Creation (34 page)

Although King Bimbisara personally detested gambling and tried to discourage it at court, his heir was a constant habitué of the Five Hills Gambling Hall, the most elegant of the capital’s gambling establishments. It was rumored that Ajatashatru himself owned the hall and that he blithely cheated the government of its share of the profits.

My future father-in-law was only a few years older than I. From the beginning, we got on well; but then, when he wanted to be charming, there was no one to compare with him. That evening at the Five Hills Gambling Hall, Ajatashatru was ablaze with charm; had even rouged his nipples, something that court dandies only do on festive occasions.

Arm in arm we entered the main hall, a long narrow room with gaming tables on either side. At the far end, a curtained alcove contained divans covered in Cathay cloth. Here the prince could relax, unobserved, but observing through one of several holes that had been cut in the dusty curtains.

I noticed that as the manager led us to the alcove, none of the gamblers looked at the prince. “You see,” Ajatashatru whispered to me, breath heavy with perfume, “I am invisible.”

I assumed that it was considered bad form to notice the prince when he took his ease among the common people. Later I learned that it was worse than bad form: it was fatal for the person who dared look at the prince when he was enjoying himself.

As the two of us took our places on divans, the curtains of the alcove were drawn. Then a series of powerful wines was brought us in silver flagons by very young girls. One was not even pubescent, which excited the prince. While he spoke to me he fondled her rather the way a Magian will caress a dog as he discourses solemnly on the proper making of haoma or the creation of the world.

“You will bring us joy and good fortune.” The prince smiled. Unlike the chamberlain, he kept his teeth clean with some sort of cosmetic gum that pulls away all particles of food. I sat so close to him that I could see that his entire body had been shaved or depilated. Were it not for those muscular forearms and brutal hands, I would have thought that I was seated beside my future mother-in-law.

“You have done me the sort of honor that cannot be measured in gold and silver. My master the Great King will be pleased.”

“We must invite him to Magadha. Not, of course, for the wedding,” Ajatashatru added, rather quickly. I always assumed that the secret service in Rajagriha was more or less aware of Persia’s intentions. Yet I believe that we had been remarkably subtle in our own spying. Nothing was ever written down by the five men that I had assigned to gauge Magadha’s military strength. Each man was obliged to memorize the same facts, on the theory that at least one was bound to return alive to Susa.

When it came to trade routes and manufactories and raw materials, our dealings were perfectly open, and we soon had a good idea of the remarkable wealth of the country. Much of the kingdom’s revenue came from taxes levied on the caravans that passed through Magadha; particularly lucrative was the famous southeast-to-northwest trail—the word road is simply not applicable to anything Indian.

The state exercised a monopoly over the making of textiles and weapons. It took the superintendent of weaving three days to show me the various workshops where women work from dawn until night, spinning and weaving. The export of finished cotton is a principal source of revenue for the kings of Magadha. Although I was not shown the arsenals, several members of the embassy were able to discover a few secrets. Although they were surprised by the inefficient way that the iron is worked, they were impressed by the efficient way that weapons and farm implements are assembled.

One set of workmen is responsible for making, let us say, the wooden shaft of a hoe. Another set will then pour molten metal into the mold for the iron head. A third set will assemble shaft and head, while a fourth is responsible for loading the finished articles onto wagons. The speed with which a great many hoes can be made and shipped is marvelous.

Unfortunately, I was never able to interest anyone at Susa in these things. For one thing, Persian nobles disdain trade. For another, as a member of the court I was never able to get to know the sort of people who might have wanted to try to produce objects in quantity.

“You will find my child a perfect treasure. She will be as devoted to you as Sita was to Rama.” This was a conventional phrase.

“That she is your daughter is more than enough for me.”

“She is closest to me of all my children.” Tears came to the bright collyrium-washed eyes. Actually, as Ambalika was later to tell me, her father had never bothered to learn the names of any of his daughters. He was interested only in his sons. “I was terrified of him,” said Ambalika later. “We all were. He never actually spoke to me until the day he told me that I was to marry a Persian lord. When I asked him where and what Persia was, he told me that that was none of my business.”

“You will also want to meet my precious child’s grandfather, Prince Jeta. He is also related to my beloved uncle the king of Koshala. Ours is a beautiful and happy family whose only division, I always say, is the Ganges River. And,” he added, the soft face suddenly concentrated by a scowl, “the federation. Oh, my dear, you must give us your wisest counsel.” The powerful hand rested for a moment on the back of my hand. The heat from his fingers was intense. The palm wine that we had been drinking notoriously heats the flesh while deranging the senses.

“We are stronger. But they are wilier. They stir up trouble on the frontier. They infiltrate the religious orders. The Jaina and Buddhist monasteries are filled with republican agents. But since my father—may he live forever—is personally devoted to the Buddha, we can do nothing. Worse, in the last year, republican agents have worked their way into the guilds. At this very moment, they control the council of the guild of pottery makers right here in Rajagriha. They also have two members on the council of the weavers’ guild. Worst of all, the elder of the shoemakers’ guild is an open republican. We are being slowly eaten away from within and— Oh, my dear friend, what are we to do?”

“Purge the guilds, Lord Prince. Eliminate the republicans.”

“But, dearest, you don’t know our little world. Our guilds are almost as old and almost as sacred as the monarchy. As for purging them ... Well,
I
would like to smash them to pieces. So would my father, secretly, of course. But they are too powerful. They are too rich. They lend money at exorbitant interest. They maintain their own militias ...”

“But that is dangerous, Lord Prince. Only the ruler should have the power to raise troops.” I had been shocked to discover that not only do the guilds of Magadha dominate the country’s commercial life but because the workers in any given trade all live together in the same quarter of the city, they resemble tiny nations: each guild has its own law courts, treasuries, troops.

“Mind you, we control the guilds, up to a point. In wartime the guild militias automatically become part of the king’s army. Yet when there is no war ...”

“They are practically independent?”

“Practically. Of course, the guilds are useful to us. No king, no secret service could ever keep control over a population as large as ours. So the guilds keep order for us. Also, when it comes to setting prices, they usually know better than we what the market’s demands are.”

“But how can you control them? If I were the ... elder of the shoemakers’ guild, say, I would want to get as much as I possibly could for a pair of shoes. I’d double the price, and people would have to buy because only my guild is allowed to make and sell shoes.”

The prince smiled, rather sweetly. He was beginning to react to all the wine that he had drunk. “For one thing, we alone have the power of life and death. We seldom use this power against the guilds, but it is always there, and they know it. Practically speaking, our power is based on the fact that we control all raw materials. We buy cheap and we sell only to make a small profit. For instance, cows are slaughtered at a certain time of year. When this happens, we buy up all the hides and put them in warehouses. When cowhides are in short supply, we sell them at a reasonable price to the guilds. If a guild was tempted to market its shoes at an unreasonable price, we would withhold the leather until they become more reasonable.”

Nowhere in the world have I found a monarchial system so delicately and intelligently balanced as to be able to gain the most revenue from the population with the least coercion.

“Will you go to war with the federation?” I was sufficiently drunk to ask the prince the question whose answer all India nervously awaited.

Ajatashatru spread his arms, palms upwards. The fingertips had been painted red. “War is always the very last thing one wants. But had the horse sacrifice turned out differently, we would at least have had a sign from heaven that it was time for us to fight for our survival. As it is ... I don’t know, my dear.”

The prince fondled a naked girl of nine or ten who lay across his lap. She had enormous, watchful eyes. I assumed that she was a secret-service agent. In Magadha, agents are recruited young, usually from among homeless orphans.

If the child was an agent, she learned nothing that night. The prince was discreet, as always. Although I had watched him on more than one occasion drink himself into unconsciousness, I never heard him say anything that he did not want the world to know. Wine made him maudlin, affectionate, confused. The “my dear’s” would come in Greek phalanxes. The hot hand would press my hand and the arm about my shoulders would bestow a loving hug. That night I was patted, hugged, my-deared and accepted as a member—more or less—of the royal family of Magadha which was separated from its cousins of Koshala by the Ganges River ... and by the wicked federation of republics. That night at the Five Hills Gambling Hall it was my impression that the decision to go to war had already been made.

“There has never been a soldier to equal my father, you know. Not even your Cyrus the Great. Believe me, Bimbisara was a high king long before the horse sacrifice. After all, it was he who conquered the people of Anga, which gave us the port of Champa, which controls all the traffic down the Ganges to the sea that leads to Cathay.”

Ajatashatru now wept, from wine. “Yes, it was Bimbisara who created what is now the most powerful nation in all the world. It was he who built a thousand thousand roads and a thousand thousand causeways over the marshes. It was he ...”

I stopped listening. When Indians use numbers, they never know when to stop. It is true that Bimbisara did create a lot of dirty lanes, which turn to mud in monsoon weather, but he never managed to maintain even the great caravan route from Champa to Taxila. Also, curiously enough, there are no bridges of any kind anywhere in India. They will tell you that bridges are impractical because of the seasonal floods, but it is my view that they do not have the ability to span rivers even with rafts tied together. Of course, one of the most powerful guilds in Magadha is that of the ferrymen and, as the Indians like to say, no guild has ever dissolved itself.

Later that evening, after the prince had fallen asleep, I gambled for a time with Caraka. But as soon as I began to lose at dice, I stopped. On the other hand, Caraka could not stop. Finally I ordered him to leave the hall. I had not realized until then to what an extent the desire to gamble can make men mad. It is like haoma or sexual passion. But haoma and sexual passion wear off in time, while the need to gamble does not.

I must say that I admired the way that Bimbisara was able to raise, so painlessly, so much revenue from the addictions of the people. For a time, we experimented at Susa with a gambling hall. But Persians are not gamblers—because they are not traders? And only Greeks came to the hall. Since the Greeks invariably lost more money than they could ever pay, the place was shut down.

AS SOON AS I HAVE DECIDED HOW ALIKE all human beings are, I am confronted with some great differences between races. Indians gamble. Persians don’t. The Vedic gods of India are the Zoroastrian devils of Persia. Why do some men believe that the cosmos is a single entity, while others believe it is many things? Or many things in one thing? Or no thing at all. Who or what created the cosmos? Does it exist or not exist? Did I exist before I addressed this question to Democritus? Do I exist now? Did I exist in another form before I was born? Will I be reborn as something else again? If there were no people on earth to watch the sun cast lengthening shadows, would there be such a thing as time?

Prince Jeta took even greater pleasure than I in pondering what he called first things. He came from Koshala to Magadha to attend his granddaughter’s wedding. At our first meeting he invited me to his country house just north of Rajagriha. I was told to come at midday. I was not, he said, to worry about the heat. Ordinarily, at that season, social visits take place in the late afternoon. But as he told me, “You will be as cool at noon as if you were in the country of snow.” This was an old-fashioned expression, dating back to the first Aryans. After all, I doubt if a dozen people at the court of Magadha had ever experienced snow.

Caraka and I traveled by canopied wagon. Caraka had just returned from a visit to the iron mines in the south; he had been impressed by their extent. Since our bullock-driver was a spy who understood Persian, we spoke cryptically. How could we tell which ones knew Persian and which did not? The Persian-speakers were all from the northwest—from Gandhara or the Indus Valley. To a man, these northwesterners are taller and fairer than the Magadhans. They also have as much difficulty with the local dialect as we did. In my honor, Varshakara had imported several dozen of them to spy on us.

Prince Jeta’s estate was enclosed by a wall of mud brick, pierced by a single wooden gate just off the main road. Since neither wall nor gate was at all impressive, we might have been paying a call on the headquarters of the millers’ guild. But once inside the gate, even the anti-Aryan Caraka was impressed.

At the end of a long alley of flowering trees was an elaborate pavilion whose tall arched windows were shaded by awnings of a pale-blue cloth that felt to the touch like silk but proved to be a new variety of cotton cloth.