The Palace of Illusions

When Agni devoured the Khandava forest and Arjuna and Krishna stood at its burning edges turning back everything that fled, one fugitive ran straight toward the archers instead of away - a being with the bearing of a king and the eyes of a draughtsman, smoke pouring off his shoulders, his great hands raised not to fight but to beg.

"Protection!" he cried over the roar of the flames. "I am Maya, architect of the asuras! I claim the refuge of Arjuna, son of Pandu!"

Krishna's discus was already rising, a wheel of light at the edge of his finger. Mayasura was of the demon race, and the forest and all that lived in it had been promised to the fire as its meal; the law of the hunt said he should burn with the rest. But the law of refuge outranks every promise ever made. A fugitive who throws himself at a warrior's feet and asks for protection must receive it, though the heavens fall. Arjuna stepped between the asura and the discus and lifted his hand. "He has come to me for shelter. He has my word. He lives."

The fire passed on, and the discus sank, and Mayasura - who had just watched his palaces and his hoarded treasures and the cities of his kindred turn to cinders in a single afternoon - found himself standing alive on scorched ground, owing his breath to two strangers. To a craftsman of his order, a debt was not a feeling. It was a contract, and a contract demanded repayment in the only coin he truly possessed, which was work.

"Ask me for anything," Mayasura said, bowing low to Arjuna and to the dark cowherd beside him whose eyes seemed to know him already. "I am the Vishvakarma of the demons. I built the floating cities that the gods themselves came down to envy. I shaped halls in which water and stone change places at a glance. Name the labor. Whatever a man can imagine and a hundred men cannot accomplish, I will raise for you, and it shall be my thanks."

Arjuna would not hear of payment. "I did what dharma asks of any warrior," he said. "A man does not take a price for sparing a life that asked for sparing. Go in peace, Maya, and owe me nothing."

But Mayasura would not go, and would not be released. To leave a debt unpaid would have shamed his whole craft and his whole race. He pressed the gift; Arjuna pressed it back; and the two of them stood deadlocked in the ash, each too proud in his own way to yield - the archer too generous to accept, the architect too honorable to be refused.

The deadlock was broken, as such things usually were among the Pandavas, by Krishna, who had been listening with the patient amusement of a man who had foreseen the whole exchange. He had not turned back the fire and spared this one creature out of mere mercy. He had been waiting for exactly this offer.

"Arjuna will take nothing for himself," Krishna said. "He is right not to. But there is a labor worthy of you, Maya, that is not a payment to him but a service to dharma itself." He turned the asura toward the south and east, toward a barren stretch of the Yamuna's bank where smoke from the dying forest still drifted over scrub and old ruins. "The sons of Pandu have been given half a kingdom, and the half that is rubble. They are raising a city there called Indraprastha. Build for their eldest, Yudhishthira, a sabha - an assembly hall - such as no king of men has ever owned and no king who comes after will ever be able to copy. Let it be a hall that tells every visitor what is coming before a single herald opens his mouth. Build that, and your debt is more than paid."

Mayasura's eyes kindled. Here at last was a commission equal to his grief and his gratitude both. "It will be," he said, "the last wonder of this age. Show me the ground."

Before the hall, there had to be a city to set it in, and the city itself was already a marvel. Where the Pandavas had been handed Khandavaprastha - a tract of thorn and ruin and old battlefields, the worst half of the realm, given to them by Dhritarashtra in the hope that a poor kingdom would keep them quiet and far from Hastinapura - they had chosen not to complain but to build.

Krishna had measured the ground himself and called down the favor of the gods upon it. Engineers came; the river was tamed into moats; the thorn was cleared and the ruins were cleared, and out of that grim inheritance rose Indraprastha - the city of Indra's own equal. Its walls climbed white and high as banks of cloud, ringed by water so wide that the far bank looked like a thread of green. Its gates were tall as mountains and its arches like the spread wings of Garuda. Inside ran broad avenues lined with the houses of merchants and sages, gardens of mango and asoka and tamala, tanks of clear water bright with lotuses and crossed by waterfowl. Temples rose; markets filled; the smoke of a thousand kitchens and ten thousand sacrifices sweetened the air.

What their enemies had meant as a desert of exile, the Pandavas turned, in a handful of years, into a capital that rivalled the seat of the gods. Men came from far kingdoms simply to walk its streets and carry the report home. Yudhishthira ruled it in justice; Bhima and the twins guarded it; Arjuna's bow kept its borders quiet; and at the heart of the prospering city, on the finest open ground, a vast measured rectangle of bare earth waited, pegged out and consecrated, for the one thing the city still lacked.

Into that waiting rectangle, his commission accepted and his grief turned to purpose, walked Mayasura the asura, and looked at the empty ground the way a poet looks at an empty page.

Mayasura did not begin with stone. He began with a pilgrimage. "Such a hall," he told Yudhishthira and Krishna, "cannot be raised from the quarries of men. The materials I need have been waiting for me since the old wars, hidden where no human hand could reach them."

Far to the north, beyond the river of heaven, near the white peak of Kailasa, lay a lake called Bindusaras, ringed by mountains and walked by sages. There, in ages past, the demon-kings had cached the spoils of their vanished empire before the gods broke them: heaps of gold that no king's treasury could match, gems still in the rough as the earth had made them, crystal mined from the roots of the mountains, and rarer things besides. Among them rested a club of monstrous weight, the war-mace of an ancient asura, which no one in the present age had been strong enough to lift; and a conch named Devadatta, white as the moon, whose single blast could drain the courage out of an army and make its veterans weep.

Mayasura went up to Bindusaras and brought it all back down. The hoarded gold and the jewels and the cool blue-white crystal he reserved for the hall. But the two great weapons he would not let pass into a storeroom. The mighty club he placed in the hands of Bhima, who closed his fingers around the haft and laughed for joy, for at last here was a weapon that did not feel like a toy. The conch Devadatta he gave to Arjuna, whose breath would one day carry its terrible voice across the field of Kurukshetra at the head of a war.

So before a single column was raised, the architect of demons had already armed two of the brothers who would one day decide the fate of the world - which was, perhaps, another thing Krishna had foreseen.

For fourteen months the consecrated plain at Indraprastha rang and glittered, and the people of the new city grew used to the sight of things floating into place that had no business floating. Mayasura did not build the way men build, course by patient course; he built the way a dream assembles itself, whole sections appearing as if remembered rather than made. Eight thousand rakshasas of his command, servants who walked the upper air, carried the finished pieces down out of the sky and set them gently into their places.

The hall rose ten thousand cubits in compass, a measured world of its own. Its columns were of gold, so many and so tall that a man standing among them felt he had wandered into a forest at sunrise. Its stairways were cut from crystal; its arched doorways were inlaid with gems that caught the lamplight and threw it back in colors that had no names. Around its inner court Mayasura set artificial ponds thick with crystal lotuses and crystal fish, and tanks of clear water where real lotuses opened and real fish hung in the green light, and the eye could not always tell which was which.

Where men would have built for strength, Mayasura built for wonder, and his particular genius was deception offered as a gift. He took the cool blue-white crystal of Bindusaras and laid it as flooring, polished until it rippled and gleamed exactly like the surface of a still pool. And he took broad sheets of true water and stilled them so perfectly, and floored their margins so cunningly, that they lay flat and solid to the eye as a pavement of glass. He set walls that wore the look of open doorways and doorways that hid behind the look of solid jeweled wall. He arranged courtyards so that indoors and out seemed to trade places as you crossed them.

It was beautiful past the telling of it, and it was also, quietly, a trap for the unwary eye - a place that asked every visitor whether he could trust what he saw. That double nature was no accident. The hall had been commissioned to declare a message, and beauty was only half of what it had to say.

When the last gem was set and the last rakshasa had withdrawn into the sky, Mayasura led the Pandavas into the finished sabha, and for a long moment the five brothers and Draupadi and Krishna walked through it in silence, turning slowly on their heels like children lost in a festival, finding no words large enough.

There was nothing like it in the whole world of men, and they knew it. Sunlight entered through high openings and shattered into the gold of ten thousand columns. The crystal floors held the columns upside down in their depths until the hall seemed twice as tall as it was. The ponds breathed cool air across the marble; the breeze carried the scent of the lotus gardens; and unseen musicians, placed by Mayasura where their sound would gather and swell, filled the spaces with low music that seemed to come from the stones themselves.

Yudhishthira thanked the architect with the grave courtesy that was his whole nature, and honored him, and let him depart in friendship to wander the earth at last free of his debt. Then the eldest Pandava took his seat in the hall that no king of men had ever owned, and around him gathered his brothers, and the sages, and the visiting lords, and the message Krishna had built into the very floors began to do its work. For a hall like this could belong only to an emperor. And so the talk in the sabha turned, as Krishna had meant it to turn, toward the Rajasuya - the great imperial sacrifice by which a king declares himself sovereign over all other kings, and dares them to dispute it.

Krishna looked at the crystal and the gold and the false water and the true, and was content. The wonder of the age was finished, and its true work had not yet even begun.

The Rajasuya came in its season, and it was everything the hall had promised. To perform it, the Pandavas first had to make their sovereignty real, and so the brothers had ridden out to the four directions and bowed the kingdoms of the earth, by treaty where they could and by the sword where they must, until tribute flowed toward Indraprastha from every horizon. Even mighty Jarasandha of Magadha, the one king who could have refused, had fallen first, removed from the board by Krishna's counsel and Bhima's arms.

So on the appointed days the kings of the world came in person to Indraprastha - not as guests merely, but as subjects acknowledging an emperor. They came from the snow-mountains and the southern seas, from the deserts of the west and the river-kingdoms of the east, and at the sacrifice they took up humble offices with their own royal hands. One great king saw to the food; another to the gifts; another washed the feet of the brahmanas; a hundred crowned heads served at the Pandavas' rite as if they had been stewards. And Krishna himself, asked who among all the assembled lords most deserved the first honor of the sacrifice, was named first by acclamation and received it.

Through it all walked Duryodhana, heir of Hastinapura, sent by his blind father with the other Kuru elders to attend the triumph of his cousins. He had been told his whole life that he was the foremost prince of the world, the heir of the elder branch, the rightful master of the line. Now he stood in a hall finer than anything his own capital contained or could contain, and watched a hundred kings carry dishes for the cousins he had tried to burn alive, while the wealth of the earth was poured at the feet of the beggars he had exiled to a desert. Mayasura had built the hall to declare an empire. To Duryodhana, every shining column declared it like an accusation.

When the sacrifice was finished and the lords began to disperse, Duryodhana lingered, unable to leave, and went walking the galleries of the great sabha with Shakuni at his shoulder, taking the measure of it as a man worries at a wound. Every column was an accusation; every jewel was a reproach. The kingdom of scrub and ruins he had maneuvered his cousins into accepting had become the seat of an emperor, while Hastinapura, the ancient seat, was now second. He counted, and hated, and memorized, and his uncle counted along beside him.

Then the hall itself joined the quiet conspiracy of his humiliation. Duryodhana came to a stretch of flawless crystal floor that rippled and gleamed exactly like the surface of a pool, and, certain he was about to step into water, he gathered up the skirts of his royal robe and lifted it high and stepped with exaggerated care - onto cool dry stone, in front of the whole laughing court, like a man wading a river that was not there.

And then, his pride still smarting, he came to a smooth expanse that looked to his eye like the same solid crystal floor, and he strode onto it with a king's confidence - and went straight down into a deep clear pool, sinking to the waist in true water that Mayasura had stilled and floored to look exactly like glass. He came up gasping and streaming, his crown askew, his fine robe ruined, splashing in a pond in the middle of the most magnificent hall on earth.

Servants ran with dry silks. And there was laughter. Bhima's, certainly, huge and unhidden and pitiless. The servants' laughter, smothered behind their hands and somehow worse for it. And from somewhere - a gallery, a balcony - lighter laughter, in a register that the dripping prince chose to believe was the queen's, Draupadi's, and chose to believe carried words in it: something about the blind son of a blind father, who could see no better than Dhritarashtra what was solid and what was not. Whether Draupadi truly laughed, or spoke those words at all, the oldest tellers do not agree. What is certain is that Duryodhana, standing waist-deep and humiliated, heard it - and a man's memory of an insult is harder than any crystal Mayasura ever laid.

The hall was not finished with him. Burning with shame, his wet robe clinging to him, Duryodhana tried to walk it off with what dignity he could gather - and the illusions of Mayasura, which made no distinctions between princes and fools, went on confounding his senses at every turn.

He came to what his eye read as an open doorway, a clear passage out of the gallery, and he walked toward it briskly to escape the laughter - and cracked his forehead hard against a solid wall of polished crystal that had only worn the appearance of a door. He reeled back, holding his head, and the laughter swelled again. Then, having learned to distrust the walls, he came to a true doorway, a real and open passage, and stood before it refusing to believe it, sure it was another solid panel waiting to bruise him, until a servant, struggling to keep his face straight, gently showed him through. And once, taking a doorway he did believe in, he caught the frame with his shoulder where the gem-work jutted, and stumbled again.

Each mistake fed the laughter, and each laugh fed the thing that was growing inside him, dark and patient. A lesser slight he might have shrugged away. But Duryodhana had come to this hall as the heir of the Kurus and had been made, in front of the assembled kings of the earth, into the man who could not tell water from floor or wall from door - the blind prince groping through a house built by his enemies. He left the sabha that day with his crown back on his head and his face composed, and underneath it something had hardened that would not soften again for thirteen years, until it was satisfied with blood.

Duryodhana left Indraprastha the next morning with all the proper courtesies, taking ceremonious leave of Yudhishthira, who pressed gifts on him and embraced him as a brother. But once the towers of the wonder-city had fallen behind him, the prince fell silent, and for the long miles of the road he barely spoke, while Shakuni rode beside him and watched his nephew the way a fisherman watches a float that has begun, very slightly, to tremble.

At last it came out of Duryodhana in a flood that he could not stop. The hall. The gold. The hundred kings carrying dishes like servants. The crystal floor that was not water and the water that looked like floor. And above all the laughter - Bhima's roar, and that lighter voice from the gallery, and the words about the blind son of a blind father. "I burn, uncle," he said. "I cannot eat and I cannot sleep. The whole wealth of the world is theirs, and I stepped into their pond while their woman laughed down at me, and a hundred kings saw it. I tell you I would rather drink poison or walk into fire than live on as the second prince of Bharatavarsha, while my cousins sit in a hall the gods would covet."

A wiser uncle would have spoken of patience, of the elder cousin's real affection, of how wide the land was and how easily two prosperous kingdoms might share it. But Shakuni was not that uncle. He had spent long years and a private grief of his own sharpening himself toward exactly this moment, and now he answered very softly. "Why speak of poison and fire? The Pandavas cannot be beaten with armies; Arjuna's bow and Bhima's arms have just humbled the whole earth, as you saw. But everything you stood among - the hall, the empire, the kings, the queen who laughed - all of it balances on a single man's single weakness. Yudhishthira loves the game of dice and cannot play it well, and he is too proud to refuse a challenge. My dice come down as I bid them. Let the king invite him to a friendly game in your name, and I will win you Indraprastha and all of it, the crystal floors and the laughing queen besides, without your ever drawing a sword."

The rest followed as quietly and as inevitably as accounting. Shakuni and Duryodhana went together to Dhritarashtra, and the blind king, who could never refuse his eldest son anything, and who carried his own old grudge that the kingdom had ever been split, gave way after the show of reluctance that he always gave. A new hall was ordered built at Hastinapura, splendid in its own right, to house a friendly contest. Vidura, wisest of the elders, was sent against his own conscience to carry the courteous invitation to Indraprastha. And Yudhishthira, bound by the very code of honor that made him great, would not refuse a kinsman's challenge to a game, though he saw the shadow on it.

So the dice were cast, and Shakuni's dice obeyed him, and Yudhishthira lost - his wealth, his kingdom, his brothers, himself, and last of all Draupadi, dragged by her hair into a second hall to be insulted before another assembly, in payment, it almost seemed, for laughter once heard from a gallery. From that came the thirteen years of exile, and from the exile came Kurukshetra, where Arjuna would lift the conch of Bindusaras to his lips and Bhima would swing the club of Bindusaras, and where almost every king who had once carried dishes in the sabha of illusions would die.

Mayasura's masterpiece still stood at Indraprastha through all of it, perfect and shining and empty of its masters, its crystal floors holding the gold columns upside down in their depths. The architect of demons had built a hall of illusions for the kings of dharma, and the first great work it had done in the world was to show one proud man a false floor and a false door. And everything that came after - the dice, the disrobing, the exile, the war that emptied the earth of its warriors - had walked into history through that one bright doorway that a humiliated prince had mistaken for a wall.