The vampire picks up the thread once more

Vikram trudged on beneath the weight of the corpse slung across his shoulder, and the dry, mocking voice at his ear took up its thread as though it had never paused for breath. There lived, said the Baital, in the great university city of Gaur in Bengal, a Brahman so celebrated that no scholar in the province dared set himself beside him — Vishnu Swami, a man whose command of dead languages, whose mastery of the four sacred Vedas, whose bulging commentaries upon the driest of ancient philosophers had made his name a byword for learning from one end of the country to the other. He was called a sea of excellent qualities, the father and mother of Brahmans, cows, and women alike, the dread of every cutthroat and courtesan in the land, as liberal as the hero Karna, as truthful as the honest king Yudhishtira himself. Vikram said nothing. He had learned, over six long and grisly stories, that the Baital's tales always opened with a shower of praise and closed in a garden full of corpses, and that the wisest course was to let the thing talk itself toward whatever cruelty it was quietly building.

A genius who could not spell his own name

Yet for all his glory, the Baital continued with relish, Vishnu Swami was a curious sort of sage. He could tell you, to a fingerbreadth, how many palms and paces separated the earth from the sun, the moon, and every star in the firmament, and he could recite in strict order every great event that had occurred five or six million years before his own birth — but ask him to spell a common word of his mother tongue, and he floundered like a schoolboy. Ask him where the distant land of the Greeks might be found upon a map, and he could not tell you. He was profoundly ignorant of anything that had happened in his own lifetime, and he had once asked a friend, in perfect seriousness, whether a cat turned loose in the jungle would not, given time enough, grow into a tiger. Vikram's mouth twitched despite himself, though he did not speak. This, the Baital purred, was the sort of head that Vishnu Swami carried upon his shoulders — stuffed to bursting with the stars and the ancients, and empty of the world directly under his nose.

Grimy hands, lank hair, and universal awe

And yet, said the Baital, every soul at the university of Kasi — pandits and raw students alike — looked upon Vishnu Swami's livid cheeks, his lack-lustre eyes, his grimed hands and soiled cotton robes, with something very near to religious dread. He did not bathe often; he did not dress well; he shuffled through the courtyards like a man half-asleep in some argument six centuries old. It mattered nothing. Reputation, once it has hardened around a man like a shell, makes his very slovenliness look like the careless magnificence of genius. Students who could not follow one word in ten of his lectures nodded gravely and told one another afterward that they had witnessed greatness. It was in the shade of this towering, shabby, half-blind eminence that four sons were born to him — and it is these four sons, my prince, said the Baital, turning the full weight of his attention upon Vikram's shoulder, and not their illustrious father, who will shortly earn Gaur's undying gratitude.

Four sons raised on fear instead of love

Vishnu Swami resolved that his sons would be reared according to the strictest and most serious principles known to pious learning, and he made himself, in addition to their father, their unyielding tutor. Before they understood a single word of what they recited, they were made to chant prayers; by the age of four they had committed to memory a small library of hymns and spiritual songs, and were set thereafter to swallow whole the precepts of sacred duty and the fine points of theology, abstract and concrete. Vishnu Swami had studied, in his bulky learned way, all the best treatises upon education, and he applied their lessons with the thoroughness of a man mixing medicine. Obedience, humility, warm attachment, reverence — these were the virtues he meant to plant, and he judged, not unreasonably by the old books, that fear ploughed the ground better than love ever could. So he set about his planting with a very free hand indeed, and the four boys grew up under a discipline that would have curdled the milk of a less devoted household.

Praise in secret, scorn in public, and broken promises

Vishnu Swami's method, the Baital explained with evident enjoyment, was a marvel of calculated cruelty dressed as devotion. He praised his sons only when he thought they could not hear him, and reprehended them loudly and often before the whole household, that they might be schooled in humility. He mocked their looks and dressed them in the coarsest cloth, lest vanity take root. Whenever they looked forward to some small treat, he was punctual in disappointing them, calling it a lesson in self-denial; and when he had given his word of a present, he would as often withdraw it as not, always insisting that he had not broken his promise, only postponed its fulfilment indefinitely, so that discipline might have, as he liked to phrase it, a name and a home in his house. Knowing, as any student of the old books knows, that fear outlasts love in a young mind, he governed chiefly by the rod, the sharp tongue, the threat of hellfire, and the general terror of a world bounded on both sides by bottomless pits.

Dawn to midnight in the house of reading

At six years old the boys were sent to the Chatushpati, the local house of reading, where the teacher called up his classes by turns from dawn onward. They labored until noon and were allowed a bare two hours — half the ordinary allowance — for bathing, eating, sleeping, and worship all together, so that in practice each occupied only a hurried quarter of the time it deserved. At three in the afternoon the lessons resumed, the boys reciting from memory what they had learned and receiving its meaning drop by drop, until twilight brought an hour's pause for worship and a meal. Then came a final return to their books, repeating the day's lesson over and over, until ten at night finally released them to their beds. It was, the Baital observed with dry satisfaction, a schedule that would have broken a grown scholar, let alone four small boys whose only crime so far was having been born to a father determined to manufacture virtue by main force, the way a potter forces shape onto reluctant clay.

No dice, no honey, no talking to girls

Even on their rare days of ease, for their father did not wish to dull sharp minds with unbroken toil, the four young Samditats were bound by a positively comic list of prohibitions. They were to disport themselves with all the gravity and decorum proper to serious young men — no night frolics, no free jests, no light expressions, no pictures scrawled upon the walls. They were forbidden honey, flesh, and any sweet turned sour; forbidden to loiter and gossip with little girls at the village well; forbidden, on any account whatsoever, to wear sandals, to carry an umbrella, or so much as to touch a gaming die, even in play, even out of simple curiosity. And naturally — the Baital could not resist adding — they were forbidden absolutely to steal their neighbours' mangoes, a rule so obviously necessary that one wonders what its author imagined his sons capable of. Vikram, listening, began already to suspect where this catalogue of prohibitions was tending, and found he did not care for the direction.

A world with no history but Brahminical history

As the boys grew older, their studies narrowed further still, funnelled ever more tightly toward the Vedas, until worldly learning was all but expelled from the curriculum, or rather so thoroughly reshaped that it lost all recognisable form and feature. History, in Vishnu Swami's house, became only the Annals of India on Brahminical Principles, with the rival Buddhistic tradition struck out entirely as though it had never been written. Geography shrank to the Lands of the Vedas, every other country on earth being judged unworthy of a schoolboy's notice. Law became nothing but the ancient and half-forgotten Institutes of Manu, revered precisely in proportion to how little anyone still followed them. It was, in short, an education constructed entirely to produce four small, devout, obedient copies of their father — scholars who would know the exact number of paces to the moon and nothing whatsoever of the town in which they lived. Surely, the Baital mused, such a upbringing could only produce sons cut from their father's own cloth.

Vikram's son asks one question too many

And yet, the Baital said, with the particular relish of a storyteller who knows he is about to overturn every expectation he has just built, some contrary goddess must surely have exchanged these four infants in the womb before ever they were born, for they grew up nothing at all like the pattern cut for them. Each, upon reaching the ripe age of twelve, was formally enrolled at the university of Kasi — and without any loss of time whatsoever, the eldest became a gambler, the second a confirmed libertine, the third a thief, and the fourth an outspoken atheist. At this last word King Vikram frowned down at his own son walking beside him, a silent warning against ever emulating the offspring of pious households; and the young prince, catching the look, remarked only that such things ran commonly enough in distinguished Brahman families, and — forgetting himself entirely — turned and asked the Baital directly what, exactly, he meant by the word atheist. Vikram's breath caught. His son had just spoken aloud, unbidden, to the thing riding on his father's shoulder.

The vampire obliges with a lecture on unbelief

It is, answered the Vampire, with evident delight at being asked, a most difficult word to pin down. The sages give it three or four separate meanings: one who denies the gods exist outright; one who grants that they exist but denies they trouble themselves with human affairs; and one who believes both in the gods and in their providence, yet holds that providence is easily brushed aside. Some derive all created things from dead, unthinking matter; others from matter that is alive and active but without will; others again from a nature merely plastic and mechanical. Thus have the Vishnu Swamis of the world tangled the question in confusion upon confusion, and the ordinary run of mortals, understanding none of it, has simply taken to flinging the word atheist at anyone whose opinions differ from their own. But I, said the Baital, being at present a vampire and mercifully free of human notions on the subject, meant only this — that the pious priest's fourth son was uncommonly clever at small distinctions and remarkably careless about first causes, and had thrown in his lot entirely with the philosophical Bauddhas.

Nothing exists but earth, water, fire, and air

Nothing existed, in the fourth son's philosophy, but the five elements — earth, water, fire, air, and the vacuum from which all else in due course proceeded. He called matter an eternal principle, beginningless and endless, in which organisation, intelligence, and design were inherent the way growth is inherent in a tree, needing no separate architect to explain them. He did not believe in soul or spirit, since neither could be found anywhere in the body when one went looking, and he judged mind itself a mere secretion of the brain, reason nothing but instinct grown sophisticated, life only an element of the air acting upon certain fortunate arrangements of matter. Good and evil, he taught, were mostly accidents of geography and calendar, and evil itself was commonly only good wearing an unfamiliar face. Law, to him, was the great creator of all things, and he refused point-blank to imagine a creator of law, since that creator would require another behind it, and that one another still, on and on toward absurdity — a chain he was far too tidy-minded to accept.

Rascally gods and jumbled letters in a bag

When his opponents pressed him with their favourite riddle — how many times must a man jumble a bagful of letters and fling them upon the ground before they fell, by chance alone, into a perfect poem — he answered coolly that the arithmetic was beyond him, but that the man had only to jumble and fling long enough, and eventually the poem must come. He rejected miracles outright, since nature, in his observation, never once suspended her own laws, and he had personally never witnessed anything supernatural in his life. He mocked the great destruction that was to end the world, reasoning that a world with no beginning could hardly be expected to have an end either. He fell upon the gods themselves with open scorn, accusing Yama of kicking his own mother, Indra of pursuing his guide's wife, and Shiva of keeping low company, concluding that no one owed such gods any particular respect. When it thundered terribly he liked to say the rascally gods were dying; when the rains fell too hard, that the villain gods were being needlessly generous. It made him, understandably, no friends among the pious.

Four young men, caught at last, hauled before the Gurus

In time, though, all four sons were surprised too often and too flagrantly in their respective vices to be overlooked any longer, and they were summoned to the dread presence of the university's Gurus for formal reckoning. There are four characters of men in this world, the assembled elders informed them coldly: he who perfectly obeys the sacred commands; he who practises them yet strays into evil; he who does neither good nor evil, and is thereby an offender too, for neglecting what he ought to observe; and he who does nothing whatsoever but evil. You four, they said, belong entirely to the last and lowest category. The brothers stood in a row, the gambler, the libertine, the thief, and the atheist, downcast eyes fixed on the floor as propriety demanded, for even in disgrace a Brahman must not run, though it rain fire. And one by one, the Gurus turned to address each in turn, reciting from memory the precise textbook penalty that ancient law prescribed for his particular species of ruin.

The gambler is sentenced first, and driven out

To the eldest they quoted the old texts on government without softening a word. Cut off the gambler's nose and ears, the manuals advised, hold his name up to public contempt, and drive him from the country as a warning to others, for a man who gambles must lose more often than he wins, and losing, he must either pay and ruin himself or refuse and forfeit his caste entirely; and though his wife and children remain under his roof, do not count them his, for none can say how soon they too will be staked and lost. Thus is the gambler left in perfect solitude, reborn hereafter into hell itself. Thou hast set the worst possible example to others, the Gurus told him flatly; therefore shalt thou exchange this seat of learning for a plain country life, and take thyself from our sight this very hour. The eldest son said nothing in his own defence, for there was, in truth, nothing whatsoever to say, and he was marched from the hall with the whole assembly's cold disapproval following him like a shadow.

The libertine quotes scripture in his own defence

The second son fared no better, though he alone attempted a spirited defence. The wise shun woman, the Gurus reminded him, for she can fascinate a man in the twinkling of an eye, while the foolish, once smitten, forfeit their truthfulness, their reputation, their whole way of life and mode of thought in the pursuit of pleasure — and worse, they drag others down into the same ruin with them, for a wild cat that devours her own young will hardly let a stranger's rat escape unmolested. The young man, entirely unabashed, answered by quoting his own favourite textbook of love back at his accusers, insisting that fortune favours folly and force, and even had the effrontery to advise the elderly professors to brush up their own skill in the gentle wars of romance. This was, predictably, not received in the spirit it was offered. The assembled Gurus, unmoved by scripture turned against itself, drove him from the hall with a chorus of execrations, and the second son departed still defending, at the very threshold, the wisdom of his chosen path.

The thief lectures his judges on the four ways to break a wall

The third son, the thief, received a longer and more technical rebuke, since Hindu law distinguishes with great care between petty larceny, punished by fine, theft on a larger scale, punished by loss of a hand, and open robbery, punished by death. Thou art worse than a woman, the greatest of plunderers, the Gurus told him, for other thieves steal what is worthless while thou stealest the very best, and other thieves work by night while thou hast made bold to work by day. They called him a disgrace who had studied his manual of housebreaking far more diligently than his sacred ritual, and as they thrust him toward the door he could not resist quoting, with a certain professional pride, the four approved methods of entering a house uninvited — picking out the burnt bricks, cutting through the unbaked ones, softening a mud wall with water, or boring patiently through timber with a centre-bit. It was, the Baital remarked drily, a lecture delivered entirely to the wrong audience, and it earned him nothing but a swifter ejection than his brothers had received.

Six hours spent failing to argue down the atheist

But it was upon the fourth son that the Gurus expended their greatest labour, for they spent six mortal hours attempting to refute him by every conceivable method of argument — by inference and by comparison, by scripture and by tradition, by reason and by evidence, historically, philosophically, and philologically, exhausting every weapon in their considerable arsenal. It availed them nothing at all, for as the old saying has it, a man who has lost all shame, who can talk fluently without sense, and who is determined to out-argue his opponent by any means whatever, will never tire and will never be put down. He compared their faith to a bubble upon water, of which one can never truly say that it exists or that it does not; he called their reverence a mirage mistaken for a pool by a thirsty traveller; and when at last their patience gave out entirely, the assembled Pandits fell upon him with their staves and drove him bodily from the hall, still lecturing them, even as he fled, on precisely where their theology had gone wrong.

A father disowns the sons whose disgrace he arranged

The four disgraced brothers returned home to a father whose own righteous indignation, it must be said, had done much to bring the Gurus' judgment down upon them in the first place. He seized the occasion to turn them out into the world entirely, until such time as they could show substantial proof of reform, reasoning aloud that those who waste their youth in ignorance commonly spend their old age consumed by regret and want. And to give the lesson teeth, he cut off their monthly allowance outright. Yet he added one door left ajar — should they travel to the neighbouring university of Jayasthal and there prove themselves something better than a family disgrace, he would instruct their maternal uncle to supply them with food and clothing. The sons wept, pleaded, even threatened self-destruction, but their father remained entirely unmoved, partly from wounded pride at the stain now fixed upon his famous name, and partly, the Baital noted with some relish, because he had grown rather fonder of his purse with each passing year.

Four brothers postpone reform to see a little life first

Foreseeing all too clearly what awaited them under their notoriously penny-pinching uncle's roof at Jayasthal, the four ne'er-do-wells silently agreed among themselves to defer that particular humiliation as long as possible. They resolved first to see a little more of the world, to push their fortunes where they stood, before condemning themselves to the dreary tribulations of reform and a stingy relative's table. It seemed, for a little while, a reasonable enough plan. Surely, they reasoned, a gambler's luck must turn eventually; surely a handsome face and easy charm could still be made to pay their own way; surely a skilled thief need not go hungry in a city full of unguarded houses; surely a keen debater could always find some fresh company willing to be dazzled. They scattered to test these several theories against the world, each entirely confident of his own particular genius, and each, the Baital promised with evident anticipation, about to discover in short order exactly how little that confidence was worth.

The gambler loses everything and flees to his uncle

It was, said the Baital, like squeezing oil from sand. The gambler, having neither capital nor credit to his name, lost a few gold pieces at play almost immediately and found himself utterly unable to pay his debt. For this he was soundly beaten with iron-shod staves by the keeper of the gambling den, and came within a hair's breadth of being sold outright into slavery to cover the loss. Thoroughly disgusted with his chosen profession at last, he sent word to his brothers that they would find him at Jayasthal, and set off, he announced grandly, to study wisdom — a resolution that struck the Baital as considerably easier to declare than to keep. Vikram, listening, reflected privately that a man who gambles away his last coin and calls his subsequent flight a pursuit of wisdom is engaged in a very particular kind of self-deception, one he suspected was about to run in the family. He said nothing aloud, however, mindful of where unguarded speech had already gotten his son that very night.

The libertine finds his charms worthless without coin

A month later it was the libertine's turn to taste disappointment. He could no longer afford even a decently washed coat, let alone the fine new clothes on which his whole strategy of seduction had depended, and he had counted heavily on his handsome face to secure him a comfortable string of elderly conquests. Judge, then, his mortification when every woman in the city — high and low, rich and poor, young and old, plain and lovely alike — took one look at the empty end of his waistcloth thrown carelessly over his shoulder, the unmistakable mark of an empty purse, and swept past him in the street without so much as a glance. The very shopkeepers' wives who had once praised his fine mustachio and his elegant walk now looked straight through him, and the wealthy old patroness who had once kept his feet in the choicest slippers left him quite deliberately to starve. In a state of genuine, if belated, repentance, he too turned his steps toward Jayasthal, to join the brother who had gone before him.

The thief, caught red-handed, escapes his dungeon

The thief, meanwhile, congratulated himself privately on being a cat in climbing, a deer in running, a snake in twisting, a hawk in pouncing, keen as a hare and strong as a lion — every quality, in short, that the old classical authorities prescribe for a truly distinguished practitioner of his trade. He was scrupulous, too, in the proper devotions, never failing to invoke his housebreaking tools before use nor to set aside a due portion of his takings for the gods of plunder. None of it saved him. He was caught outright in a merchant's storeroom and handed over to the magistrate without ceremony, and because he belonged to the priestly caste, for which the law prescribes harsher penalties precisely to shame those who ought to know better, the fine imposed upon him was ruinous. Unable to pay, he languished some while in a dungeon, until at last he contrived his escape, made his parting bow to the god of rascals, stole a blanket from a careless guard on his way out, and set off cursing his old profession all the way to Jayasthal.

The atheist finds no one left to argue with

The fourth brother suffered a subtler humiliation. His whole pleasure in life had lain in after-dinner disputation, in turning the light artillery of his wit against whatever ponderous mass of lore some pious Brahman cared to bring against him — Brahmans who, out of respect for his celebrated father, had never dared press a formal complaint however thoroughly he embarrassed them. In the strange city to which his disgrace had exiled him, however, nobody knew whose son he was, and nobody troubled to invite him anywhere at all. Once he tried his customary trick upon a circle of sages reciting mystical verses beside a tank, greeting their long-windedness with a dozen contemptuous tush-and-pish interjections in as many minutes — and found himself obliged to ply his heels with considerable vigour in flight from their justified fury. Stripped of the one audience that had made his cleverness worth anything, he too abandoned the field and started for Jayasthal with all possible speed, to join the brothers already gathering there in shared disgrace.

Four brothers reunite under a miser's roof

Reunited at last beneath their maternal uncle's roof, the four young men set about, as by one unspoken agreement, attempting to loosen the strings of his notoriously tight purse. They failed signally, as anyone who knew the uncle's reputation might have predicted, and after a series of equally unsuccessful schemes to extract comfort from him by other means, they resolved at last upon a genuinely useful course — to lay in some real stock of facts and knowledge, sufficient to reconcile them with their father and restore them to the comfortable life at Gaur they had once so freely despised, and which now, in their reduced circumstances, brought unaccustomed tears to their eyes. Having settled upon the necessity of study, the four brothers fell to debating exactly what branch of learning might serve them best and fastest. It needed to be something dramatic, something that would astonish the sages of Gaur into forgetting their disgrace entirely. After some deliberation, that particular corner of the preternatural known popularly as white magic found unanimous favour among them.

Choosing a teacher without a single flaw

Having settled on their subject, the brothers chose a Guru with all the exacting care that their faith prescribed for such matters — a man of honourable family and affable demeanour, who was, they satisfied themselves at exhaustive length, not a glutton, not leprous, not blind in one eye nor in both, not unusually short, not troubled by whitlows, asthma, or any other disease, not noisy or overly talkative, without any defect of finger or toe, and — perhaps most rigorously vetted of all — not subject to his own wife. Under this paragon's instruction they threw themselves into their studies with a diligence that had eluded every tutor of their childhood, driven now not by fear of the rod but by the far sharper spur of genuine want and genuine shame. It is a curious feature of young men, the Baital observed, that they will labour joyously at exactly the study their elders never thought to assign them, provided only that it promises to restore their pride rather than merely their virtue.

A globule within a globule, and the secret of life

The science that had lately set all of Jayasthal alight was the discovery of a certain physiologico-philosophico-psychologico-materialist, who, after diving for a few score years into the depths of his own self-consciousness in search of the cause of causes and the original origin of matter, had become convinced that the fundamental form of all organic being was a globule containing another globule within itself. Having reasoned his way to this conviction, he further contrived, by means the Baital declined politely to specify, to produce such a complex globule out of triturated and roasted flint. Picture it, said the Baital: a cross old man sitting among his gallipots and crucibles, calmly creating tiny animalcules, and supplying to the corpses of birds, beasts, and fishes what is vulgarly called life, adding, as he went, all the latest improvements to the ancient business of creation itself. It was precisely this luminous secret, still fresh and controversial, that the four brothers now set themselves to master, with an application that would have astonished every teacher who had ever despaired of them at Kasi.

Two cities of scholars go to war over a globule

The new science, being a novelty, engrossed the whole of the learned world in a positive fever of excitement, and split it neatly down the middle. The wise of Gaur wrote against it with real bitterness: unfortunate human nature, they lamented, wanted no crowning indignity but this — first you argued away the soul's immortality, calling reason itself merely a dog's instinct grown clever, and now, with impious hand, you have torn asunder even life's last frail thread to its divine giver. The wise of Jayasthal answered with equal fervour in the opposite direction: welcome, thrice welcome, this admirable development, they wrote, which assigns to man his proper station in the grand scale of being at last — we have not invented these facts, we have only investigated them, and truth, once real, can only enlighten, never harm. Concerning both learned camps, the Baital remarked to Vikram with evident satisfaction, I need only observe that, exactly like your own Majesty's celebrated Nine Gems of Science, they were in the settled habit of talking loudest about precisely what they understood least.

The four brothers achieve total mastery

In due course, and to their considerable credit, the four young men applied the whole force of their combined talents to mastering every difficulty of the life-giving process, and their industry, for once in their disorderly lives, obtained its full reward. Whatever their failings as gamblers, seducers, thieves, and scoffers, none could deny now that they had become true adepts of this strange and controversial art, each brother excelling at a different stage of the work — one at the ordering of bones, one at the binding of flesh to skeleton, one at the fitting of organs, and the fourth, the erstwhile atheist, at the culminating mystery of the globule itself, which he alone among them had learned to place with a steady and confident hand. Having achieved this mastery, and their pockets and their uncle's patience both being equally exhausted, the four brothers determined at last that the time had come to return home to Gaur, to their father's house, and to prove before all the scholars of that city that their long exile had not been wasted after all.

A dead tiger's bones, found upon the homeward road

As the four brothers approached their native city at last, hearts beating with the mingled dread and hope of the long-absent, gazing with moistened eyes upon its familiar spires and venerable groves, they came upon a low-caste Kanjar trudging the same road, a bundle slung over his shoulder containing the skin and bones of a tiger he had found lying dead somewhere in the jungle. The thief's quick eye fastened on the bundle at once. Let us take these remains with us, he murmured to the gambler, and by their means prove the truth of our science before the sages of Gaur, to the very confounding of their noses. It was, after all, precisely the sort of opportunity their training had prepared them to seize — and old habits, the Baital noted dryly, die a good deal harder than old vices are supposed to. While the libertine, the gambler, and the atheist kept the unsuspecting Kanjar in idle conversation, the thief set quietly to work upon the bundle at his feet.

A single hopping bone sends a stranger fleeing

With his brothers' chatter covering the theft, the thief drew a single shank bone from the bundle and quietly vivified it there upon the roadside, purely as a rehearsal before the grander performance to come. The bone thereupon stood bolt upright of its own accord and began hopping about in so grotesque and unearthly a fashion that the poor Kanjar, catching sight of it out of the corner of his eye, let out a cry of pure terror and fled down the road as though the Baital himself had been breathing on the back of his neck. The four brothers watched him go with considerable satisfaction, laughing at the success of their small trial run, and gathered up the rest of the tiger's remains without further hindrance. It should have been, Vikram thought grimly as he listened, warning enough for any sensible man — that a science capable of frightening a hardened snake-catcher out of his wits with one single reanimated bone might perhaps want rather more caution applied to an entire tiger. But no one involved, the Baital added, was troubling himself just then with caution.

A father's open arms, and a new book of recipes

Vishnu Swami, meanwhile, had lately published a very learned commentary upon the mystical sayings of the sage Lokakshi, and the success of this new book had quite effaced from the Brahman mind any lingering memory of his earlier failure in the raising of his own sons. Riding this fresh wave of renown, he had gone on to append a whole twentieth volume to his celebrated treatise on education, offering recipes, no less, for the Reformation of Prodigals. It was into this atmosphere of restored paternal glory that his four sons now returned, and their learned and reverend father, having heard already from his brother-in-law that the young men had at least qualified themselves to support their own keep, received them with open arms. When they told him of their wish to demonstrate their new science publicly, he threw himself into forwarding their ambitions with real energy, and this despite privately, the Baital noted with a certain relish, entertaining not the slightest belief that any of it could possibly be true.

The reluctant scholars of Gaur agree to attend

The Pandits and Gurus of Gaur were, at first, entirely unwilling to lend their considerable dignity to what struck them as nothing less than open dealings with the devil himself. It was only through the sheer weight of Vishnu Swami's name, pressed home with a father's tireless importunity on his sons' behalf, that they were at last persuaded to attend. And so, upon an appointed day, the whole learned population of the university of Gaur assembled together in a large pleasure-garden where they habitually diverted themselves after hours with ball-tossing, pigeon-tumbling, and kite-flying — every tutor, teacher, professor, prolocutor, pastor, philosopher, mathematician, schoolmaster, pedagogue, institutor, dominie, coach, mentor, lecturer, fellow, and head of house that the city could muster, gathered now beneath the trees to witness whatever the four notorious sons of Vishnu Swami had prepared for them. It was, the Baital observed, a truly magnificent gathering of learning in one place, and very shortly it would be considerably diminished.

A speech so learned that its own author could not follow it

The four young men stepped forward at last, carrying their bundle of bones and their other strange requisites, walking with eyes properly downcast and a slow, shrinking gait, for even now, even here, a Brahman must not be seen to run. They delivered an impromptu oration that their father had composed for them in advance, so densely stuffed with erudition that even Vishnu Swami himself, by his own admission, had never quite managed to follow its full meaning. In its flourishing peroration they announced their intention to prove, by plain ocular demonstration, the truth of a science that their short-sighted rivals at Jayasthal had unfairly derided, but which the broad-minded and ever-inquiring sages of Gaur — so the speech flattered its own audience shamelessly — had rightly welcomed with open arms. Huge words, tangled sentences, and outrageous, wholly undeserved compliments seem to have thoroughly fogged the assembled intellects, who began, rather touchingly, to congratulate themselves on possessing exactly the liberality of mind the speech had just credited to them.

One plain-spoken dean objects, and is laughed into silence

Only one voice among that whole glittering assembly rose against what was being prepared, and he was, tellingly, one of the heads of houses whose plain, vulgarly intelligible Sanskrit and reputation as a practical man had long made him rather an embarrassment to his more ornamental colleagues. His objection was generally scouted before it was even properly heard. The metaphysician Rashik Lall sneered openly to the poet Vaiswata, who passed the same contemptuous look on to the theo-philosopher Vardhaman; the antiquarian Haridatt murmured something to the metaphysician Vasudeva, who answered with a loud, dismissive laugh; while three further sages of great Vedic learning simply opened their eyes wide and stared at the objector in a show of well-rehearsed astonishment. Wounded by this united front of ridicule, the dean said nothing further, rose quietly from his seat, and walked home alone, leaving the garden and its dangerous experiment to men wiser, or at least louder, than himself. Vikram, hearing this, felt a cold and specific dread settle over him, for he had a fair notion by now which of these men the Baital's story would prove to be right.

The bundle is opened before the eager crowd

With the one dissenting voice safely gone, a great crowd pressed close around the four young men and their beaming father as they opened the bundle containing the tiger's remains and began, with visible ceremony, to prepare for their long-rehearsed task. The first of the brothers knelt and spread the bones carefully upon the grass, fitting each one with practised fingers into its proper socket, working outward from the great curved spine to the smallest joint of the paws, not forgetting even the fearsome teeth and the curved ivory tusks. The crowd leaned in, craning past one another's shoulders for a better view, murmuring in a mixture of scholarly scepticism and helpless fascination as the skeleton of the beast took shape, rib by rib and vertebra by vertebra, upon the trampled garden grass before them, while Vishnu Swami stood beaming at the edge of the circle, accepting the compliments of colleagues who, only a season before, would not have dreamed of lending his family's name their countenance.

Elephant muscle bound to tiger bone by a marvellous unguent

The second brother now came forward with his own contribution to the grim assembly. He had procured, from what source the Baital did not trouble to say, the heart and the great muscles of an elephant, and by means of a marvellous unguent of his own devising he set about binding this borrowed strength directly onto the waiting tiger skeleton, working the thick elephantine sinew around each rib and limb until the whole skeleton stood wrapped in muscle far heavier and more powerful than any living tiger had ever carried in its life. The crowd's murmuring quieted into something closer to held breath as the shape on the grass thickened and darkened before their eyes, taking on, rib by binding rib, an unmistakable and faintly monstrous bulk. Even the most confident sages in the front row, Vikram imagined, must have felt some small, unfamiliar prickle of unease at the sight — though pride, once committed this publicly to a position, has a well-known talent for silencing precisely that sort of prickle.

A cat's brain, and a rhinoceros for skin

The third brother stepped in next, drawing from his pouch the brain and the sharp eyes of a large tom-cat, which he fitted with careful hands into the waiting cavity of the tiger's skull, settling them into place as calmly as a man arranging ornaments upon a shelf. Over this whole grim assemblage of borrowed parts — tiger bone, elephant muscle, feline brain — he then stretched and fitted the tough hide of a young rhinoceros, smoothing it down until the shape lying upon the garden grass looked, for the first time, less like a heap of scavenged remains and more like some vast, unnamed beast dozing in the afternoon sun, waiting only for the breath denied to it. The assembled scholars pressed still closer, utterly unable to look away, whispering estimates to one another of just how large and how strong such a creature must prove if the final step of the operation, the mysterious globule itself, truly worked as the young men had promised it would.

The fourth son steps forward with the final mystery

At last it was the turn of the fourth brother, the atheist, who had directed the whole intricate operation from its very first bone and now produced, from some innermost fold of his robe, the strange globule containing another globule within itself — the very secret over which two universities had spent a full season hurling learned insults at one another. The crowd pressed forward as one body, craning their necks, utterly breathless with anticipation, jostling for a clearer view of the moment that would settle, once and for all, whether the wise men of Jayasthal or the wise men of Gaur had been right all along. Not one voice in that entire glittering assembly of tutors, prolocutors, and heads of houses paused to ask the far more urgent question that the departed dean alone had thought to raise — namely, whether it was altogether wise to prove a point of pure philosophy by waking a tiger's appetite in the middle of a crowded garden. The fourth brother knelt, and placed the Principle of Organic Life directly into the waiting body.

The chest heaves, the eyes open, and the beast stands

The effect was immediate and unmistakable. The great inert body upon the grass heaved its chest once, then a second time, and began, unmistakably, to breathe. Its limbs stirred and twitched of their own accord. Its borrowed cat's eyes opened, dull at first, then sharpening swiftly into focus. It gathered its enormous stitched-together legs beneath itself and jumped fully to its feet in one fluid motion no one present had quite expected, shook itself from massive shoulder to tufted tail exactly as any living tiger might after a long sleep, glared slowly around the ring of stunned learned faces pressing close on every side, and began, with terrible deliberation, to gnash its teeth and lick its chops, lashing its ribs meanwhile with a tail grown suddenly, dreadfully alive. For one long, frozen heartbeat, the Baital said, no one in that garden moved or breathed at all — the four brothers included, who had spent so long imagining this triumph and had somehow never quite pictured what a hungry, furious, newly-woken tiger would actually look like, standing directly in front of them.

A roar like thunder, and Vishnu Swami is the first to fall

Then, with a roar like thunder rolling across the sky at the turning of the season, the beast sprang forward exactly as the sages sprang back, and it did not hesitate over whom to choose first. It flung the proud and beaming Vishnu Swami to the ground with one sweep of a foreleg built from an elephant's own muscle, and clawed all four of his sons in the same terrible instant, one great paw sufficient to catch two of them at once. It did not even pause to drink the blood of the men who had built it, so ravenous was its long-fasted hunger, but tore itself away at once and went bounding after the far larger and far more tempting herd of fleeing scholars streaming for the garden gate. Vikram, listening in grim silence, understood now exactly why the Baital had lingered so lovingly over every stage of the beast's construction — each borrowed part, so carefully described, was in fact a separate loaded weapon, and the whole audience had just watched every one of them fire at once.

Eighty-foot bounds, and no possible escape

Jostling and tumbling over one another, stumbling and clutching at the trailing hems of one another's long scholarly robes, the entire learned population of Gaur university rushed in hottest possible haste toward the single narrow garden gate, every man in that whole distinguished company reduced in an instant to the same raw, undignified animal terror. It did them no good whatsoever. The beast, carrying within its tiger's frame the full unnatural strength of an elephant's muscle, covered eighty or ninety feet in a single bound, closing the distance to the fleeing crowd far faster than any living tiger ever could, and cutting off every last hope of escape before the gate was even in proper sight. It had, after all, been built for exactly this — bones for speed and killing instinct, an elephant's muscle for raw unstoppable power, a cat's sharp eyes for the hunt — every improvement its makers had proudly assembled now turned entirely, and with perfect efficiency, against the men who had assembled it.

One hundred and twenty-one scholars lie dead in the grass

Being frightfully hungry after its long unnatural fast, and having been furnished by its own overconfident creators with such admirable implements of destruction, the beast did not cease its bloody work until one hundred and twenty-one learned and highly distinguished Pandits and Gurus lay scattered across the trampled pleasure-garden, chewed, clawed, and in most cases stone dead where they had fallen. Among that terrible tally, the Baital added, with the flat satisfaction of a storyteller reaching his intended point at last, were numbered the celebrated sage Vishnu Swami himself and every one of his four remarkable sons — the gambler, the libertine, the thief, and the atheist alike, united in death exactly as they had been united, moments before, in their proudest and final triumph. The pleasure-garden where scholars had lately tossed balls and flown kites after their studies now lay silent and red in the afternoon light, and not one voice remained among the fallen to explain, even to itself, quite how the celebrated new science had gone so catastrophically, so completely wrong.

The vampire falls silent, then poses his challenge

Having told this story to its grim conclusion, the Baital hung silent upon Vikram's shoulder for a long moment, as though savouring in advance whatever discomfort was still to come. Then, at last, he resumed. Now heed my words well, Raja Vikram, he said, his voice sharpening into that familiar needling edge Vikram had come to dread above almost anything else in this long night's ordeal. I am about to ask thee which of all those learned men, lying dead in that garden, was in truth the most finished fool of the whole company. The answer, mark me, is not hard to find — but I promise thee it will prove exceedingly distasteful to thy pride. Mortify thy vanity swiftly, therefore, and answer without delay, or else I shall be talking and thou shalt be walking through this entire livelong night to precious little purpose. Understand this above all, Vikram: science without understanding is worth nothing at all, and those who lack understanding perish exactly as those poor overreaching brothers perished, reviving a tiger they had not the wit to fear.

Vikram weighs every candidate for the crown of folly

The warrior king walked on in heavy silence, turning the question over with real and growing discomfort, for he suspected already, from long bitter experience of these nightly contests, exactly what shape of trap the Baital had built for him this time. Was it one of the four brothers, so brilliantly trained and so catastrophically applied, each of whom had spent a ruined youth mastering vice only to spend his final talent mastering death itself? Was it the hundred and twenty-one assembled scholars, men learned enough to debate the finest points of cosmogony yet not one of them wise enough to leave when a plain-spoken dean quietly showed them the door? Was it Vishnu Swami himself, the son who had wandered so very far in book-learning and so little distance at all in ordinary sense? Vikram glanced once at his own son walking silently beside him, mindful of the boy's earlier lapse, and felt the full, uncomfortable weight of the question settle upon his own conscience as much as upon the tale he had just heard.

Vikram names the father as the greatest fool of all

At last, in slow and by no means willing accents, Vikram gave his answer. The greatest fool of them all, he said, was the father. His reasoning, once it came, was not hard to follow. Vishnu Swami had raised his sons under a discipline built entirely upon fear and disappointment rather than love, and had reaped exactly the harvest such planting deserves — four sons who fled every value he claimed to prize the instant they were free of his hand. He had disowned them in fury for that very disgrace, cutting off their support without a backward glance, and yet, the moment their new and unproven science promised to restore his own battered reputation rather than genuinely to reform them, he flung his full weight and his famous name behind a public spectacle he did not even privately believe in, ignoring the one sober colleague who tried to warn him. An old man ought to have learned, of all men living, to fear consequences he could not see coming; instead he staked a hundred and twenty other lives, and his own, and his sons', on his own vanity. Is it not said, Vikram finished heavily, that there is no fool like an old fool?

Gramercy, cries the vampire, and declares himself free

Gramercy, cried the Baital at once, bursting into a wild, discordant peal of laughter that rang out sharp and ugly through the night air. I now return to my tree. By this head, he crowed, I never before heard a father so readily condemn a father as thou hast just condemned him. There was open delight in the creature's voice, the particular delight of a hunter watching prey step neatly into a trap it had half suspected was there and walked into anyway, unable to resist the shape of its own cleverness. Vikram felt the familiar cold drop in his stomach even as the last word left his mouth, the instant, unstoppable knowledge that he had spoken aloud after all, that pride in his own judgment had once again proven stronger than his vow of silence, and that the Baital's mockery was not really about Vishnu Swami any longer at all — it was about him.

The bundle goes suddenly, sickeningly light

With those mocking words still hanging in the air, the Baital was gone. There was no lengthy struggle, no visible transformation, nothing so dramatic as a burst of flame or smoke — only the sudden, sickening lightness of the bundle against Vikram's shoulder, the cloth that had held a corpse's dead weight through so many long miles that night now sagging empty and slack, its knotted ends flapping loose and hollow where a body had been only an instant before. Somewhere above the treeline, unseen in the darkness, something passed swiftly back through the night air toward the distant grove and the tall tree from which Vikram had first cut the corpse down that very evening, an eternity of ghastly stories ago. Vikram stood absolutely motionless for a long moment, the empty cloth swaying gently against his shoulder, and said nothing at all, for there was, just then, nothing whatsoever left to say.

A father's rebuke, and a son's quiet promise

It was his son who broke the silence first, and it was toward his son that Vikram's frustration turned. He scolded the boy, though not harshly, reminding him that it was his own unguarded question earlier that night — that idle curiosity about the meaning of the word atheist, tossed out loud to a vampire who wanted nothing better than an excuse to talk — which he, Vikram, had always credited his son with too much sense to commit. He had thought more highly of the boy's acuteness than this, he said, and would never have believed him capable of being caught by so shallow and obvious a trick. Dharma Dhwaj answered not a single word in his own defence, accepting the rebuke exactly as silently as the rule of this whole strange ordeal demanded, but he promised, with quiet sincerity, to be wiser before the night was through. Vikram studied his son's face a moment longer in the darkness, then turned without further comment back the way they had come.

Retracing every silent step back through the dark

There was nothing for it but to begin again, exactly as he had begun every single time before this one. Vikram turned on his heel without another word and set off back along the same dark road he had only just walked, his son falling into step silently beside him, neither of them speaking now, both painfully aware of precisely how costly a single careless word had already proven to be that night. The forest closed back around them exactly as before, the same gnarled roots, the same distant howling of jackals, the same low mist curling between the trees, every landmark of the long walk now demanding to be retraced in the opposite direction before any of tonight's grim work could even properly resume. There was no anger left in Vikram's stride by now, only the flat, grim determination of a man who has done a difficult thing many times already and fully expects to do it many times more before this particular ordeal releases him, whatever the cost to his patience or his pride.

Up the tree once more, to cut him down again

At last the great tree rose up out of the darkness ahead of them exactly as it always did, its heavy branches hung with shadow, and there, swaying gently from a high bough exactly as though he had never left it, hung the corpse once more, silent and waiting. Vikram climbed without a word of complaint, hand over hand up the familiar trunk, drew his blade, and cut the body down from its branch precisely as he had done at the very start of this long night's work, and precisely as he now understood he would go on doing for as many more stories as it took. He caught the falling weight against his shoulder, bound it once more securely into the same length of cloth, tied the same practised knots, and set the whole grim burden back into its accustomed place across his back, the familiar dead weight settling home again as though it had never been anywhere else at all.

Setting off once more, as a new tale already begins

Without another word wasted on the matter, Vikram turned and set off for the third time that night along the dark road toward the distant cremation ground, his silent son once again at his side, the empty forest swallowing the sound of their footsteps exactly as it had swallowed it twice already. He had barely gone a dozen paces beneath the dripping branches when the voice at his ear stirred back to life, dry and amused as ever, entirely unbothered by its own brief flight and its own inevitable return. And, just as before, the Baital held his tongue only a moment longer before he began. There lived once, said the voice, settling in comfortably for the long walk ahead, as though no interruption had occurred at all.