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, though I do not mean the Muchukunda whose sleep in a mountain cave you already know, the one who woke to burn Kalayavana to ash with a single glance. This was an earlier bearer of that name, remembered in the teaching stories for a different reason entirely, 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, proud in the particular way of men who have never lost a battle, and it was this pride, 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, stung by the accusation into admitting what shame had kept him from admitting the night before, confessed that he had indeed held back a counter-working equal to the rakshasas' summoning, out of a fear that using it against a power as old as Kubera's might draw down a vengeance worse than a single lost battle. But a king's rebuke, once earned, is not easily refused, and by midday the priest had gathered himself, drawn the necessary circle in the frost-hard ground before the ruined camp, and spoken the countervailing verses he had kept silent through the whole of the previous night.

The stillness that answered him this time was of a different kind entirely. Whatever hold the rakshasas' summoning had kept over the ground around Alakapuri broke like a held breath finally released, and by evening word reached Muchukunda that the road to the city gates stood open and undefended, its wealth his for the simple act of walking in and claiming it.

It was Kubera himself who came out to meet him before he could take a single step through those gates, not as a defeated lord but as a curious one, and he offered Muchukunda, with a courtesy that carried no trace of a beaten man's bitterness, the freedom of the city's treasuries, gold and gems enough to outfit a hundred armies, saying that a king who had endured such a night and still stood at his gates by morning had earned whatever he cared to carry away.

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

I did not come here to be given a city, Muchukunda told Kubera, standing at the gates he had every right, by the terms offered, to walk through. I came to take one, by whatever conduct a kshatriya is permitted to take a city, and instead my army was broken by powers I could not answer, and my priest, not my own arm, answered them for me. What stands open before me now is not my victory. It is my priest's, or perhaps it is yours, offered to spare yourself further trouble. If I walk through those gates and call the wealth inside mine, I will have taken your city and lied about it in the same motion, and I would rather go home with nothing than rule over a treasury I cannot 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, had never once, by his own admission, met a king who turned from an open gate. His respect, when it came, was not the flattering kind offered to a guest but the harder kind offered between equals, and he let Muchukunda march home with his scattered army and not one coin more than he had brought north with him, and thought no less of the man 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 at those open gates: 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.