The Actor Spies of Dwaraka

Indra came down to Dwaraka in the last watch of a summer night, and he came as a suppliant, which the lord of the gods did not often do.

Krishna received him on the terrace above the sea-gate, with Balarama standing by in his working clothes, and heard him out. There was a city in the sky, Indra said, named Vajrapura, and in it ruled the daitya Vajranabha, whose name meant the navel of the thunderbolt and whose flesh the thunderbolt could not open. Brahma had granted him what such kings always ask for and always phrase too cleverly: that no god should enter his city, and that no army of the Yadavas should pass its gate.

"Then he has thought about us already," Balarama said.

"He thinks about little else," said Indra. "He has begun to speak of Amaravati as a province he has not yet collected. He drills his sons on the parade ground and names my streets to them one at a time."

Krishna asked what the place was like, and Indra described it as a man describes a wall he has walked the whole length of. A disc of white stone hung in the air above the northern ranges. Gates that opened downward only. No road, no ford, no forest track, no season when the guard grew slack, because there was nothing outside the walls for a guard to grow slack about.

"They cannot go out," Indra said. "So everything must be carried in. Grain, wine, singers, dancers, players."

"Players," Krishna repeated.

"The king is mad for the theater." Indra said it wearily, the way one reports an enemy's harmless habit. "Three stages inside the walls and a fourth in his own courtyard. He has paid a company's whole journey out of his treasury before now, and he weeps in public at a well-acted death, and he keeps the good troupes a season at a time because he cannot bear the quiet after they go."

Krishna was silent a while and watched the sea change color under the coming light.

"Brahma is a careful god," he said at last. "No deva may enter. No army of the Yadavas may pass the gate. Nobody said one word about a company of actors."

The thing was put to Pradyumna the next morning, and Pradyumna, who was Krishna's son and had his father's face and his mother's temper, understood it before the sentence was finished.

"You want us to learn a trade," he said.

"I want you to learn it well enough that nobody in that city ever asks a second question," Krishna said. "A poor troupe is remembered as a poor troupe. A great one is remembered as a great one. Neither is remembered as an army. But only one of them gets invited to stay."

So the strangest muster in the history of the Yadavas was held in a courtyard behind the armory. Gada came, and Samba, and Satyaki's kinsmen, and a hundred young men who had spent their whole lives being told they were the finest cavalry on the western coast, and they were handed masks. Narada undertook their teaching, because Narada knew the dramatic art the way other sages knew the fire ritual, and he began by telling them that they were all worse at this than they were at anything else they had ever done.

He was right, and the first months were a humiliation. Men who could put an arrow through a swinging ring at a gallop could not cross a stage without walking like sentries. Pradyumna, who had never in his life been told he was clumsy, was told it eleven times in one afternoon. They learned the modes of speech and the hand-signs and the seven kinds of gait; they learned to be old men, and merchants, and grieving queens, and monkeys; they learned the drums and the flute and the long recitative that carries a story over a crowd's noise.

And somewhere in the second year the thing stopped being a stratagem and became a craft. They played in the towns along the coast, then in Avanti, then in the courts of the north, and the reports ran ahead of them. There was a company out of the west, people said, that made you forget you were sitting on a bench. Their Ravana was a terror. Their women's parts were played by a young man so beautiful that the audience forgot to breathe.

Which was exactly what Krishna had wanted said, and said far enough north to be heard in the sky.

Meanwhile the swans had been busy.

There were geese on the lake behind Dwaraka's northern wall that could speak, as the geese of the old stories always can, and one of them - a grave, self-important bird with a habit of clearing his throat before delivering news - had taken a great liking to Pradyumna. He had flown far in his time. He had seen the sky-city from above, which was more than any Yadava had done, and he had seen, walking in its highest garden, Vajranabha's daughter Prabhavati.

"There is no one like her," the goose announced, "in any water I have flown over."

"Then take her a message," Pradyumna said, half laughing.

The goose took the message. That was the beginning of a courtship conducted entirely by birds, and it went on for the better part of a year. The goose would settle on the rim of the marble tank in the sky-garden, deliver a verse, listen gravely to the answer, and be gone before the guards came round. He carried praise, then argument, then a description of Pradyumna so extravagant that Prabhavati told him flatly he was inventing a man.

"I invent nothing," said the goose, wounded. "I decorate. There is a difference, and it is a matter of proportion."

She began to wait for him. Her companions found her at the tank at odd hours and teased her about the bird. And in time she said the thing that all this had been walking toward, which was that she had come to love a man she had never seen, on the word of a goose, and knew perfectly well how that would sound in her father's hall.

"He is of the Yadavas," the goose admitted at last, "and his father is Krishna."

Prabhavati sat with that a long time. Her father had spent her whole childhood teaching her that the name was a curse.

"Tell him," she said finally, "that this city has no door he can come through."

The goose put his head on one side.

"It has one," he said. "The king built it himself, out of love of the theater."

The company came up to Vajrapura in the autumn, and they came the way a great troupe comes: slowly, with drums, having refused two lesser invitations on the road.

Vajranabha received them himself, and he was not at all what the young Yadavas had prepared for. He was courteous. He was knowledgeable. He argued with Pradyumna about the proper staging of a famous scene, and he was not entirely wrong. He gave them the courtyard theater, and a house, and a season's keep, and asked only that they play something new every fifth night.

They did. That autumn in the sky-city was afterward spoken of as a golden season. They played the burning of the forest, and the churning of the ocean, and a comedy about a miser and his son-in-law that made the king laugh until he had to be helped from his seat. The city, which had been rich and idle and bored behind its seamless walls, came to the theater the way starving people come to a granary. The asura nobles brought their households. The daughters of the great houses came early and stayed late and found reasons to be near the tiring-room.

And backstage, in the ordinary confusion of paint and rope and half-costumed men, the other work went forward.

Prabhavati found Pradyumna between two acts, with half his face still painted for a part, and looked at him for a long moment.

"The goose lied," she said.

"In which direction?"

"He was modest."

They were married by the gandharva rite, which requires nothing but two willing people and a night, and which the old law allows to warriors. They were not the only ones. Gada took a daughter of one of the great asura houses; Samba took another; before the season turned, half a dozen Yadava heroes were quietly, irrevocably married inside the walls of a city that had been built so that no Yadava could enter it.

None of them told the king. The Harivamsa is unhurried about this stretch of the tale, and lingers on it with evident pleasure: the performances by night, the whispering by day, a fortress dissolving not under siege but under courtship.

It ended, as these things do, with a servant who talked.

Vajranabha came into his own courtyard theater one grey morning with his guard behind him, and the players were standing in it without their paint, and he understood the whole shape of it in a breath: the season, the daughters, the marriages, the company he had paid to bring in through the one door his boon had left open.

"How long?" he said. He sounded, more than anything, like a man who has been cheated at a game he loved.

"Since before you sent for us," Pradyumna said.

"And my daughter?"

"Is my wife, and chose it, and would tell you so herself."

Then the courtyard was a battlefield, and the change was very fast. Costume chests came open and there was iron under the silk, because the company had carried its weapons in the way companies carry properties, in plain sight, painted and unremarked. The asuras of Vajrapura fought hard and fought well; they were the sons of a house that had never lost anything. But the boon had been asked for exactly, and exactly it was kept: no god entered that city, and no Yadava army passed that gate, and the men who now held its courtyard had come in one by one with masks in their baggage, invited, applauded, paid.

Vajranabha and Pradyumna fought until the roof of the theater came down, and Pradyumna killed him there. The city was opened. Indra had his sky back and his streets unclaimed, and the Yadava heroes came home over the northern mountains with asura brides riding beside them, and the whole company got, in the end, the only ending it could have got, which was a story told about itself.

The tellers have always loved this one and have never quite pretended otherwise. Nothing in the tale is solemn except the boon, and the boon is what breaks. A wall answers force with force, and no army was ever going to be enough; but no wall was ever built that could keep out delight, because delight is invited in.

What force cannot enter, beauty walks through the front gate.