The Frog Princess

The fire had burned low again in the Kamyaka forest, and Markandeya, seeing the weight that had settled over Yudhishthira's face after so many stories of dharma tested and ages falling, smiled and said, "Let me tell you something lighter tonight, king, though I warn you it carries its own sting in the tail, as the sweetest fruit sometimes does."

Yudhishthira, glad of anything that promised even a moment's ease, nodded for him to begin.

"There was once a king of the solar line of Ikshvaku," Markandeya said, "named Parikshit - and I say at once, so there is no confusion in your mind, that this is not the Parikshit who will one day be born your own grandson through Abhimanyu's line. He is a far older king of that name, from generations long before yours, and the two share nothing but the name and, as you will hear, perhaps a fondness for the hunt.

This Parikshit was a mighty hunter, as many kings of his line were, and one day he rode deep into a forest much like this one, chasing a deer that would not tire, until his horse was spent and his own throat was raw with thirst and the sun stood directly overhead with no mercy in it. He pressed on alone, on foot now, further than a wise king ought to have gone without his guard, led by nothing but the sound of water somewhere ahead of him through the trees."

Yudhishthira settled back to listen, glad of a story that promised, for once, no battle and no grief of his own - though he would soon learn that even a light tale carries its lesson.

At last Parikshit broke through the trees into a clearing where a still, clear lake lay ringed with lotus, and there, kneeling at its edge, he saw a woman of such beauty that for a moment he forgot his thirst entirely. Her skin held the sheen of monsoon light on water, her eyes were dark and quick, and when she looked up at him startled, some current in him that had never before been fully awake rose to meet her gaze.

He forgot his kingdom's business, forgot the deer, forgot even the reason he had come crashing through her clearing. When at last his voice returned to him he asked, humbly for a king, whether she would consent to be his wife.

She considered him a long moment, the way one considers a stranger who has arrived without warning at one's door, and then she said, "I will marry you, King Parikshit, on one condition, and if you cannot hold to it, our marriage ends the instant you fail. You must never show me water. Not a lake, not a river, not a bowl set out in the rain. Wherever you take me, water must be kept from my sight. Promise me this, and I am yours."

It was a strange condition, and any counselor worth his salary would have asked why, would have wondered what kind of vow guards itself so fiercely against so ordinary a thing as water. But Parikshit was not thinking as a king that day; he was thinking as a man who has just seen the one face he has waited his whole life to see, and a man in that condition makes promises the way a child makes them, certain in the moment that he will never, ever break them.

"I promise," he said, without asking why, without weighing what such a promise might someday cost him, and so their marriage began exactly as Markandeya had warned it would: too quickly, on a vow too carelessly given.

"Parikshit brought his bride home," Markandeya continued, "and kept his word with the fierce, unthinking devotion of a man in love. Every fountain in his palace was drained. Every pond was filled in or fenced away from her path. Servants were drilled for months on which corridors led near water and which did not, and the king himself walked always a step ahead of her on any journey, watching the ground the way a soldier watches for traps. He was, by every account, utterly besotted, and for a long while it seemed that the strange condition would cost him nothing at all.

But even the most careful house cannot be made perfectly free of water forever, and it happened one day, when the king was occupied with matters of state, that a servant - meaning no harm, knowing nothing of the queen's condition, or perhaps knowing and being careless of it in the way servants sometimes are when a rule seems foolish to them - led the queen through the palace gardens along a path that passed a small ornamental pool, its surface bright with new lotus.

She stopped. She had not seen open water since the day of her marriage, and something in her - whether longing or fate or the simple pull of her own nature - drew her to its edge. She knelt, and touched the water with one hand, the way a person touches the door of a home they have not entered in a long time.

The moment her fingers broke the surface, she was gone. Not fled, not drowned - simply gone, vanished as completely as a reflection vanishes when the water that holds it is disturbed, leaving the servant staring at an empty garden path and a still-rippling pool, with no notion at all of what had just been undone by one ordinary afternoon's walk."

"When Parikshit learned what had happened," Markandeya said, "his grief was a terrible thing to see. He searched every pool and river in his kingdom, questioned every servant, wept before gods who gave him no answer, and when weeks passed with no sign of his queen, his grief curdled into something closer to madness. He became convinced, in the way grieving men convince themselves of strange certainties, that whatever had taken her lived among the frogs that filled every pond and paddy field in his realm, and he gave an order that stunned his own court: every frog in the kingdom was to be killed.

His soldiers obeyed, as soldiers do, and for many days the ponds of that country ran cruel with a slaughter no war council had ever planned for. It might have gone on until not a single frog remained alive in the whole kingdom, had not an old frog, wiser and braver than the rest, come before the king in the one shape a mortal could bear to look upon and speak with.

He named himself Ayu, king of the frogs, and he told Parikshit the truth at last: the woman he had married and lost was no ordinary maiden but Sushobhana, Ayu's own daughter, a frog princess who wore human form as easily as a fine garment, and who had returned to the water the instant her husband's promise was broken.

'Call off this slaughter, King Parikshit, and I will return her to you,' Ayu said. 'But hear me first, for I owe it to you as much as I owe it to my own daughter's honor. She has done this before. She was married once before you, to another king, under this very condition, and she broke faith with him exactly as she has broken faith with you. My daughter is beautiful beyond most mortal women, and she is faithless beyond most mortal women too. I tell you this not to shame her, but so that you take her back, if you take her back at all, with your eyes open.'"

"Parikshit, hearing this, did not hesitate," Markandeya said. "Whether from love too deep to be reasoned with or simply from a heart too lonely to refuse a second chance, he said he would take Sushobhana back regardless of her father's warning, and the slaughter of the frogs was called off at once. Ayu, true to his word, restored his daughter to the king, and for a time the palace knew a strange, uneasy peace.

But a father's warning, once spoken, has a way of proving itself true in its own season. Sushobhana bore Parikshit sons, and something of her old faithlessness, or perhaps simply the burden of a nature never fully at home in either water or land, passed into them; the line was troubled for a generation by sons who could not quite hold to their own word, who inherited, it was said, something of their mother's gift for breaking a promise as easily as she had made one. Only with time, and with hardship enough to burn away what was false in them, did that flaw work itself out of the family and leave, at last, heirs fit to rule as their grandfather once had, before a lake and a lovely stranger had undone him."

Markandeya let the fire finish the silence that followed, then said, "That is the whole of it, Yudhishthira. A light tale, I promised you, though you will notice it does not end lightly. Hasty vows and beautiful conditions are the seeds of grief far more often than they are the seeds of happiness. A king who promises before he understands what he is promising will pay, sooner or later, in the very thing he loves most - his wife, his sons, his peace, or his kingdom, whichever the world chooses to take first."

Yudhishthira said nothing for a long while. He, who had once staked a kingdom and a wife on the throw of dice without asking what such a wager truly risked, understood the sting in the sage's tale better than he cared to say aloud, and he sat by the fire turning the story over in silence long after Markandeya had gone quiet.