Gautama recognized immediately what had happened, as he had long known Indra lusted after his wife. He cursed Indra to wear his shame on his skin, covering his visage in lewd markings. When Indra returned to the heavens, Brahma took pity on him and turned those marks into eyes.
But Gautama saved his true wrath for his wife, for he believed she should have known the man at the door was Indra and resisted his advances. With another of his terrible boons, he turned Ahalya to stone and left her alone in their forest home.
The scroll ended there, and I knew there was no redemption for Ahalya—the gods would help Indra but never a woman who had slept with another man. It ate at me, for how was Ahalya to have known? The fault was Indra’s from start to finish. Gautama could have chosen to understand and forgive her. But neither gods nor men had such mercy.
I understood too why my mother, living in a cold and forbidding court and exiled by her own husband, would write her missive to me on this particular story. It was a warning.
I took the scroll with me to my room and hid it among my things. I could not stop thinking about Ahalya, doomed to remain a stone statue in a forest, slowly eroding while her husband continued to wander the world. If a woman crafted by the gods themselves could be consigned to this fate, what hope was there for a woman born of a woman? Was that not what my mother had wished for me to know?
I read the scroll enough times to commit it to memory, absorbed in thoughts as overcast as the weather.
Eventually, the season passed and so did my mood. Yudhajit and I took advantage of the firmer ground by fighting particularly hard, beginning with spears and sparring until both our arms burned from effort, our breaths coming short and painful. “Father frets about the harvest from Sakala this year,” Yudhajit said as we slumped against the cool ground, exhausted.
“Why? We have had ample rain.” I plucked a stalk of long grass from the ground and shredded it as I spoke.
“I could not make much sense of it. He talked of blood and of the gods, but what would that have to do with the harvest?”
I closed my eyes and envisioned a map of Kekaya. Sakala was a small farming village on the southwestern border of the kingdom, near the Chandrabhaga River, which was sacred to Vishnu. Something about this pricked the back of my mind. During the rainy seasons, we had received a rare visit from some rich merchants from a town upriver of Sakala. Had I learned something then?
Of course—Manthara. She had told me of a strange event reported by the merchants’ servants as we practiced—the river had split after a torrential downpour, adding a new bend. I hadn’t thought much of it at the time, more focused on striking her shield with my sword. But now I said, “Oh!”
“Oh?” Yudhajit asked lazily, rolling to lie in a patch of sunlight.
“The outlying villages all perform animal sacrifice, including Sakala,” I explained. “It’s one of the few customs that Father has allowed them to keep, even after the sages declared the practice to be barbaric and contrary to the wishes of the gods. The village must not have realized that the new split of the Chandrabagha River runs right to them. Perhaps when they sacrificed their animals, some of the blood ran into the flooded river, offending Vishnu, as the sages had warned.”
The color drained from Yudhajit’s face. I understood his fear. Vishnu was among the most powerful gods. In his immortal form, he could turn fields to ash with only a thought. Just as the gods regularly answered the prayers of the pious, so too did they often visit destruction on those who they deemed immoral.
“What is Father to do about it, then?” Yudhajit had only recently been allowed into the Mantri Parishad. He often told me of their discussions, and we tried to find ways for him to prove himself to the others.
“Pray to Vishnu?” I phrased my words as a question, for I did not actually know the answer. “Perhaps if the people of Sakala make an elaborate offering, or—they could hold a Yagna! It would likely bankrupt the village, but that would surely appease Vishnu.”
Yudhajit hummed thoughtfully, then threw a loose fistful of dirt at me. I supposed that meant thank you.
The thick, royal blue rope between us was so full and solid it seemed nearly made of metal. I could sense my brother plain as sunlight. It was difficult for Yudhajit to admit that I had a talent for matters of governance. To him, the throne was merely another tiresome responsibility. He knew well how to navigate the court and create spectacles but hated the intricacies that kept the kingdom running, the ones that I navigated as easily as I did the Binding Plane. Yudhajit liked to make fun of me for it, teasing me for how enthusiastically I threw myself into studies of history and administration.