The Baital resumes his tale, sly as ever

Once more the dead thing on Vikram's shoulder stirred and chuckled in the dark. Listen, great king! it hissed, mimicking a reverence it did not feel, since you are so hungry for wisdom that you carry corpses through a haunted forest at midnight, I will feed you another. Vikram said nothing, only tightened his grip on the cloth and walked on, his silent son Dharma Dhwaj a pace behind, the sorcerer's fire still an age away through the tamarisks. In a country ruled by Raja Birbar of Madanpur, the Baital said, there lived an unremarkable trader named Hiranyadatt, a man of modest means and unremarkable ambitions, whose entire claim upon the notice of the world was a single, extraordinary daughter. Her name was Madansena — the army of Cupid — and the name, as the Baital purred it out, already promised trouble of the sort that follows beautiful women through every bazaar and palace of Hindustan.

A beauty that unsettled gods, men, and sages alike

The Baital lingered, as vampires do, over description, relishing each comparison like a jeweler turning a stone to the light. Madansena's face, he said, was the moon itself; her hair the monsoon clouds; her eyes had the quick, dark glitter of a musk-rat's; her brows arched like drawn bows, her nose fine as a parrot's curved bill. Her neck carried itself like a dove's, her teeth were rows of pomegranate seed, her lips held the deep red of a ripe gourd, and her waist bent and swayed with the same liquid grace as a leopard's. Her hands and feet were soft as new blossoms, her skin pale and fragrant as jasmine, and — the Baital added, with a leer Vikram could all but hear — she did not merely possess this beauty but grew into it daily, so that gods, mortal men, and ash-smeared sages alike found their meditations interrupted whenever she passed. It was, the Baital observed, precisely the kind of beauty that ruins fathers, and Hiranyadatt was about to learn it.

A father's pride becomes a father's problem

As Madansena ripened toward womanhood, her parents fell into the anxious calculations that beset every household with a marriageable daughter, and theirs was worse than most, for the whole country side had begun talking. Word of her had spread from village to village until the name of Hiranyadatt the trader, a man nobody had troubled to notice before, was known throughout the domains of Raja Birbar purely as the father of that girl. Painters were commissioned by suitors who had never laid eyes on her, and their portraits arrived by messenger in a steady, flattering stream, each one a small siege laid against the trader's door. Hiranyadatt dutifully carried every likeness to his daughter and asked her judgment, for — unusually for a father of his era — he had told her plainly to choose for herself. But Madansena, the Baital noted with some relish, was as particular as she was lovely; she turned away portrait after portrait, declaring that none of these staring painted men pleased her, and asked only that her father find her a husband handsome, wise, and possessed of good sense — as though such a creature were easily found.

Four suitors arrive to prove their worth

In time, as Hiranyadatt had perhaps feared, four suitors arrived in person from four different countries, each convinced that he alone answered his daughter's modest-sounding demand. The trader, canny enough to know that handsome faces are cheap and character is not, told all four the same thing: their looks he could judge for himself, standing as they were before him, but their claims to wisdom and quality would need proof. It was a fair test, and an old one — for any fool can commission a flattering portrait, but few can improvise a boast on the spot and make it convincing. The Baital's voice, narrating, took on the dry relish of a man watching four peacocks display before a single hen, and Vikram, despite himself, found he was listening for the punchline.

The first suitor stakes his claim on scripture

The first suitor stepped forward with the easy confidence of a man who has never doubted his own excellence. I have, he announced, a perfect acquaintance with the Shastras — with the sacred sciences themselves. In learning, I have no rival anywhere. As for my person, you have eyes; look and judge for yourself. He said this, the Baital noted, the way certain scholars always say such things — as if scripture were a possession like a fine horse, to be produced and admired rather than lived. Hiranyadatt listened gravely, filing the claim away, for a son-in-law who could recite the Vedas by heart was no small prize for a trading family hoping to climb in the world.

The second suitor boasts of arrows and ears

The second suitor was cut from rougher cloth. My gift, he declared, chest out, is archery beyond compare. I can loose an arrow at a sound alone — at a creature I cannot see, guided only by what I hear — and strike it dead. My proportions, too, speak for themselves. It was a warrior's boast, delivered with a warrior's swagger, and the Baital allowed that it was at least a demonstrable one, unlike vague claims to wisdom that no one present could verify without years of study. Hiranyadatt nodded slowly. A soldier's skill was useful in uncertain times, whatever a trader's daughter might privately think of the smell of leather and steel.

The third suitor speaks the language of beasts

The third suitor's claim was stranger, and therefore more interesting. I understand, he said, the speech of every creature of land and water — the tongues of birds, the tongues of beasts — and in strength I have no equal among men. My comeliness, again, you may judge for yourself. There was something almost wistful in how the Baital related this one, as though he found the notion of a man fluent in sparrow-talk and jackal-argument genuinely charming, a rarer and odder gift than either scripture or archery, the sort of skill that belongs more to fable than to a marriage market. Hiranyadatt, listening, said nothing yet — but something in this answer had already begun to work on him, though not for any reason the suitor himself would have guessed.

The fourth suitor's peculiar economy of virtue

The fourth and last suitor offered the strangest boast of all — not a talent for learning or war or beasts, but a small, exact scheme of commerce and charity. I know, he said, how to weave a certain cloth that sells for five rubies apiece. And when I sell it, I do not keep the gain for myself: one ruby I give to a Brahman, one I offer to a deity, one I keep to wear upon my own body, one I set aside for my wife, and the fifth I spend on feasting my friends. This is my knowledge, and no other man alive possesses it. My looks, once more, are there for you to see. The Baital let the strangeness of this sit a moment — a suitor whose entire pitch was a five-part budget for virtue — before moving the tale along, for Hiranyadatt now had four very different men to weigh against one daughter.

A father worries that too much beauty is a curse

Hiranyadatt withdrew to think, and his thinking, the Baital reported with the air of a man quoting scripture he privately doubted, ran along old, gloomy grooves. Too much of anything, he told himself, is never good; had not the peerless Sita, lovely beyond all women, been carried off bodily by the demon Ravana precisely because of that same loveliness? Had not King Bali, famous for his boundless generosity, given so freely that he gave himself into poverty and was tricked out of heaven and earth entirely? His daughter, he reasoned uneasily, was too beautiful to remain unmarried much longer — beauty like hers left idle was an invitation to some disaster he could not yet name — and yet the very extremity of her charms made the choice of a husband feel less like a blessing and more like defusing something dangerous. It was not, the Baital remarked to Vikram, the most romantic frame of mind in which to arrange a wedding, but fathers of beautiful daughters rarely have the luxury of romance.

Madansena is asked to choose, and cannot

Having turned the problem over as long as his nerve allowed, Hiranyadatt went to his daughter and laid out the four suitors and their four peculiar claims exactly as they had been spoken, then asked her plainly which of them she would have. But Madansena, who had been so certain in rejecting a parade of painted portraits, found herself suddenly and thoroughly undone by the prospect of real, breathing men waiting on her word. She dropped her gaze, colour rising in her cheeks, and could produce no answer at all — not a name, not a preference, not even a complaint. The Baital paused here with evident enjoyment, noting to Vikram that a girl who can dismiss a hundred painted suitors with a curled lip will often fall silent entirely once the choice becomes real and irreversible; certainty, he observed, is cheapest when nothing is actually at stake.

The father decides the matter by caste, not love

Seeing his daughter would give him nothing to work with, Hiranyadatt fell back on the only logic he fully trusted — the logic of category and station. Reasoning it through alone, he told himself that the suitor learned in the Shastras must belong to the Brahman order, being a man of scripture; the archer who could kill by sound alone was plainly a Kshatriya, a warrior born; and the weaver of the five-ruby cloth, with his careful little economy of alms and offerings, was a Shudra, a man of humble service. But the fourth suitor — the one who spoke the secret language of birds and beasts — belonged, by Hiranyadatt's reckoning, to his own order, the trading Vaishya caste. And so, without ever once asking what his daughter's heart preferred, the trader settled the entire matter on a technicality of birth, and pressed forward at once with the betrothal to the bird-speaking suitor. The Baital let a beat of silence hang here, as if inviting Vikram to notice how neatly a father's convenience had been dressed up as destiny.

A spring garden, and a stranger who will not be refused

Before the wedding could take place, Madansena went walking one spring evening in her father's garden, the season doing its usual work of making young blood restless. It happened that a young merchant's son named Somdatt, child of the trader Dharmdatt, was passing home through that same garden after a day's pleasure in the forest, and the sight of her stopped him where he stood. He turned at once to his companion, urgent and half-undone already. Brother, he said, if I can win her, my whole life will have been worth living. If I cannot, then everything else I do in this world is wasted breath. It was, the Baital observed drily, the sort of declaration young men make freely and regret specifically, but Somdatt meant every syllable of it in that moment, and meaning cost him nothing yet.

Somdatt seizes her hand and threatens his own death

Restless past all restraint, Somdatt could not simply admire from a distance as a cautious man might have done. He crossed the garden, took Madansena's hand before she could withdraw it, and made his declaration plainly, without shame or preamble: If you will not love me, I will throw my life away on your account. It was a threat dressed as a confession, the oldest blackmail in the world wearing the face of devotion, and the Baital's telling made no secret of which he thought it was. Madansena, for her part, did not swoon or soften. Do not do this, she answered him steadily, pulling back. It would be a sin, and it would leave the guilt of your blood on my own soul, condemning me to misery in this life and whatever comes after it. She refused him, in other words, not from indifference but from a very exact moral accounting — already, in this first exchange, the woman who would tell nothing but the truth for the rest of the tale was showing her method.

A desperate plea, and the beginning of a bargain

Somdatt would not be so easily turned aside. Your beauty has pierced me through, he told her, voice cracking with a young man's total lack of proportion, and the mere thought of losing you has burned away my reason. Love has stripped me of all sense of right and wrong — I no longer know one from the other. But make me a promise, and I will live. It was, the Baital said, exactly the kind of ultimatum that ought to be laughed out of any garden — a man announcing that his own bad judgment is now her responsibility to manage. And yet Madansena did not laugh. Something in his desperation, or perhaps only her own fastidious horror at being the cause of a death, however unearned the blackmail, made her pause and actually consider what promise she might safely give him.

Madansena's lament for a degenerate age

Before answering, Madansena delivered — with the deliberateness of a woman buying herself time to think — a long, mournful reflection on the times she lived in. Truly, she said, the Kali Yug, the iron and degenerate age, had begun; falsehood multiplied everywhere while truth dwindled to nothing; men spoke smoothly while nursing deceit beneath their tongues; religion crumbled, crime flourished, even the earth itself gave less fruit than before. Kings extorted fines from their own people, Brahmans had grown greedy, sons defied their fathers, brothers distrusted brothers, friendship had fled from between friends, masters had lost their sincerity, servants had abandoned service, men had abandoned manliness, and — she added, with what may have been the ghost of a smile — women had abandoned modesty. It was, the Baital told Vikram, a magnificent piece of stalling, a woman cataloguing the collapse of an entire civilization rather than simply say yes or no to a lovesick stranger — and it worked exactly as stalling should, buying her the space to invent something cleverer than either answer.

The oath sworn by the waters of the Ganges

Having thoroughly aired her grievance against the age she was born into, Madansena finally gave Somdatt his answer, and it was not the one he expected. Five days from now, she told him, I am to be married. But if you will only refrain from killing yourself, I promise you this — I will come to you first, before I go to my husband, and only afterward will I remain with him. She swore the oath formally, calling the sacred Ganges itself to witness it, and with that solemn, strange bargain struck, she turned and went home, leaving Somdatt to make of it what he could. He, for his part, went his own way too — the Baital noted that neither of them seemed to grasp, in that garden, just how literally this promise would be kept, or what it would cost each of the men waiting at either end of it.

A lakh of rupees and a wedding without incident

The wedding, when it came, was everything a prosperous trader could stage. Hiranyadatt spent a full lakh of rupees on feasting and gifts for the bridegroom's family, sparing nothing. The bride and groom were anointed together with turmeric in the old fashion, Madansena made to hold the little iron box of eye-paint, her husband a pair of betel-scissors, while through the night before the marriage shrill wedding music never ceased and the couple's limbs were rubbed with fragrant oil. The bridegroom's head was duly shaved, and the procession that carried him to his bride blazed with torches and fireworks enough, the Baital added with dark good humour, that half a dozen unruly boys and troublemaking young men were killed or wounded along the route before it ever reached the house — a detail he clearly relished more than Vikram did. Afterward, at the wedding supper, the food was so excellent that even the notoriously exacting guests sat quiet and satisfied, and for once no family's honour was publicly shredded over the meal.

On her wedding night, Madansena tells her husband everything

With the ceremonies concluded, the husband brought Madansena home, and after some days had passed, his brothers' wives led her by night, as custom required, into his chamber and seated her upon a bed strewn with flowers. But when her new husband reached for her hand, she pulled it back — not coyly, but decisively — and told him, without a single omission, the whole story of the garden, of Somdatt's threat, of her promise, of the oath sworn upon the Ganges. It was, the Baital observed, a startling thing to do on one's wedding night, and Vikram — who had until now said nothing — felt his jaw tighten in anticipation of the young husband's fury. But the fury did not come. Not yet.

The husband's strange, exact answer: a promise is sacred

The bridegroom heard her out in full, and when she finished, he did not rage, weep, or forbid her anything. Instead he answered her the way a scholar answers a point of law. All meaning, he said slowly, is founded upon speech; from speech every understanding proceeds and takes its shape. A man — or a woman — who breaks faith with their own speech breaks faith with everything at once, for there is nothing left underneath it to trust. If you truly mean to keep your word to him, then go and keep it. And so, astonishingly, he gave her his blessing to leave their marriage bed on their wedding night and walk out into the dark to honour a promise made to another man. The Baital let this sit a moment before adding, almost gently for once, that this husband's answer was the most purely principled thing anyone in the whole story would say — right before he became, in the end, the least admirable man in it.

On the midnight road, a thief blocks her path

Freshly permitted, Madansena rose, dressed herself in her full wedding finery and jewels, and went out alone into the night to keep her vow. She had not gone far before a thief spotted her — a woman alone, glittering with ornament, walking the dark road at an hour made for exactly this kind of encounter. He came up to her in high good humour, clearly already counting his profit. Where do you think you're going, he asked her, at midnight, in the dark, dressed like that and loaded with jewels? It was the natural question of a man who has just found easy prey, and the Baital, narrating, made sure Vikram understood the thief expected an easy night's work — a frightened woman, a quick robbery, nothing more complicated than that.

Madansena answers a thief with nothing but the truth

Madansena might have lied, screamed, or begged; instead, true to the promise she had already made to Somdatt and to the pattern the whole tale would follow, she simply told the thief the truth. She was going, she said, to the house of her beloved, under the protection of Kama Deva himself, the god of desire, whose fiery arrows had wounded the hearts of all three worlds — and she told him the entire story exactly as it had happened, hiding nothing. Then she added a bargain of her own devising: Do not take my jewels now. I give you my word — when I return this way, all these ornaments will be yours. The thief considered this a moment, and — reasoning, in his own rough way, that it would be senseless to rob by force what was already promised to him freely — let her pass untouched, and sat himself down by the roadside to wait and think.

The thief's roadside meditation on fate and virtue

Left alone, the thief fell into a long, half-bitter soliloquy that the Baital rendered with unexpected sympathy. It astonished him, he said to himself, that the same power which had sustained him hidden in his mother's womb now seemed to take no interest in him at all now that he was born and trying to make something of his life — he could not tell whether that power was merely asleep, or simply dead to him. Yet he would swallow poison, he told himself, before he would beg any man for money or favour; there were six things, after all, that dragged a man down — friendship with the treacherous, laughing without cause, quarreling with women, serving an unworthy master, riding a donkey, and speaking any tongue but Sanskrit — and five things fate itself writes upon a man at birth: his age, his deeds, his wealth, his learning, and his fame. He had, he decided, just done one good and honest thing by letting the woman go on her word, and a man's fortune rises exactly as long as his virtue does, and fails the moment it falters.

Madansena wakes a startled Somdatt in the dark

Meanwhile Madansena reached the place where Somdatt lay sleeping, unaware that the promise he had extracted from her in a moment of desperate self-pity was about to be honoured to the letter. She woke him suddenly out of his sleep, and he sprang up in genuine alarm, demanding to know what manner of being stood before him — some daughter of the gods, perhaps, or of a saint, or of a serpent-spirit — anything, it seemed, but an ordinary mortal woman arriving at his door in the dead of night. It was a fitting touch, the Baital noted, that the man who had once sworn to die for her now could not even recognize her when she actually appeared, exactly as sworn.

Somdatt learns the vow was kept, and asks the crucial question

I am no spirit, Madansena told him plainly. I am human — Madansena, daughter of the trader Hiranyadatt. Do you not remember taking my hand in that garden, and swearing you would kill yourself unless I promised to come to you first, before I went to my husband? Somdatt, still recovering himself, asked the one question that would decide everything that followed: Have you told your husband all of this, or not? And she answered him exactly as she had answered the thief and would answer everyone else in this story — without a single evasion. I have told him everything, she said, and having understood the whole affair, he himself gave me his permission to come. The Baital paused meaningfully on this exchange, for it is the hinge on which the whole remaining tale, and its final riddle, would turn.

Somdatt, hearing she came with permission, wants her no longer

The answer seemed to drain something out of Somdatt entirely. He fell into a long, mournful speech of his own, comparing the situation before him to pearls without a fitting setting, food without clarified butter, singing without melody — things that exist, technically, but wrong, unnatural, spoiled at the root. In the same way, he said, unclean clothing ruins beauty, bad food undermines strength, a wicked wife wears her husband down to his grave, a disreputable son destroys his family's name, and a woman — whether loving or hating — brings nothing but pain in the end, for a woman never says what is truly in her heart, never speaks what is on her tongue, and never reveals what she is actually doing. Having delivered this bleak little sermon on the unknowability of women, he simply told her to go home; a woman who came to him with her own husband's blessing, he said, was of no further interest to him — with another man's wife, freely given, he wanted nothing at all to do.

The homeward road, and a thief who keeps his word

Madansena rose and turned back the way she had come, and once again the same thief was waiting on the road. Hearing from her own mouth how the whole strange night had actually ended, he was moved to open praise of her — of her honesty, her courage, the sheer unlikelihood of a woman keeping every single promise she had made to every single man in one night — and, exactly as he had sworn, he let her pass a second time entirely unplundered, jewels and all, asking nothing further of her. The Baital observed to Vikram, with the air of a man scoring a point he intended to use later, that of the three men in this story, the thief was the only one whose behaviour toward her never changed at all, from the moment he met her to the moment he let her go for the last time.

She tells her husband everything, and he stops loving her

At last Madansena reached her own house and told her husband the entire matter, exactly as it had unfolded — Somdatt's dismissal, the thief's mercy, every step of the night laid bare precisely as she had promised herself she would always do. But something in her husband had changed since he had so calmly granted her leave to go. He no longer loved her. Neither a king, he told her, with a coldness that had not been in his voice before, nor a minister, nor a wife, nor a man's own hair or nails, look well once they are out of their proper place. The beauty of the kokila bird is its song; of an ugly man, his knowledge; of a devotee, his capacity to forgive; and of a woman — her chastity. It was, the Baital let hang in the air, a strange thing for the very man who had insisted a promise must always be kept to say now — as though keeping her word had cost her the one thing he claimed to value most.

The Baital springs his question on the walking king

Having brought the tale to this cold, unresolved landing, the Baital did not pause for sympathy or reflection. He asked his question exactly as he always did — sudden, needling, timed to catch Vikram off guard in the dark. Of these three men, he said, the husband, the lover, and the thief — whose virtue, tell me, was the greatest? It was, on its face, a simple request for a verdict, the kind any listener might venture without much thought. But Vikram had walked this road with the Baital many times now, and knew perfectly well what such questions cost him — and knew it, and answered anyway, because some part of him could never let an unanswered puzzle pass unremarked, however much wiser silence would have been.

Vikram forgets himself and blurts out an answer

The tale had moved him more than he meant to let show, and before caution could catch up with his tongue, Vikram spoke. The thief's, he said — plainly, immediately, with the flat certainty of a man who has already worked the whole problem out in his head without noticing he was doing it. The Baital, delighted, pounced at once on the opening he had been fishing for all along. And why, he asked, all false innocence, do you say so? It was the same trap it always was, and Vikram, committed now, had no choice left but to walk all the way into it and explain himself in full.

Vikram's full reasoning — the thief owed her nothing, and gave everything

Because, Vikram said, consider each man honestly. The husband, when he saw that his wife had loved another man — however innocently, however purely kept — could no longer feel affection for her; his forgiveness turned out to have limits after all, whatever fine words he used to grant her leave. Somdatt let her go untouched, yes, but only because he feared the king's law and the punishment that would follow if he wronged another man's wife — his restraint cost him nothing and protected only himself. But the thief owed her no such caution. No law bound him to fear for touching her, no king watched him on that dark road, nothing stood between him and her jewels but his own word, freely given twice over. And twice he kept it, gaining nothing by keeping faith and risking nothing by breaking it, which is precisely why his virtue, of the three, was the truest — it was the only one not propped up by fear of consequence. Vikram delivered this whole judgment with the grim satisfaction of a man who believes he has reasoned his way to something true.

The Baital's gleeful, mocking laugh of victory

The moment the last word left Vikram's mouth, the Baital's laughter broke out behind his shoulder — sharp, delighted, utterly without warmth. Hi! Hi! Hi! he cackled, the sound of it curdling through the black trees like something enjoying itself far too much. Here, then, ends my story! There was no surprise in his voice at all, only the pure, spiteful triumph of a creature who has watched the same trick work on the same man yet again and finds it endlessly funny regardless. Vikram's face, had there been light enough to see it, would have shown the exact grim recognition of a man who has, once more, talked his own captive straight out of his grasp.

Slipping the cloth, the Baital vanishes into the night

There was no struggle, no visible movement at all — only, in the space of a breath, the sudden absence of weight from the sling upon Vikram's back. The Baital had slipped out of the wrapping cloth exactly as he always did, the way smoke slips a closed fist, and was gone, flying off through the darkness of the forest with his mocking laughter trailing behind him like a scent. The cloth itself hung there still, knotted, empty, swaying faintly against Vikram's shoulder as though nothing at all had happened to it. Father and son stood together on the black road and looked at one another in silence — Dharma Dhwaj wide-eyed, Vikram's jaw set hard — both of them fully aware, without needing to say it aloud, of exactly how many more times this same small catastrophe was going to repeat itself before the night was done.

A new rule for next time, and a grim retort

Vikram broke the silence first. Son Dharma Dhwaj, he said, the next time that villain of a vampire asks me a question, I give you leave to pinch my arm hard, before I have had any chance to open my mouth and answer him. Otherwise, in plain truth, we will never bring this task to its end. Your word is upon my head, sire, the young prince answered dutifully, though privately he held little hope that any plan would outwit a spirit who had already escaped his father twice over through nothing but cleverness. Vikram did not linger on the empty cloth or curse the dark; he simply turned without another word, retraced the long path back through the forest with his son at his heels, climbed once more into the branches of the distant siras-tree, cut the Baital down a second time from the branch where he again hung suspended, bound him back into the cloth, slung him again across his shoulder, and set off once more toward the sorcerer's fire as though the entire cycle had not just cost him half the night.

Laughing already, the vampire starts a new tale at once

Long before they reached the siras-tree the second time, Vikram could hear the Baital laughing to himself in the dark, loud and unrestrained, as though the joke had only improved with retelling. Surely he laughs at our beards, sire, said Dharma Dhwaj, who — being young — hated above all things to be mocked like a child. Let them laugh that win, Vikram answered fiercely, hating just as much, in his own way, to be mocked like an old fool who could not learn from his own mistakes. Neither complaint slowed the vampire down in the least. No sooner was he settled back into his sling than he lost no time at all in opening a fresh story, his voice already sliding into its familiar, needling rhythm — one puzzle barely closed behind them, and another already beginning before Vikram had so much as caught his breath.