Vikram trudges on; the corpse begins to talk again

King Vikram walked in grim silence beneath the darkening trees, the shrouded weight of the vampire lashed across his shoulder, his small son padding along at his side without a word of complaint. Neither the ache in the king's arms nor the many failures behind him had loosened his jaw yet, and he meant to keep it that way — for he had learned, again and again, how dearly a single answer could cost him. It was the thing slung on his back that broke the hush first. A dry, papery chuckle rattled out of the bundle, and the Baital's voice, amused and unhurried, announced that since the king was so fond of long walks in the dark, he might as well be given something to think about along the way. And so, without waiting for leave, the vampire began once more: in the Gaur country, he said, there stood a city called Varddhman, and its king was named Gunshekhar — a proud sovereign who, in time, would come to lean rather too heavily on the counsel of one clever, soft-spoken minister.

A Jain minister wins the king's whole heart

That minister's name was Abhaichand, and he served King Gunshekhar as Diwan, the trusted first voice at court. Abhaichand was of the Jain faith, and he was patient in the way that only truly persuasive men are patient — he did not argue with his king so much as he simply kept talking, day after day, council after council, until the king's own convictions had quietly become indistinguishable from his minister's. Gunshekhar was not a foolish man, nor a cruel one; he wanted, sincerely, to rule well and to die having done some good in the world, and Abhaichand knew exactly how to make that wanting into an opening. Little by little the old gods of the court receded, and a new and stricter creed crept into their place. By the time anyone at court might have thought to object, the king had already come, heart and mind, into the Jain faith — and whatever Abhaichand counselled next, the king was ready to do without argument.

The minister preaches the sermon of the sacred cow

One day Abhaichand came before the king and spoke at length of the true nature of the world. Whoever takes another creature's life, he said, is condemned to be taken in turn, birth after birth, dying and returning, dying and returning, without end, and so it was proper for any soul fortunate enough to hold a human life to devote it to mercy rather than to slaughter. He bid the king look higher than even Brahma, Vishnu, and Mahadeva, who in their myths were still swayed by love, wrath, desire, and pain — far above them, he said, stood the humble Cow, free of passion, free of anger, free of drunkenness and covetousness, asking nothing and giving milk and comfort to the whole world in return. It was the duty of the righteous, he pressed, to guard the life of every creature without exception, from the towering elephant down to the smallest ant, and those who fattened themselves on the flesh of others would return to this world maimed, limping, blind, or hunchbacked for their appetite. The king listened, and believed every word.

Pleasure itself is outlawed across the kingdom

Won over entirely, King Gunshekhar turned his minister's sermon into law. Heralds went out through Varddhman proclaiming, in the king's name, that the worship of Shiva and of Vishnu was henceforth forbidden, and with it the old pious gifts that had once pleased the gods and the poor alike — gifts of cows, gifts of land, gifts of rice balls offered to the ancestors. Gaming was banned, and the drinking of spirits was banned, and even so small and private a mourning rite as casting a departed one's bones into the sacred Ganges was placed under the king's ban. Whoever was caught at any of these old and ordinary acts of Hindu life would have his goods confiscated by the crown, and be punished, and be driven from the city in disgrace. It was, on its face, a kingdom built entirely on mercy — and it was also, quietly, a kingdom where a man could no longer weep for his father in the way his father had taught him, nor pour a libation, nor throw dice with his friends of an evening, without becoming a criminal of the state.

The old faiths wither under the new order

Under this new and rigorous rule, the whole religious life of Varddhman was slowly starved out. Brahmans found no one left who would receive them. The wandering Jogis, who had once been feared and courted for their power over the elements, went unfed and unheeded. The Janganis with their sacred emblems, the begging Sevras, the ash-smeared Sannyasis who carried the staff of Shiva, the ordinary mendicants who had for generations lived on the alms of the pious — all of them found the city's doors shut against them, for no man dared be seen giving to a faith the crown had set its face against. It was not that the people had stopped believing, exactly; it was that belief itself had become dangerous, and dangerous things are practiced only in secret, if at all. And so the city carried on for years in this fashion, outwardly serene and bloodless and mild, every old rite gone quiet, every temple bell a little more silent than the year before — until the day death came, at last, even for a king who had banned so much of it.

The old king dies; his son claims the throne

In the fullness of time, as comes to every man however great, Gunshekhar passed into the power of Death, and the throne of Varddhman stood empty. It did not stand empty for long. His son, Dharmadhwaj, came forward and took his seat upon the royal carpet, and the city that had lived so long under his father's severe and bloodless rule now waited to see what manner of king this new prince would prove to be. He was young, and he had watched his father's reign from close enough to have formed his own sharp opinions of it — opinions he had wisely kept to himself while the old king lived. Now the carpet was his, and the guarded silence of a prince gave way at once to the plain will of a king. Before he had even settled fully into his new authority, Dharmadhwaj had already begun looking for the one man he held most responsible for the strange, joyless shape his father's kingdom had taken — the soft-voiced minister who had talked an entire city out of its old and ordinary pleasures.

The disgraced minister is paraded through the streets

Dharmadhwaj's first great act as king was public, and it was merciless. He ordered Abhaichand seized, and had the old minister's head shaved bare but for seven mocking locks of hair left standing, and his face blackened with soot so that no one passing could mistake his shame for anything else. Then he had him set backward upon an ass, and with drums beaten loudly before him to draw every eye in Varddhman, he was led the whole long way around the city — past the temples he had closed, past the gaming houses he had shuttered, past the ghats where the Ganges had been forbidden to receive its dead — so that everyone who had lived under his rule of denial might watch his fall. When the circuit was complete, Dharmadhwaj drove him from the kingdom entirely, and washed his hands of him. From that day the new king ruled alone, answerable to no minister's sermons, and the ashes of his father's reforms began at once to be swept away.

Old pleasures return to a grateful city

With Abhaichand gone, King Dharmadhwaj set about undoing his father's long austerity. The old worship was permitted again, and the old gifts, and the old griefs were once more allowed their proper rites upon the sacred river. Dice rattled openly in the gaming houses once more, and wine was poured without fear of the confiscator's eye, and the wandering Jogis and Sannyasis and humble mendicants found the city's doors opening to them again as though they had never been shut. Whatever quiet suffering the ordinary people of Varddhman had borne under the Jain minister's rule, they bore it no longer, and the city seemed almost to exhale as its old, familiar, unpunished pleasures came flooding back into every street and household. Dharmadhwaj governed after this fashion, free of anxiety and free of any minister's sermons, for a good long while, and the memory of his father's strange and joyless reign began to fade into the kind of story old men tell young ones — until, that is, an ordinary stroll one spring afternoon led the young king into an affair stranger than anything his father's ministers had ever preached.

A spring walk among the lotus tanks

It happened in the season of spring, when the air in Varddhman had turned soft and the gardens had come fully into bloom, that King Dharmadhwaj took his three queens with him for a stroll through the palace grounds. They came at length to a great tank, its still water crowded with lotuses just opening to the light, and the king, struck by their beauty, could not resist them. He drew off his royal robes there on the bank and went down into the cool water himself, wading out among the blossoms while his queens waited above on the grass, laughing and calling encouragement to him from the shade. He was, in that unguarded moment, nothing more than a young husband delighted by a garden and by the company of the women he loved — with no notion at all that before the sun set that same evening, this same idle pleasure would set before him one of the strangest riddles of delicacy any king had ever been asked to judge.

A falling lotus breaks a queen's foot

Wading back to the bank with a single perfect lotus plucked from the water, the king climbed out and turned to present it, as a small gallant gesture, into the hands of one of his queens. But the wet stem slipped between his fingers before she could take it, and the flower — light as breath, soft-petalled, weighing scarcely anything at all — fell the short distance to the ground and merely brushed against her foot. It should have meant nothing. Instead, the queen cried out, and where the lotus had touched her, the bone beneath had broken clean, as though she had been struck with an iron rod rather than grazed by a flower. The king, badly shaken, scrambled up out of the tank without pausing to dress properly, and knelt beside her at once, calling for physicians and binding the injured foot with his own hands, murmuring reassurance he did not entirely feel himself. He had meant only to honor her with a small blossom. Instead he had learned, in the space of one heartbeat, just how little it took to shatter her.

Moonlight alone raises blisters on a queen

Night settled over the garden while the first queen was still being tended, and the moon rose full and bright above the palace, silvering the lotus tank and the paths where the royal party lingered. It was, by every account, a gentle light — the kind poets praise for its coolness, the kind lovers are said to walk beneath without harm. Yet as its rays fell across the bare skin of the second queen, blisters rose upon her almost as one watched, as though she had been standing too long beneath a noonday sun rather than beneath the mild and silvery moon. There was no flame near her, no heat to blame, nothing but moonlight itself touching her skin — and still it marked her as cruelly as fire might have marked a lesser woman. The king, already unsettled by the accident at the tank, now found himself staring at his second queen in something closer to awe than concern, beginning to wonder just what manner of women he had married, and what stranger proof of their fragility the night still had in store for him.

A distant pestle strikes the third queen down

The night was not yet finished with its wonders. As the royal party still lingered over the second queen's strange blisters, a small and ordinary sound drifted to them from far off — nothing more than the steady thud of a wooden pestle, somewhere in a distant householder's home, grinding grain for the next day's bread, the most unremarkable noise in the whole kingdom. No one else in the garden so much as turned their head toward it. But the third queen went rigid where she stood, pressed her hands to her temples, cried out once at a sudden and violent pain splitting through her skull, and fainted dead away into the arms of her attendants before the king could reach her. She had not been touched. She had not even been near the sound, only within hearing of its faint, ordinary echo. The king, now thoroughly shaken, had three queens laid up before midnight from nothing more than a flower, a moonbeam, and a pestle's distant knock — and no way yet of knowing which of the three misfortunes had truly proven the deepest.

The Baital breaks off to challenge Vikram himself

Here the Baital let the tale of Varddhman fall silent, and his voice changed — no longer the storyteller idling through a history, but the sly and needling questioner Vikram had come to know only too well. Speaking now not to any character within his own story but straight across to the grim king who carried him, he said, in that same dry, mocking register, O king, of these three queens — she whose foot the falling lotus broke, she whom the moonlight alone blistered, and she whom a distant pestle's sound struck senseless with pain — which among them, tell me, was truly the most delicate? It was, as always, a small enough question on its face, and, as always, utterly deliberate in its cruelty. The vampire knew precisely what silence had cost this king before, and knew just as precisely how little that knowledge would help him now. Vikram walked on for a moment without answering, his son's small footsteps still keeping pace beside him in the dark, and said nothing at all — for exactly as long as his pride could bear to say nothing.

Vikram cannot leave the riddle unanswered

It was not in Vikram's nature, and never had been, to let a question of judgment pass by him unmet, whatever the cost of answering might prove to be. He had broken his silence before this same way, time after time, unable to bear being thought a king who did not know his own mind, and he broke it now precisely the same. Of the three, he said at last, his voice carrying flat and certain through the dark, it is she who fainted at the mere sound of the pestle, from the headache alone, who is the most delicate of them all. The others, he reasoned aloud, had at least been touched — by a falling weight, by a fall of light upon bare skin — but the third queen had been reached by nothing more than a sound, carried faint and secondhand across a whole garden's distance, and it alone had been enough to fell her senseless. A hurt that needs no contact at all, he said, is a finer and more terrible hurt than any other. He had answered fully, fairly, and completely — and in the same breath, he had answered at all.

The vampire slips free and flees to his tree

The instant the last word left Vikram's mouth, something in the bundle on his shoulder went suddenly, terribly light. The Baital had heard exactly what he had been waiting the whole story to hear, and he wasted not one more moment of the king's company. Quitting the corpse as easily as a man might shrug off a borrowed coat, he was gone from Vikram's shoulder in a blur too quick for eye or hand to follow, streaking back the whole long way through the darkened country to the very tree from which the king had first cut him down that night. There he settled himself once more upon a high branch, hanging by his feet in the old, familiar way, silent now, patient, and entirely, insufferably pleased with himself — leaving Vikram standing alone on the road with an empty shroud slack across his shoulder, his son beside him, and the whole night's labor undone in the space of a single answered question.

Vikram stands still, then turns back without a word

King Vikram did not curse, and he did not sigh, and he did not waste breath on the empty bundle at his feet. He simply stood motionless for a moment in the dark, absorbing the loss the way a man absorbs a blow he has been half expecting for some time, and then, without a word to his son, he turned his face back the way he had come. The boy turned with him, matching his father's grim, unhurried pace, asking nothing, for there was nothing to ask that the silence between them did not already answer. It was, by now, a familiar road — the same stretch of dark country they had already walked once this night, retraced a second time not out of hope but out of sheer refusal to leave the task undone. Whatever pride had made him answer the riddle a moment before, it was that same unbending pride, turned now to simple stubbornness, that carried his feet back down the path toward the tree, his son's small footsteps once again keeping faithful time beside his own.

Down from the tree, and bound again

When father and son reached the tree at last, Vikram set to work without complaint, as though this were simply one more chore appointed to a king rather than the second such labor of the same long night. He climbed up into the branches where the vampire hung waiting, cut him down with the same blade that had freed him the first time, and slung the limp, chuckling weight of him back over one shoulder, lashing the shroud fast so it would not slip again. The Baital offered no struggle and no protest — he had never needed to struggle, since his escape had cost him nothing more than a well-aimed question and a moment's patience. Vikram said nothing to him now, asked for no promises, expected none. He simply settled the bundle into its old place across his back, felt his son fall into step beside him once more, and turned his face toward the sorcerer's ground a second time, exactly as he had done, and would clearly go on doing, for as many nights as it took.

Onward again, and already a new tale begins

The two of them set off once more into the dark, father and son, retracing yet again the long road toward the waiting sorcerer, the vampire's weight settled once more across the king's shoulder as though it had never left it. They had gone scarcely any distance at all before the bundle stirred, and the same dry, unhurried, faintly delighted voice rose up out of it again, already circling toward its next story before the last one's echo had properly died away. Vikram did not answer it, and did not slow his stride, and his son walked on beside him in the same patient silence as before — but neither of them told the vampire to be still, either, for by now both of them understood well enough that the telling would happen regardless, and that the long walk back to the sorcerer's tree was never going to pass in silence while the Baital still had breath enough left to fill it with one more riddle.