Muchukunda and the Lord of Treasure

Snow had not yet come to the plain, but the nights at Kurukshetra had turned sharp enough that the Pandavas kept their fires burning until dawn, and it was in the grey hour just before one such dawn that Yudhishthira came to Bhishma unable, for once, to wait for evening. He had not slept. He had lain awake instead turning over a thought that had followed him since the war's last morning, that the throne now his had been won less by his own hand than by Krishna's counsel, Bhima's strength, Arjuna's bow, and the deaths of men he had loved and men he had not, and he did not know, he confessed, in what sense such a kingdom could honestly be called his to rule.

Bhishma considered this for a long moment before answering, for it was, he said, the better sort of question a king could ask himself, the kind that most kings are too comfortable to ask at all. There was once a king, he began, who bore the name Muchukunda, a royal sage remembered in the teaching stories, and his story answers your question better than I could answer it myself. He marched once against a city no army could rightly hope to take, and what he refused, once it was handed to him, matters more than what he won.

Muchukunda was a king of the old solar line who had conquered the whole earth, proud in the particular way of men who have never lost a battle, and it was the wish to test his strength, more than any wrong done to him, that turned his eyes one year toward Alakapuri, the city of the yakshas ruled by Kubera, lord of treasure and keeper of the north. No mortal king had marched against that city within memory, for its wealth was said to be guarded not by soldiers but by powers no human army could meet in open field, and it was precisely this reputation that drew Muchukunda toward it, since a victory no one else had dared attempt seemed to him the only victory left worth having.

He gathered a host worthy of the ambition, chariots and elephants and foot soldiers numbering in their tens of thousands, and marched north through country that grew stranger and colder the further it carried him, until the towers of Alakapuri rose at last on the horizon, gleaming with a light that seemed to come from within the stone rather than from any sun. Muchukunda made his camp within sight of those towers and sent a herald ahead with the plain demand that every proud king sends before he means to take a city: submit, or be taken.

Kubera's answer arrived not as words but as a stillness that fell suddenly over the whole camp at dusk, a silence so complete that even the horses stopped their restless shifting, and Muchukunda's priest, a man well versed in omens, came to the king's tent with his face already pale, saying that he did not think the lord of treasure intended to answer with a herald at all.

The priest's fear proved well founded before the night was through. Kubera kept no standing army in the ordinary sense, needing none, for his power over the wealth and terrain of the north let him call up, when called upon, a horde of rakshasas out of the rock and shadow of the mountains themselves, creatures with no fear of mortal weapons and an appetite for mortal soldiers that turned the edge of Muchukunda's camp, within the space of a single hour, into a rout. Elephants bolted. Chariots overturned in the dark. Men who had stood unmoved through a dozen human battles broke and ran from enemies that seemed to rise out of the ground under their own feet, and by the time the sky paled toward morning, Muchukunda's proud host had scattered across half a day's march in every direction that led away from Alakapuri.

Muchukunda himself did not run. He stood in the wreck of his own camp as the rakshasas withdrew with the dawn, as such creatures of shadow generally do, and when his priest came stumbling back to him, ash-streaked and shaking, the king's fury broke not on the enemy who had beaten him but on the man beside him.

You are a priest of great learning, Muchukunda said, and I have watched you counter lesser workings with your mantras a hundred times in a hundred lesser causes. You knew what power guarded this city before I ever asked you to march with me, and yet you stood behind me through the whole of last night with your hands folded and your voice silent, while rakshasas your own learning could have turned aside tore my army to pieces around us both. If you have the power to answer what came against us, priest, I ask you now, before this campaign becomes only a story of my shame, to use it.

The priest was Vasishtha, and he did not answer the rebuke with words. A king's rebuke, once earned, is not easily refused, and he withdrew and performed austerities so terrible that their power went out against the rakshasas themselves.

The stillness that followed this time was of a different kind entirely. The rakshasas were slain and driven off, and the road to the city gates stood open and undefended.

It was Kubera himself who came out to meet the king before Muchukunda could take a single step through those gates, not as a defeated lord but as a scornful one. Kings stronger than you have come to me, he said, and they came to worship me as the giver of joy and sorrow. If you have strength in your arms, show it. Why lean so heavily on the power of a brahmana? Muchukunda, angry but measured, answered that the Creator made brahmana and kshatriya from one source, the one with the power of austerities and mantras, the other with the power of arms, to protect the world together, and that he had acted exactly so. Then Kubera, speaking to the king and his priest, made a stranger offer: I do not give or take a kingdom unless it is ordained. I give you this entire earth. Rule it.

Muchukunda looked at the lord of treasure for a long moment, and then he did the thing that made the story worth remembering at all. He refused.

I do not wish to enjoy a kingdom given to me by you, Muchukunda told Kubera. I wish to enjoy the prosperity of a kingdom won by my own arms and valour. My priest's austerities and my own arms are one strength, as the Creator meant them to be. But a kingdom handed to me by another as a gift is not a thing either of us has won, and I would rather rule only what I can honestly call earned.

Kubera, who had governed his wealth for ages beyond a mortal king's counting and had met every manner of greed a siege could produce, was filled with wonder at a king so fixed in a kshatriya's dharma. His respect, when it came, was not the flattering kind offered to a guest but the harder kind offered between equals, and Muchukunda went home and ruled the earth he had won by the strength of his own arms, and Kubera thought no less of him for it, and perhaps a great deal more.

Bhishma let the fire crackle a moment before he went on. You asked me, he said to Yudhishthira, whether a throne won by Krishna's counsel and Bhima's strength and Arjuna's bow can honestly be called yours. I will not pretend the question dissolves easily. But hear what Muchukunda understood standing before the lord of treasure: a gift that opens a door is not the same as the walking through it, and a king's true kingdom is not the one first placed in his hands but the one his own conduct, exercised every day afterward, goes on quietly earning. Rule so well, grandson, that whatever hand first gave you this throne, the throne becomes indisputably yours by the time you are done ruling it.