Vikram and the Vampire
Become Vikram the Great he established his court at a delightful and beautiful location rich in the best of water. The country was difficult of access, and artificially made incapable of supporting a host of invaders, but four great roads met near the city. The capital was surrounded with durable ramparts, having gates of defence, and near it was a mountain fortress, under the especial charge of a great captain.
The metropolis was well garrisoned and provisioned, and it surrounded the royal palace, a noble building without as well as within. Grandeur seemed embodied there, and Prosperity had made it her own. The nearer ground, viewed from the terraces and pleasure pavilions, was a lovely mingling of rock and mountain, plain and valley, field and fallow, crystal lake and glittering stream. The banks of the winding Lavana were fringed with meads whose herbage, pearly with morning dew, afforded choicest grazing for the sacred cow, and were dotted with perfumed clumps of Bo-trees, tamarinds, and holy figs: in one place Vikram planted 100,000 in a single orchard and gave them to his spiritual advisers. The river valley separated the stream from a belt of forest growth which extended to a hill range, dark with impervious jungle, and cleared here and there for the cultivator’s village. Behind it, rose another subrange, wooded with a lower bush and already blue with air, whilst in the background towered range upon range, here rising abruptly into points and peaks, there ramp-shaped or wall-formed, with sheer descents, and all of light azure hue adorned with glories of silver and gold.
After reigning for some years, Vikram the Brave found himself, at the age of thirty, a staid and sober middle-aged man. He had several sons – daughters are naught in India – by his several wives, and he had some paternal affection for nearly all – except, of course, for his eldest son, a youth who seemed to conduct himself as though he had a claim to the succession. In fact, the king seemed to have taken up his abode for life at Ujjayani, when suddenly he bethought himself, ‘I must visit those countries of whose names I am ever hearing.’ The fact is, he had determined to spy out in disguise the lands of all his foes, and to find the best means of bringing against them his formidable army.
* * * * *We now learn how Bhartari Raja becomes Regent of Ujjayani.
Having thus resolved, Vikram the Brave gave the government into the charge of a younger brother, Bhartari Raja, and in the garb of a religious mendicant, accompanied by Dharma Dhwaj, his second son, a youth bordering on the age of puberty, he began to travel from city to city, and from forest to forest.
The Regent was of a settled melancholic turn of mind, having lost in early youth a very peculiar wife. One day, whilst out hunting, he happened to pass a funeral pyre, upon which a Brahman’s widow had just become Sati (a holy woman) with the greatest fortitude. On his return home he related the adventure to Sita Rani, his spouse, and she at once made reply that virtuous women die with their husbands, killed by the fire of grief, not by the flames of the pile. To prove her truth the prince, after an affectionate farewell, rode forth to the chase, and presently sent back the suite with his robes torn and stained, to report his accidental death. Sita perished upon the spot, and the widower remained inconsolable – for a time.
He led the dullest of lives, and took to himself sundry spouses, all equally distinguished for birth, beauty, and modesty. Like his brother, he performed all the proper devoirs of a Raja, rising before the day to finish his ablutions, to worship the gods, and to do due obeisance to the Brahmans. He then ascended the throne, to judge his people according to the Shastra, carefully keeping in subjection lust, anger, avarice, folly, drunkenness, and pride; preserving himself from being seduced by the love of gaming and of the chase; restraining his desire for dancing, singing, and playing on musical instruments, and refraining from sleep during daytime, from wine, from molesting men of worth, from dice, from putting human beings to death by artful means, from useless travelling, and from holding any one guilty without the commission of a crime. His levées were in a hall decently splendid, and he was distinguished only by an umbrella of peacock’s feathers; he received all complainants, petitioners, and presenters of offences with kind looks and soft words. He united to himself the seven or eight wise councillors, and the sober and virtuous secretary that formed the high cabinet of his royal brother, and they met in some secret lonely spot, as a mountain, a terrace, a bower or a forest, whence women, parrots, and other talkative birds were carefully excluded.
And at the end of this useful and somewhat laborious day, he retired to his private apartments, and, after listening to spiritual songs and to soft music, he fell asleep. Sometimes he would summon his brother’s ‘Nine Gems of Science,’ and give ear to their learned discourses. But it was observed that the viceroy reserved this exercise for nights when he was troubled with insomnia – the words of wisdom being to him an infallible remedy for that disorder.
Thus passed onwards his youth, doing nothing that it could desire, forbidden all pleasures because they were unprincely, and working in the palace harder than in the pauper’s hut. Having, however, fortunately for himself, few predilections and no imagination, he began to pride himself upon being a philosopher. Much business from an early age had dulled his wits, which were never of the most brilliant; and in the steadily increasing torpidity of his spirit, he traced the germs of that quietude which forms the highest happiness of man in this storm of matter called the world. He therefore allowed himself but one friend of his soul. He retained, I have said, his brother’s seven or eight ministers; he was constant in attendance upon the Brahman priests who officiated at the palace, and who kept the impious from touching sacred property; and he was courteous to the commander-in-chief who directed his warriors, to the officers of justice who inflicted punishment upon offenders, and to the lords of towns, varying in number from one to a thousand. But he placed an intimate of his own in the high position of confidential councillor, the ambassador to regulate war and peace.
Mahi-pala was a person of noble birth, endowed with shining abilities, popular, dexterous in business, acquainted with foreign parts, famed for eloquence and intrepidity, and as Menu the Lawgiver advises, remarkably handsome.
Bhartari Raja, as I have said, became a quietist and a philosopher. But Kama,21 the bright god who exerts his sway over the three worlds, heaven and earth and grewsome Hades,22 had marked out the prince once more as the victim of his blossom-tipped shafts and his flowery bow. How, indeed, could he hope to escape the doom which has fallen equally upon Bramha the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and dreadful Shiva the Three-eyed Destroyer?23
By reason of her exceeding beauty, her face was a full moon shining in the clearest sky; her hair was the purple cloud of autumn when, gravid with rain, it hangs low over earth; and her complexion mocked the pale waxen hue of the large-flowered jasmine. Her eyes were those of the timid antelope; her lips were red as those of the pomegranate’s bud, and when they opened, from them distilled a fountain of ambrosia. Her neck was like a pigeon’s; her hand the pink lining of the conch-shell; her waist a leopard’s; her feet the softest lotuses. In a word, a model of grace and loveliness was Dangalah Rani, Raja Bhartari’s last and youngest wife.
The warrior laid down his arms before her; the politician spoke out every secret in her presence. The religious prince would have slaughtered a cow – that sole unforgivable sin – to save one of her eyelashes: the absolute king would not drink a cup of water without her permission; the staid philosopher, the sober quietist, to win from her the shadow of a smile, would have danced before her like a singing-girl. So desperately enamoured became Bhartari Raja.
It is written, however, that love, alas! breeds not love; and so it happened to the Regent. The warmth of his affection, instead of animating his wife, annoyed her; his protestations wearied her; his vows gave her the headache; and his caresses were a colic that made her blood run cold. Of course, the prince perceived nothing, being lost in wonder and admiration of the beauty’s coyness and coquetry. And as women must give away their hearts, whether asked or not, so the lovely Dangalah Rani lost no time in lavishing all the passion of her idle soul upon Mahi-pala, the handsome ambassador of peace and war. By this means the three were happy and were contented; their felicity, however, being built on a rotten foundation, could not long endure. It soon ended in the following extraordinary way.
In the city of Ujjayani,24 within sight of the palace, dwelt a Brahman and his wife, who, being old and poor, and having nothing else to do, had applied themselves to the practice of austere devotion.25 They fasted and refrained from drink, they stood on their heads, and they held their arms for weeks in the air; they prayed till their knees were like pads; they disciplined themselves with scourges of wire; and they walked about unclad in the cold season, and in summer they sat within a circle of flaming wood, till they became the envy and admiration of all the plebeian gods that inhabit the lower heavens. In fine, as a reward for their exceeding piety, the venerable pair received at the hands of a celestial messenger an apple of the tree Kalpavriksha – a fruit which has the virtue of conferring eternal life upon him that tastes it.
Scarcely had the god disappeared, when the Brahman, opening his toothless mouth, prepared to eat the fruit of immortality. Then his wife addressed him in these words, shedding copious tears the while:
‘To die, O man, is a passing pain; to be poor is an interminable anguish. Surely our present lot is the penalty of some great crime committed by us in a past state of being.26 Callest thou this state life? Better we die at once, and so escape the woes of the world!’
Hearing these words, the Brahman sat undecided, with open jaws and eyes fixed upon the apple. Presently he found tongue: ‘I have accepted the fruit, and have brought it here; but having heard thy speech, my intellect hath wasted away; now I will do whatever thou pointest out.’
The wife resumed her discourse, which had been interrupted by a more than usually copious flow of tears. ‘Moreover, O husband, we are old, and what are the enjoyments of the stricken in years? Truly quoth the poet —
Die loved in youth, not hated in age.
If that fruit could have restored thy dimmed eyes, and deaf ears, and blunted taste, and warmth of love, I had not spoken to thee thus.’
After which the Brahman threw away the apple, to the great joy of his wife, who felt a natural indignation at the prospect of seeing her goodman become immortal, whilst she still remained subject to the laws of death; but she concealed this motive in the depths of her thought, enlarging, as women are apt to do, upon everything but the truth. And she spoke with such success, that the priest was about to toss in his rage the heavenly fruit into the fire, reproaching the gods as if by sending it they had done him an injury. Then the wife snatched it out of his hand, and telling him that it was too precious to be wasted, bade him arise and gird his loins and wend him to the Regent’s palace, and offer him the fruit – as King Vikram was absent – with a right reverend brahmanical benediction. She concluded with impressing upon her unworldly husband the necessity of requiring a large sum of money as a return for his inestimable gift. ‘By this means,’ she said, ‘thou mayst promote thy present and future welfare.’27
Then the Brahman went forth, and standing in the presence of the Raja, told him all things touching the fruit, concluding with, ‘O, mighty prince! vouchsafe to accept this tribute, and bestow wealth upon me. I shall be happy in your living long!’
Bhartari Raja led the supplicant into an inner strong-room, where stood heaps of the finest gold-dust, and bade him carry away all that he could; this the priest did, not forgetting to fill even his eloquent and toothless mouth with the precious metal. Having dismissed the devotee groaning under the burden, the Regent entered the apartments of his wives, and, having summoned the beautiful Queen Dangalah Rani, gave her the fruit, and said, ‘Eat this, light of my eyes! This fruit – joy of my heart! – will make thee everlastingly young and beautiful.’
The pretty queen, placing both hands upon her husband’s bosom, kissed his eyes and lips, and sweetly smiling on his face – for great is the guile of women – whispered, ‘Eat it thyself, dear one, or at least share it with me; for what is life and what is youth without the presence of those we love?’ But the Raja, whose heart was melted by these unusual words, put her away tenderly, and, having explained that the fruit would serve for only one person, departed.
Whereupon the pretty queen, sweetly smiling as before, slipped the precious present into her pocket. When the Regent was transacting business in the hall of audience she sent for the ambassador who regulated war and peace, and presented him with the apple in a manner at least as tender as that with which it had been offered to her.
Then the ambassador, after slipping the fruit into his pocket also, retired from the presence of the pretty queen, and meeting Lakha, one of the maids of honour, explained to her its wonderful power, and gave it to her as a token of his love. But the maid of honour, being an ambitious girl, determined that the fruit was a fit present to set before the Regent in the absence of the King. Bhartari Raja accepted it, bestowed on her great wealth, and dismissed her with many thanks.
He then took up the apple and looked at it with eyes brimful of tears, for he knew the whole extent of his misfortune. His heart ached, he felt a loathing for the world, and he said with sighs and groans:28
‘Of what value are these delusions of wealth and affection, whose sweetness endures for a moment and becomes eternal bitterness? Love is like the drunkard’s cup: delicious is the first drink, palling are the draughts that succeed it, and most distasteful are the dregs. What is life but a restless vision of imaginary pleasures and of real pains, from which the only waking is the terrible day of death? The affection of this world is of no use, since, in consequence of it, we fall at last into hell. For which reason it is best to practise the austerities of religion, that the Deity may bestow upon us hereafter that happiness which he refuses to us here!’
Thus did Bhartari Raja determine to abandon the world. But before setting out for the forest, he could not refrain from seeing the queen once more, so hot was the flame which Kama had kindled in his heart. He therefore went to the apartments of his women, and having caused Dangalah Rani to be summoned, he asked her what had become of the fruit which he had given to her. She answered that, according to his command, she had eaten it. Upon which the Regent showed her the apple, and she beholding it stood aghast, unable to make any reply. The Raja gave careful orders for her beheading; he then went out, and having had the fruit washed, ate it. He quitted the throne to be a jogi, or religious mendicant, and without communicating with any one departed into the jungle. There he became such a devotee that death had no power over him, and he is wandering still. But some say that he was duly absorbed into the essence of the Deity.
* * * * *We are next told how the valiant Vikram returned to his own country.
Thus Vikram’s throne remained empty. When the news reached King Indra, Regent of the Lower Firmament and Protector of Earthly Monarchs, he sent Prithwi Pala, a fierce giant,29 to defend the city of Ujjayani till such time as its lawful master might reappear, and the guardian used to keep watch and ward night and day over his trust.
In less than a year the valorous Raja Vikram became thoroughly tired of wandering about the woods half dressed: now suffering from famine, then exposed to the attacks of wild beasts, and at all times very ill at ease. He reflected also that he was not doing his duty to his wives and children; that the heir-apparent would probably make the worst use of the parental absence; and finally, that his subjects, deprived of his fatherly care, had been left in the hands of a man who, for aught he could say, was not worthy of the high trust. He had also spied out all the weak points of friend and foe. Whilst these and other equally weighty considerations were hanging about the Raja’s mind, he heard a rumour of the state of things spread abroad; that Bhartari, the regent, having abdicated his throne, had gone away into the forest. Then quoth Vikram to his son, ‘We have ended our wayfarings, now let us turn our steps homewards!’
The gong was striking the mysterious hour of midnight as the king and the young prince approached the principal gate. And they were pushing through it when a monstrous figure rose up before them, and called out with a fearful voice, ‘Who are ye, and where are ye going? Stand and deliver your names!’
‘I am Raja Vikram,’ rejoined the king, half choked with rage, ‘and I am come to mine own city. Who art thou that darest to stop or stay me?’
‘That question is easily answered,’ cried Prithwi Pala the giant, in his roaring voice; ‘the gods have sent me to protect Ujjayani. If thou be really Raja Vikram, prove thyself a man: first fight with me, and then return to thine own.’
The warrior king cried ‘Sadhu!’ wanting nothing better. He girt his girdle tight round his loins, summoned his opponent into the empty space beyond the gate, told him to stand on guard, and presently began to devise some means of closing with or running in upon him. The giant’s fists were large as water melons, and his knotted arms whistled through the air like falling trees, threatening fatal blows. Besides which the Raja’s head scarcely reached the giant’s stomach, and the latter, each time he struck out, whooped so abominably loud, that no human nerves could remain unshaken.
At last Vikram’s good luck prevailed. The giant’s left foot slipped, and the hero, seizing his antagonist’s other leg, began to trip him up. At the same moment the young prince, hastening to his parent’s assistance, jumped viciously upon the enemy’s naked toes. By their united exertions they brought him to the ground, when the son sat down upon his stomach, making himself as weighty as he well could, whilst the father, climbing up to the monster’s throat, placed himself astride upon it, and pressing both thumbs upon his eyes, threatened to blind him if he would not yield.
Then the giant, modifying the bellow of his voice, cried out —
‘O Raja, thou hast overthrown me, and I grant thee thy life.’
‘Surely thou art mad, monster,’ replied the king, in jeering tone, half laughing, half angry. ‘To whom grantest thou life? If I desire it I can kill thee; how, then, dost thou talk about granting me my life?’
‘Vikram of Ujjayani,’ said the giant, ‘be not too proud! I will save thee from a nearly impending death. Only hearken to the tale which I have to tell thee, and use thy judgment, and act upon it. So shalt thou rule the world free from care, and live without danger, and die happily.’
‘Proceed,’ quoth the Raja, after a moment’s thought, dismounting from the giant’s throat, and beginning to listen with all his ears.
The giant raised himself from the ground, and when in a sitting posture, began in solemn tones to speak as follows:
‘In short, the history of the matter is, that three men were born in this same city of Ujjayani, in the same lunar mansion, in the same division of the great circle described upon the ecliptic, and in the same period of time. You, the first, were born in the house of a king. The second was an oilman’s son, who was slain by the third, a jogi, or anchorite, who kills all he can, wafting the sweet scent of human sacrifice to the nostrils of Durga, goddess of destruction. Moreover, the holy man, after compassing the death of the oilman’s son, has suspended him head downwards from a mimosa tree in a cemetery. He is now anxiously plotting thy destruction. He hath murdered his own child – ’
‘And how came an anchorite to have a child?’ asked Raja Vikram, incredulously.
‘That is what I am about to tell thee,’ replied the giant. ‘In the good days of thy generous father, Gandharba-Sena, as the court was taking its pleasure in the forest, they saw a devotee, or rather a devotee’s head, protruding from a hole in the ground. The white ants had surrounded his body with a case of earth, and had made their home upon his skin. All kinds of insects and small animals crawled up and down the face, yet not a muscle moved. Wasps had hung their nests to its temples, and scorpions wandered in and out of the matted and clotted hair; yet the hermit felt them not. He spoke to no one; he received no gifts; and had it not been for the opening of his nostrils, as he continually inhaled the pungent smoke of a thorn fire, man would have deemed him dead. Such were his religious austerities.
‘Thy father marvelled much at the sight, and rode home in profound thought. That evening, as he sat in the hall of audience, he could speak of nothing but the devotee; and his curiosity soon rose to such a pitch, that he proclaimed about the city a reward of one hundred gold pieces to any one that could bring to court this anchorite of his own free will.
‘Shortly afterwards, Vasantasena, a singing and dancing girl more celebrated for wit and beauty than for sagesse or discretion, appeared before thy sire, and offered for the petty inducement of a gold bangle to bring the anchorite into the palace, carrying a baby on his shoulder.
‘The king hearing her speak was astonished, gave her a betel leaf in token that he held her to her promise, and permitted her to depart, which she did with a laugh of triumph.
‘Vasantasena went directly to the jungle, where she found the pious man faint with thirst, shrivelled with hunger, and half dead with heat and cold. She cautiously put out the fire. Then, having prepared a confection, she approached from behind and rubbed upon his lips a little of the sweetmeat, which he licked up with great relish. Thereupon she made more and gave it to him. After two days of this generous diet he gained some strength, and on the third, as he felt a finger upon his mouth, he opened his eyes and said, “Why hast thou come here?”
‘The girl, who had her story in readiness, replied: “I am the daughter of a deity, and have practised religious observances in the heavenly regions. I have now come into this forest!” And the devotee, who began to think how much more pleasant is such society than solitude, asked her where her hut was, and requested to be led there.
‘Then Vasantasena, having unearthed the holy man and compelled him to purify himself, led him to the abode which she had caused to be built for herself in the wood. She explained its luxuries by the nature of her vow, which bound her to indulge in costly apparel, in food with six flavours, and in every kind of indulgence.30 In course of time the hermit learned to follow her example; he gave up inhaling smoke, and he began to eat and drink as a daily occupation.
‘At length Kama began to trouble him. Briefly the saint and saintess were made man and wife, by the simple form of matrimony called the Gandharbavivaha,31 and about ten months afterwards a son was born to them. Thus the anchorite came to have a child.
‘Remained Vasantasena’s last feat. Some months passed: then she said to the devotee her husband, “Oh saint! let us now, having finished our devotions, perform a pilgrimage to some sacred place, that all the sins of our bodies may be washed away, after which we will die and depart into everlasting happiness.” Cajoled by these speeches, the hermit mounted his child upon his shoulder and followed her where she went – directly into Raja Gandharba-Sena’s palace.
‘When the king and the ministers and the officers and the courtiers saw Vasantasena, and her spouse carrying the baby, they recognised her from afar. The Raja exclaimed, “Lo! this is the very singing girl who went forth to bring back the devotee.” And all replied: “O great monarch! thou speakest truly; this is the very same woman. And be pleased to observe that whatever things she, having asked leave to undertake, went forth to do, all these she hath done!” Then gathering around her they asked her all manner of questions, as if the whole matter had been the lightest and the most laughable thing in the world.