The Five Fords of the Apsaras

The vow was simple and Arjuna had written it himself: whichever brother intruded upon another while he sat alone with Draupadi would take twelve years of exile in the forests. He broke it to fetch his bow for a brahmana whose cattle had been stolen, and he refused every argument for staying, and that quarrel with his own conscience is told in its own place. What followed was the long walk.

He went north first, and at the Ganga a naga princess named Ulupi drew him down into the water and kept him a night and sent him back at dawn with a gift, and that also is told elsewhere.

'Take this for the night,' she had said. 'In water no creature will master you. Whatever swims, whatever crawls in a river, whatever waits in a pool, is under your hand. You will never drown, and nothing that lives beneath the surface will hold you against your will.'

He had thanked her the way a man thanks a giver for a gift he cannot imagine using, and had gone on with his brahmanas and his bow.

The road took years and it ran down the whole length of the land. He bathed where the great rivers bent, he heard the local stories at every ford, and he let the ascetics who travelled with him choose the tirthas, since a wandering that is also a penance does better with guides. In the south the country turned green and hot and older. He came to the Kaveri where it runs broad and shallow over rock, and he came at last within a day of the southern sea, into a country of palm and salt wind and low temples full of the light coming off the water. Somewhere on that same southern road stood Manalura and a king's daughter named Chitrangada, whose story is her own and her son's.

It was on the sea shore that he heard about the five fords.

There were five of them within a short walk of one another, and they had names that any pilgrim in the south would know: Agastya, Saubhadra, Pauloma, Karandhama, and Bharadwaja, the tirthas of the southern ocean.

Arjuna went to see them and found them beautiful and empty. Broad stone steps went down into clear green water. There were pillared halls at the edges with the roofs still sound, and flowering trees growing wild over the paving where somebody had once planted them in rows. And there was nobody there at all: no bathers, no priests, no flowers on the water, no ash, no wet footprints on the stone. Grass had come up between the slabs.

'Why does no one use them?' he asked the ascetics who had come with him.

'Because they are full of crocodiles,' said the eldest of them, 'and because they have been for longer than anyone alive can count. Look at the stonework. Kings built those steps. Men bathed there in the time of our great-grandfathers and made their offerings and went home. Then the creatures came into the water, and men were taken, and after enough men were taken the priests carried the images away and the villages moved inland. We do not go near them. We warn travellers away from them, and you are a traveller, and we are warning you.'

'Crocodiles in five pools at once,' said Arjuna, 'and in none of the rivers between here and the Kaveri.'

'That has been remarked on,' the old man said. 'Whatever is in that water, it chose that water. Son of Kunti, we know who you are, and it will make no difference. A bow is of no use to a man already under the surface with a thing that lives there. Bathe in the sea. The sea is holy enough.'

Arjuna looked a while longer at the steps going down into the clear green water, and at the halls that nobody had entered in a hundred years, and the arrangement of it struck him as less like a danger than like a door that had been shut and left shut.

'Five sacred fords standing idle,' he said, 'is not a thing I am willing to walk past. I will bathe in this one.'

The tirtha he chose was Saubhadra. He set down his bow and his quiver on the top step, in reach, and he went down the stone in the early light while the ascetics stood back from the edge and watched him the way men watch something they expect to have to describe afterward.

The water was cold and very clear. He waded out until it took him at the chest and put his hands together and began the words.

It hit him below the surface with the whole weight of its body and shut its jaws on his leg above the knee, and it did not thrash. It simply began to go backward into the deep water, hauling him after it, which is the way those creatures kill: no fight, only a steady patient dragging until the man stops being able to breathe.

On the bank somebody shouted. Arjuna went under, and under the water he felt no fear at all, and it took him a moment to understand why. The thing that had him could not move him. He was standing on the bottom in the dark-green light with a crocodile the length of a boat fastened to his leg, and the pull of it was nothing, and the naga girl's voice came back to him out of a night on the Ganga years and a thousand leagues away.

He reached down and took it by the snout with both hands.

Then he walked out of the pool, up the shelf of the bottom and up the stone steps with the water pouring off him, dragging the creature after him by main strength, and it came up out of its own water fighting for the first time and losing. He hauled it clear of the last wet step, onto dry stone, into the sun.

And there was no crocodile.

A woman stood on the paving in front of him, drenched, ornamented, shaking, with the sun coming off her the way it comes off water, and the print of his two hands still red on her arm. Behind him the ascetics had gone entirely silent. She looked at her own hands, and turned them over, and looked again. Then she sat down on the wet stone and wept as if she had been holding it for a century, which she had.

When she could speak she did it kneeling.

'I am Varga,' she said, 'an apsara of the court of heaven, and I have been a beast in that water for a hundred years. Four of us are still down there: Saurabheyi, Samichi, Budbuda, Lata. We were punished together.'

'For what?' said Arjuna.

'For doing what we were sent to do. There was a young brahmana in the forest near here, hardly more than a boy, and he had been at his study and his vows so hard that the heat of it was felt where such heat is always felt. The lord of heaven has never trusted a man like that, and he did what he always does. He sent us. We went as we always go: we came where he sat, and we sang, and we danced, and we did everything that has never failed.'

'And he did not look up. Not once. We stayed at it until it stopped being a task and became an insult, and then we were laughing at him, and he heard us, and he did look up then. He said, "Since you have come in that shape to take a man's mind from him, take the shape of what you are: go into the water and be crocodiles for a hundred years." We fell where we stood into that pool. We begged him from the water in the only voice we had left. We were only doing what we were told, we said, which is a poor plea, and he knew it, and he was young and ashamed of his anger. He gave us the ending.'

'What ending?'

'That a foremost of men would come to these fords, and go into the water that everyone else avoids, and take hold of us, and drag us onto dry land, and by the touch of his hands we would have our own forms again. He said the man would be one our kind had failed to break. I have lain in the dark a hundred years without understanding that, until this morning, when something took my jaws off my own face.'

She looked up at him, and she was not weeping now.

'The other four lie in four pools within a hundred paces of here,' she said. 'They cannot come out. They cannot ask. Do for them what has been done for me.'

So Arjuna went down into the other four.

He went into Agastya, and something struck him in the deep water and fastened on his arm, and he took it by the jaws and walked it up the steps into the sun and let go of a woman. He went into Pauloma and did it again. He went into Karandhama, which did not wait for him to be waist deep, and it made no difference. He went into Bharadwaja last, and by then the ascetics had come down off the high bank to watch, and the freed apsaras stood on the paving with their arms around one another and called encouragement to the water.

When the fifth was standing on dry stone, the five did not go at once. They stood together in the empty court in the sea light, in their own shapes, still dripping, and made their obeisance, and Varga spoke for them.

'We were sent to break an ascetic and could not, and it cost us a hundred years,' she said. 'We are set free by an ascetic in exile who walked into the one water in the south that no one will enter. Ask us for something.'

'Live in these fords,' said Arjuna, 'not under them. Let men come back. That is all I want out of it.'

They rose the way the celestials rise, all together and without any noise at all, and were gone into the light off the sea.

The ascetics went down the steps into Saubhadra that same day, an old man first, and the water was only water. Word went inland with the salt carts. Within a season the halls were swept and the paving had flowers on it again, and men called the five the fords of the women, and told the story there to anyone who asked why they had ever stood empty.

Arjuna took up his bow from the top step and went on along the coast, with much of his twelve years still in front of him.

A place had been dreaded for a hundred years, and everything the dread said of it was true: there were monsters in that water, and men had died. The fear was accurate and still wrong, because what waited in those pools was not a thing to be killed. It was a thing to be pulled into the light and let go.