The Poisoned Prince

The quarrels of the cousins in the courtyards of Hastinapura have their own telling: the tree shaken until Kaurava boys fell out of it like fruit, the pool where Bhima held ten of them under water and let them up laughing. What is told here is the day the quarrel stopped being a quarrel.

Duryodhana had counted. He was a careful boy, and he had understood before anyone else in that house that a hundred of them could not manage one of Kunti's sons if that son ever decided to stop playing. Bhima ate for four and wrestled for sport and did not know his own weight; he broke his cousins' collarbones without malice, which was somehow worse.

"He grows," Duryodhana said to himself. "Every month he is heavier than the month before. Yudhishthira will have the throne by law and Bhima will hold it by force, and Arjuna will shoot down whoever objects. Remove the middle one and the other two are only a lawyer and an archer."

So he became gentle. He praised Bhima at meals. He proposed, with the enthusiasm of a boy who has invented a treat, a water festival at Pramanakoti on the bank of the Ganga, where the current ran deep and green under a shelf of rock.

The elders permitted it gladly, because it looked like healing. Servants went ahead and raised pavilions on the sand. Cooks came with baskets. Boats were dragged down to the water, and garlands were strung on their prows, and jars of sweetened water were sunk in the shallows to cool.

In one basket, under the honey cakes made especially for Bhima, sat cakes prepared by a cook who had been given kalakuta, black as a bee's back, and a great deal of gold, and no explanation.

The cousins rode out together at dawn, singing.

They swam all morning. They raced the boats, they wrestled in the shallows, they threw one another off the rock shelf into the green water, and Bhima, who could not be thrown by four of them at once, allowed himself to be thrown and came up roaring with laughter, and for a few hours it was very nearly the friendship the old men in the palace prayed for.

At the meal Duryodhana served his cousin with his own hands, which nobody found strange, because he had been serving him for weeks.

"Eat," he said. "You are the only one of us worth cooking for."

Bhima ate everything he was given and then ate what the others could not finish, and Duryodhana kept the special basket beside him and kept his eyes friendly, and the sweets went down among all the rest.

In the afternoon they swam again. The poison was slow and it was patient. Bhima felt it first as pleasant heaviness, the sort that follows a long day in the sun. He came out of the water, walked a little way along the bank to where the ground was cool under the trees, and lay down, and told himself he would rise in a moment.

By evening the party was gathering the boats. Duryodhana went along the bank alone and found him lying where the shadows had grown over him, breathing slowly, his eyes half open and unseeing.

He worked quickly. There were creepers everywhere at the water's edge. He tore them down in armfuls and bound the sleeping boy at the wrists, at the elbows, at the knees and the ankles, winding until the green cords bit into the flesh. Then he set his shoulder against him and rolled him, once, twice, over the lip of the bank.

The Ganga took him without a sound. Duryodhana watched the ring of ripples widen, flatten, and disappear, and then he went back to the pavilions and asked, pleasantly, whether anyone had seen Bhima.

He went down through green light into black, and the river carried him along its floor, and then the floor opened, as the waters at Pramanakoti are said to open, into the country of the nagas.

There the serpents found him: a bound boy, sinking through their air with poison in his blood. They did what serpents do to what falls into their world. They struck him at the throat, at the chest, at the arms, scores of them at once, and drove their venom into him.

And venom met venom. The kalakuta in his blood was met, matched and burned away, so that the very fangs that came to kill him cured him, and Bhima opened his eyes in the country under the river with his head clear for the first time since noon.

He flexed once and the creepers parted like wet grass. He rose. The serpents struck again and he took them by the tails and broke them against the ground, and those that could flee fled, hissing the news through the tunnels: a human child, unpoisonable, killing the guard.

They came to Vasuki, king of the nagas, jeweled and ancient, and he came down to see this creature for himself, with his counselors behind him.

Among them was an old naga named Aryaka, who looked once at the boy standing in the wreckage and cried out and went to him with his arms open.

"Do not touch him," said Aryaka. "This is my own blood. Kunti's father was descended from my line, and this child is her son. Look at his face. It is the face of that house."

He held Bhima and asked him how he came there, and Bhima, who had never in his life learned to shade a story, told it exactly: the cakes, the swimming, the heaviness, the dark.

The serpents heard him out. In that court, where every child is born holding death in its mouth, they had rarely heard of anything so cold as a boy poisoning his cousin at a picnic.

"He is your kinsman," said Vasuki. "Ask me for something worthy of the house of the nagas, and it is given."

Aryaka did not ask for gold. "There are the vessels of the elixir," he said. "Give the boy to drink."

The counselors looked at one another. In the treasury of the serpents stood the cups of rasa, and it was said that one cup held the strength of a thousand elephants, and that no human frame had been offered them.

"Let him drink as much as he can hold," said Vasuki.

They purified him and seated him facing east, and he took the first cup and drained it at a draught, and the nagas watching made a low sound of astonishment. He drank a second. He drank a third. He drank eight, one after another, and set the eighth down and looked around for a ninth, and there was none.

Then the strength took him and he could not stand under it. They laid him upon a divine bed, and he slept there for eight days while the elixir went through him and remade what it found, and the serpents came in shifts to look at the sleeping child who now carried in his arms the weight of ten thousand elephants.

Above, at Pramanakoti, they searched the banks by torchlight, and dragged the shallows, and found nothing. Duryodhana searched hardest and looked most stricken, and rode home at dawn with the others in silence.

Hastinapura mourned. Kunti wept and would not be comforted and said aloud what everyone was thinking, which was that her son had not drowned, because that boy could not drown. Yudhishthira held her hands and said nothing where servants could hear. He had seen his cousin serving the sweets. He had no proof, and he had four brothers left, and he had begun already to count what a spoken accusation would cost.

Vidura, who knew everything before anyone told him, advised them only to wait.

On the eighth day Bhima woke, and knew at once that something in him had changed, because the bed he rose from cracked under his hand as he pushed himself up.

Vasuki gave him leave. "Go back to your mother. You have taken enough of our strength to carry the rest of your family on your back, and I think you will need to. Say nothing to anyone about the road you came by."

The nagas fed him and dressed him in fresh cloth and brought him up, and he came out of the water at Pramanakoti in the early light and began to walk. He walked into Hastinapura dusty and enormous and entirely alive, and the gate guards stared, and a servant dropped a water jar in the courtyard, and Kunti came out running with her hair unbound.

In the inner rooms he told it all: the cakes, the creepers, the fangs, the cups. Kunti wept again, differently. Yudhishthira listened to the end without once interrupting, which was his way, and then he did the hardest thing in the story.

"Say nothing," he said. "Not to Bhishma. Not to the king. Not to Duryodhana, and above all not to Duryodhana. If you accuse him we will be five boys in a house of a hundred, and grandfather will be forced to judge his own blood, and the kingdom will split while our father's ashes are still warm. Be careful what you eat. Be careful where you sleep. And be a boy, and laugh with them."

Bhima looked at his elder brother for a long moment. "He put me in the river," he said.

"I know," said Yudhishthira. "Remember it."

So he remembered it, and said nothing, and went back to wrestling with his cousins in the courtyard as though nothing had happened. He kept the account open for a long life: the poison, the burning house, the dice hall, his brothers' wife dragged by her hair. Every entry was settled at last on the field of Kurukshetra, and one of them was settled upon Dushasana in a manner the world has never stopped talking about.