The King the Demon Could Not Eat

Upon his bed of arrows at Kurukshetra, Bhishma lay propped against the shafts that pierced him, waiting only for the sun to turn north before he released his life. Yudhishthira sat before him still troubled, for kingship weighed on him now as heavily as grief. 'Grandsire,' he said, 'you tell me a king must be armed and watchful, that enemies gather where a throne is weak. But no army stands at every door in the night. What protects a king when he is utterly alone?'

Bhishma's eyes, dimmed by pain, brightened at the question. 'There is an old story, Yudhishthira, that answers you better than any army could. It is the story of a king of the Kaikeyas, a good and vigilant ruler, who went once into a forest at night, apart from his guards, and was seized by a rakshasa.'

'Seized how, grandsire? Was he not devoured on the spot?'

'That is the wonder of it,' Bhishma said. 'The rakshasa was old in cunning, and it did not eat men without cause - for even demons, the story tells us, respect a certain law, and will not devour a king who has committed no wrong against his people. So before it closed its jaws, it asked the king to account for himself, to show why he alone among men should escape its hunger. And the king, held fast in claws that could have ended him in an instant, did not tremble. He began, instead, to speak.'

Yudhishthira leaned forward. 'What did he say?'

'He said,' Bhishma answered, 'exactly what a king should be able to say, if his rule has been just. Listen, and judge for yourself whether such a king has anything left to fear.'

In the story Bhishma told, the king of the Kaikeyas had gone out from his palace at night, as was sometimes his custom, to walk alone among the trees at the edge of his kingdom and see with his own eyes whether his people slept safely. He carried no guard, for he trusted the peace he had made, and it was in this solitude that the rakshasa found him.

The demon came upon him suddenly, immense in the darkness, its breath rank with old slaughter, and closed its claws about him before he could cry out. Any other man would have screamed for help that could not reach him in time, or begged for a mercy demons rarely give. The king did neither. He looked up into the creature's burning eyes and did not flinch.

'Rakshasa,' he said, his voice as level as if he sat upon his own throne, 'you have caught me fairly, alone and unarmed, and by every right of the hunt you may eat me now. But before you do, hear this: I am a king who has never failed his kingdom. If that is true, will you still find me good eating?'

The rakshasa paused, for it was an old and knowing thing, and it had learned across long centuries that a king's virtue could be a kind of poison to a demon's throat - that to devour a truly righteous ruler brought calamity upon the eater, while an unjust king was fair prey to any power that could take him. 'Prove it, then,' the demon said, tightening its grip only slightly. 'Show me one flaw in your rule, one broken duty, and I will crush you where you stand. Fail to show me a clean account, and I will know you for prey.'

And so, still held fast, the king began to speak of his kingdom.

'In my kingdom,' the king said, 'no sacrifice ordained by the sages goes unmade for want of my support. I have never grudged the priests their fire or their offerings, nor let a rite lapse that the gods were owed.'

The rakshasa's claws did not loosen, but it listened.

'In my kingdom, no guest arrives at any door, however humble, and leaves unfed. I have seen to it that hospitality is honored from my own table down to the poorest householder's, for a land that turns away the stranger turns away its own fortune.'

Still the demon listened.

'In my kingdom, no widow goes unprotected. When a man dies leaving wife and children with no one to shield them, it is the king's duty to stand as their guardian, and I have never let that duty fall to another or to none at all. I know the name of every widow within my borders who has cause to fear want, and none of them fears it.'

'And in my kingdom,' the king went on, 'no tax is levied unjustly. I take from my people only what the treasury needs and the law allows, never a coin more to swell my own comfort, for a king who plunders his subjects to enrich himself has already made himself a thief wearing a crown - and a thief, rakshasa, is exactly the sort of man you are permitted to eat.'

He paused, and looked steadily into the demon's eyes. 'Search my reign for a lapse, if you can find one. I do not think you will.'

The rakshasa said nothing for a long moment. It turned the king's words over as a hunter turns over a trail gone suddenly cold, searching for the one broken thread that would justify its hunger.

The rakshasa was not easily satisfied, for demons that hunt kings have learned that men will say much to save their own lives, and that words cost nothing next to flesh. So it questioned him further, turning over each claim the king had made as a jeweler turns a stone to the light, looking for the flaw within.

'You say no sacrifice lapses,' it said. 'Yet do the priests not sometimes complain, even under kings they praise?'

'Ask them,' the king answered. 'You will find no complaint that reached me and went unanswered.'

'You say no guest is turned away. Yet surely on some night, in some far corner of your land, a door was shut against a traveler.'

'Then it was shut by a fault I have not yet corrected,' the king said, 'and I would thank you for the knowledge, though I do not believe you have found one.'

'You say no widow wants for protection. Yet kingdoms are wide, and a king cannot see every hearth.'

'I have set officers in every district for exactly that reason, rakshasa, so that what I cannot see with my own eyes is still seen. That is what governance means - not that the king does everything himself, but that nothing is left undone.'

The demon pressed on this way, circling the king's account as it might circle a wounded animal, testing for the one place where the hide had broken and the blood might show. But everywhere it pressed, it found the same thing: not a boast dressed up as virtue, but a rule genuinely without cruelty, without theft, without neglect. There was no thread to pull, no seam where wrongdoing had been stitched over with fine words. The king's kingdom, examined from every side a rakshasa knew how to examine, was simply, thoroughly just.

At last the demon's claws, which had not loosened through the whole exchange, began to open.

'I have hunted many kings,' the rakshasa said at last, setting the man gently upon his feet, 'and I have eaten most of them, for it is rare that a throne is kept as clean as you claim to keep yours. But I find no fault in you, and a demon who devours a faultless king brings ruin down upon its own head, for such a king is protected by more than soldiers. He is protected by the gods who witness his sacrifices, by the guests who bless his table, by the widows who pray for him, by the subjects who are not robbed by his hand. That protection does not end where his palace walls end. It follows him even into a rakshasa's grip, in a dark forest, at night, alone.'

And so the demon, rather than devouring him, bowed low to the king of the Kaikeyas and let him go in honor, vanishing back into the night from which it had come.

Bhishma fell silent a moment on his bed of arrows, and Yudhishthira sat very still, turning the story over.

'You asked me, Yudhishthira, what protects a king when he is alone and no army can reach him,' Bhishma said at last. 'This is the answer. It is not a weapon, and it is not luck. It is a reign with nothing in it to be ashamed of. The rakshasa searched that king from every angle a demon knows how to search, and found not one place where injustice had left a wound for it to enter through. That is the true armor of a throne - not walls, not swords, but a rule so faultless that even the hungriest darkness finds nothing there to eat.'

'Then let no lapse of mine ever open such a door,' Yudhishthira said quietly, and Bhishma, watching him, believed he meant it.