The River and the Island

Long before the great war was even a shadow on the horizon, the river Yamuna carried a secret in its current. King Uparichara Vasu, a monarch beloved of Indra and master of a flying crystal chariot, had been hunting in the deep forest when a longing for his queen, Girika, overcame him. She was far away at the palace, and he was alone among the trees, but he could not bear to let the moment pass unhonored.

Unwilling to waste what he believed was destined for a worthy heir, the king gathered his seed within a folded leaf and called down a swift hawk. "Carry this to my queen," he told the bird, and the hawk rose into the bright air with the leaf clutched in its talons. But the sky over the Yamuna was a hunting ground, and another hawk, seeing the leaf and thinking it meat, swooped to seize it. The two birds clashed and tumbled, beating their wings, and in the struggle the leaf slipped free and fell, turning over and over, until it vanished into the moving water below.

Beneath that surface waited Adrika, once an apsara of the heavens, now cursed by Brahma to wear the body of a fish until her debt of sin was paid. She rose to the falling thing and swallowed it whole. So it was that what a king sent into the sky came to rest in the belly of a creature swimming through the Yamuna, and the river kept its counsel, as rivers do.

Ten months turned in their slow circle, and the fish that carried the king's seed grew heavy and strange. One grey dawn the fishermen of the river drew their nets and felt them strain as never before. With shouts and braced feet they hauled in a fish so vast that it took several men to drag it onto the muddy bank. When they cut it open, expecting only the ordinary spoils of their trade, they fell back in astonishment.

Inside the creature lay two human infants, a boy and a girl, living and whole, their small mouths working silently. At the moment they were lifted into the morning light, the fish that had borne them shimmered and changed, and the cursed apsara Adrika rose from its ruined shape, freed at last, and ascended to the world of the gods from which she had fallen. The fishermen watched her go, struck dumb, and then looked down at the two children breathing in their rough hands.

The chief of the fisher-folk, a careful and honest man, did not know what to do with such a wonder. These were no common foundlings. He wrapped them warmly and carried them through the reeds to the one man whose judgment governed the river country, the king himself, that the rightful order of things might be observed.

King Uparichara Vasu looked upon the twins and understood at once whose they were, for the secret of the lost seed was his own. He took the boy into his household, and that child grew to become a righteous ruler, the founder of the line of Matsya, the Fish Kingdom. But the girl carried about her a deep and clinging odor of the river, the raw smell of fish that no washing could lift, and the king judged that she belonged among the people of the water who had drawn her from the net.

So he gave her back to the chief of the fishermen, to be raised as a daughter of that humble house. They called her Satyavati, the truthful one, and also Matsyagandha, she who smells of fish, for the scent went everywhere she went and announced her before she spoke.

Yet a strange thing happened as the years passed. Though she lived in a hut of mud and reed and ate the plain food of fishers, Satyavati grew into a young woman whose beauty stopped travelers in the road. Her eyes were dark and steady, her form graceful, her bearing somehow finer than her station. Only the odor of fish stood between her and the admiration she would otherwise have commanded everywhere, and it was a wall that nothing could breach. She bore it without complaint, and she worked.

Her work was the ferry. The fisher-chief, her father, kept a boat that carried travelers across the broad waters of the Yamuna, and Satyavati plied it day after day, leaning into the oar, reading the moods of the current as easily as another reads a familiar face. Pilgrims bound for distant shrines, merchants with their bundles, herdsmen, and wandering ascetics all stepped into her boat and let her carry them from one bank to the other.

She knew the river in all its seasons, the slow brown flood of the rains and the clear shallow flow of the dry months, the places where the bottom shelved and the places where it dropped away into cold depth. The work hardened her hands and browned her arms, and still the smell of fish hung about her like a garment she could not take off. Travelers were kind or unkind as travelers are, and she answered both the same, with the calm of one who has learned not to expect the world to be just.

She had no grand thoughts of what her life might become. She was the daughter of a fisherman, born of a fish, working a ferry on the Yamuna, and she expected to grow old at the oar. The river gave her its labor and its silence, and she took both. She did not know that her name was already written into the destiny of a great dynasty, nor that the next sage to step into her boat would change everything.

One morning a sage came down to the crossing, his hair matted from years of austerity, his eyes bright with the power that long penance lays up in a man. This was Parashara, grandson of the great Vashishtha, a master of the scriptures and of forces beyond the ordinary world. He had a journey to make and asked the fisher-girl to row him across.

Satyavati took up her oar and bent to the work, and as the boat moved out into the stream the sage studied her face. The fish-smell that turned away common men did not turn away Parashara, for his sight pierced through surfaces to the marrow of things, and what he saw in this fisher-girl was a woman destined to be the mother of a son of immeasurable greatness. The knowledge stirred a desire in him, and he spoke of it plainly, as the seers of old were wont to do, telling her that he wished to be the father of her child.

Satyavati's heart filled with fear and confusion. "Holy one," she said, "look about you. The sages sit in meditation upon both banks, and they will see. I am a maiden, and my virtue is all the wealth my poor house possesses. How can you ask this of me here, in the open eye of the river?" Her voice did not waver, for she was truthful even when afraid, and she held the oar steady against the current while she waited for the sage to answer.

Parashara heard the reason in her fear and did not dismiss it. With a word and a turning of his will, the sage drew up out of the river a thick white fog that rolled across the water and swallowed the boat, the banks, and the watching ascetics until the world was reduced to the small space the two of them shared. No eye could pierce it. "Now we are hidden," he told her, "and none shall see."

Still Satyavati hesitated, and she asked for assurances that only a sage could grant. "If I do as you ask, what will become of me? A ruined maiden is fit for no one's house." Parashara promised her that her maidenhood would be restored, untouched and whole, so that no mark of this hour would cling to her afterward. And then he bid her name a boon, any gift within his power to give.

Satyavati thought of the one burden that had shadowed her whole life. "Take from me the smell of fish," she said. "Give me instead a fragrance that men will love." The sage smiled and granted it. In that instant the raw odor of the river lifted away from her forever, and in its place rose a sweetness so rich and far-carrying that it could be caught from a yojana's distance. From that day she was called Yojanagandha, whose scent travels a yojana, and Gandhavati, the fragrant one. The fisher-girl who had smelled of fish now drew the air sweet about her wherever she walked.

There upon a small island in the midst of the Yamuna, screened by the sage's fog, Satyavati conceived and, by the grace that attends such births, brought forth a son that very day. He did not enter the world as an ordinary infant, helpless and crying. He grew to the full stature of a man in the moment of his birth, dark of complexion and grave of face, already filled with the knowledge of the scriptures and the fire of austerity.

Because he was born upon an island, a dvipa, and was dark like Krishna, the world would come to call him Krishna Dvaipayana. And because in later ages he would divide the single mass of the Vedas into four ordered branches so that men might learn them, he earned the name by which he is best remembered: Veda Vyasa, the arranger, the compiler of the Vedas, and the very voice that would one day tell the tale of the Bharatas.

But on the day of his birth he had no kingdom and no desire for one. He bowed to his mother and told her that he would go at once into the forest to a life of penance and contemplation, for that was the path his nature demanded. Before he left, he made her a solemn promise. "Mother," he said, "whenever you have need of me, only think of me, and in that same instant I will come to you, wherever I am and whatever I am doing." Then he turned and walked into the trees, and the fog lifted, and Satyavati stood alone on the bank, a maiden again as she had been, sweet-scented now where she had once smelled of fish, carrying a secret no one on the river would ever guess.

Years went by, and the sweet fragrance of Satyavati spread her fame across the country. It happened that King Shantanu of Hastinapur, lord of the Kuru line, came hunting along the Yamuna and caught upon the breeze a scent so wondrous that he followed it as a man follows a dream, until he came to the fisher settlement and saw the woman from whom it rose. He was a widower, his great queen Ganga long departed, and at the sight of Satyavati an old hope kindled in him. He went to her father, the chief of the fishermen, and asked for her hand in marriage.

The fisher-chief was shrewd and loved his daughter, and he did not bow at once before a king. "My daughter is fit to be a queen," he said, "but I will give her only on one condition. The son she bears to you must be the one to inherit your throne. Promise me that, and she is yours. Refuse it, and there is nothing more to say."

Shantanu's heart fell, for he could not make such a promise. He already had a son, Devavrata, a prince of matchless gifts whom he had named heir, the child of Ganga herself. To set that prince aside would be a grave wrong. The king said nothing, turned away, and rode back to Hastinapur with the fragrance of Satyavati haunting him and a sorrow he would not name settling over the whole palace.

Prince Devavrata watched his father waste in silence and could not understand the cause until he drew it from the king's charioteer and then sought out the fisher-chief himself. There he learned the whole of it: the fragrant maiden, the demand that her son must rule, and his father's grief at being unable to set his firstborn aside.

The prince did not hesitate. For the sake of his father's happiness, he stood before the fisher-chief and renounced his own right to the throne of Hastinapur, swearing that Satyavati's children would inherit it. But the wary fisherman pressed further. "Your sons may one day claim the kingdom for themselves, prince, however noble your own word." Then Devavrata raised his voice and took an oath so terrible that the heavens themselves are said to have trembled. "I will never marry," he vowed. "I will live my whole life in celibacy, so that I shall have no sons to contend with the children of Satyavati. This I swear."

For that fearsome renunciation the gods rained down flowers, and the prince earned the name by which all ages remember him: Bhishma, he of the awful vow. The fisher-chief, satisfied at last, gave his daughter, and Bhishma seated her in his chariot and bore her home to Hastinapur to be the queen of his father. So the girl born of a fish, who had rowed a ferry on the Yamuna, became a queen of the Kuru house, and the most loyal warrior of the dynasty bound his entire life to make it so.

Satyavati bore Shantanu two sons in Hastinapur, Chitrangada and Vichitravirya, and for a season it seemed the throne was well provided with heirs. But the line that began so brightly soon ran into shadow. Chitrangada, the elder, grew proud and strong and fierce, so much so that he scorned all rivals. A gandharva who shared his name challenged him, and they fought a long and dreadful battle upon the field of Kurukshetra. In the end the gandharva struck the young king down, and Chitrangada died without a wife or child to follow him.

The burden of the dynasty fell upon the younger brother, Vichitravirya, who was still a boy. Bhishma ruled as regent and guarded the kingdom until the prince came of age, and then, to secure the line, he won by force of arms the three princesses of Kashi, Amba, Ambika, and Ambalika. Amba was released to follow her own heart, but Ambika and Ambalika were wed to Vichitravirya, and for seven years the young king lived in pleasure with his two queens.

Yet pleasure proved his ruin. Vichitravirya fell into a wasting illness, and despite every care he too died young, leaving no child behind. Now the great Kuru throne stood empty of heirs. Chitrangada was gone, Vichitravirya was gone, and Bhishma was bound by his unbreakable vow never to marry or beget a son. The dynasty that stretched back to Bharata himself stood upon the very edge of extinction, and the whole weight of it came to rest on the shoulders of one woman, the queen mother, Satyavati.

In her grief Satyavati turned first to Bhishma, the one man whose strength could surely save the house. She begged him to set aside his vow, to take the widowed queens and father children upon them so that the line of Shantanu might continue. It was a mother's desperate reasoning, and she pleaded that the survival of the whole dynasty justified the breaking of a single oath.

But Bhishma would not bend. "Mother," he said gently, "I may give up the three worlds, I may give up the kingdom of the gods, I may give up anything that exists or can be imagined, but I will never give up my truth. The sun may lose its heat, the moon its coolness, the wind its motion, before Bhishma forsakes his vow." He reminded her of the law of niyoga, the ancient custom by which a sage or a worthy man might be called to raise up offspring for a dead man's line, and he urged her to seek such a remedy rather than ask him to forswear himself.

Satyavati saw that his resolve was a mountain that no plea could move, and she fell silent, turning the matter over in her heart. The custom Bhishma named required a man of great purity and power to father the children, and as she searched her memory for such a man, her thoughts traveled back across the long years to a misty morning on the Yamuna, to a sage's boon and a son born upon an island, and to a promise that had been waiting all this time to be claimed.

Then Satyavati told Bhishma a secret she had carried in silence since before she ever entered the Kuru house. Long ago, before her marriage, she had borne a son to the sage Parashara, a child who grew to manhood in the hour of his birth and went away into the forest to a life of penance. "He promised me," she said, "that whenever I had need of him and called him to mind, he would come. He is my firstborn, a sage of boundless power. If you consent, I will summon him now, that he may raise up sons for the line of his half-brother Vichitravirya." Bhishma, hearing this, joined his palms and gave his glad assent, for who could be more fit than such a one.

Satyavati closed her eyes and thought of her son, Krishna Dvaipayana, the great Vyasa. In that same instant, wherever he had been at his austerities, he knew his mother's mind and stood before her, unbidden by any messenger, true to the word he had given upon the island so many years before. He bowed to her and asked what she required, and Satyavati, after honoring him, opened to him the sorrow of the empty throne and asked him to do what the law of niyoga allowed, to father children upon the widowed queens of Vichitravirya so that the Kuru line should not perish from the earth.

Vyasa consented to his mother's command, and from his act would come Dhritarashtra, Pandu, and Vidura, the fathers and uncle of the great cousins whose quarrel would one day shake the world. So the wheel turned full circle. The seed lost in the Yamuna had passed through a fish, a fisher-girl, a sage's fog, and a queen's grief, until at last the son born of the river was called home to plant the very dynasty whose mighty and tragic story he himself would one day compose. The fisher-girl had become the mother of a line, and the river had kept its promise after all.