The King Who Was Made a Brahmana

Yudhishthira said, "Grandfather, you have told me all morning what a man owes according to his order, and each time the order comes first and the man second. Is a birth then a sealed verdict? Does a man come into the world already sentenced, with nothing before him but the carrying out of it?"

Bhishma did not answer directly. "Hear what happened to Vitahavya," he said, "and then tell me what you think a birth is."

On the Narmada stood Mahishmati, the city of the Haihayas, and there was no older quarrel in the country than the one between that house and the kings of Kashi. It had begun so long before either side could remember that no living man could say who had been wronged first. The Haihayas came down the river in their hundreds, brothers and cousins fighting in a single line, and Kashi could not hold them. Haryashva of Kashi was killed in his own fields. His son Sudeva took the throne and was killed in his turn. Divodasa after him abandoned Varanasi altogether and built a new city where the Ganga and the Gomati meet, and fortified it, and the Haihayas came and broke that too and drove him into the forest with nothing.

It was three generations of a single war, and each generation buried its king. Divodasa in his exile went to Bharadvaja and asked for a son who could end it, and by the sage's sacrifice Pratardana was born to him, a boy who grew in a season and took up arms while still a child in years. He went down the river to Mahishmati and he did to the Haihayas what the Haihayas had done to Kashi for a hundred years, and he did it thoroughly. The hundred princes of that house fell. The city that had never been entered was entered. When the killing stopped there was one man left alive of all that line, and his name was Vitahavya, and he was their king.

Vitahavya came out of Mahishmati alone. He had no army behind him and no country in front of him, and there was no throne anywhere in the world that would have received him, because to receive him was to invite Pratardana across the border the following week. He was a king for exactly as long as it took him to walk out of the gate, and after that he was a man being hunted through the forest by an enemy who had every right of war on his side.

He went east and north, keeping off the roads, sleeping where the ground allowed it, until he came into the deep forest and to the hermitage of Bhrigu, and there he stopped, because there was nowhere further to go.

What he did at the gate of that hermitage he did as a suppliant and not as a king. He did not offer terms. He did not name his house or promise anything for the future, having no future to promise from. He put himself down before the sage and said only that he was pursued and asked for protection, which is the one request that in the whole law may not be answered with a calculation.

Bhrigu looked at what had come to his door: a hunted man with a war behind him that had emptied two kingdoms, and an armed king somewhere on the road behind that man, and a hermitage of ascetics with no weapon in it and no wall around it. He also knew, as everyone in that country knew, what Pratardana would consider himself owed. And he said, "Fear nothing."

He did not say it conditionally. He did not say it while working out what it might cost. Bhishma paused here and said to Yudhishthira, "Notice that the whole of what follows was already decided in those two words, though nobody present could yet see how."

Pratardana came within the day. He came with his troops behind him and his bow in his hand, and he stopped them all at the edge of the hermitage grounds and walked in alone, unarmed as a man must be who enters a place of penance, because the boy born of Bharadvaja's fire was not going to lose in a sage's clearing what he had spent his childhood winning on the river.

He found Bhrigu at his fire and saluted him as a king salutes a great ascetic, touching the ground, naming himself and his father and his errand without evasion. Then he said what he had come to say.

"Holy one, the man I hunt is in this hermitage. Do not deny it, for I have followed him here and there is no other road out. He is the last of the Haihayas, and my house has three kings in the ground on his family's account. My grandfather was killed in his own fields. My father was driven out of two cities and had to beg a sage for a son because he had no other weapon left. I was made for this and for nothing else. Give him to me. I ask you as a kshatriya asks, and I will not enter your huts to look for him, and I will not touch anything of yours. But I will not go back down that road without him."

The ascetics of that hermitage stood where they were and made no sound. Every one of them understood that the sage now had three things he could do. He could hand over the man who had asked him for shelter. He could refuse and see what an army did to a clearing full of unarmed men. Or he could lie, and save both, and be a liar for the rest of a life whose entire power rested on never having been one.

Bhrigu did not rise from his fire. He said, "There is no kshatriya here. In this hermitage there are only brahmanas."

And it was true as he said it. Not true because Pratardana believed it, and not true as a clever answer is true when the words are arranged to mislead without technically lying. It became true, in the moment of its utterance, in the body of the man hiding among the huts. The mouth that spoke had never in its life spoken a false thing, and the accumulated force of that abstinence was not a reputation but a power, and it worked on the world the way heat works on metal. Vitahavya, standing among the ascetics, felt the change go through him as a fever goes through a man in one wave, and the order he had been born into and had lived by and had ruled by and had lost everything in went out of him and did not come back.

Pratardana understood what had happened. He was a hard young man and a thorough one, but he was not a fool, and he knew that the sage had not tricked him. Whatever had walked into this clearing yesterday, there was no kshatriya in it now, and a kshatriya was what he had been sent to kill. His enmity had nowhere left to attach itself. He saluted the sage again, turned, and took his army home, and the war between Kashi and the Haihayas, which had eaten three generations and two cities, ended in a forest clearing without a blow struck.

Vitahavya lived out his life there as a brahmana, and studied, and undertook penance, and his descendants after him were of that order and not of the other. The line that had come down from the kings of Mahishmati continued in the world as a line of sages, and the great Gritsamada was of it, whose learning nobody afterward thought to question on the ground of what his ancestors had been.

"Now answer your own question," Bhishma said. "You asked whether a birth is a sealed verdict. A man who had been a king of the Haihayas since before Pratardana's grandfather was born ceased to be one inside a single sentence, and his sons and his sons' sons were something else entirely. If birth were the fixed thing you take it for, the sage's word could not have moved it, and the word did move it. What the order gives a man is a duty, not a sentence, and duty is a thing that can be handed on and taken up, or the world would be a machine and there would be nothing to praise in anyone."

"But do not take the wrong lesson and go looking for the sentence that will transform you," he went on. "Matanga strove for that very thing with a fierceness that shook the heavens, and was refused, and had to be told at the end that what he wanted could not be had by wanting it. Vitahavya never asked for it at all. He asked to be hidden."

"The thing to look at is the sage. Bhrigu had no army and no wall and nothing whatever to protect that man with except his own truthfulness, and truthfulness is not a shield you can hold in front of somebody else while keeping it. He put the whole of it on the line for a stranger with a bad name and no future, and because he kept nothing back, the sentence he might have told as a lie became a fact instead. That is the difference between shelter and the appearance of shelter, Yudhishthira. Cheap protection is the kind you offer while working out in advance what you will do when it is tested. Real protection is spending yourself on it, without reservation, and the strange thing the tale records is that shelter given that way does not only hide a man. It remakes him."