Gandhamadana, Mountain of Fragrance

The sage Lomasa had led them north for months, out of the Kamyaka woods and along the rivers, from one tirtha to the next, until the plains gave way to foothills and the foothills gave way to a country that no longer belonged to men. Beyond the last herdsman's track the road narrowed to a thread laid across bare rock. Behind them lay the world of kingdoms and dice halls and thirteen counted years. Ahead of them stood Gandhamadana.

Even at a distance the mountain announced itself. The wind that came down its flanks carried a sweetness with no source that anyone could point to, not flower and not smoke and not sandalwood, though something of all three at once, and it was from that fragrance that the mountain took its name. Gandhamadana, the maddening scent, the mountain that intoxicates. Pilgrims said the gods kept their gardens on it. The gods had never troubled to deny it.

"Take care from here," Lomasa told them. "This is Kubera's country. The paths on this mountain were not cut for us, and what walks them does not always care to share."

They climbed. The air thinned and turned cold enough to burn the throat. Draupadi, who had been a queen in Indraprastha and had walked barefoot through forests ever since, found the stone cruel under her feet, and Yudhishthira slowed the whole party for her without once admitting that he was doing it. Bhima went ahead and came back, ahead and came back, restless as weather.

Then the sky broke open. A storm came down off the summit with no warning at all, flattening the trees below them, driving them under an overhang of rock, filling the world with noise for as long as it lasted. When it passed, the forest was scoured clean and silent, and the air smelled of the mountain more strongly than before.

Something came turning down the wind after the storm, slow and bright against the wet dark of the rocks, and settled on the ground at Draupadi's feet.

It was a lotus, but no lotus that grows in the ponds of Hastinapura. Its petals were past counting and its color was not quite any color, and the fragrance that had filled the whole mountain a moment before was suddenly revealed to be only the rumor of this one flower's scent. Draupadi lifted it in both hands. For a while she said nothing at all.

"Saugandhika," Lomasa said quietly. "The sweet-scented. It grows where Kubera keeps his water."

Draupadi turned to Yudhishthira first, as she always did, and then to Bhima, because she knew which of them the asking belonged to.

"If a flower like this exists," she said, "then somewhere on this mountain there is a place where such flowers are ordinary. I have had my palace taken from me and my hair pulled in a hall full of kings, and I have not asked either of you for anything since. I am asking now. Bhima, bring me more of these. Bring them for the sake of dharma if you like, and bring them because I want them."

Bhima was already moving.

He took no path, because there was no path in the direction he wanted to go. He went up through the trees the way water goes down them, straight and without negotiation, and the forest of Gandhamadana came apart in front of him. Elephants heard him coming and stood aside. Lions left their kills. He roared as he climbed, for no reason except that his blood was high and the slope was steep and Draupadi had asked him, at last, for something he could go and take with his hands.

High up, where the pines gave way to plantain groves, the way narrowed between two walls of rock, and across that narrow place lay an old monkey, thin and grey, its long tail stretched out over the path like a fallen branch.

"Move," Bhima said. "There is a road here and I am using it."

The monkey did not get up. "I am old and I am ill," it said, "and I was sleeping. Step over me and go on your way."

"I will not," said Bhima. "The teaching on that is clear. A man does not step across any living being. Draw your tail aside and I will pass."

"I have no strength left to move it," the monkey said. "You have strength. Move it yourself."

Bhima laughed and reached down with one hand, the hand that had broken Kichaka in the dark and would one day break Duryodhana's thigh, and the tail did not stir. He set his mace on the rock and used both arms and the whole of his weight and the whole of a strength that had never once failed him in his life, and the tail lay where it lay. Sweat stood out on him in that cold air. He let go, stepped back, and looked at the old monkey with something in his face that had not been there in years.

"Who are you?" he said. "There is no one in the world who could do this to me. There is one."

"Sit down, brother," said Hanuman. "We have the same father."

They talked a long while on that ledge, the son of the wind and the son of the wind, of Rama and of Lanka, of the ages of the world and what a man is permitted in each of them. Hanuman promised that when the great war came he would sit upon Arjuna's banner and roar, and the courage would go out of the enemy at the sound of it. Then he pointed north, toward the water, and told Bhima where the flowers grew.

The lake lay in a fold of the mountain under a sky so clear it seemed thin, and its water was still, and the saugandhika lotuses stood upon it in their thousands with the whole fragrance of Gandhamadana rising off them at once. Around it ran terraces and stairs of cut stone, and gardens laid out by no gardener Bhima could see, and the houses of Kubera, lord of wealth and of this mountain, offering no welcome whatever.

The keepers of the lake came out to meet him: yakshas in their hundreds, and rakshasas beside them, armed and entirely unhurried.

"This water belongs to Kubera," they told him. "Ask, and if he grants it, take. No one drinks here or plucks here without asking first."

"I am a kshatriya," Bhima said. "I do not beg for what grows on the earth. The earth was not made for Kubera alone. If your king wants his flowers, let him come and hold them."

He went down into the water anyway, and they came at him, and what followed on that shore was one of the great slaughters of his life. He fought with his mace, and with trees pulled up whole by the roots, and with his hands when the trees broke. The yakshas ran. Those who did not run stayed there. Then he waded out among the lotuses in the reddened water and picked them carefully, one at a time, the way a man picks flowers for someone.

When word reached Kubera, he sent no army. He had carried for a long age a curse of his own laid on one of his yakshas, to be lifted only when a mortal's violence should end it, and Bhima's arrogance that afternoon had ended it. So he sent his pardon instead, and the mountain permitted the Pandavas to stay.

The mountain was not finished with Bhima. In a defile not far from their camp a python of enormous size took him in its coils and held him past all struggling, and it was Yudhishthira, arriving and answering the creature's questions on dharma with the patience of a man who had never once been in a hurry, who bought his brother's life back with words alone; the serpent had been a king named Nahusha, and it went to heaven at the end of that conversation.

After that, the days on Gandhamadana grew quiet. Near Badari, among the jujube trees where the young Ganga came down white and loud out of the rocks, the brothers made a camp that was almost a home, and stayed in it. Draupadi kept the fire. Yudhishthira sat with sages and listened. Bhima climbed for the sake of climbing. The sweet wind came down off the summit every evening as it had done for ages before any of them were born.

They were waiting. Arjuna had gone north and then further than north, up to Indra's own heaven, to stand before his father and learn the weapons that would be wanted when the thirteenth year was finished. No message came down. The years the exile still owed passed one after another on that mountain, and the brothers spent them in the fragrance of it.

Then one day the sky over the summit filled with light and sound together, and Indra's chariot came down onto Gandhamadana with Matali holding the reins. Arjuna stepped off it in a shape his brothers hardly recognized, wearing the ornaments of heaven, carrying in him the weapons of Indra and Rudra and Yama and Varuna. Draupadi wept. Bhima lifted him off his feet. Yudhishthira asked, before anything else, whether he was well.

The mountain had held them for years and given them a flower, a brother out of an older age, and a war's worth of weapons. Then it let them go back down toward the plains, and toward Kurukshetra.