The Fisher Queen's Burden

There had been a girl on a ferry who smelled of the river, and a sage, and a son borne on an island before she had ever seen a king; and there had been a bargain struck with a fisherman for a throne. All of that is told elsewhere. What is not told is what the bargain bought her.

Shantanu died while her sons were still boys, and Satyavati found that a queen mother in Hastinapura had exactly as much power as Bhishma chose to place in her hands, which was all of it, and exactly as much comfort as the world chose to give her, which was none.

Chitrangada was crowned first. He was a splendid young man and an insolent one, and a gandharva who bore the same name came and told him to change it or fight, and after three years on the field at Kurukshetra the gandharva killed him.

So Vichitravirya was crowned, a boy still, with Bhishma governing in his name and his mother sitting behind the screen. When he came of age Bhishma rode to Kashi and carried off the three princesses from their swayamvara; the eldest was released to the man she loved and made a ruin of it, and Ambika and Ambalika were married to the young king.

He was happy with them for seven years. He was also, from the first, a slight and hollow-chested boy, and consumption took him before he was thirty. The physicians did everything and the priests did everything and he died anyway, childless.

Satyavati stood at the second pyre in eight years, with her two daughters-in-law on either side of her, both of them under twenty and both of them widows. When the fire had gone down she went back to the palace and sat in the empty audience hall and looked at the throne of the Kurus, which she had schemed for and won, and which now belonged to nobody alive.

She sent for Bhishma while the mourning was still on the house, because she had been a boatman's daughter and knew that you bail a swamping boat before you weep in it.

"You are the eldest son of Shantanu," she said. "You are alive. The kingdom is masterless, the ancestors have no one to offer them water, and there are two girls in this palace who will be old women in a house with no children in it. Take the crown. Take the widows. Take whatever name for it the law allows you to take - kingship, guardianship, the raising of seed for a dead brother. I do not care what it is called."

"You know what I swore," Bhishma said.

"I know why you swore it. You swore it for me. My father would not give me to your father unless my sons had the throne, and you stood on that riverbank and gave away your kingdom and your marriage so that an old fisherman could be satisfied." Her voice did not rise. "My sons are ashes. Both of them. The purpose your vow was built to serve is burnt and scattered and there is nothing left of it. A vow serves dharma. It does not stand above dharma with its arms folded while dharma dies in front of it."

She gave him the law, because she had learned the law. In calamity the rule bends: this is the teaching of every treatise. Men of the highest birth have been born of seers and of gods when the ordinary course failed. Whole lines have been continued by appointment. She named the cases. She had them ready.

"There is no sin in it and no scandal in it," she said, "and I am not asking you as your king's widow. I am asking you as an old woman who has buried both her children. Give this house a child, Devavrata. There is no one else who can."

Bhishma heard her out to the end. Then he said the thing that the world would repeat for as long as there was a world to repeat it in.

"Mother, I will give up the three worlds if you ask me. I will give up the empire of heaven, and anything greater than heaven, if there is anything greater. But I will not give up truth. The earth may abandon its scent, water its wetness, light its shape, air its touch. The sun may lay down its brightness and fire its heat, the moon may put off its coolness, space may surrender sound, and the god of justice may set aside his fairness. I cannot set aside my word. Ask me for the kingdom and I will hold it for whatever child you produce. Do not ask me for this."

Satyavati wept then, in front of him, which she had not done at either pyre.

And Bhishma, when she was finished, gave her the road out. The law that she had quoted at him, he said, had a second clause. When a line fails, a brahmana of high merit may be invited, with due honour and by the widows' consent, to raise up offspring for the dead. Let her send for such a man. Let her choose him herself. He would guard whatever came of it with his life.

Then Satyavati, who had held one secret for forty years, put it down on the floor between them. Before Shantanu, before Hastinapura, she had borne a son to the sage Parashara on an island in the river, and that son had gone away to the forest as a child with a promise that he would come the moment she thought of him. She thought of him. He came. What passed in the queens' chambers after that, and what it cost Ambika and Ambalika, is told in its own place.

Three children were born into that silent palace: one blind, one pale, one wise. Satyavati had her heirs. She had bought them at a price she had not been told in advance.

For the next thirty years the kingdom of the Kurus was run by an old woman and a celibate soldier, and it was run well.

Bhishma held the field and the treasury and the frontier. Satyavati held the household, which in a dynasty is the same thing as holding the future. She saw the three boys fed and schooled and married. She sat through the reading of the law with them. She was the only person in the palace who was never once heard to say that the blind child was a misfortune, and the only one who never for a moment considered crowning him.

When the time came she and Bhishma set Dhritarashtra aside, gently and absolutely, because a man who cannot see cannot lead an army or read a treaty, and they crowned Pandu instead, and Vidura, born of a serving woman and wiser than either of his brothers, was made counsellor. There was no quarrel. It was the last succession in that family that passed without one.

Pandu went out and conquered in every direction and came home with tribute stacked in the courtyards until there was nowhere to walk. Gandhari came from the mountains with a bandage over her eyes. Kunti came from the Yadavas and Madri from Madra. The house filled with noise.

Satyavati, very old now, sat in the sun and let herself believe she had won. The fisherman's daughter had a crowned grandson, a full treasury, a granddaughter-in-law from every quarter of the earth, and the strongest man alive standing at the door with his arms crossed.

Then Pandu came back from a hunt in the forest and did not come home at all, but sent word that he had renounced the kingdom for a fault of his own and had gone up into the mountains to live as an ascetic with both his wives.

She sent messengers. She sent gifts. She sent Vidura. He did not come back down.

The ascetics came down from Shatashringa in the spring with five small boys, one widow, and the ashes of a king and a queen.

Satyavati received them standing. She was told how Pandu had died and how Madri had gone into the fire after him, and she gave the orders for the rites in a steady voice, and then she went to her own rooms and thought of her eldest son, and he came.

Vyasa stood in front of his mother, matted and enormous and gentle, and he did not soften any part of it.

"The happy years of the earth are behind us," he said. "What is coming will be worse each day than the day before it. The world is past its youth. This house will destroy itself, and it will take the kshatriyas of the whole earth down with it, and it will do this through the children now playing in your courtyard. You cannot prevent it. Do not stay to watch it. Give up the palace, mother. Go to the forest and live on air and thought, and do not be a witness to the suicide of your own line."

Satyavati did not argue. She had spent her whole life adding to this house, and she recognised a final reckoning when it was read out to her.

She went to Bhishma and released him from nothing, since he had never held anything of hers, and thanked him, which she had never done. She went to Ambika and Ambalika, who had been given to that palace as girls and had endured everything it asked of them, and she told them what Vyasa had said and asked whether they would come. Both of them came.

The three women walked out of Hastinapura on foot. In the hermitage they ate what the forest gave and then less than that, and they kept the hard vows, and Satyavati, who had once bargained a throne out of a lovesick king for her unborn sons, sat down under a tree and let go of every last thing she had won.

In time all three gave up their bodies in austerity and attained the high regions. None of them lived to hear about the dice.