_This is the tale which Jehan Tugluk Khan, a wise man in
Tartary, and milk brother to Ghengiz Khan, Emperor of the East
and the North, and Captain General of the Golden Horde,
whispered to the Foolish Virgin who came to him, bringing the
purple, spiked flower of the Kadam-tree as an offering, and
begging him for a love potion with which to hold Haydar Khan, a
young, red-faced warrior from the west who had ridden into camp,
a song on his lips, a woman's breast scarf tied to his tufted
bamboo lance, a necklace of his slain foes' skulls strung about
his massive chest, and sitting astride a white stallion whose
mane was dyed crimson in sign of strife and whose dainty,
dancing feet rang on the rose-red marble pavement of the
emperor's courtyard like crystal bells in the wind of spring._
_This is a tale of passion, and, by the same token, a tale of
wisdom. For, in the yellow, placid lands east of the Urals and
west of harsh, sneering Pekin, it is babbled by the toothless
old women who know life, that wisdom and desire are twin sisters
rocked in the same cradle: one speaks while the other sings.
They say that it is the wisdom of passion which makes eternal
the instinct of love._
_This is the tale of Vasantasena, the slave who was free in her
own heart, and of Madusadan, a captain of horse, who plucked the
white rose without fearing the thorns._
_This, finally, is the tale of Vikramavati, King of Hindustan in
the days of the Golden Age, when Surya, the Sun, warmed the
fields without scorching; when Vanyu, the Wind, filled the air
with the pollen of the many flowers without stripping the trees
bare of leaves; when Varuna, Regent of Water, sang through the
land without destroying the dykes or drowning the lowing cattle
and the little naked children who played at the river's bank;
when Prithwi, the Earth, sustained all and starved none; when
Chandra, the Moon, was as bright and ripening as his elder
brother, the Sun._
_LET ALL THE WISE CHILDREN LISTEN TO MY JATAKA!_
Vasantasena was the girl's name, and she came to young King
Vikramavati's court on the tenth day of the dark half of the month
Bhadra. She came as befitted a slave captured in war, with her
henna-stained feet bound together by a thin, golden chain, her white
hands tied behind her back with ropes of pearls, her slim young body
covered with a silken robe of the sad hue of the tamala flower, in sign
of mourning for Dharma, her father, the king of the south, who had
fallen in battle beneath the steel-shod tusks of the war elephants.
She knelt before the peacock throne, and Vikramavati saw that her face
was as beautiful as the moon on the fourteenth day, that her black locks
were like female snakes, her waist like the waist of a she-lion, her
arms like twin marble columns blue-veined, her skin like the sweetly
scented champaka flower, and her breasts as the young tinduka fruit.
He looked into her eyes and saw that they were of a deep bronze color,
gold flecked, and with pupils that were black and opaque--eyes that
seemed to hold all the wisdom, all the secret mockery, the secret
knowledge of womanhood--and his hand trembled, and he thought in his
soul that the bountiful hand of Sravanna, the God of Plenty, had been
raised high in the western heaven at the hour of her birth.
"Remember the words of the Brahmin," grumbled Deo Singh, his old prime
minister who had served his father before him and who was watching him
anxiously, jealously. "'Woman is the greatest robber of all. For other
robbers steal property which is spiritually worthless, such as gold and
diamonds; while woman steals the best--a man's heart, and soul, and
ambition, and strength.' Remember, furthermore, the words of--"
"Enough croakings for the day, Leaky-Tongue!" cut in Vikramavati, with
the insolent rashness of his twenty-four years. "Go home to your
withered beldame of a wife and pray with her before the altar of unborn
children, and help her clean the household pots. This is the season when
I speak of love!"
"Whose love--yours or the girl's?" smilingly asked Madusadan, captain of
horse, a man ten years the king's senior, with a mocking, bitter eye, a
great, crimson mouth, a crunching chest, massive, hairy arms, the honey
of eloquence on his tongue, and a mind that was a deer in leaping, a cat
in climbing. Men disliked him because they could not beat him in joust
or tournament; and women feared him because the purity of his life,
which was an open book, gave the lie to his red lips and the
slow-eddying flame in his hooded, brown eyes. "Whose love, wise king?"
But the latter did not hear.
He dismissed the soldiers and ministers and courtiers with an impatient
gesture, and stepped down from his peacock throne.
"Fool!" said Madusadan, as he looked through a slit in the curtain from
an inner room and saw that the king was raising Vasantasena to her feet;
saw, too, the derisive patience in her golden eyes.
"A fool--though a king versed in statecraft!" he whispered into the ear
of Shivadevi, Vasantasena's shriveled, gnarled hill nurse who had
followed her mistress into captivity.
"Thee! A fool indeed!" cackled the old nurse as, side by side with the
captain of horse, she listened to the tale of love the king was
spreading before the slave girl's narrow, white feet, as Kama-Deva, the
young God of Passion, spread the tale of his longing before Rati, his
wife, with the voice of the cuckoo, the humming-bee in mating time, and
the southern breeze laden with lotus.
"You came to me a slave captured among the crackling spears of battle,"
said Vikramavati, "and behold, it is I who am the slave. For your sake I
would sin the many sins. For the sake of one of your precious eyelashes
I would spit on the names of the gods and slaughter the holy cow. You
are a light shining in a dark house. Your body is a garden of strange
and glorious flowers which I gather in the gloom. I feel the savor and
shade of your dim tresses, and think of the home land where the hill
winds sweep.
"My love for you is as the soft sweetness of wild honey which the bees
of the forest have gathered among the perfumed asoka flowers--sweet and
warm, but with a sharp after-taste to prick the tongue and set the body
eternally longing. To hold you I would throw a noose around the far
stars. I give you all I have, all I am, all I shall ever be, and it
would not be the thousandth part of my love for you. See! My heart is a
carpet for your little lisping feet. Step gently, child!"
Vasantasena replied never a word. With unwinking, opaque eyes, she
stared beyond the king, at a slit in the curtain which separated the
throne-room from the inner apartment. For through the embroidered folds
of the brocade, a great, hairy, brown, high-veined hand was thrust, the
broad thumb wagging mockingly, meaningly, like a shadow of fate.
And she remembered the huge star sapphire set in hammered silver that
twinkled on the thumb like a cresset of passion. She remembered how that
hand had plucked her from amidst the horse's trampling feet and the
sword-rimmed wheels of the war-chariots as she crouched low above her
father's body. She remembered the voice that had come to her, clear
through the clamor and din of battle, the braying of the conches, the
neighing of the stallions, the shrill, angry trumpeting of the
elephants--