When she plucked the lotus and worshipped it, the friend explained, she thanked the gods for the sight of your beauty. When she set it to her ear, she meant, 'I am a daughter of the Carnatic' — at which Vajramukut shuddered, for Raja Dantawat of the Carnatic had been, was, and would ever be his own father's bitter enemy. When she bit it with her teeth, she told you her father is Raja Dantawat himself — the prince's joy curdling further at the name — and when she trod it beneath her foot, she gave you her own name: Padmavati. At this the prince cried out in sheer delight, all thought of enmity forgotten. And when, last of all, she placed it in her bosom, she meant simply this: you are truly dwelling in my heart. Vajramukut sprang up from his sickbed as though the fever had never touched him, showering his friend with praise for a cleverness he could barely comprehend, and begged him at once to arrange their journey to her city.

Two travelers set out for the Carnatic

The minister's son easily obtained leave for his master to travel, on the polite fiction that the prince's body needed a change of water and his mind a change of scene — a diagnosis no physician thought to dispute, given how thoroughly it matched the symptoms. The two young men dressed and armed themselves for the road, packed a modest store of jewels for barter along the way, mounted their horses, and set off in the very direction the princess's palanquin had gone, following little more than instinct and a name — Dantawat, and his kingdom of the Carnatic — through country neither of them had ever traveled before. It took several days of hard riding before the towers of the enemy capital finally rose out of the haze on the horizon, and by then Vajramukut had rehearsed in his head, a hundred times over, every possible way the coming encounter might go wrong.

In search of a wise old woman

Arrived at last in the Carnatic capital, the minister's son disguised them both as travelling traders and pitched their small tent on a clear patch of ground in one of the suburbs. His first order of business, he announced, was to find a wise old fortune-teller. When the puzzled prince asked what possible use that could be, his friend explained, with the flat cynicism of a man who has thought the matter through, that elderly women who tell fortunes professionally are seldom above ministering to more immediate concerns as well, and are therefore, in circumstances such as theirs, exactly the properest people to consult. Is this a treatise upon the subject of immorality, devil? Vikram demanded, ferociously, breaking into the tale itself. The Baital, all wounded innocence, assured him it was nothing of the sort — merely that he must be permitted to tell his story his own way, or not at all.

An old woman spinning at her wheel

They found her seated before the door of her hut, spinning at her wheel in the sun, and went up to her with polite salutations. Mother, they said, we are travelling traders, our stock is coming on behind us, and we have come ahead to find a place to live. Give us a house, and we will pay you well for it. The old woman, who was as much a reader of faces as a teller of fortunes, studied the two young men closely — noted their wide, honest brows and generous mouths — and, liking what she saw, took pity on them at once. This hovel is yours, my masters, she said kindly, remain here as long as you please. She led them into an inner room, lamenting the poorness of her small home even as she welcomed them into it, and bade them rest themselves after their long journey, entirely unaware of the trouble she had just invited under her own roof.

The nurse's secret connection revealed

After a while the old woman returned and settled in to gossip, as hostesses do, and the minister's son, ever patient, asked after her family and her means of living. My son, she said, is a favourite servant in the household of our great King Dantawat, and I myself am the wet-nurse of the Princess Padmavati, his eldest child. In my old age I live here, but the king provides for my eating and drinking, and once a day I go to see the girl — a miracle of beauty and goodness, wit and accomplishment — and coming home again, I manage to bear my own small griefs. Vajramukut, hearing the princess's name spoken so casually in a stranger's mouth, felt his heart lurch violently in his chest, though he was careful, this once, to keep his face and his tongue entirely still — a small but real triumph, given his history, of brazenness over modesty.

A letter slipped into royal hands

Over the following days Vajramukut, with his liberality, his soft speech, and his considerable good looks, worked his way steadily into old Lakshmi's affections, until at last, on his friend's advice, he ventured to raise the subject nearest his heart. Would she, he asked, when she visited the princess the next morning, be willing to slip a small piece of paper into her hand? Son, the old nurse answered, delighted — for what old woman is not delighted by such a commission — there is no need to wait for the morrow for so urgent a matter. Get your paper ready, and I will carry it this very hour. Trembling with a joy he could barely contain, the prince ran at once to find his friend, seated as ever in the garden with his nose in a book, to tell him the nurse had agreed.

Composing verses fit for a princess

Left to compose his own letter, the prince fell into an agony of phrase-weighing — was light of my eyes too worn a compliment, was blood of my liver perhaps too forceful for a first note? The minister's son, smiling at this display, told him plainly not to trouble his head with composition at all. He drew his own inkstand from his waist-shawl, nibbed a reed pen, chose a sheet of pink flowered paper, and in a few unhurried minutes wrote out several short verses in his master's voice, folded and gummed the letter, and sketched a single lotus flower upon the outside as a private mark of recognition. He handed the finished note to the prince without further comment, told him simply to give it to their hostess, and assured him, with the calm certainty of a man who had already thought three moves ahead, that all would be well.

A poem in triplicate, just in case

The verses spoke of a pearl clinging to hidden sands yet fit for the diadems of kings, a gleam of sun breaking a wintry gloom and gone too soon, a dream of bliss that shines an hour and flies to bless no more — polished, pretty, entirely impersonal lines that could, in truth, have been addressed to any woman alive. And indeed the minister's son, ever practical, had quietly prepared three possible closing stanzas rather than one: an optative version hoping the light might shine again, a desperative version mourning that all joy lay dead, and an exultative version celebrating the pearl regained — for lovers, he told Vikram with a perfectly straight face, are always in one of these three moods, and it saves considerable time to have all three ready in advance. This time, judging the moment, he had chosen the optative, and folded the letter shut without telling the prince a word of his own careful contingency planning.

The princess tears the letter in scorn

Padmavati received the note from her old nurse with every sign of affectionate patience, glanced at the lotus sketched upon the outside, and unfolded it slowly to read. Her verdict was immediate and merciless: she read the doggerel with open contempt, tore off the first word of the final line, and thrust the scrap back into the nurse's hands. Get thee gone, mother of Yama, you unfortunate creature, she snapped, and carry this answer back to the fool who writes such wretched verses — I wonder where he studied the humanities. Begone, and never attempt such a thing again! The old nurse, stung and bewildered, hurried home in real distress, and met the anxious prince on the road before she had even reached her own door. When she repeated the scene to him exactly as it happened, sparing no detail of the princess's scorn, Vajramukut felt a wild urge to fall upon his own sword rather than live with such humiliation.

A woman's no is a distinct yes

Fortune, or at least his friend's cooler head, intervened before any sword was drawn. Be not so hasty, my prince, the minister's son said, seeing his master's wild grief. You have misread her entirely. Later in life you will learn that nine times in ten, a woman's no is a distinct yes. This morning's work has in fact gone well — she asked where you learned the humanities, and rightly understood, that question means only one thing: who are you? Heartened, though still shaken, the prince returned the next day to confess his true rank to old Lakshmi, who declared at once — as nurses always will, after the fact — that she had suspected as much all along. Trusting him now completely, she agreed to carry a second, bolder message to the palace, this time naming the prince outright and declaring him worthy of her nursling in every particular of birth and character.

Struck across the cheek, and called a witch

When Lakshmi delivered this second, more direct message, Padmavati's fury was, if anything, more spectacular than before. She rubbed sandal paste onto her hands, struck the old woman sharply across both cheeks, and cried, Wretch! Witch! Get out of my house — did I not forbid you to speak such folly to me? Both the lover and the nurse were thoroughly demoralized by this second rebuff, until the minister's son, unruffled as ever, explained the true meaning hidden inside it: when she smeared sandal on her ten fingers and struck the nurse's face, she was telling them that once ten more moonlit nights had passed, she would meet the prince in the dark. He warned his master, too, in the same breath, that so clever a woman as Padmavati was unlikely ever to make a comfortable wife — a warning Vajramukut, deep in his infatuation, did not care to hear at all.

Saffron promises three more days

When the ten nights of moonlight had at last worn away, the old nurse returned once more to the palace with the same patient message, and this time Padmavati marked three of her fingers with saffron and again left their imprint on the nurse's cheek before driving her off. The minister's son, consulted again, read the sign at once: three fingers, three days — after which the prince would be granted access to her at last. It was, by any account, a strange and roundabout courtship, conducted entirely through insults delivered to an increasingly bruised old woman's face, and the prince said as much, half in wonder and half in guilt at what poor Lakshmi was enduring on his behalf. But she waved off his concern each time, insisting that no service given in love's cause could ever be called a hardship, and returned to the palace the following week exactly as before.

Driven from the western gate

When the three days had passed, the nurse returned once more to ask after the princess's health, only to be met with fresh wrath — Padmavati took her personally by the arm, marched her all the way to the palace's western gate, called her mother of the elephant's trunk, and threatened her outright with the bastinado should she ever dare return. Reported back to the young statesman, this outburst too yielded its secret after only a few minutes' thought: she had, he announced, just invited the prince to meet her at that very gate, at that very hour, the following night. Vajramukut received the news with the particular mixture of terror and elation that had become, by this point, his more or less permanent condition, and immediately began wondering how in the world he ought to prepare himself to look worthy of her.

Half a day spent at the mirror

He answered that question, in the event, by devoting the better part of the following day to his own reflection. He shaved his cheeks and chin to perfect smoothness, trimmed and curled his mustachio, plucked the fine hairs from his eyebrows with tweezers until they arched just so, trained his musk-scented curls to fall gracefully about his face, drew broad lines of antimony along his eyelids, fixed a brilliant sectarian mark upon his brow, and reddened his lips by chewing betel-nut — one would imagine you are talking of a silly girl, not a prince, fiend! Vikram broke in, unwilling to let his own son hear of such fopperies. The Baital, speaking quickly now as if determined not to be interrupted twice, pressed on regardless — the whitened, freshly shaved neck, the reddened ear-tips pinched to color, the copper powder rubbed into his gums to make his teeth gleam, the henna at his fingertips, the two hours spent alone on the binding of his turban.

Advice from a conqueror of hearts

When at last Vajramukut asked how he looked, his friend pronounced him admirable, and the prince, brimming with a happiness he feared might not survive the night, begged for guidance on how best to conduct himself. As a conqueror, my prince, the minister's son answered, if a conqueror is what you mean to be. Tell a woman she loves you, and she will come to believe it. Show her you care nothing for her, and she will think of nothing else. Above all, beware that fatal virtue men call modesty and women call sheepishness — remember what it has already cost us, when all this might have been settled at a tank fifteen miles from your own father's palace. And having escaped the rock of Modesty, do not now fall into the gulf of Security — this Padmavati is far too clever and far too prudent a woman to be handled carelessly. With that final caution ringing in the prince's ears, the two of them set out through the darkening streets toward the palace's western gate.

Through the sleeping palace gate

Two watches of the night had passed, and a profound stillness lay over the city, when the two young men crept quietly through the shadowed streets to the western gate. There they found the wicket standing ajar. The minister's son peered cautiously through it and saw the old porter dozing at his post, as still and stately as a Brahman lost deep in the Vedas, and behind him, waiting, a single veiled figure standing motionless in the dark. He slipped back to where the prince waited, delivered one final warning against modesty and against carelessness both, and sent him forward alone to glide through the wicket unseen. Then, having lingered a short while longer at the gate with an anxious ear turned toward the palace, the minister's son withdrew quietly through the sleeping streets, back to the old nurse's house, to wait out the long hours until his prince returned — if he returned at all.

Led by a veiled hand through the dark

Inside the gate Vajramukut felt his hand seized at once by the waiting, veiled figure, who motioned him urgently to silence and led him forward at a quick, sure pace. They passed beneath low archways, through dim corridors and darkened doorways whose turnings the prince could never afterward have retraced alone, until at last, climbing a final flight of stone steps, they emerged into the private apartments of the princess herself. Every step of that hidden passage had been rehearsed a hundred times, evidently, by someone who knew the palace as well as her own hand — and the prince, half-terrified and half-intoxicated by the sheer audacity of what he was doing, followed the silent guide without a single question, his carefully hennaed fingers cold with nerves, his painstakingly arranged turban already beginning to come loose in the dark.

A chamber built like fairyland

What broke upon Vajramukut when he entered nearly made him faint outright. Golden censers exhaled the costliest perfumes; gemmed vases overflowed with flowers; silver lamps burning fragrant oil lit doorways whose panels were carved into wonders, and walls painted with figures so lifelike the beholder felt half-enchanted merely looking at them. On one side stood a couch of gold brocade strewn with fresh-cut jasmine; on the other, arranged in perfect order, stood attar-holders, betel-boxes, rose-water bottles, and silver cases of scented pastes, sandalwood, saffron, and musk. Sweetmeats of every color were scattered across a floor of stuccoed white, and attendants in bright silks stood ranked by rank, hands folded — some reading poems aloud, some dancing, some drawing music from ivory lutes and ebony pipes and silver kettledrums. It was, the narrator confesses, a room beyond any full description — the wonder of the age — and the prince, rooted in its threshold, felt his whole body prickle with a joy too large to hold.

Padmavati unveils herself at last

Then a second veiled figure came forward and lifted her covering, and there at last stood the princess herself, Padmavati, dazzling in the lamplight, her beauty undimmed by all the splendor surrounding her. She led the still-speechless prince to an alcove, seated him gently, rubbed sandal powder over his skin with her own hands, hung a garland of jasmine about his neck, sprinkled rose-water across his fine clothes, and took up a peacock-feather fan to cool him herself. Even now some trace of his old habit surfaced — those delicate hands of yours were never made to ply a fan, he protested softly. Why trouble yourself? The mere sight of you cools me. Give it to me, and sit. No, great king, she answered, smiling the most fascinating of smiles, you have troubled yourself so greatly to come here that it is only right I should serve you. At which her favourite slave simply took the fan from her hand and said, This is my duty — let the two of you enjoy each other.

Nights of stolen happiness

So began weeks of secret bliss. By day Padmavati hid him carefully away; by night the two lovers returned to the same tender, innocent pleasures, chewing betel from little agate boxes and talking for hours of nothing and everything. The prince, barely twenty, ardent by nature and strictly reared by serious parents, gave himself over entirely to her, forgetting the world outside her chambers and marvelling constantly at a fortune richer, he thought, than all the fabled mines of Meru. Every morning, for vanity's sake, he made her teach him some scrap of poetry or philosophy, hoping — as the Baital drily observed to Vikram, ignoring his host's disapproving grunts — that by such small daily thefts of learning he might in time become almost as clever as the woman he loved, a hope about as realistic as most such hopes tend to be.

She adores him for his dullness

Padmavati, being a young woman of genuinely superior mind, was in fact more captivated by her lover's very dullness than by any other quality he possessed — she adored it precisely because it stood in such total contrast to herself. At first she simply invested him, as clever women so often do, with the brilliance of her own imagination: surely, she reasoned, beneath so calm a surface must lurk a penetrating judgment, a noble and generous heart, for did not nature write such things plainly on a broad, high brow? And so she fed the delusion tirelessly — smiling with tender pride when he mangled the meter of a poem after hours of labor, laughing with delight when his platitudes fell dim as a dying firefly, discovering charming simplicity in the very blunders that would have embarrassed a lesser devotion. Love, the Baital noted to Vikram, with the particular relish of a demon who has never had to feel it, makes remarkably generous editors of otherwise sharp-eyed women.

A dangerous confidence, freely given

At first Padmavati suspected that the clever tricks which had won her heart — the coded flowers, the decoded letters — could not possibly have been the prince's own invention, and guessed that some third party must be involved. But clever women, notoriously, see least clearly into matters that touch themselves most nearly, and rather than press the question she said nothing and watched. Before long the besotted Vajramukut, unable to keep a single secret from the woman he loved, had told her everything — beginning with his friend's early diatribes against love, and ending, fatally, with the minister's son's own solemn warning that she, the pretty princess, would one day play her husband a foul trick. Padmavati listened, smiling like an angel throughout, and privately swore to herself that if she did not find some way to repay that particular insult, she would deserve to be reborn a gardener's donkey in her next life.

A month of neglect takes its toll

A month slipped by in this fashion, and the prince, who had eaten and slept and idled a great deal too much and hunted not at all, began to turn bilious and melancholy by turns. His face yellowed, his eyes lost their whites' clean shine, he yawned constantly like a liver patient, complained of headaches, and lost his appetite entirely. Alone one night he thought aloud, half to himself: he had given up country, throne, home, and everything else for this happiness, yet the friend through whose sole cleverness he had obtained it he had not laid eyes on in thirty full days — what must the man be thinking of him now, and how could he even know what had befallen him in all that silence? It was, for the first time in weeks, a thought that reached past his own contentment to someone else's neglect.

Padmavati orders him back to his friend

Padmavati found him sunk in exactly this mood, and understood its cause the moment she saw his face. She began by teasing him for his sudden fickleness, and when he grew ready to protest, quoting old proverbs about wives superseded for their faults, she smoothed his temper at once by explaining she meant only his neglect of his friend, not any failing of her own. How can you find happiness here, my soul, she asked softly, while your heart wanders elsewhere? Why hide this from me — did you fear it would distress me? Think better of your wife than to believe she would ever come between you and the man to whom we both owe so much. Then, gently but firmly, she ordered him to go to his friend that very night, and not return until his mind was fully at ease — and she pressed upon him a gift of sweetmeats, she said, as a small token of her admiration for so clever a man.

A parting gift made with poisoned care

Vajramukut embraced her with such transports of grateful relief that Padmavati, fearing her own fury might show through the mask of her fondness, hurried off at once to fill her comfit boxes with the finest delicacies she owned. She returned bearing a full bag of sweets for her lover, and then, as he rose to leave, pressed into his hand a smaller, separate parcel meant especially for the friend — made, she told him proudly, with her own delicate fingers, and certain, she flattered herself, to please even so discriminating a palate. Vajramukut endured a long string of farewell embraces and repeated hopes for his speedy return, and finally slipped safely out through the palace gate, walking briskly through the midnight streets toward the old nurse's house, entirely unaware that he carried, tucked against his own body, a gift meant to kill the one friend who had made his whole romance possible.

Reunited at the nurse's house

Though it was well past midnight, the minister's son was still awake, sitting on his mat, when the prince arrived, and the two young men fell into each other's arms in a genuine embrace of long-delayed affection. The friend noted at once the haggard, jaded look on the prince's face and did not hide that his own weeks had been spent in real anxiety over what so talented and formidable a princess might have done to his master. Vajramukut, who by now considered Padmavati nothing short of an angel and his month in her chambers a taste of heaven itself, answered with unusual formality — and, the narrator notes, two grammatical blunders folded into a single borrowed quotation — that abilities properly directed win a man happiness in both worlds. The minister's son only rolled his head slightly at this, saying nothing, in a manner the prince knew very well and did not entirely like.

Suspicion falls on the sugar-plums

Jealous of her again! the prince accused, mistaking his friend's silence for envy, and launched into an eager account of the kind messages and the pleasant little surprise she had prepared, producing at last the parcel of sweets with a flourish — made by her own dear hands, he said proudly, quoting a line she had taught him about being glad to be a man and not a philosopher. The kind messages she sent me? The pleasant surprise prepared for me? the minister's son repeated in a flat, hard voice quite unlike his usual manner. My lord will be good enough to tell me — how did she come to hear my name at all? The question landed like a blow. Only then did the prince realize, with a sinking heart, exactly what he had let slip in a month of pillow-talk confidences — and exactly how badly, by his friend's own earlier warnings, he had already failed him.

My life to a pariah's they are poisoned

You have not done well, the minister's son said, in telling her my name at all — never let a woman think your left hand knows what she confided to your right, still less that you have passed it to a third person. And you did worse in letting her see the affection you bear your own servant, for a woman ever hates her lover's friend. When the prince protested that he could keep no secrets from a woman he loved as another self, his friend cut him off entirely. Returning, however, to the sugar-plums — my life to a pariah's, they are poisoned. Vajramukut recoiled in genuine horror. Impossible! No mortal could do such a thing — if a man fears not his fellow man, surely he dreads the gods. I have never yet known, the minister's son answered grimly, what a woman in love does fear. But the trial, prince, is easy enough.

The dog Muti proves the point

He called the old nurse's dog over by name — Muti — with a grim little joke about sending him off to his three-headed kinsman who waits upon dreadful Yama, and tossed the animal one of the sweetmeats. The dog ate it eagerly, and within moments was writhing on the ground; shortly after, it was dead. The wretch! Oh, the wretch! Vajramukut cried, transported all at once with wonder and fury. And I loved her! It is over now — I dare not go near such a calamity again. His friend received the confirmation with a strange, weary calm. What has happened has happened, he said. I was prepared for something of this kind from so talented a princess — clever women never manage even their crimes decently. Give me dullness, one idea, one desire — thrice-blessed dullness that brings with it, at least, its own kind of happiness. For once, the prince did not rise to defend talent against his friend's old prejudice.

Can you live without her, even now?

Your slave did his best to warn you against her, the minister's son continued, but my heart is easy now — I have tested her strength, she has tried and failed, and the failure will keep her from trying again just yet. But answer me one question honestly: can you be happy without her? Vajramukut was silent a long moment, then answered, flushing, Brother, I cannot. Better confessed than concealed, his friend replied evenly. Then we must meet her on her own battlefield, and beat her at her own weapon, which is cunning. I do not begin treachery willingly with women — I dislike it, and besides, they will practice it on me first regardless, after which I consider myself entirely justified in answering in kind. And she will likely make you a fine wife yet, remember — it was my death she plotted, not yours. The prince, hearing his own crime forgiven so readily, felt something close to shame.

A plan takes shape before dawn

When the prince, almost as an afterthought, raised the awkward matter of the bride his own father had already chosen for him, his friend waved the objection away entirely — woman, he observed, is by nature monogamous, man polygamous, whatever physiology might formally claim, and quoted a cheerfully cynical couplet about divorcing and remarrying as the season allows, adding only that if the king raised any objection, the prince should simply refer him to his own private conduct. Reassured, Vajramukut retired to sleep soundly despite the night's revelations, while the minister's son withdrew to his own cot to think, as he always did his best thinking, lying quietly in the dark. By morning his plan had fully matured, and as evening approached and he walked with his master back toward the palace gate, he laid out, in careful and precise detail, exactly what the prince now needed to do.

A trident, a powder, a plan of deceit

Take this trident, he instructed, and hide it about you. Show her only your greatest love tonight, and conceal everything that has happened. When she asks after me, tell her I was weary and unwell last night, that illness kept me from her sweets, but that I mean to eat them tonight instead. When she falls asleep, take her jewels quietly, strike her left leg once with the trident, and come straight to me. But should she lie awake, rub a little of this powder on your thumb — only ground grubs fed on verdigris, nothing more — and touch it to her nostrils; it would fell an elephant, so guard your own face carefully as you use it. Vajramukut embraced his friend, tucked trident and powder alike beneath his robes, and passed once more through the sleeping palace gate to where Padmavati waited for him, radiant and entirely unsuspecting.

Padmavati sleeps, unaware of her fate

She fell upon his chest and searched his eyes the moment he entered, and deceived herself thoroughly, as clever women so often will — certain now that her secret remained safe, that her lover was hers eternally, and that her small act of poison had passed entirely undetected. Overcome with relief and satisfaction, the beautiful princess drifted at last into a deep and untroubled sleep beside him, her breathing slow and even, her face as peaceful as a woman with nothing at all on her conscience. Vajramukut lay beside her a long while in the dark, listening to that quiet breathing, feeling — whatever the narrator declines to record of his private thoughts in that moment — the full, uncomfortable weight of what he had promised his friend he would do to the sleeping woman beside him before the night was through.

The prince steals away with her jewels

At last he moved. Following his friend's instructions exactly, he gathered up Padmavati's jewels and ornaments, struck her once upon the left leg with the trident's three points, and slipped from the room without waking her, out through the sleeping palace and back to where the minister's son waited. His friend inspected the gathered jewels closely by lamplight, nodded once in satisfaction, and, taking up an empty sack, motioned for the prince to follow him without a word of explanation. Leaving their horses and baggage behind at the old nurse's house, the two of them walked together through the darkened streets to a burning-ground on the city's edge, a place of ash and silence where, the minister's son had judged correctly, no one else would think to look for two travelling traders at that hour of the night.

Disguised as ascetic and disciple

At the cremation ground the minister's son buried both their own travelling clothes in the ash and drew from his sack the robes of a wandering ascetic, which he put on himself, handing his master the humbler garb of a disciple. Go, youth, to the bazaar, he instructed, now fully in character as guru to chela, and sell these jewels. Let half the jewellers in the place see them clearly, and if anyone lays hold of you, bring him straight to me. It was a plan built entirely on being caught — the opposite, Vajramukut realized slowly, of everything caution would normally suggest, and precisely because of that, the sort of plan no one watching would ever think to suspect.

A goldsmith grows suspicious

At dawn, Vajramukut carried the princess's jewels to the nearest goldsmith's shop and asked their worth. Gardeners, tailors, and goldsmiths, the Baital observed to Vikram, are proverbially dishonest men, and this one proved no exception — noting that the disciple plainly had no idea what he was holding, the goldsmith offered barely a thousandth of its true value, hoping to fill his own coffers on the strength of the boy's ignorance. When the disciple rejected the offer and turned to leave, wanting the affair to go further, the goldsmith sprang up, blocked the doorway, and threatened to call the officers of justice unless the young man surrendered goods he now claimed had been stolen from his own shop — a threat the goldsmith himself half-regretted the moment it left his mouth, knowing full well the officers would take a larger cut of any recovery than he would.

The royal jeweller recognizes the gems

While the goldsmith stood hesitating in his own doorway, a shadow fell across the shop and in walked the city's chief jeweller. The moment he saw the ornaments in the disciple's hand he recognized them instantly. These belong to Raja Dantawat's daughter, he declared. I know them well — I set the stones myself only a few months ago. He turned at once to the young man and demanded to know, truly, where he had gotten them. By now ten or twenty onlookers had gathered at the commotion, and word of a disciple caught with the princess's own jewels spread quickly enough to reach the superintendent of the archers, who sent a soldier to bring the disciple, the goldsmith, and the jeweller all before him, ornaments and all, exactly as the minister's son had planned from the very start.

Before the hall of justice

Tell me truly, whence have you obtained these? the superintendent demanded, once all three men and the jewels stood before him in the hall of justice. Vajramukut, playing his part with well-rehearsed fear, answered that his spiritual preceptor, even now worshipping out at the cemetery beyond the town, had given him the stones with an order to sell them — how could a mere disciple know where his guru had come by them? Dismiss me, my lord, he begged, I am an innocent man. The kotwal, unmoved but methodical, ordered that the ascetic himself be sent for at once, and had both the disciple and the mysterious jewels brought together before none other than King Dantawat, to whom the entire strange business was now formally reported in full.

The ascetic's tale of a chastised witch

Before the Raja, the minister's son played the guru to perfection. He unrolled a black antelope hide with slow, deliberate care, smoothed it beneath him as a seat, took up a rosary of beads each large as an egg, and spent nearly an hour murmuring and rolling his head in apparent trance before at last fixing the king with a level gaze and answering him. By Shiva, great king, these jewels are my own. On the fourteenth night of the dark half of the moon, I went to a burning-ground to perform a witch's incantation. She appeared after long, toilsome labor, but her demeanor was so unruly I was forced to chastise her — I struck her, if memory serves, upon the left leg with this very trident. Still she proved refractory, so I stripped her of her jewels and her clothing both, and told her to go wherever she pleased. Never have I encountered so perverse a witch. That is how these ornaments came into my keeping.

A father's blood runs cold

Raja Dantawat was stunned into silence by the ascetic's tale. He begged the holy man to remain in the palace a while longer, and hurried at once into the private apartments of the women, where he found the queen dowager first. Go without a moment's delay, mother, he told her, and look at Padmavati's left leg — tell me if there is any mark upon it, and of what kind. The old queen returned soon after, and her report did nothing to ease his fear: she had found the princess lying in bed, complaining of an accident, in evident pain, and upon examining the wound had found it made by some three-pointed instrument, though the girl herself insisted a mere nail had caught her. But I never yet heard, the queen added, with rather more relish than the moment called for, of any nail that leaves three separate holes — we must hurry, or there will be gangrene, mortification, amputation, and perhaps death in this house before the week is out.

A king reasons his daughter into a witch

For a moment the king's heart nearly broke outright. But he was a man well practiced at mastering his own feelings, and he quickly applied the reins of reflection to the wild horse of his passion. The affairs of one's own household, he told himself, the secrets of one's own heart, whatever losses one suffers — none of it should ever be disclosed to outsiders. And if Padmavati was truly a witch, then she was, in the strictest and most final sense, no longer his daughter at all. Resolved on this cold logic, he went out to consult the ascetic still sitting cross-legged upon his black hide, tracing idle marks with his trident on the stone floor, and asked him directly what punishment the Dharma-Shastra prescribed for so heinous a crime as witchcraft.

The scripture on witchcraft's true penalty

Great king, the ascetic answered, with all the solemn authority of a man who had spent a lifetime studying scripture rather than one night inventing it, the Dharma-Shastra is clear on this point: if a Brahman, a cow, a woman, a child, or any other person dependent upon us should be guilty of a perfidious act, their punishment is banishment from the country — never death, however richly they may deserve it, for the goddess Lakshmi flies in horror from the spilling of such blood. Hearing this, the Raja thanked the holy man profusely, pressed rich gifts upon him, and sent him on his way rejoicing — never once suspecting that he had just been handed, by the very man responsible for the crime, the exact legal mechanism by which his own daughter could be quietly removed from the palace and delivered, eventually, straight into that same man's care.

Seized in the night, abandoned to the jungle

That very night, once the palace had settled into sleep, King Dantawat ordered a band of trusted men to seize Padmavati quietly, without alarming the household, and to carry her far out into a distant jungle thick with fiends, tigers, and bears, and there to abandon her to whatever fate awaited her. It was done exactly as commanded — the princess taken from her own bed in the dark, carried out through gates she had once slipped her own lover through in secret, and left alone among the wild trees with no one but her own wits and whatever mercy the jungle chose to show her.

The two conspirators follow in secret

Meanwhile the false ascetic and his disciple hurried back to the cremation ground, dug up their own buried clothes, and returned to their true selves once more. They visited old Lakshmi's house one last time, rewarding her hospitality so generously that she wept openly at their kindness, then girt on their weapons, mounted their waiting horses, and rode out following the very party that had just carried Padmavati from her father's gate — two friends trailing a princess's abandonment through the dark, each of them entirely responsible, in his own way, for the danger she now rode into.

Rescued, and easily persuaded

It cost them, in the event, very little effort to persuade the frightened, abandoned girl to trade her uncertain chances in a jungle full of tigers and bears for the certain prospect of becoming Vajramukut's lawfully wedded wife back in Benares. Whatever fear and fury she might have felt on learning the full extent of the deception played against her, the alternative on offer that night in the dark forest made the choice, in the end, no choice at all. The narrator cannot resist noting, with a certain dry amusement, that she did not even think to ask whether she would have a rival already waiting for her in her new husband's house — a question, we are told, that women in her position almost never neglect to raise.

A true wedding, openly celebrated

After some days of travel, the three of them — the prince, his ever-resourceful friend, and the rescued princess, this unlikely trio the narrator calls the pilgrims of one love — arrived at last at the house of their fathers in Benares, and joy without limit greeted them there, from the greatest of the household down to the smallest. What had begun in secrecy, disguise, poison, and a wound struck by trident-point in the dark was resolved now into an open, lawful, and thoroughly celebrated marriage — the whole elaborate architecture of deception folded quietly away behind the far simpler, far more respectable fact of a wedding properly and publicly performed.

The Baital springs his riddle

Now, Raja Vikram, said the Baital, breaking off the tale abruptly, you have said very little — no doubt you are absorbed in a story where a man beats a woman at her own weapon, deceit. But I warn you: you will surely fall into Narak, the infernal regions, unless you make up your mind and answer me plainly. Of these four — the lover, the lover's friend, the girl, or her father — who was most to blame of all? The question hung in the dark forest air exactly as it always did, precise and merciless, demanding of the silent king an answer he could not simply walk away from.

Dharma Dhwaj blurts out an answer

For my part, I think Padmavati was the worst of them, cried Dharma Dhwaj, Vikram's own son, unable to hold his tongue, for she was at the very bottom of all their troubles! Vikram murmured something mild about young people and their two hasty senses of seeing and hearing, but his son's eager sympathy pleased him well enough that he forgave the interruption at once. Yet bound as he was by the old vow that governed this whole grim bargain with the vampire — that he must speak the truth of his judgment or be damned for his silence — Vikram knew the boy's quick answer could not stand in for his own, and set himself, however reluctantly, to work out the true reckoning for himself.

Vikram names the guilty man

At length, determined to do justice despite every inclination in him to stay silent, Vikram spoke. Raja Dantawat, he said flatly, is the person most at fault. The words fell into the dark jungle air with the same grim finality that had marked every one of Vikram's forced answers before this one — a king, once again, condemning a king, against his own evident preference, because the truth of the matter, once he had turned it over fully in his mind, would allow no gentler verdict. In what way was he at fault? the Baital asked at once, his voice curious now, almost eager, sensing that the real substance of the answer was still to come.

The prince and the friend, excused in turn

Vikram laid out his reasoning without hurry. Prince Vajramukut, he said, being tempted by the love-god himself, was as good as insane, and therefore cannot be held responsible for what he did — a man out of his own senses cannot be judged by the standard of a man in them. As for the minister's son, he did nothing but perform his master's business obediently, without pausing to question its causes or its costs — and that is, in fact, an excellent quality in a dependant, whose whole proper duty is to do as he is bid, not to sit in judgment over the one he serves. Neither of these two, weighed fairly, carries the true weight of the blame.

The Raja should have known better

With respect to the young woman, Vikram continued, I have only this to say: she was a young woman, and thereby, of necessity, a possible murderess. It was, even by his own grim standards, an ungenerous verdict, offered without much further examination. But the Raja — and here his voice hardened — a prince himself, a man of mature years and long experience, a father of eight children! He ought never to have been fooled by so shallow and threadbare a trick as a wandering stranger's tale. And he certainly should never have condemned his own daughter to banishment among fiends and tigers on nothing firmer than that stranger's unproven word, without a single moment's true reflection, without so much as asking her himself what had actually happened. That failure of judgment, in a man who above all others should have known better, is the true and final fault in this whole affair.

Gramercy to you, cried the vampire

Gramercy to you! the Baital cried, and burst into a wild, discordant shout of laughter that echoed off through the black trees. I now return to my tree — by my tail, I never yet heard a Raja so readily condemn a Raja! And with those mocking words still hanging in the air, he slipped clean out of the wrapping cloth, leaving it hanging suddenly light and empty across Vikram's shoulder, exactly as he had done every single time before.

Vikram stands frozen in dismay

Vikram stood a moment fixed to the spot in blank dismay, the emptied cloth swaying uselessly against his back, the vampire's mocking laughter still ringing somewhere off among the dark trees. He had spoken the honest truth demanded of him, exactly as his vow required — and once again, precisely because of that honesty, the whole long night's labor had come undone in a single instant. There was no time to curse his own bad luck. Recovering himself, he said nothing at all, only turned in silence and began retracing every step of the road he had just walked, his son Dharma Dhwaj falling in close behind him without a word.

Back up the siras-tree once more

Retracing his own footprints through the dark, Vikram came again at last to the distant siras-tree where this whole night had begun. Without a word of complaint he climbed once more into its branches, seized the grinning Baital where he hung waiting, tore him down bodily, and packed him back into the cloth exactly as before — the same knots, the same grip, the same grim, wordless efficiency of a man who has done this precise task more times than he cares to count. Then, slinging the vampire once more across his shoulder, he set his face back toward the sorcerer's cremation ground and started out again upon the same silent road.

A new voice, a new tale begins

He had gone scarcely a few paces down the dark path before a voice sounded again from the bundle at his back — patient, dry, and entirely unbothered by the night's small defeat, already beginning, without so much as a pause for breath, to tell another true story. Vikram walked on into the jungle exactly as before, in exactly the same silence, carrying exactly the same burden, toward exactly the same distant tree, while behind him the old, endless bargain simply started over once again.