When Fire Hid From the World

The field of Kurukshetra had gone quiet at last. Bhishma lay on his bed of arrows, the shafts that held him up a hand's breadth above the ground, and Yudhishthira sat beside him as he had sat for many days, asking and listening.

"Grandfather," he said, "the rites say that the gift given to priests may be land, or cattle, or gold. But the sacred texts say that gold is the highest gift of all. What is gold? Where did it come from? Why is it counted purer than land and cows?"

Bhishma was quiet for a while. "When Rama, the son of Jamadagni, had emptied the earth of kshatriyas and performed a great horse sacrifice to cleanse himself, his heart was still not light," he said. "He asked the gods and the rishis what purifies a man who has done fierce deeds. Vasishtha answered him: give gold. All the gods are fire, and gold is the essence of fire. Then Vasishtha told him how gold was born. Listen, and I will tell it to you as it was told to him."

In an age long gone, Bhishma said, Shiva wedded Uma on the slopes of the Himalaya, and the gods, afraid of what a child of two such energies might do to the three worlds, begged Shiva to hold back his seed. He agreed. But Uma, robbed of a son, grew angry and cursed the gods: since they had denied her offspring, they would have none of their own.

Then the asura Taraka rose. He had won a boon from Brahma that no god, asura or rakshasa could kill him, and he pressed the gods and the rishis hard. They ran to Brahma, and Brahma told them the way out. Agni had not been present when Uma spoke her curse. Some of Shiva's energy had fallen into the fire, and Agni would carry it into the river Ganga, and from it would be born a son who would kill Taraka with a spear. "Find Agni," Brahma said. "He is older even than Rudra. He is in the hearts of all beings. He will do what you want."

So the gods and the rishis went out to find him, and could not. Agni had drawn his self into his own self and hidden, and he did not want to be found.

"Why did he hide?" asked Yudhishthira.

"Vasishtha did not say," said Bhishma. "Only that he would not show himself to the gods. Hear what it cost those who found him."

The gods searched the three worlds. They were great ascetics, able to go anywhere, and still they could not find him.

Agni had gone down into the waters of the nether world and lay sleeping there, and fire under water is still fire. The waters grew warm, then hot, and the frogs that lived in them were scorched in their homes among the stones. One frog, unable to bear it, swam up out of the depths and found the gods waiting anxiously on the surface.

"He is below," it said. "The bearer of oblations is sleeping in the water, and his heat has scorched us all. If you have business with Agni, go down to him there. As for us, we are leaving this place, we are afraid of him." And it dived back into the water.

But Agni had heard. He came to the frogs in his anger.

"You could not keep your tongues," he said. "Then your tongues shall keep nothing. From this day frogs will have no sense of taste."

And he was gone at once to find another hiding place, so that he would not have to show himself to the gods.

The gods looked at the frogs, who had suffered for doing them a service, and took pity on them.

"Agni's curse cannot be taken back," they said. "Your tongues will know no taste. But in its place take voices, many voices of many kinds. You shall roam when darkness covers everything. And in the driest season, when the ponds have gone to dust, you shall lie in your holes without food, and still live."

And the heat Agni had left in those waters did not go away. It still rises through the mountains in the hot springs, and a man who bathes in one is bathing in the warmth of the god's old hiding place.

Agni went next into a great ashvattha tree and folded himself into its dark heart, and was still.

The gods took up the search again and went over the whole earth, and found nothing. Then an elephant came to them, a great beast as huge and mighty as Airavata, the elephant of Indra himself, and lifted its trunk toward the ashvattha.

"In there," it said. "Agni is inside that tree."

Agni came out of the wood blazing, senseless with rage.

"Twice now," he said. "Twice I have been given up. Let your tongues turn, then. From this day the tongues of all elephants shall bend backward in their mouths."

And because an elephant had pointed him out, he left the ashvattha and went looking for somewhere new to sleep.

The gods stayed with the elephants. They were gods whose strength is truth, and they did not forget a service done to them.

"Your tongues are turned and we cannot turn them back," they said. "But they shall not hinder you. You will eat everything as freely as any beast that walks, and you will still utter cries, though their syllables are indistinct."

The elephants went off trumpeting, and the sound carried a long way.

The last hiding place was a shami tree, small and thorny, the kind of tree a man walks past without seeing. Agni crept into the heart of the wood and lay quiet as sap.

A parrot saw it and told the gods, and they came to the tree.

Agni's anger turned on the bird. "Speech has undone me three times," he said, "and speech shall be taken. Parrots will no longer have the power of speech." And the tongues of parrots turned as he said.

The gods saw Agni where the parrot had shown them, and they would not let the little bird be wholly ruined for helping them.

"Your tongue is hidden," they said to the parrot, "but you will still utter beautiful words, indistinct yet wonderful, like the speech of the old and of children. It will still be speech."

Then they turned to the shami tree that had held the god, and ordained that it would be an abode of the gods and that its wood would be sacred in every rite. From that day fire has lived in the shami, and men churn its wood to call him out.

Agni, found at last, looked at the gods in distress. "Why have you come?" he said.

"There is a task only you can do," they said. "The asura Taraka has grown proud on Brahma's boon and crushes us. We are cursed by the goddess and can have no sons of our own. Give us a son of your energy, a brave son, to destroy him. There is no one else to save us."

"Tell me the task and it is done," said Agni. "Do not think twice about it."

He went to the Ganga and placed the seed in her, and the child grew so fierce inside her that she could not bear it. She set it down on the great mountain Meru, and everything it touched, the rocks, the rivers, the trees of the mountain, turned to gold. The child lay in a thicket of reeds, shining like the young sun, and the Krittikas found him and nursed him, and he was called Kartikeya, and Skanda, and Guha. And because gold was born of Agni's seed, the rishis gave Agni a new name: Hiranyareta, he whose seed is gold.

Bhishma stopped. The wind moved over the field, and a camp fire somewhere beyond the tents cracked and settled.

"That is why gold is the highest gift," he said. "It is fire's own essence, born of fire's seed. When you give gold, you give Agni, and all the gods are Agni. Vasishtha told Rama this, and Rama gave gold to the brahmanas and was cleansed."

Yudhishthira was thinking of something else.

"A frog scalded out of its stones," he said. "An elephant. A bird in a nest. Each of them told the truth to the gods, and each was maimed for it."

"And each was given something back," said Bhishma. "Not what was taken, but something. The gods could not undo the curse of a god. What they could do, they did. That is how debts are paid in this world more often than not, crookedly, and in a different coin."

"And the shami," said Yudhishthira.

"Shami," Bhishma agreed. "The plainest wood in the forest. Thorny, crooked, no use for a beam or a bow. Fire chose it to hide in, and now no sacrifice is lit without it. Remember that, when you are king. The thing that holds the fire is rarely the thing that looks like it should."

Yudhishthira sat a long time beside the old man and said nothing, and the fires of the camp burned on in the dark.