A general who dared to rewrite the rules of war

Once more the corpse-vampire hung silent and grinning across Vikram's shoulder as the king strode back through the darkening thorn forest toward the sorcerer's fire, and once more, unbidden, the Baital's voice came dry and mocking from its sack of stretched skin. In the venerable city of Bardwan, it said, under the mighty King Rupsen, there lived a Rajput warrior named Rajeshwar, a man who had climbed from the meanest rank of the army to command the whole of it. But where lesser men, having reached such a height, settle down to enjoy the view and thank the gods for their good fortune, Rajeshwar could not rest. He looked at the army he now commanded and saw not perfection but habit dressed up as wisdom, and he set about remaking the art of war itself, one stubborn tradition at a time.

Old wisdom versus one general's stubborn common sense

Where other commanders leaned on the campaign plans that pandits and Brahmans had drawn up in quiet studies centuries before, Rajeshwar trusted his own eyes and his own judgment, striking when the moment served rather than when some ancient book said he might. He studied ground before he studied scripture. He handled his light troops the way a hunter handles hounds, and he starved his enemies' supply lines while guarding his own so jealously that even Kartikeya, the god of war himself, might have admired the arrangement. He noticed that his archers' bows were clumsy and slow, and changed them before any defeat forced his hand. He noticed that the sword hilts his men gripped had cramped a thousand fists for eighteen hundred years and were called perfect only because no one had thought to ask. And when he raised a corps of warriors who fought with fire-tipped arrows and turned them loose against the enemy's war-elephants, campaign after campaign fell to him as easily as ripe fruit falls from a shaken branch.

Vikram bristles at the vampire's pointed compliment

One instance of his judgment I must give thee, Vikram, the Baital added, with that particular relish it reserved for needling its captor, seeing that thou art a warrior-king thyself, and might do worse than imitate great Rajeshwar's innovations. Vikram answered nothing but a low grunt, refusing the demon the satisfaction of a reply, and the Baital, entirely undiscouraged, swept on. Rajeshwar had found his master's armies thick with old Kshatriya officers who had grown great only by growing old, and fat besides. Their young and able men rotted in the ranks beneath them while the ancients, who could no longer mount a horse unaided nor see a spear's length before their own noses, clung to their commands because they had once fought in some campaign nobody now remembered, and considered that service a debt owed them forever. Rajeshwar broke that debt. He would not employ a captain who could not stand steady on his own legs through a full day's sun.

Merit replaces birthright in Rajeshwar's remade army

Rajeshwar's reforms cut deeper than mere pensioning off of the aged. Whenever a common soldier distinguished himself under fire, the general raised him at once into the privileges of the warrior caste, birth and lineage notwithstanding. And where it had long been the custom to shower every man who marched to war with silver bars and circlets alike, whether he had cowered behind a dune of sand the whole battle or led the charge into the enemy's teeth, Rajeshwar broke that habit too, and made honour worth having again by giving it only to those who had earned it. The effect was swift and total: in a remarkably short span of years, there was no king and no general left in the region whose army could stand against his. It was into this household of hard-won discipline and clear-eyed merit — a household that judged a man by his sword-arm and not his pedigree — that a ragged, boastful stranger named Birbal would soon come walking, looking for work.

A noise at the gate the general cannot ignore

One day, as Rajeshwar sat near the threshold of his own gate, he heard beyond it the murmur and clatter of a crowd, and asked his porter what the commotion meant. It is only what happens at every rich man's door, my lord, the porter answered. Many people come and sit here hoping to win a living and some fortune from your generosity, and when they gather they fall to talking among themselves of this and that — it is these very men making the noise you hear. Rajeshwar received this explanation in silence and thought no more of it, and the porter returned to his post at the gate. It was an ordinary day like a hundred before it, the kind on which nothing of consequence is expected to happen, and the general had no notion that among the beggars and petitioners crowded at his threshold, waiting his pleasure, stood a Rajput swordsman just arrived from the southern roads, whose name was Birbal, and whose arrival would change everything.

A wandering Rajput asks to be brought before the chief

The traveller was announced properly enough. O chief, said the porter, presenting himself before his master, an armed man has come to the gate hoping for employment. If you command it, I will bring him before your honour. Rajeshwar, ever curious about new blood for his reformed army, gave the word at once: Bring him in. The porter went out and returned leading the stranger — a lean, travel-worn Rajput with the bearing of a man who had walked a long way and did not intend to apologize for it. Rajeshwar studied him a moment and then asked plainly who and what he was. Birbal answered without hesitation and without false modesty either: he was, he said, a man of distinguished fame in the use of weapons, whose name for fidelity and valour had already carried to the farthest ends of Bharat-Kandha, the whole length and breadth of India. It was a large claim from a road-stained stranger, and Rajeshwar, who had heard a hundred such claims before, was not yet inclined to believe a word of it.

Birbal proves his boast on the edge of a blade

Rajeshwar had met this style of self-introduction many times, and it stirred in him only a mild wish to humble the man by exposing his ignorance of arms. So he told Birbal, not unkindly, to draw his blade and show some feat of it. Birbal did not hesitate. He drew his sword, and reading at once the thought forming behind the general's carefully neutral face, he raised his own left hand and extended the forefinger straight upward. Then, with a single sweep, he whirled the blade about his head like the arm of some demon come to life, and brought it down across the raised finger with such perfect control that a sliver of nail fell to the floor and not one drop of blood rose to mark the skin beneath it. It was the kind of stroke that could only be performed by a man who had spent a lifetime learning exactly how much steel a body could survive, and exactly how little.

Rajeshwar is won over and carries Birbal to the king

Live for ever! Rajeshwar exclaimed, and meant it, for he had rarely seen swordsmanship of such exactness. He pressed Birbal further, putting to him question after question on the art of war — or more precisely on Rajeshwar's own hard-won and unorthodox opinions of it, the very doctrines he had spent years forcing on a reluctant army. Birbal answered each one with a spirit and a clear-eyed judgment that left no doubt in the general's mind: whatever else this ragged stranger might be, he was no common hired sword. Satisfied, Rajeshwar did not merely offer him a place in the ranks. He took Birbal directly to the palace of King Rupsen himself, and there recommended, in the strongest terms a commander-in-chief can use, that the man be taken into royal service without a day's delay. It was rare praise from a man not given to praising easily, and King Rupsen, hearing it, was inclined to listen.

A king asks his price and gets an outrageous answer

Rupsen was a king of few words and many thoughts, and having heard his general out, he turned to the stranger and asked directly what sum he would require for his daily upkeep. Birbal answered without so much as blinking: a thousand ounces of gold a day, that he might have enough to live on. The king, astonished past his usual composure, demanded to know what army the man commanded that he dared name such a price. I have none, Birbal replied, entirely unruffled by the question, and stiff with a pride that refused to apologize for its own scale. I have, first, a wife; second, a son; third, a daughter; fourth, myself. There is no fifth person in my service. It was an answer of magnificent, almost comic audacity — a household of four presented as though it were an army worth a king's treasury — and it hung in the air of the court for a long, disbelieving moment before anyone found a response to it.

The court laughs, and Birbal is sent away

The response, when it came, was laughter — not loud or cruel, but the low, helpless laughter of courtiers who cannot quite believe what they have just heard. Every head in the hall turned aside to hide a smile, and even the royal women, watching the scene from behind their veils at the edges of the court, pressed their hands over their mouths to stifle their own amusement. Whatever dignity Birbal had carried into the audience chamber, he carried out of it under a cloud of muffled mirth, dismissed from the king's presence without an answer, without employment, and — it must have seemed to every watching courtier — without the faintest hope of ever collecting a single ounce of the fortune he had named. And yet, the Baital observed with evident relish, it is a curious thing about you humans that the world so often takes a man precisely at the value he sets upon himself, however absurd that value first appears to everyone standing near him.

The vampire's cynicism draws Vikram's sharp rebuke

Set a high enough price on yourself, the Baital continued, warming to its favorite subject, and each man will murmur to his neighbour that surely there is something to this fellow. Tell the world often enough that you are brave, or clever, or generous, or even handsome, and in time the world will believe you — and once it believes you, it will be far harder to unconvince it than it ever was to convince it in the first place. Thus— Listen not to him, sirrah! Vikram broke in sharply, addressing young Prince Dharma Dhwaj, who walked a little behind them and had been listening to the demon's philosophy with far too much attention for his father's comfort. Listen to him not. And tell me, villain, with such ignoble doctrines as thine, what becomes of modesty, humility, self-sacrifice, and all the other virtues that make a man worth calling a man? The Baital, entirely unbothered, only shrugged its borrowed shoulders and prepared a fresh and even more infuriating answer.

A king reasons his way into an extravagant wage

But before the Baital could provoke Vikram into another threat of being dashed against the ground — a threat it had, in fact, just earned, and only barely escaped by muttering something about having wandered onto a metaphysical thread of thought — it returned to its story. King Rupsen, alone with his own reflections after Birbal's dismissal, found the matter would not leave him. He reasoned that a man does not name so vast a sum without some reason of his own, a reason that would in time make itself known. And he reasoned further that if he simply granted the request, his own generosity might yet turn to his advantage in ways he could not presently foresee. Having settled the question in his own mind, the king summoned Birbal back before him, along with the steward of his household, and gave the order plainly: the Rajput was to receive one thousand ounces of gold from the royal treasury every single day, without argument and without delay.

Birbal turns his fortune into food for the poor

It is related that Birbal made the noblest possible use of the wealth he had so boldly demanded. Each morning he divided the whole sum into two equal portions, giving the first outright to Brahmans and priests. The remaining half he divided again, giving one part as alms to pilgrims, to the wandering mendicants of Vishnu, and to the ash-smeared ascetics of Shiva who came to his gate wearing little more than a scrap of cotton cloth, a rope at the waist, and matted hair twisted like cord about their heads. With the last quarter of the fortune, he had food prepared and fed the hungry of the city with his own hands, and only then did he and his own household sit down to eat whatever remained. A man who had demanded a king's ransom for his own upkeep was, in practice, keeping almost nothing of it for himself — a fact that would have surprised every courtier who had laughed at him.

Every night, Birbal stands guard over the king's sleep

Each evening, once his wealth had been given away, Birbal armed himself with sword and buckler and took up his post beside the king's own bed, pacing the chamber all night long with his blade drawn and ready. If Rupsen woke in the darkness and asked who stood watch, the answer came at once, steady and unhesitating: Birbal is here; whatever command you give, that he will obey. And the king, testing him as a wise master will test a servant, often gave him strange and difficult orders at strange hours — for a servant's worth, it is said, is proven not by what he does willingly in the light of day, but by what he does without complaint when tried out of season and in the dark. Birbal never once complained. Waking or sleeping, eating or standing guard, he held his king in constant remembrance through every hour of the day, a devotion so complete that even the palace grew used to seeing his shadow pass the royal doorway, night after night, without fail.

A wail rises from the cemetery at midnight

On one such night, deep in the small hours when the palace slept and even the guards had grown drowsy at their posts, the king woke to the sound of a woman weeping — a thin, carrying wail drifting in from the cemetery that bordered the palace grounds. Who is on watch? Rupsen called into the darkness. I am here, answered Birbal at once, as he always did. Go, the king commanded him, to the place from which that woman's cry proceeds, learn the cause of her grief, and return to me quickly. Birbal obeyed without a word of hesitation, sword in hand, striding out into the cemetery's night-black rows of stones and shadow. But the king did not simply return to his bed and wait. Curious to see for himself what manner of man he had hired, and perhaps also uneasy at the strangeness of the hour, Rupsen rose, dressed himself in unmarked black so that he would not be recognized, and followed his servant out into the dark at a careful distance, unseen.

In the graveyard, Birbal meets a woman made of grief

What Birbal found among the tombs was no ordinary mourner. A woman of pale gold complexion stood there, jewels flashing from head to foot in the moonlight, a horn held in one hand and a necklace in the other — and yet for all her ornament she was inconsolable, dancing one moment and running wildly the next, beating her own head and flinging herself to the ground with cries of despair, though never once did a tear fall from her eyes. Birbal, not recognizing in her the ancient goddess born of the sea's foam, whom the whole host of heaven loved, asked her plainly why she wept, who she was, and what grief lay upon her so heavily. I am the Royal-Luck, she answered simply — the very tutelary fortune of the king's own house, the unseen luck by which any throne stands or falls — and in that answer alone lay the whole shape of the disaster Birbal had been sent, all unknowing, to discover.

The goddess names the king's death within a month

For what reason do you weep? Birbal pressed her, and the goddess, still dancing her strange grief-stricken dance among the graves, told him plainly. In the king's own palace, she said, acts unworthy of his rank were being done — low deeds that no throne can commit and go unpunished — and misfortune must fall upon the house as a result. She herself would be forced to abandon it. Within a month, she told him, after suffering greatly, the king would die, and it was for this coming loss that she wept without tears, for she had brought much happiness to Rupsen's house across the years and grieved bitterly that her own prophecy could not, by any means, be made to prove false. Birbal listened to all of this in the cemetery's cold moonlight without moving, without speaking, absorbing a sentence of death passed on the master he had sworn, night after night, to guard with his own life — and then, quietly, he asked her the only question that mattered.

A terrible remedy, if Birbal is willing to pay it

Is there, Birbal asked her, any remedy for this — any way that the king might yet be saved, and live out a hundred years? There is, the goddess answered. Eight miles to the east of here stands a temple sacred to my sister Devi, the terrible one. Offer her your own son's head, cut off by your own hand, and the king's reign shall endure for an age. And with those words, the Royal-Luck vanished from the cemetery as suddenly as she had appeared, leaving Birbal alone among the graves with a burden no father should ever be asked to carry. He did not cry out, did not curse the goddess or beg her to unsay it. He answered not a single word. He simply turned, with hurried and purposeful steps, and set off for home — and behind him, still cloaked in unmarked black, still unseen, the king followed close at his heels, watching and listening to every single thing his servant did next.

Birbal wakes his family to tell them everything

Birbal went straight to his wife and roused her from sleep, and told her all of it — the wailing goddess, the prophecy of the king's death, the terrible price of its undoing — withholding nothing. The wise have always said that a true wife is one who receives her husband's words, however hard, with affection and without resistance, and Birbal's wife proved herself such a wife that very night. The moment she understood what had been asked of her family, she rose at once and woke her son, and her daughter too stirred and woke beside them, drawn into the same lamplit circle of grim, whispered conversation. Birbal told them all, plainly and without softening it, that they must follow him that very hour to the temple of Devi in the forest, eight miles distant. No one in that small room asked why it must be tonight, or why it must be their family and no other's. They simply began, in the darkness, to prepare themselves for the road.

A husband asks his wife to release their son

As the family set out along the forest road toward the temple, Birbal turned to his wife and put the question to her directly, sparing her nothing: if she would willingly give up their son, he would sacrifice the boy to Devi the Destroyer, for their master's sake. It was a monstrous thing to ask of any mother, and yet she answered him without a moment's hesitation or reproach. Father and mother, son and daughter, brother and kinsman — I have none of these any longer, she told him. You are everything to me now. It is written in the scriptures that a wife is not made pure by gifts to priests, nor by the performing of rites, but by waiting upon her husband, obeying him, and loving him — though he be lame, or maimed, or blind, or stricken with any affliction the gods can devise. A woman's whole virtue, she said, lay in that single unbroken loyalty, and she would not be the one to break it now, whatever it cost her.

The wife recites the five true blessings of a household

She went further still, quoting to her husband the old wisdom she had carried since her own girlhood: that a son under one's authority, a body free of sickness, a hunger for knowledge, a wise friend, and an obedient wife — these five things alone are the true bestowers of happiness and the dispellers of every grief a household can suffer. An unwilling servant, a miserly king, a false friend, and a wife who will not be governed, she said, are the disturbers of peace and the givers of every trouble a family can know. Having spoken this, she did not hesitate a further moment. She turned from her husband to her own son, walking beside them still only half-awake to the full weight of what was happening, and told him plainly and without flinching: Child, by the gift of your head, the king's life may yet be spared, and the kingdom kept unshaken. The words fell between mother and son on the dark forest road like a sentence neither of them thought to appeal.

The son answers his mother without a moment's protest

The boy did not weep, did not plead, did not so much as slow his pace along the forest path. Mother, he answered her, in my judgment we should hasten this matter rather than delay it. First, I must obey your command, for that is a son's plain duty. Second, I must promote the welfare of my master, for that is what my father's service to the king requires of this whole family. And third — if this body of mine can be of any use at all to a goddess, then nothing better could ever be done with it in this world. Here the Baital could not resist breaking off its own tale to remark, with unmistakable relish, that it found it endlessly interesting to hear a young man whose throat was so shortly to be cut discoursing like a doctor of laws upon his own execution — a piece of demon's wit that earned it, this time, only a cold and furious silence from Vikram, who had no answer ready for it.

The son turns to his father with one final duty

Undeterred by his mother's grief or his own approaching end, the young man turned next to his father and spoke with the same calm conviction. Father, he said, whoever proves himself of use to his master has lived his life in this world to good purpose, and for that usefulness he will surely be rewarded in the worlds to come. It was the last thing he would say before they reached the temple, and it settled the matter as firmly in his own mind as his mother's words had settled it in hers. Only his sister, walking a little apart from the rest of the family with her own private horror rising in her throat, refused to be so easily reconciled to what was coming. If a mother gives poison to her own daughter, she cried out to them, and a father sells his son, and a king seizes the whole property of his subjects, then where in this world could anyone ever again look for protection? No one answered her. No one even paused to look back.

The daughter's protest goes unheard on the forest road

The daughter's cry hung unanswered in the night air, and the family walked on without breaking stride, absorbed in their own low, urgent talk of duty and sacrifice, leaving her question to trail behind them like something spoken into an empty room. And behind all of them, unseen, unheard, wrapped still in his plain black cloak, King Rupsen followed at his careful distance, watching a household walk itself toward its own destruction for his sake and doing nothing yet to stop it — whether from shock, or disbelief, or the simple paralysis of a man watching a disaster too large to interrupt, the Baital did not say. It was, in its way, the truest moment of foreboding in the whole night's journey: one voice among the five raised in protest against the logic that was carrying them all forward, and that one voice — the daughter's, the only one who saw clearly what was about to happen — was the single voice that went entirely unheeded by everyone who loved her.

The temple of Devi waits in the forest dark

At last the small procession reached the temple, a single stone chamber set within a wide paved courtyard, fronted by an immense hall built to seat many hundreds at festival time, though it stood now silent and empty under the night sky. Pools of blood, not yet dried, marked the stones before the image where earlier victims had been offered. Within the sanctum itself waited Devi in her most terrible aspect — a towering black figure with ten arms, one hand driving a spear through the demon Mahisha's body, another gripping a serpent's tail even as the same serpent sank its fangs into the giant's breast, the remaining arms raised high overhead bristling with every instrument of war a goddess might require, and at her right leg a lion crouched in eternal readiness. It was before this vision of annihilating, righteous fury — and not before any gentler face of the divine — that Birbal now knelt his family down, one by one, to keep the bargain the Royal-Luck had struck for them in the cemetery.

Birbal prays, and the goddess is asked for blood

Birbal joined his hands and lifted his voice to the terrible goddess with all the fervour a Hindu heart can summon even at its most desperate. O mother, he cried, let the king's life be prolonged a thousand years by the sacrifice of my son. O Devi, destroy his enemies! Kill them, reduce them to ashes, drive them away, devour them, cut them in two, drink their blood, destroy them root and branch — with thunderbolt, spear, scimitar, discus, or rope, annihilate them utterly! It was a prayer built from the oldest and bloodiest of invocations, every syllable of it aimed at buying, through sheer ferocity of devotion, the one boon the family had walked eight miles through the dark to purchase. And when the prayer was finished, Birbal did not hesitate, did not allow himself a final look at the boy kneeling now before the black stone image, waiting with the same calm conviction he had shown all along the road. There was, by then, nothing left to say that had not already been said.

The son's head falls first before the goddess

Birbal caused his son to kneel before the image, and then, without a tremor in his hand, he struck a single blow so violent that the boy's head rolled free across the temple stones. He threw the sword down the instant the deed was finished — and it was then, in the space of that single unguarded moment, that his daughter, half out of her mind with grief at the sight of her brother's death, snatched the fallen blade up from the ground and struck her own neck with all the force her small body could muster, so that her head too fell separated from her. No one had asked this of her. No goddess had named her in the bargain. She took the choice entirely for herself, in an instant of unbearable grief, and by the time anyone standing near might have moved to stop her, it was already done — the second death in a night that had begun with only one name written against it, and would not end with two.

A mother follows her children into death unbidden

The mother, who had spoken so steadily of duty and obedience on the road to the temple, found in the end that steadiness could not survive the sight of both her children's heads lying on the bloodied stones before her. Unable to bear the loss, she too seized the fallen sword and succeeded, with her own hand, in cutting off her own head, joining her son and daughter in death within moments of each of them. Birbal stood alone now before the terrible black image of Devi, the only one of his family still breathing, and he looked upon the ruin of everything he had built his devoted, generous, hard-working life around. My children are dead, he reflected, with a grief too large and too quiet for any final prayer. Why now should I remain in servitude? And upon whom should I bestow the gold I still receive from the king? There was, in his own reckoning, no answer left worth living for. He took up the sword one final time, and gave himself so deep a wound in his own neck that his head, too, fell from his body.

Four heads lie on the temple stones before the king

King Rupsen, who had followed his servant's family the whole eight miles in silence and unmarked black, now stood alone at the edge of the temple courtyard and looked upon four severed heads lying before the terrible goddess he had never once, in his own long reign, thought to visit or appease. The thought that rose in him was not gratitude, nor relief that his own life had somehow been bought back from the goddess of Fortune's grim prophecy. It was horror, plain and total. For my sake has the family of Birbal been destroyed, he said to himself, standing amid the wreckage of the most loyal household he had ever known. Kingly power, for the upholding of which the destruction of a whole family is thought necessary, is nothing but a curse, and to govern by such means is no justice at all. He did not hesitate over the thought for long. He took up the same blood-slicked sword his servant had just used, and made ready to end his own life in atonement for the four he had, however unwillingly, cost.

Devi herself stays the king's hand at the last moment

But the goddess, it seems, had by then had her fill of bloodshed for one night. Just as Rupsen raised the sword against his own throat, Devi herself stayed his hand, and bade him instead ask of her any boon he pleased, as satisfied now as any terrible deity permits herself to be. The king did not ask for treasure, or for years added to his own reign, or for any of the thousand things a monarch spared at the point of death might reasonably have begged. He asked only that his faithful servant be restored to life, together with the whole of his high-minded family — the wife who had died for love of her husband, the son who had died for duty, the daughter who had died for grief she could not master. It was, in its way, the truest measure of the man Rupsen had become across that single terrible night: offered anything at all by a goddess who had just granted him his own life back, he spent the whole of his wish on someone else's family.

The water of immortality undoes a night of death

Devi granted the request in the space of a single heartbeat. She reached down into Patala, the regions that lie beneath the earth, and drew up from that hidden world a vase brimming with Amrita, the sacred water of immortality itself, and with it she sprinkled the four fallen bodies where they lay upon the temple stones. In an instant, wife and son and daughter and Birbal himself rose up whole and breathing, restored precisely as they had been before the sword had ever touched them, as though the whole night's slaughter had been nothing more than a terrible dream from which the goddess had, at the last possible moment, chosen to wake them. There on the temple floor, amid the drying pools of older blood, a family that had annihilated itself out of love and duty within the space of a single night found itself alive again, and a king who had nearly killed himself in grief for them found himself, instead, standing before five living people he owed a debt no treasury could ever repay.

A king shares his throne with his servant

When the disbelief and the embracing and the murmured thanks to the goddess had finally run their course, the whole party — king, general's recruit, wife, son, and daughter alike — rose from the temple courtyard and walked home together at an easy, unhurried pace through the last hours of the night, as though eight miles of forest road were nothing at all after what they had just survived. In the days that followed, King Rupsen did exactly what the moment demanded and no ordinary king would have thought to do: he divided his own throne with his friend Birbal, raising the man who had once been laughed out of his court for naming an army of four to a rank beside his own. It was, the Baital observed, drawing its long tale at last toward its close, a fitting reward for a servant who had grudged his own life nothing to save his master's, and a fitting instinct in a master who could, when the test came, annihilate every greedy longing for his own continued existence and worldly prosperity.

The Baital poses its cruelest riddle yet

Having said this much, the Baital paused, as it always did before the sting, and let the silence of the thorn forest settle over Vikram's steady footsteps for a long moment before it spoke again in that same sententious, needling tone it saved for its very hardest questions. Happy the servant who grudges not his own life to save that of his master, it intoned. And happy, thrice happy, the master who can annihilate all greedy longing for existence and worldly prosperity. But now, Raja, I have one searching question to put to you, and I will have my answer before we go one step further. Of these five souls in my tale — Birbal, his wife, his son, his daughter, and King Rupsen himself — which among them, tell me, was the greatest fool? It was, on its face, a question built to mock everything Vikram held sacred about loyalty and sacrifice, and the king felt the insult of it land before he had even begun to shape his reply.

Vikram answers for the honour of a whole family

Demon! Vikram burst out, every cherished conviction he held about fidelity, family devotion, obedience, and high-mindedness rising up outraged at the vampire's callous way of framing the question. If by greatest fool thou meanest the noblest mind among them, then I answer thee without a moment's hesitation: Rupsen the king. And why, pray? the Baital asked, all silky curiosity, plainly delighted to have provoked exactly the fierce, unhesitating answer it had been fishing for. Vikram did not make him wait for the reasoning. Because, dull demon, he said, Birbal was bound by every law of gratitude to offer his own life for a master who had treated him with such generosity — he had no true choice in the matter, given what he owed. The son could not disobey his father's household without dishonouring it. And the women acted naturally and instinctively, killing themselves only because the example of the men before them had already been set. But Rupsen the king surrendered his own throne for the sake of a mere retainer, and counted his own life and every royal inducement to keep it worth less than a straw. For that reason, and no other, I judge him the most meritorious fool of the five.

The vampire laughs and vanishes at the answer's end

The instant the last word left Vikram's mouth, the Baital's laughter rang out through the thorn forest, high and delighted and entirely without mercy. Surely, mighty Vikram, it crowed, you must be growing tired of forever climbing that tall tree of yours, even had you the arms and legs of Hanuman himself! And with that final piece of mockery still hanging in the air, the demon simply vanished — slipped out from inside the cloth that wrapped it, though that cloth had been set down flat upon the ground and tied as securely as ever, with no visible gap through which anything solid could have passed. One instant the sack across Vikram's shoulder held its familiar cold, grinning weight; the next, it hung empty and slack, the fabric settling slowly against itself with nothing left inside it, while somewhere above the black canopy of trees a shape too fast to follow with the eye streaked back toward the distant tree from which the king had first cut it down.

Vikram turns back without a word of complaint

Vikram stood motionless for a single long moment in the sudden silence, the empty cloth hanging loose and useless from his shoulder, the forest around him giving back no sound but his own breath and his son's uncertain footsteps behind him. He did not curse the demon. He did not rail against the fate that bound him, night after night, to this same maddening errand. He simply turned, wordlessly, and began retracing every step of the long road he had just walked, young Dharma Dhwaj falling in silently beside him, neither father nor son wasting breath on words that would change nothing about what had to be done next. Back through the dark they went, back past the thorn trees and the cemetery stones, back to the same tree where the vampire always returned to hang, laughing, just out of easy reach — because a task sworn to a sorcerer, once undertaken, does not release a king merely because a demon has grown clever about escaping his cloth for the third time in one long night.

A silent king cuts his prisoner down once more

Vikram found the Baital exactly where he expected it, hanging once again from its accustomed bough, grinning down at him with the particular satisfaction of a thing that has just won a small, cruel victory and intends to enjoy it a while longer before losing the next round. Without a word of reproach, without so much as a sigh of exasperation that the demon might have savoured, Vikram climbed the tree as he had climbed it every time before, cut the corpse down with the same steady hand, and bundled it back into its cloth, knotting the fabric securely once more before slinging the whole silent weight back over his shoulder. Then he set off yet again through the darkness toward the sorcerer waiting at the appointed place, his stride as even and unhurried as if this were the first attempt of the night rather than one of many, giving the vampire nothing — no anger, no fatigue, no satisfaction — to feed on.

A new tale begins before the road is even long

They had not gone far — barely far enough for the tree to vanish again behind them into the dark tangle of the forest — before the Baital's voice came drifting up from the cloth once more, dry, unhurried, and entirely untroubled by its own recent defeat. It had, it announced, another true story to tell, and without waiting for any leave or objection from the king carrying it, the demon began at once to speak, spinning out the opening lines of a fresh tale into the night air as easily as if the whole business of dying and vanishing and being caught and cut down again were no more to it than clearing its throat before a familiar performance. Vikram walked on in his habitual grim silence, giving no sign that he had heard, though his pace, as always, never once slowed or faltered under the vampire's renewed and untiring chatter.