The Maharaja

In my mythology class we were given an assignment to rewrite the legend of King Arthur. This is my take on the legend, set in ancient India. Enjoy!

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The boy was a slave, and he had been all his life. He had thought he always would be, until the day he became King.

He was a small, thin, brown thing, malnourished and hardly able to lift a bucket of water when he was first given to the khan of Ashkra, the First of the four kingdoms of the Indian people. A peddler traveling the roads that separated the kingdoms had found him, whimpering and cowering in the mud. He hadn't been much of a gift—his resemblance to a skeleton made the gentry whisper that the boy was bad luck, but the khan, busy with other matters, had waved his hand in an accepting dismissal, and the boy was rushed to the kitchens.

They called him Little Gowrili, for after he was washed they saw he had the burnished gold skin and mud-colored hair of the people of Gowri, the Third Kingdom, not the cinnamon skin and onyx black hair of the Ashkrans. Little Gowrili went quietly into his life as a slave. With no parentage or particular caste, and physically unable to be of proper use to the cooks, the blacksmiths, the liverymen, or the gardeners, he was easily ignored. He was made to haul water to the kitchens so that it could be said that he had an actual purpose. But Little Gowrili, an orphan and a slave, could not imagine life any different than it was.

Ashkra went to war. The First Kingdom challenged the Fourth, Chandran, to battle for supremacy and reign over the land. Before Little Gowrili's birth, there had been only one kingdom, the High Kingdom, ruled by one man who united the people. But since the man's heirless reign had ended nearly twelve years before, the kingdoms were torn with war over the throne.

Little Gowrili went on with his work, and found that after years of hauling buckets of water to the cooks, his small, wiry arms were stronger. When he was strong enough, Little Gowrili, who was no longer very little, was sent to attend one of the lesser princes of Ashkra in battle, a young raja. He brushed the raja's horse and attended to the raja's saddle and weapons, and though at night in his cot he could hear the screams of war, he never saw one minute of action.

In Little Gowrili's fourteenth year, a week of peace was called between the armies to begin the yearly Trial of the Laylali.

There was a sacred tree which grew where the borders of the Four Kingdoms met—the Laylali tree, a flowerless tree with silk-like bark that appeared black in the daylight and white in the moonlight. The tree had belonged to the first Maharaja, the first High King, who planted it to symbolize the union of kingdoms. Now that the union was broken, the tree did not flower. It was said that the man meant to the the king of the High Kingdom would have only to touch the trunk of the tree and it would flower to prove his nobility.

Gowrili's lesser raja attended the Trial. Gowrili himself watched as all the finest lords and khans, the gentry and the rajas both greater and lesser, went to the tree and gently touched its fine bark. But each walked away discouraged, for the tree yielded no flower.

When all the nobility had tried to compel the Laylali tree into bloom and all had failed, a terrible minute of silence followed. There was no king, and in a day the war would resume. No one spoke a word, but the nobles and their servants dispersed quietly, slinking away in misery. Though he knew he risked the wrath of his lesser raja, Gowrili was drawn to the tree. He being a simple, humble, worthless slave, he thought he could do no harm by touching the tree—where hundreds and hundreds of nobles had graced with their fingers, the slave called Little Gowrili rested his own small hand.

Someone cried out, and soon the sound spread through the dispersing crowd. The slave boy, his hand still on the Laylali tree, turned to see what the commotion was about. He found the eyes of hundreds of baffled gentry and followed their gaze, first to his thin brown hand and then up to the outstretched branches of the tree above him. On the tip of a branch, there was spread a single, delicate white-and-gold blossom.

The tree and its yearly Trial were sacred. So sacred that, despite the incredulity that a slave had made the tree bloom, the nobility knelt on the damp earth and crowned the slave as their King.

*

The High Kingdom, with its King, was restored.

The King was young, but he was hard from his years of labor in Ashkra. And though once he was a spider of a child, bird-thin and weak, he was now suddenly transformed into the King. He was able to look his former masters, the khan and lesser raja of Ashkra, in the eyes without a flinch.

He had one advisor, a shaman who had come to him from the mountains the moment he had heard that the Maharaja was found again, and old, wrinkled man with a snow white beard that fell to the floor, his calloused hand always clutching a knotted staff. With the help of his loyal shaman, the King united the Four Kingdoms and the Laylali tree flourished. But the he still needed a Maharani—a High Queen.

Of the Four, the First and Fourth were the easiest to rule. But the Second and Third were most displeased with the crowning of a slave as Maharaja. The two were the hardest to control, and they had been warring themselves for longer than the twelve years without a King. The King, as told by his advisor, was desperate, though he did not show it, to have their allegiance.

After four years of a successful reign, the lord of the Second Kingdom Kerala, sent to the Mahraja a gift: his only daughter.

The same year, Gowri's lord also sent a token to the new King: his youngest son.

In the fifth year of his reign, the King married the Keralan princess. And he made the Gowrili raja his primary chief of the High Kingdom.

They were as one, those three. Though forced together unwillingly, they became closer than friends. The new Maharani served her husband, the chief raja served his King, and the King in return did his best to keep his two friends in his favor. They were more than just his closest and dearest friends, a tie not by blood but by growth; they were his link to two unhappy kingdoms thirsty for his blood. With years making their bond stronger they conquered each problem in the High Kingdom with ease, year after year passed until they were older and wiser still. Together, they made an unparalleled team, with the King's shaman lurking in their shadows.

Then came the day when the shaman, who had grown close to his liege, unhappily pronounced his last prophecy.

“Rajadhiraja, King of Kings,” he said in a solemn, weary voice, for the man was old and troubled by his visions, “I have grievous news for you. It pains me to speak of it, but it must be said. After I speak this prophecy which has haunted my dreams for many nights, I will return to my mountains so I will not be forced to witness it come to pass.”

“Speak, Holy One,” said the Maharaja, fearing the worst. His wife ill with a stillborn child, his chief friend killed in battle with rebels, his nobles unfaithful, his Kingdom in ruin—?

“Though you love your Queen, your dearest wife, and though she is the most beloved Maharani, you must kill her. She has betrayed you for your dearest friend, the Raja of Gowri. For many months now they have tried to remain faithful to you, their King, but at last they have fallen into adultery, and according to law, Maharaja,” the shaman said gravely with a deep bow to his sovereign, “you must kill them.”

*

The day of the Maharani's execution, the King remained in his palace. The Raja of Gowri had fled and now both the Second and Third Kingdoms were preparing for war against the High Kingdom and the Maharaja. Ashkra and Chandran were rallying their troops to defend the kingdom, but the matter of the Queen's death was still at hand.

The King did not watch. He could not. He knew that it was according to sacred law that adulterers be slain, but it would be agony to watch his Queen die. Against his better judgement, the Maharaja prayed that his old friend, his Queen's lover, would arrive in time to rescue the woman.

He knew when the clamor outside began—the Queen's shrieks were cut short and the clang of swords and shields colliding grew louder. The thunder of horse hooves and the growing roar of men making war filled the King's ears, and he remembered that he had never himself been in a battle. He had secured peace in his land before blood had been shed. In pain over the suffering caused by one mistake, the King closed his eyes and went back to his peaceful days as a slave.

The Maharani lived. So did the Raja of Gowri and his men. They rode to Gowri and the war began that night. The King lead his troops against the onslaught of Gowrili and Keralan soldiers, for the first time seeing blood spilt by the deadly swing of a sword.

The battle raged on for a day and then a night and another day. The air stank of rotting flesh, the earth was damp and slippery with blood, and the rivers ran red. The Maharaja fought with the sword given to him on his crowning day, staining it again and again with the blood of other men, sinking it into flesh and then jerking it back out, thinking not of the bodies he left behind him, but of the threats that lay ahead. His heart seemed to stop beating and his breath caught in his lungs as he watched the number of soldiers around him dwindle, and the sky grew blacker and sadder. The King was ready for death, exhausted with a sadness that went deep into his bones, and when he and three of his chiefs were the last left defending the High Kingdom, he felt the sting of an unknown blade pierce his skin and break his heart.

He heard a shriek like that of a wounded animal, but it was far away from him as he fell to the muddy earth, moist with gore. Shadows thrashed above him, and in his fading sanity he knew that he had been betrayed—one of his own had slain him.

But he felt no pain. He welcomed the oncoming darkness, and the bloody land strewn with bodies, the palace empty without his Queen, the lone and dreary world he left behind him.

The slave who was King closed his eyes and thought how strange it was that after all these years of being a great leader and ruler, he was still a slave, for being King was just another form of slavery.

With a last breath, the Maharaja died.