The Rise of Hastinapur (35 page)

The vault-keeper came skipping into her room, wearing a white turban that was almost as big as his head. He had a book tucked under his arm, and all his fingers had rings of either gold or silver. He stood a few feet away from her chair, hands joined and back bent so low that she could see the black spot on the back of the man’s neck.

‘Enough, Satyapala,’ she said. ‘Take your seat.’

‘I have brought with me all the books that I have shown you yesterday, my lady,’ said Satyapala, in his deep, rich voice. ‘I shall go over the numbers with you once again.’

Gandhari did not stop him.

‘The wealth of your citizens has increased this year, Your Highness. If last year, your average citizen was worth four hundred copper coins each, this year he is worth six hundred copper coins each.’

Gandhari said, ‘And each copper coin has a gold coin in your vault, does it not?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Satyapala, ‘yes, yes. The tributes from Hastinapur are making your citizens truly wealthy, my lady. I often wish that I were born in Gandhar, that I had not had to see the years of poverty that I had seen in Hastinapur.’

‘That reminds me, Satyapala,’ said Gandari, ‘why did you leave Hastinapur and come to Gandhar?’

‘Ah, Your Majesty, what shall I say of the tales that visitors to Gandhar told us back in Hastinapur? Fruit bearers, grain traders, merchants, all of them would come to Gandhar and they would be bound by its spell. “How does one go to Gandhar and live there forever?” I ask them, and they tell me that I ought to become a vault-keeper.’

‘So you were not a vault-keeper when you were in Hastinapur?’

Satyapala shook his head. ‘No, my lady, I was but a fisherman.’ His face grew suddenly sad. ‘Even though Her Majesty Satyavati has done all she could for our settlements, we are still looked at with scowls back there. Not like here, where people respect us, Your Highness.’

Gandhari recalled the first time her father had told her about the treaty between Hastinapur and Gandhar: Hastinapur would provide everything that Gandhar needed, and the price would be set by Gandhar. After trade had continued for ten years or so, the vault-keepers had come, some of them fishermen like Satyapala, some blacksmiths, and they fashioned large boxes of iron in which the gold could be kept safe from thieves. They issued a copper coin for each gold coin in storage, and soon, the people of Gandhar began to exchange copper coins with one another. All trade with Hastinapur, though, remained in gold because traders from Hastinapur did not accept copper.

Now that she thought about it, it was an odd practice all right. If copper coins were just as good as gold coins, as the vault-keepers told the citizens, then certainly they ought to be good enough for the traders from Hastinapur. But they somehow were not. Every time a merchant from Hastinapur sold his wares in Gandhar, he stopped by at the royal treasury on his way back to exchange all his copper for gold. When the same wares were sold to Hastinapur’s traders, though, they were happy to give and accept copper coins.

Satyapala was still speaking about this or the other, and Gandhari waved her arm at the girl at the door, who let Shakuni in. On seeing him Satyapala stiffened a little, and he seemed to mutter something under his breath. Once Shakuni approached them, though, he got to his feet and bowed to him in the same elaborate manner he had bowed to her.

‘These books of yours,’ said Shakuni, ‘I am not interested in them, Satyapala, and neither is the queen. It is her decree that you must show her the gold that is in your vaults.’

‘The gold, sire?’ asked Satyapala.

‘Yes, the gold that your books say is locked up in your vaults.’

Satyapala turned to Gandhari. ‘Do you wish to see the gold in all of Gandhar’s vaults, Your Majesty?’

‘No,’ said Shakuni, interrupting, ‘perhaps just the main vault for now.’

‘Right away?’ Satyapala glanced at the sand glass on the window sill. ‘It is rather late, the hour of robbery and ruin.’

‘Then we leave early on the morrow. I shall have the carriage ready for the three of us.’

Satyapala said, ‘As you wish, sire. If I can take your leave then … I shall go to the vault and make preparations for your visit.’

Shakuni grinned at him. ‘But it is the hour of robbery and ruin, as you said. You shall spend the night here, at the palace, and my guards will watch you, so if you even think of leaving or sending a message…’

‘That is enough,’ Gandhari snapped. ‘Satyapala is our guest for the night. Let us treat him as one.’ She clapped her hands twice, and two waiting-women arrived with their heads bowed. ‘Take him to the guest room, and wait on him all night.’

Amid all this, Gandhari saw that the vault-keeper’s eyes were moving from side to side, and even when he spoke his smooth voice had cracked. But then he saw her catching his gaze, and he smiled broadly at her and bowed. Rising from his seat,he pottered out of the room behind the girls.

THREE

V
ery few lived in Gandhar now who still remembered the battle cries that had come from the edge of Kamyaka forty years ago. But every child born on the land could fully narrate the story by the time he attained the age of five. Gandhari first heard it from the lips of her father one long winter night when she was a girl of three, and that one time had been enough for the tale to sear itself into her mind. If she ever wanted to recall it, all she had to do was to close her eyes and it would appear in front of her, as though she had stood in the ankle-deep frozen marshes and watched the diamond-tipped lances crash into bronze shields.

The first challenge was thrown by the king of Hastinapur, and though Gandhar was reluctant at first, she got goaded out into the open, beyond her walls. The Kuru forces had hundreds of archers in them, good archers, and they revelled at fighting over flatlands. Gandhar’s battle strategy was to draw them out to the edge of the forest and into the marshlands, in which their archers would sink their feet and not find stable footing. Though that also impeded Gandhar’s horses and elephants from moving freely, if Kuru’s archers could be blunted, half the battle was won.

The first two days were quiet inside the walls of the city, for men in armour left in droves and none returned. Once every hour or so a trumpet or a neigh would pierce the air and reach them, sending men to ploughs and spades, for they were convinced that Gandhar would lose and would need to be defended by citizens. But a never-ending stream of horses and elephants left the stables and barracks that lined the eastern wall of the city, and the mines stayed open throughout the night. Bowmen were imported from Kamboja for gold, and they were deployed on the inside of the city with their arrows set to shoot.

But the fears of the city were never realized. On the third day they heard a cacophony of conches and yells, and they knew that either the battle had been won or Hastinapur had found a way to kill their whole army with one blow. If they had been able to see the wetland of Kamyaka, they would have known that the Kuru forces did kill their whole first army – sixty elephants, eighty-four cavalrymen and seventy footmen – but the reinforcements had held the enemy at bay. Once the Kuru archers were killed, the second batch came only the morning after, and during that night, without the cushion of raining arrows from behind them, their cavalry was no match for Gandhar’s.

No one knew why Kuru’s reinforcements were late in arriving. Some said the great distance and the rocky terrain made their travel difficult, but they knew it before they began the battle. They would have planned for that. Others said that they did not have the ability to train units at the mindless speed that Gandhar could, thanks to her ever swarming goldmine. No matter what the reason, by the time Hastinapur’s archers reached Kamyaka, all they saw was green marsh turned red with the blood of their kinsmen. Hooves and trunks of fallen animals were visible in the sludge, along with twisted limbs, gashed throats and gouged eyes.

It was said that the then general of the Gandhar army, the legendary Idobhargava, then trotted up to the head of the army, looked at the small group of archers that stood glancing at one another, and said with his sword drawn and helmet raised, ‘You may run back to your hell. We shall not give chase.’

And as they turned back to flee, the horses behind the general stood up on their hind legs to pound the wet earth, and the elephants raised their trunks to the sky. It was this cry of victory that the citizens heard back in the city.

In the years that came afterward, men and women wondered why the general had called his forces back when the upper hand was surely with him. Some said that the general was a man given to moments of pity on the battlefield, others said that if Gandhar’s forces had gone up to Hastinapur’s walls, they would have faced the same predicament that the archers did, and reinforcements would have had to travel all the two hundred miles of rocky terrain and get to the fighting area, whereas Hastinapur’s army would have the increased advantage of their towers, which would make their archers invincible. Fighting in the marshes of Kamyaka under the cloak of darkness was not the same as laying siege to a heavily walled city.

But if Idobhargava had pity on the Kuru people, he did not show any, for that very day, upon his return to Gandhar, he sent by the city’s swiftest messengers a summons for Pratipa, the old king of Hastinapur, with a threat that if Hastinapur failed to give Gandhar the battle tribute that he demanded, he would descend upon it with the might of a thousand elephants. When he spoke to the gathering of people at the town centre that afternoon, his right arm still bleeding from a searing wound, he spoke not of battle strategy or of war, but of the mines. In the fight between the wealthy and the strong, he said, the victors are always the wealthy.

Gandhar would never forget those words.

The camel caravans started arriving a month after the battle, carrying anything that could be eaten – but not grown – in Gandhar. Every month Hastinapur gave two thousand
tulas
of rice, wheat and pulses in tribute, in addition to basketfuls of apples that grew in abundance on their fertile lands. In the first few weeks Idobhargava would wait at the gates for the caravans, his arm in a sling, and he would personally see to the weighing and the counting. On their return he would keep two of the camels, though what he did with them no one ever knew.

But with time, the caravans began bringing in what the traders called items of value – tiny ivory statues of pretty princesses with their ponies, teak cots whose legs you could fold and rest against the wall, drawings in various colours on tough camel hide, coins from far off kingdoms with engravings no one could read, and other such goods for which the miners of Gandhar paid hefty sums. This practice began at first under disguise, but when the traders saw that Idobhargava himself began to enquire about this marble box or that velvet stole, they came out into the open, and it soon resulted in the formation of the first trade route between both kingdoms.

Soon, the number of camels that came to Gandhar every month from Hastinapur increased almost ten-fold. If twenty camels came from Hastinapur, it was now understood that no more than two would carry tributes. The others went straight to the town hall and set up their stalls, and they sold their wares not only to the wealthy, but also to non-miners. Agriculture in Gandhar had always been difficult; it wasn’t easy to coax green shoots out of rock, and here were Hastinapur’s farmers, selling succulent apples and ripe corn for almost nothing. If farming had been a fool’s occupation in Gandhar before Hastinapur arrived, it died a beggar’s death soon after. Now, a mere forty years after the battle of Kamyaka, there was not one farmer left in the kingdom.

Hastinapur did not replace just the farmers. Before the tributes began, Gandhar had been the home of cotton. Kingdoms further to the northwest, where the sun was harsh and the monsoons light, would come to Gandhar and buy their fine gowns and tunics. But once camels from Hastinapur came bearing bales of the soft fabric they called silk, and once they began to sell each silk tunic at half the price of a cotton shawl, tailors began to coach their sons to become miners instead.