A beauty whose praises had grown tiresome

Across the fair kingdoms won by the Arya from the western highlands, one name traveled faster than any army: Unmadini, daughter of the Brahman Haridas. A hundred poets and pandits had already spent their ink upon her — comparing her face to the full moon, her curls to coiling snakes, her eyes to a startled deer, her voice to the kokila's song drifting from some cool, shadowed brake. It was, Vikram, the kind of praise that costs a poet nothing and teaches a woman nothing about herself; to praise a beauty's beauty is no praise at all, for she has heard it a thousand times already from her own mirror. Unmadini had heard it ten thousand times, from suitors near and far, and had come, slowly and completely, to despise every syllable of it. She wanted a man who could see past her face to something else in her — if there was anything else to be found. Whether such a man existed remained, for now, an open question.

No poetry, or no marriage at all

One day Unmadini went to her father, whom she loved and who loved her without limit, and told him her single condition: her husband would be a man of learning and sense, handsome enough, but one who had never in his life composed her a verse. She wanted no metaphors, no odes comparing her teeth to opal strings — she wanted wit, judgment, and knowledge that could be tested, not flattery that could be rehearsed. Haridas, indulgent father that he was, agreed to hold to her terms, though it multiplied his difficulties a hundredfold, for every eligible young man in the province seemed to fancy himself a poet the moment he glimpsed her behind her curtain. Her friends, watching suitor after suitor turned away, shook their heads and predicted she would grow old alone, or — as they put it none too kindly — end up leading apes in the underworld, the traditional fate reserved for women too particular to marry at all. Unmadini did not care. She held her ground.

Four rivals, one brutal first test

In time, as these things happen, four suitors arrived within the same season, each from a different country, each claiming equal shares of youth, beauty, strength, and understanding — the standard boasts of ambitious young men presenting themselves to a wealthy Brahman's house. Haridas received them courteously, heard their intentions, and set the terms of the contest plainly: they would return the next morning for the first ordeal, a test not of family or fortune but of the mind itself — an open conversation before the household, in which each man would be invited to speak, and by his speech reveal what manner of husband he might make. It was, in its way, a shrewd test, for a man may hide his faults behind a fine coat but rarely behind his own words for long. The four suitors agreed, bowed, and departed to prepare themselves for a trial that none of them yet understood was being watched, and judged, from behind a curtain by the very woman they hoped to win.

The poet who spoke of death and got no bride

Morning came, and the four suitors sat before Haridas and his assembled household while, behind an embroidered curtain, Unmadini listened to every word. The young poet Mahasani rose first, and — being unable to help himself — spoke in verse: foolish is the man who seeks permanence in a world as frail as a plantain stem, he intoned, all that is high must fall, all that is low must perish, and the dead take little comfort in the tears the living shed for them, so let mourners perform the funeral rites and be done with weeping. It was elegant. It was also, from behind the curtain, instantly fatal. What ill-omened creature is this, Unmadini murmured to her attendants, who greets a marriage assembly with talk of corpses and funerals — and worse, who has dared to recite me poetry? There was, the narrator notes dryly, very little chance of success left for that suitor from that moment on, though he had not yet been told so to his face.

A suitor who demanded a wife's obedience

The second suitor rose next, a serious young man steeped in scripture, and made his case in the language of duty. A woman is called virtuous, he said, only when she serves the husband her parents have chosen for her; a wife who neglects that service for fasting or private devotion shortens her husband's life and earns herself a place in the fire hereafter — for a woman's only true portion in this world, and her only heaven in the next, is her husband. It was pious, correct, and utterly unwelcome. The word serve landed on Unmadini's ear like a slammed door; she had spent her whole life resisting exactly this kind of tidy, scripture-sanctioned command, and she was not about to marry a man who opened their courtship by placing a leash on her devotions before the wedding garlands were even woven. She decided, privately and finally, that he was as clever as an elephant — which is to say, not at all — and that she would never willingly look upon him again.

The warrior's boast wins quiet admiration

Third came Gunakar, a young man of martial bearing, and he spoke without apology of what he was. A mother protects her child in infancy, he said, and a father while it grows, but it is the warrior-born who defends his kin at every hour of life without end — such is the way of the world, and such is my nature. I dwell upon the heads of the strong. There was no poetry in it, no scripture, only the blunt pride of a soldier's household, and the assembly — men who understood and respected the sword even when they did not carry one themselves — looked on him with new and genuine respect. Behind her curtain, Unmadini said nothing, but she did not dismiss him outright either, as she had the first two; there was something in his plain, confident bearing that at least did not offend her, even if it did not yet move her. The contest, for the moment, stood between him and one man left to speak.

The suitor who chose silence over cleverness

Last of the four sat Devasharma, who had spent the entire morning simply listening while the others competed to impress. The others assumed his quiet meant he had nothing to offer, that he had been cowed by their eloquence. When his turn finally came, he said only this: silence is better than speech. Pressed further by Haridas to say more, he offered a short catalogue of restraint rather than a display of brilliance — a wise man, he said, does not proclaim his own age, nor a deception worked upon him, nor his wealth, nor its loss, nor the faults of his family, nor his private incantations, nor the tenderness between himself and his wife, nor his medicines, nor his religious observances, nor his charities, nor any reproach against him, nor — most pointedly — his wife's infidelity, should such a thing exist. It was the opposite of everything the others had done: no verse, no scripture, no boast, only the discipline of a man who understood that the tongue, unguarded, ruins more households than it ever builds.

Two suitors dismissed with rosewater and regret

The first trial ended, and Haridas rose to close it with the courtesy his position demanded. The poet Mahasani and the scripture-quoting second suitor were thanked, given betel to chew, their garments touched with scented attar, rosewater sprinkled gently over their bowed heads, and escorted to the door with many kind words and small parting gifts — the traditional, gentle language of rejection among people too well-bred to simply say no. Haridas showed real regret in his manner as he bid them farewell, for he was not a cruel man and took no pleasure in disappointing anyone who had come to his house in good faith. To Gunakar the soldier and Devasharma the quiet Brahman, however, he extended a different invitation: return tomorrow, he said, for there is a second trial yet to come, one that will ask not what you can say, but what you can do. Both young men agreed, each now aware that the true contest had narrowed to the two of them alone.

A flying carriage against power over death

The next morning Gunakar and Devasharma returned and took the seats set out for them, and Haridas put his question plainly: show me, he said, the fruits of your particular gifts, so that I may judge between you. Gunakar spoke first, and there was pride in his voice. I have built, he said, a carriage of four wheels, and within it lies a power that will carry any rider, in a single moment, wherever he wishes to go — no journey, however far, that it cannot cross between one breath and the next. Devasharma, when his turn came, spoke far more quietly, but what he said struck the room into a different kind of silence: I hold such power over the angel of death, he said, that I can raise a corpse and give it life again — and I can teach this same power to my friends, that they too might do it. A flying carriage. Command over death itself. Haridas sat back, and the household waited to see which gift would carry the day.

The vampire pauses to test the king's wit

Here the Baital broke off his tale to address Raja Vikram directly, as was his habit — the small, cruel game he played each time before continuing, hoping to trap the silent king into speech and so break the spell that bound him to this endless walk. Tell me, O warrior king, he said, which of these two young men — the one who commands machines, or the one who commands death — was the fitter husband for the maid? Vikram said nothing. Whether he genuinely could not answer, or whether — more likely — he simply refused to be drawn, determined not to give the vampire the satisfaction of an escape after so many hours of carrying him through the dark, the king kept walking in silence, his jaw set, his son Dharma Dhwaj at his side. The Baital, seeing that his small trap had failed to spring this time, allowed himself only a thin smile in the darkness, and continued his story without further comment.

A silent glance decides everything

Unmadini was brought before the assembly for the household's final judgment, and she kept her eyes lowered and her lips closed, offering not one word to help her father decide. But those watching closely noticed that her gaze, twice, slid sideways — toward Devasharma, and nowhere else. It was answer enough. Haridas, reading his daughter's silence with a parent's practiced eye, quoted the old proverb that pearls are properly strung only with other pearls, and there, before the assembled household, formally betrothed his daughter to the quiet Brahman who had said almost nothing throughout both trials, and who had won her, in the end, by exactly that restraint. It was not the martial glamour of the flying carriage that had moved her, nor the soldier's proud bearing, but something quieter in Devasharma that matched something quiet and exacting in herself. The betrothal was sealed, the family satisfied, and only two disappointed men remained to learn how they would each take the news.

The warrior's fury cools before it can ignite

Gunakar took the news of his rejection with the visible strain of a proud man forcing himself to be gracious. His hand went to his mustache and twisted its ends near enough to his own eyes that they reddened; his fingers found the hilt of his sword and rested there, testing it, as a man tests a threshold before deciding not to cross it. For a moment the whole room felt the tension of a soldier who has just been told, in front of witnesses, that a soft-spoken priest's son has out-competed him for a bride. But Gunakar was, whatever else he was, a man of noble birth and disciplined temper, and after that one dangerous moment his anger passed, unspent, and he said nothing more against the match. It would matter later — more than anyone in that room could have guessed — that he chose restraint here rather than grievance, for fate had not finished with Gunakar and Devasharma, and would soon bind the two rivals together far more tightly than any wedding ever could.

The rejected poet returns, raging

Mahasani took his rejection rather worse. Where Gunakar had swallowed his fury in silence, the poet forced his way back into the assembly uninvited and let it pour out of him in a torrent — quoting proverb after bitter proverb about women being a mine of grief, a poisoned root, the ruin of resolve and virtue alike. From Unmadini his venom turned to her father, whom he denounced as a false Brahman who accepted forbidden gifts of cows and gold and, he sneered, worshipped monkeys rather than gods. And from Haridas his rage swept on to condemn priests and sons of priests generally, landing hardest and most personally on Devasharma by name, whom he accused of every failing a jealous man can invent about a rival who has simply won. The bystanders tried to calm him and only provoked him further; Haridas, a gentler and weaker man than the situation called for, visibly quailed before the poet's raised voice and wild gesturing, which did nothing at all to cool Mahasani's fury.

A curse sworn in front of witnesses

Emboldened by the fear he saw in Haridas's face, Mahasani went further than mere insult. He swore a solemn and terrible oath: whatever betrothals had been made, whatever contracts sealed, unless Unmadini became his wife he would take his own life that very hour — and having died by his own hand, he vowed, he would return as a demon to haunt this house and torment every soul beneath its roof. Gunakar, unimpressed and still smarting from his own rejection, told the poet flatly to go ahead and do it, and be gone wherever such creatures go. Haridas, appalled at the soldier's bluntness in the face of a man threatening suicide, rebuked him for cruelty — but the reproof came too late to matter, for Mahasani, driven now by spite, wounded love, rage, and a kind of perverse heroism all at once, had already made up his mind to see the threat through to its terrible end, whatever anyone in the room now said to stop him.

A hanged poet keeps his terrible promise

Mahasani drew a noose from beneath his robes, rushed from the house before anyone could catch hold of him, and hanged himself from the nearest tree. That alone would have been tragedy enough. But as the midnight gong sounded across the sleeping town, Mahasani rose again — not as the pale ghost of a jilted young man, but as a Rakshasa, a demon grown gigantic and malignant, every trace of the poet burned away by rage and death together. He tore through Haridas's household, terrifying every servant and sleeper inside it, and seized the shrieking Unmadini in his monstrous grip. Before he vanished with her into the night sky, he left one message behind, almost courteous in its cruelty: she could be found, he said, on the topmost peak of the Himalaya, should anyone care enough to climb after her. Haridas woke to find his household in ruins and his only daughter gone, carried off by the very suitor he had turned away with rosewater and polite words only days before.

A father runs to his daughter's rival for help

Haridas did not waste the night in grief alone. He ran, weeping and wringing his hands, straight to the house of Devasharma, and poured out the whole terrible story — the demon, the abduction, the peak of the Himalaya — begging his intended son-in-law to act at once, before it was too late to matter. Devasharma did not hesitate, but neither did he go alone: his first move was to seek out Gunakar, the very rival he had so recently defeated for Unmadini's hand, and ask for his help. It was, on the face of it, an extraordinary request — asking the man he had beaten in love to now risk his life recovering the prize for him. But Gunakar, whatever sting still lingered from being outmatched by what he might privately have called a priestling, granted the request without a moment's hesitation, and the two former rivals became, in that instant, comrades bound to a single desperate purpose: bringing Unmadini home alive.

Rivals in love, allies in a rescue

The magic carriage was made ready at once, and the two young men set out together, calling back to Haridas to take heart, for before the sun set his daughter would be safe in his arms once more. Gunakar spoke the cabalistic words that sent the carriage climbing into open sky, faster than any bird, while Devasharma, seated beside him, prepared the weapon he alone possessed against a demon born of a poet's rage — the sacred Gayatri verse, calling on the divine light of the sun to illuminate understanding, invoked with the sacred syllable Om. As the carriage bore down toward the distant Himalayan peak where the Rakshasa held its captive, the recited hymn did its work: the demon's power broke before the sound of it, and Unmadini, alive and unharmed, was pulled free from the monster's grip and carried swiftly back down out of the mountain cold toward the warm, waiting arms of the father who had never stopped weeping for her.

A wedding splendid enough to break hearts

They brought her home before sunset, exactly as promised, and Haridas wept again — this time from joy, praising the sun aloud for the deliverance the sacred hymn had won. He would take no further chances with fate. Consulting the astrologers for the most auspicious planetary conjunction, he chose the fortunate hour with great care and rubbed turmeric upon his daughter's hands as tradition demanded, sealing at last the marriage that a demon had tried to prevent. The wedding that followed was magnificent — so magnificent, the story goes, that it broke the hearts of two dozen disappointed rivals who had hoped, even at this late hour, that something might yet go wrong. Nothing did. Unmadini became, at last and fully, the wife of the quiet Brahman who had won her not with verse or boasting but with restraint, and for a time it seemed the whole strange, violent courtship had ended exactly as it should — in safety, in celebration, and in peace.

A dangerous road home through wild hills

In time Devasharma asked his father-in-law's leave to return to his own home, bringing his bride with him, and the request was granted gladly. Gunakar, true to the loyalty forged in their rescue of Unmadini, swore he would not leave the couple's side until he had seen them safely settled beneath their own roof. Their road, unfortunately, ran straight across the wild summits of the Vindhya hills, where danger gathered as thick as shells upon a shore. Jagged precipices dropped away beneath paths barely wide enough for a single traveler; torrents roared black and furious through stone channels that threatened to sweep away anyone who tried to cross them; the jungle swallowed the trail entire in places, dark and tangled as the valley of death itself. Thunderclouds licked the earth with fire and shook the crags with their voices. The sun, at its worst hours, grew hot enough to strike birds dead from the sky. And always, at the edges of hearing, came the trumpeting of wild elephants, the tiger's roar, the hyena's foul laugh, and the yipping of wild dogs on the trail of prey.

Protected through peril, until a dream comes

For all its terrors, the little party crossed the Vindhya range unharmed, sustained — the storyteller insists — by the favor of the five-armed god of love himself, watching over a bride and the two men sworn to protect her. They had very nearly reached the open plains at the southern foot of the hills, safety almost within sight, when one night Unmadini woke shaking from a vision that would not leave her. She had dreamed of wading through a sluggish, muddy pool that darkened and curdled with every step she took into it, carrying in her arms something like a sick child, convulsing and wailing against her. And the cry had not been hers alone to bear — other children answered it from the water's edge and the pond's thick surface, some bloated, some reduced to bare skeletons, all of them somehow crying out at her, as though she herself were the cause of every one of their sufferings, and no effort of hers could quiet a single one of them.

A husband reads doom into his wife's dream

Unmadini told her husband everything, every detail of the muddy water and the weeping children, and Devasharma did not try to comfort her with easy reassurance. After a long pause, he told her plainly that the dream meant a terrible calamity was coming for them all. Then, without further explanation, he drew from his travelling wallet a skein of ordinary thread and divided it into three equal parts, one for himself, one for Gunakar, one for his wife, explaining that any grievous wound, wrapped in this thread, would close and heal instantly. That done, he taught both his wife and his friend something far graver still — the Mantra, the sacred, secret formula by which a dead man's life can be called back into his body even after his soul has already taken its place among the stars. He would not repeat its words for the Raja now, the Baital noted, but its ending was known to all: the three holy syllables, Bhuh, Bhuvah, Svar. Vikram, hearing this, felt his hope for the travelers already beginning to sink.

Wild archers block the road to the plains

That very evening, as they emerged at last from the hills onto open plain, disaster arrived exactly as the dream had promised. A small, wiry, dark-skinned Kirata — one of the fierce hill tribes who haunted that border country — stepped into their path with bow drawn, gesturing with sharp, urgent motions that they must halt and lay down every weapon they carried. When the travelers pressed forward instead of obeying, the tribesman's shrill, chattering voice rose in fury, his restless red eyes blazing, his weapon whirling furiously above his head as a signal to his hidden kinsmen. And from the rocks and thickets crowding both sides of the narrow path, a sudden storm of arrows fell upon the three travelers all at once — dozens of hidden bows loosing together, the ambush sprung in a single coordinated instant that gave Devasharma and Gunakar no time at all to do anything but draw their own weapons and brace for what was already, unmistakably, upon them.

The soldier falls beneath swarming numbers

Gunakar met the attack the only way he knew how to meet anything — head-on, sword in hand, his strong arm cutting down some sixty of the tribesmen before the fight had even properly begun. But the Kiratas kept coming, wave after wave, like angry hornets swarming the man who had already destroyed their nest, and no single arm, however skilled, however tireless, can cut down an endless enemy forever. Eventually the numbers told. Gunakar, the flying-carriage-builder, the proud warrior who had once boasted he dwelt upon the heads of the strong, was overwhelmed at last and driven down to the earth beneath the weight of his attackers. It was the same fierce courage that had once helped tear Unmadini free from a demon's grip in the Himalayan snows, spent now on a nameless hillside against enemies with no grievance beyond plunder — and for all his strength, for all his skill, it was not, in the end, going to be enough to save either himself or the friend still fighting beside him.

Devasharma falls defending a fallen friend

Devasharma had spent the opening moments of the ambush not fighting but hiding — sweeping his beautiful wife into the hollow of a nearby tree, out of the arrows' reach, before turning back to the battle he had just abandoned her to watch from hiding. He found Gunakar already down. Rather than flee with what chance remained him, he planted himself over his friend's body and fought on alone, buying time that could no longer be spent on anything but a slower death. The Kiratas closed around him as they had closed around Gunakar, and in time — not very much time — he too was thrown to the ground, overpowered by sheer weight of numbers no single blade could hold back forever. The tribesmen finished what the arrows had started: drawing their knives, they cut the heads from both fallen men, stripped every ornament from their bodies as plunder, and withdrew back into the hills, leaving the woman they had not troubled to search for — hidden and unharmed in her tree — for whatever luck that mercy was worth to her now.

Silence falls, and a wife finds the dead

Unmadini had crouched in the hollow of that tree through the entire massacre, more dead than alive herself with terror, unable to see clearly what was happening to the two men who had crossed a demon-haunted mountain range to keep her safe. When the shrieking and clashing finally gave way to silence, she forced herself to creep out and look. What she found broke whatever composure terror had left her: her husband and his dearest friend lying motionless on the trampled ground, their heads severed and lying some distance from their bodies, the evening already darkening around the whole ruined scene. She sat down in the dirt beside them and wept — not the polite, ornamental grief of a poet's verse, but the raw, helpless weeping of a woman who has just watched everything her wedding had promised her collapse into two headless corpses on a hillside, with night coming on and no one left alive to tell her what to do next.

A desperate remedy, applied in the dark

Then, through her grief, Unmadini remembered what her husband had taught her only that very morning — as if some part of him had known, even then, that she would need it before the day was out. She drew the length of thread from where she had kept it hidden against her body and set to work, drawing each severed head back to its rightful body and binding thread around each neck as she had been shown. But the evening light was failing fast, her hands were shaking, and grief and terror together clouded a mind trying to perform, by touch and half-darkness, a task that demanded steady care and clear sight. In her confusion she made a single, catastrophic mistake: she fitted each head to the wrong trunk, Devasharma's head bound to Gunakar's body and Gunakar's head bound to Devasharma's, without the faintest idea that she had swapped them. Satisfied that she had done all she could, she sat back, recited her prayers, and spoke aloud the life-giving incantation her husband had taught her that very morning.

The dead wake, and something is wrong

The Mantra worked exactly as promised. In an instant both men were alive again — eyes opening, chests rising, limbs shaking off the stiffness of death as each sat up and began testing his own body, hands running over arms and legs as if to confirm that everything was, in fact, still attached and functioning. But something was very plainly not right, and both men seemed to sense it before either could name it. Each pressed his palms to his own forehead, looked down at himself, and rose unsteadily to his feet, staring at his own hands and legs with the confused, mounting alarm of a man who does not quite recognize what he is looking at. They examined the scraps of clothing the tribesmen had left them, and then — slowly, warily — each began to study the other, two faces frowning at two bodies, neither man yet able to say aloud the terrible thing his own eyes were beginning to suspect about what had just happened to them both.

A wife embraces the wrong man, twice

Unmadini, watching all this, assumed the men's dazed confusion was simply the natural aftermath of having survived decapitation and resurrection in the same terrible evening — who would not stagger and stare after such an ordeal? She stood before them for a moment, then rushed with a cry of pure joy into the arms of the one she took, by every outward sign, to be her own husband. He recoiled from her at once, telling her flatly that she was mistaken. Blushing furiously despite everything else churning inside her, she turned instead to the second man, certain now that she had simply approached the wrong one first, and threw her arms around his neck instead. He too pulled back from her embrace, just as firmly as the first. And there, standing between two men who had each just refused to be recognized as her husband, a horrible understanding finally broke over Unmadini: she had not misjudged which man was which. She had mixed the heads themselves, and there was no way now to know, by looking, which body belonged to which name.

This is thy wife! No, she is thine!

What followed was as absurd as it was anguished. This is thy wife, cried the head that had once belonged to Devasharma, now fixed atop Gunakar's soldierly frame. No, she is thy wife, retorted the head that had once belonged to Gunakar, now perched above the Brahman's slighter body. Then she is my wife, insisted the first compound creature. By no means — she is my wife, shouted the second. What, then, am I? demanded Devasharma's-head-on-Gunakar's-body. What do you think I am? shot back Gunakar's-head-on-Devasharma's-body, answering one impossible question with another. Unmadini shall be mine, declared the head. You lie — she shall be mine, bellowed the body beneath it. Holy Yama, hear this villain, both men cried out at precisely the same instant, each one utterly convinced of his own claim and utterly unable to explain, even to himself, exactly what he now was. Unmadini stood between them in the gathering dark, wife to both, and to neither, while the two men who had crossed mountains and fought demons for her now turned that same fury on each other.

The vampire poses his cruelest riddle yet

Having brought his tale to this grotesque impasse, the Baital could not resist his usual closing needle. Even great Brahma the creator, he said, could not settle such a quarrel except by beheading the pair a second time and setting each head back where it truly belonged — and I am quite certain, O Raja Vikram, that your wits are no match for a puzzle that has stumped a god. Still, he pressed on, since you insist on carrying me through this cremation ground rather than simply admitting defeat, answer me this: of these two men — one wearing Devasharma's head atop Gunakar's frame, the other wearing Gunakar's head atop Devasharma's — which is the true and rightful husband of the beautiful Unmadini? It is even said among us Baitals, he added with relish, that when this same pair of half-men appeared eventually before Yama, the Just King himself, the confusion grew so absolute that Yama bit his own finger in exasperated bewilderment, unable to judge a case with two heads arguing two different lifetimes of sin beneath two borrowed bodies.

A son's laughter, a father's stern rebuke

Young Prince Dharma Dhwaj, walking at his father's side through the dark, could not hold back his laughter at the sheer absurdity of two men squabbling over which body owned which head. Vikram, however, took his son's amusement personally, as fathers are prone to do, certain — as single-minded fathers so often are — that the boy meant the laughter as some sly mockery of him rather than simple delight at a ridiculous image. He turned on the prince with real severity, reminding him of the old saying that laughter without cause lowers a man in the estimation of his fellows, and adding, for good measure, the familiar warning that a loud laugh is the surest sign of an empty head. Having thoroughly chastened his son, and having, in the process, committed himself past the point of easy retreat, Vikram drew himself up with evident self-importance and began, at last, to deliver the verdict the vampire had been baiting him toward the entire journey. It is said in the Shastras, he announced, gravely, and prepared to explain.

The king rules: the head is the noblest part

Vikram delivered his judgment without hesitation, weighing it as carefully as any verdict he had ever passed from his own throne. Just as the river Ganga is honored above all other rivers, he declared, and the great mountain Sumeru stands as monarch among all mountains, and the wish-granting tree of paradise reigns as king among all trees, so too the head stands above every other limb of the human body — for it is the head, and the head alone, that houses the reasoning mind, the memory of who a man has been, and the will that gives his actions their direction and meaning. The hands may labor and the legs may carry a man from place to place, but they do so only in service to what the head decides; strip a man of his head and what remains, however strong, is no longer a person at all, only an instrument waiting for direction it can no longer receive. By this same reasoning, Vikram concluded, a wife belongs not to whichever trunk happens to carry her husband's name, but to whichever man's head — his true seat of self — claims the highest and most rightful position. The wife, therefore, belonged to the body wearing Devasharma's head.

The demon mocks the king's borrowed wisdom

The Baital burst into delighted, scornful laughter the moment the words left Vikram's mouth. Your majesty need hardly parade such learning at me, he sneered — no doubt some court poet, one of your precious Nine Gems of Science, fed you that little speech, men who know a great deal more about their own verses than they will ever know about scripture. And having landed that blow, the vampire pressed further, mocking not just Vikram's answer but the whole tradition of argument behind it: next, he supposed, the king would start defending the Digambara philosophers who insist the soul is a small, dense, localized thing exactly the size of the body it inhabits, or side with clever Jaimini, who publicly writes that the brain merely serves an immortal soul but privately believes the brain simply is the soul, nothing more — a tidy little doctrine, the demon added acidly, for any Brahman to be caught holding. You might as well agree with me outright, he said, that the soul lives in a vein of the breast, or the pit of the stomach, or that reason keeps its office in the heart while the brain merely rents space nearby.

The vampire names his own heretical verdict

Having thoroughly mocked the reasoning behind Vikram's answer, the Baital delivered his own contrary opinion with evident relish, precisely to spite the king who had finally spoken. In my judgment, he announced, against both the Shastras and against Raja Vikram, the beautiful Unmadini belongs not to the head at all, but to the body. For it is the body, he insisted, that carries the immortal soul, tucked away safely in the pit of the stomach, while the head is nothing more than a box of bone, thicker in some men than others, stuffed with brains no finer in substance or wisdom than those found in the skull of any ordinary calf. It was exactly the kind of provocation the demon most enjoyed — not merely disagreeing with the king, but disagreeing in a way calculated to sound as grotesque and undignified as possible, reducing the seat of human reason to butcher's offal, and doing it, moreover, immediately after Vikram had just spent real effort constructing his own careful, dignified argument to the contrary.

Villain, cries the king, defending the soul's true seat

Vikram, stung, refused to let the insult stand unanswered. Villain, he snapped back at the grinning demon on his shoulder, does the soul — the conscious, thinking life within a man — not enter the body precisely through the sagittal suture of the skull, and take up its residence in the brain, from which vantage point, through that same opening, it contemplates the perfections of the divine? It was the argument of a man who had spent years absorbing the reasoning of priests and scholars, delivered now with genuine heat rather than mere recitation, for the vampire's mockery had gotten under the warrior-king's skin in a way that simple silence never had. For once, the two of them stood locked in open argument rather than the vampire's usual one-sided taunting — Vikram defending the dignity of reason and the head that housed it, the Baital cheerfully insisting that the body and its buried soul were what truly mattered. Neither man showed any sign of yielding the point to the other.

Mid-argument, the vampire changes the subject entirely

And then, exactly as the debate reached its sharpest pitch, the Baital broke off with theatrical suddenness, as though the whole argument had simply bored him the moment it stopped being useful. I must, however, bid you farewell for the moment, O warrior king, he announced grandly, addressing Vikram by a title of empire the king had not yet actually earned — a small, knowing flourish of the demon's own foresight, dropped in as if by accident. I feel, he continued, a sudden and quite ardent desire to change this cramped position of mine for one rather more natural to me. There was no further explanation offered, no warning of what was about to happen — only that same maddening, gleeful courtesy the Baital always wrapped around his cruelest tricks, delivered here with the unmistakable satisfaction of a creature who has just spent an entire conversation baiting a king into an argument for the sole pleasure of vanishing the instant that argument grew interesting.

The cloth goes light and empty on his shoulder

Vikram understood, half a second too late, exactly what had just happened. In answering the riddle at all — in letting himself be provoked into full debate over heads and souls and calves' brains — he had already committed the one act that always cost him everything: he had spoken, and speaking broke whatever fragile hold he had kept on his captive. There was no dramatic struggle, no visible departure. The Baital simply slipped from the wrapping cloth slung across the king's shoulder the way water slips from between closed fingers — there, and then simply not there — and was gone back toward his tree faster than Vikram's hand could close on empty air. The king felt the change before he even looked down: the sack that had held a demon's dead weight for so many miles now hung slack and weightless against his side, swinging gently with each step, holding nothing at all. Above him, somewhere in the dark, he could still hear, fading, that same low, satisfied laughter.

Without a word, the king turns back

Vikram stood perfectly still for a moment in the darkness, the empty cloth hanging from his shoulder, his son Dharma Dhwaj watching him carefully and, this time, wisely saying nothing at all. There was no cursing, no outburst, nothing in his bearing that betrayed the sheer scale of what had just been lost after so many hours of walking, carrying, listening, answering. He simply turned, wordlessly, and began retracing the long path back the way he had come — back across the ruined ground, back past the landmarks he had only just left behind, his son falling into step silently beside him. It was the same grim, wordless discipline that had carried him through every one of the vampire's previous escapes: no despair, no debate with himself about whether the effort was worth repeating, only the flat, immovable resolve of a man who had made a vow to the sorcerer Shanta-Shil and intended to see it through no matter how many times a demon's riddles forced him to start again from nothing.

Up the tree once more, blade in hand

The tree was exactly where he had left it, and so, as always, was the Baital, hanging once again from the very branch from which Vikram had first cut him down. Without comment, without so much as a sigh of frustration, Vikram climbed, cut the vampire loose a second time, and wrapped him back into the sack with the same brisk, practiced efficiency of a man performing a task he has already resigned himself to repeating as many times as necessary. There was a kind of grim comedy in it, though nothing in the king's stony expression suggested he found any humor there himself — the great Vikramaditya, warrior and sovereign, reduced by a talking corpse's riddles to climbing the same tree over and over in the dead of night, each time further from finishing the sorcerer's errand than the last attempt had promised. He slung the sack back over his shoulder, felt its familiar dead weight settle once more against his side, and turned without a word to begin the long walk back toward the cremation ground for what felt, by now, like the hundredth time.

Before ten paces, a new tale begins

Vikram had barely found his stride again, the empty road stretching ahead of him under a sky already thinning toward dawn, when the voice at his shoulder started up once more, as if the whole elaborate escape had been nothing more than the vampire clearing his throat before continuing. My left eyelid flutters, the Baital announced with theatrical gloom, my heart throbs, my sight grows dim — surely this is how the end begins. It is only as the god Vidhata wrote long ago upon my forehead; how could it be otherwise? And yet, he continued, brightening with the same perverse relish he brought to every fresh disaster, listen well, mighty Raja, for I have a true story to tell you, and may Saraswati herself sit upon my tongue as I tell it. Vikram said nothing, only walked on into the dark with his son beside him and the vampire's dead weight once again settled against his shoulder, bracing himself, without complaint, for whatever the Baital's tenth story was about to demand of him.