The Fire in the Sea

The gandharva had come to the ford at moonrise certain that no mortal crossed the Ganga at night without his leave, and he left the water on foot with his chariot burned to ash, alive only because Yudhishthira asked that he be spared (that duel is its own telling). By the time the fires were built on the bank, the defeated challenger had become Chitraratha, and he sat among the five brothers and their mother as though the night had always been meant for talking rather than for weapons.

He had given Arjuna horses of the gandharva breed and taken from him the weapon of fire, and now he offered advice, which he plainly considered the better gift.

'You are the sons of Pandu,' he said, 'and you walk the roads without a priest before you. That is why I dared you at the water. A house of kshatriyas that carries no brahmin at its head is a house walking in the dark, and any creature of the night may test it.'

'You speak of brahmins as though they were armies,' Arjuna said.

'Worse,' said the gandharva. 'An army can be counted. You know where it camps and what it eats. A brahmin's anger has no camp. It is fed by nothing but itself, and once it is lit there is no herald who can carry terms to it.'

He looked west, downriver, in the direction where all the rivers finally go.

'Far from this bank there is a sea,' he said, 'and beneath that sea a mouth shaped like the head of a mare has been drinking the water and burning since before your fathers' fathers were named. Men call it a wonder. It is not a wonder. It is a vow that was made in grief and had to be put somewhere. Sit, Arjuna, and I will tell you whose it was.'

In the old age of the world, said the gandharva, the race of Bhrigu was the richest line of brahmins alive. Kings had poured wealth on them for generations, at coronations and horse sacrifices and every rite where a throne needed heaven's approval, and the Bhrigus had taken what was given because a gift refused insults the giver. Gold sat in their houses in quantities that no house of ascetics had any use for.

Then the kshatriyas fell on hard years. The kings who had emptied their treasuries into brahmin hands looked around their bare halls and remembered where it had gone, and they came to the hermitages of the Bhrigus not as sacrificers but as suppliants, asking for the return of what their grandfathers had given away.

The Bhrigus, said Chitraratha, made the first mistake, and it was a small one, of the kind that fear always makes. Some of them gave their wealth to brahmins of other lines for safekeeping. Some buried it in the earth under their own floors and told the kings there was nothing left. They did not refuse out of greed alone; they refused because a gift given at a sacrifice is not a loan, and they were afraid, and men who are afraid hold tighter.

One of the kings, digging in a Bhrigu house, struck buried gold with his own hands.

What followed had no shape of law in it. The kshatriyas went through the hermitages of the Bhrigus the way fire goes through summer grass, and they did not stop at the men who had lied to them. They killed the old who had given no answer at all. They killed the women. They opened the wombs of the women who were carrying, so that nothing of the line should be left to remember the debt or to collect it.

'That is the part you must hold on to,' the gandharva said. 'They killed the unborn, because they were afraid of exactly what came.'

The widows of the Bhrigus fled north into the folds of the mountains, and among them was one who was carrying a son. She did not do the ordinary thing with him. Knowing what the kings had done to wombs, she drew the child up into her thigh and carried him there, and the years went by, and no one who looked at her could say she was carrying anything at all.

A woman of the hermitages who had no love for her carried word to the kshatriyas: there is one left, and the seed of Bhrigu is still in her.

They came for her. They found her in a clearing with the mountains behind her, and they were closing on her when the child, grown beyond all counting in the dark where he had been kept, broke out of his mother's thigh and stood up.

What came out of him was light. It was not a weapon and he had used no mantra; it was simply the accumulated brightness of a being who had been held back from the world for years and had spent all that time knowing what had been done to his people. The kings could not look at it. They went blind where they stood, every one of them, and they went stumbling through the hills like cattle in smoke, and at last they came back to that clearing and put their heads on the ground before the mother of the child.

She asked her son to give them their eyes, and he did. He was born, and named for the thigh that had hidden him, and he was Aurva.

But he had grown up inside a woman who had run from a massacre, and the first thing he had learned in the world was who had emptied it of his kin. He mastered the Vedas in less time than a boy takes to master a bow. Then he went into the forest, sat down, and began an austerity whose declared object was the destruction of every world there was.

The penance was answered before it was finished, but not by the gods. The dead came up out of the world of the fathers, the murdered Bhrigus themselves, and Bhrigu at the head of them, and they stood in that forest and looked at the fire their descendant was building.

'Aurva,' they said, 'put it down. We have seen what you are making and it is not ours.'

'You were butchered,' he said. 'Your women were butchered. Children who had no names yet were cut out and killed. I have taken a vow before the fire, and I am not a man who breaks one.'

'Listen to what you were not told,' Bhrigu said. 'We were not helpless. Not one of those kings could have stood in front of us for the length of a breath if we had chosen to burn them, and we did not choose it. We had grown weary of long life, and we would not take our own deaths, because a man who kills himself loses the worlds he has earned. So we let the kshatriyas come. We let their greed do for us what our own hands were forbidden to do. Their crime was real and it was ours to arrange. Do you understand? You are avenging a death we asked for.'

Aurva sat in the ash of his fire and did not answer for a long time.

'Then whose is this anger?' he said at last.

'Yours,' said the fathers. 'It is your hunger, child, and not our justice. It has kept you company since before you were born and you have called it duty because you had nothing else to call it. But hear this also. We do not ask you to swallow it. A vow taken before the fire and abandoned will turn and eat the man who took it, and we did not come here to kill our own line a second time. Do not cancel your anger. Give it somewhere to burn that is not the world.'

So Aurva did what the fathers told him. He drew the fire of his penance out of himself, and he carried it west to where the land stops, and he threw it into the sea.

It did not go out. It took the shape of the head of a great mare, and it stood in the water with its mouth open, drinking the ocean and throwing it out again as flame, and it has been there ever since. The sea does not put it out and it does not drink the sea dry. It burns exactly as much as it is given and no more, and it will go on doing so until the end of the age, when everything that was set aside will be called for at once.

'That is what a vow looks like,' said Chitraratha, 'when a wise man is talked out of using it and cannot simply throw it away. It goes under the water. It keeps burning. But it burns nothing that was ever alive.'

Arjuna asked whether the anger of that line had ended there, and the gandharva laughed without much humor in it.

'Aurva had a son, and that son had a son, and in the fourth generation of that house the fire came up again with a better grip on itself,' he said. 'Rama of the axe, of the race of Bhrigu, who cleared the earth of kshatriyas twenty-one times over a wrong done to his own father. You have heard that story. Ask yourself only this: his great-grandfather was told by the dead themselves that the dead had wanted no such thing, and four generations later the axe went out anyway.'

He stirred the fire on the riverbank.

'Take a priest with you,' he said. 'A house that carries a brahmin before it does not have to learn where these fires go by walking into one. And remember what Aurva learned in that forest. The dead ask for nothing. Every offering made to them is kept by the living, and it is the living it burns.'