The Wager Over the Horse's Tail

Kadru and Vinata were sisters as well as co-wives, both married to the sage Kashyapa, and when their husband offered each of them a boon in reward for years of devoted service, the two boons they chose would shape the enmity between two kinds of creature for as long as the world lasted.

Kadru asked for a thousand sons, serpents every one, glittering and numerous, a nation to call her own. Vinata asked for only two sons, but sons of a strength and splendor that would outshine Kadru's thousand put together. Kashyapa granted both requests exactly as asked, and in time Kadru laid a thousand eggs and Vinata laid two, and all of them were set aside in warm jars to mature at their own pace, however long that pace might be.

Kadru's thousand hatched first, as sheer numbers made likely, and her hermitage filled with serpent sons hissing and coiling underfoot, a small kingdom already formed before Vinata had anything to show at all. Vinata, watching her sister's brood grow loud and many while her own two eggs sat silent and unmoving, felt the particular impatience of a mother who has been promised something extraordinary and has so far received nothing but waiting.

It was this impatience, more than any single failing of character, that the rest of the story would turn on. A boon chosen for its rarity asks for the one virtue rarity always demands in return, a willingness to wait for it without forcing the matter, and Vinata's account of what happened next begins exactly where that willingness ran out.

Unable to bear the silence of her own eggs any longer, Vinata broke one open before its time. Inside lay a son only half formed, his lower body still undeveloped, and the sight of what her impatience had done to him was answer enough to the question she had been asking.

The child, who would be called Aruna, was furious rather than grateful to have been freed early into a body that could not yet support him. He cursed his own mother before he had even properly been born: for five hundred years, he told her, she would live as a slave, and only then would the son still waiting in the unbroken egg come to set her free. Having spoken the curse, Aruna rose out of the ocean's edge into the sky, incomplete as he was, and in time took his place at the front of Surya's chariot, driving the sun to its rising each dawn, his own ruddy color said ever after to be the color the sky takes on just before the sun itself appears.

Vinata was left with a curse laid on her by her own child, one egg cracked and empty, and one egg still whole and unmoving as before. She had traded five hundred years of freedom for the sight of a son she was not yet permitted to raise, and she had learned nothing from it that would keep her from making a second, worse mistake soon after. The lesson of the broken egg, it seems, is one that has to be paid for twice before it is truly heard, and Vinata's second payment was already approaching.

Some time later, the two sisters stood together at the edge of the ocean and watched Uchchaihshravas pass by, the flawless white horse that had risen from the churning of that same sea when gods and demons together had labored for the nectar of immortality, a story told fully elsewhere. No one disputed that the horse was white from mane to hoof to tail, without a single dark hair on him.

Seized nonetheless by the same appetite for testing fate that had already cost her five hundred years, Vinata proposed a wager. Whichever sister was wrong about the color of the horse's tail, she said, would become the other's slave. Kadru, with a thousand sons at her command and nothing yet to lose, claimed the tail was black. Vinata, certain of what her own eyes told her, claimed it was white, and staked her freedom on being right.

That night, Kadru summoned her sons and told them plainly what she needed: enough of them to coil themselves along the horse's tail like fine black hairs, so that in the morning light the wager would be settled in her favor whether or not it had ever been true. Vasuki, greatest among Kadru's serpent sons and destined to be king of serpents, heard the command along with his brothers, and the story does not pretend that all of them were eager to obey a lie for their mother's sake. Some hesitated. But enough of them went, and by dawn the tail of Uchchaihshravas carried a fine dark fringe that had not been there the day before.

When Vinata came in the morning to see the tail for herself, she found exactly what her sister had promised: black hairs woven through white, thick enough that no honest witness could have called the horse pure white any longer. She had lost a wager that had never needed to be fair in order to be lost, and by the terms she herself had set, she now belonged to Kadru as a slave.

Vasuki and his brothers returned to Nagaloka, the world beneath the world where the serpent race made its home, carrying with them a victory that tasted, for most of them, more like shame than triumph. They had not won a wager; they had disguised themselves as a lie their mother needed told, and the difference did not escape them even as they settled back into the coils and caverns of their own kingdom.

Kadru, for her part, showed no such unease. She had asked for a thousand sons and now had both the sons and a sister in service to command, and if the manner of the winning troubled her, the story gives no sign of it. A wager settled by deceit paid her exactly as well as a wager settled fairly would have, and she saw no reason to weigh the two differently.

Vinata, meanwhile, took up the labor of a slave in her own sister's household, still carrying the unhatched egg that held her second son, the one Aruna's curse had promised would come one day to set her free, though neither sister yet knew what shape that freedom would take, or how long the waiting would last this time.

Among the serpent sons who had hesitated before coiling themselves onto the horse's tail, unwilling even at their mother's word to make a lie stand as truth, Kadru found no gratitude for their scruple. She cursed them instead: in an age yet to come, she told them, they and their kind would burn in a great sacrificial fire, punishment not for disobeying her but simply for having been slow to obey. That curse would ripen generations later into the snake sacrifice of King Janamejaya, a fire that very nearly ended the serpent race entirely, and its telling belongs to that later story.

For now, in the world beneath the world, two things sat waiting side by side: a curse laid on serpents not yet born, and an egg belonging to a slave not yet freed. Vinata served her sister's household through the long years Aruna had promised, and within the shell of her second egg her true champion grew, unseen, toward a shape that would eventually be recognized as king of birds rather than merely a son who had come too late to prevent his mother's enslavement.

What binds the whole account together, the impatient breaking of one egg and the deliberate cheating over a horse's tail, is that both were the same appetite wearing two faces. Vinata could not wait for what was promised her, and Kadru would not wait for what was actually true. Between a mother's impatience and a mother's dishonesty there proved to be almost no distance at all, and the serpents and the birds have been paying for both ever since.