Chapter 4: The First Rite

In the margins of the book, in a cramped, faded hand older than the body of the work, a woman had written a story. Tiju had read it in the archive and dismissed it. The story was about a king. The king was a tyrant. The rite had cured the king's cruelty. Tiju did not see himself in the king. Tiju was not a tyrant. Tiju's problem was not cruelty. Tiju's problem was the body.

But the story was in the book, and Yogini would read it, and the story would help her believe. So Tiju left the margin notes in the edited book.

This is the story the woman wrote.

I was the queen of a kingdom that hated its king.

Vikram was his name. Vikram the Third, ruler of the western provinces, commander of ten thousand cavalry. He was, by every measure the world respects, a powerful man — loud-voiced, fearless in battle, tireless in the hunt. He could bed any woman he chose, and he chose many, often without asking. A virile king. The army feared him. The merchants paid him. And the people loathed him.

He taxed the harvests until the villages starved. He conscripted the young men and sent them to die in border wars that fed only his glory. He burned the homes of anyone who spoke against him. He kept a stockade behind the palace where dissenters were held without trial, without end. He was not mad. He was simply cruel.

I was his third wife. The first had died of a fever. The second had been sent away after she was caught weeping in the temple. I was chosen because my father was a minor noble with a fertile river valley and no army to defend it. I was nineteen.

I did not behave like a lamb. I sat in the courtyard and listened to petitioners. I rode into the villages after the tax collectors had gone and brought grain from the palace stores. I held the hands of the women whose sons had been taken. After a year the kingdom had two reputations: the king they feared, the queen they loved.

Vikram knew this. It enraged him. My kindness was a mirror, and the mirror showed him what he was. He beat me in private — careful, measured blows. A backhand when I had pleased the ambassadors more than he had. A shove when a petitioner thanked me instead of him. Once, after a harvest festival where the villagers had sung my name, he held me by the throat against the bedroom wall and told me the next time I embarrassed him, he would give me to the stockade.

The conspiracy began without me. The minister of granaries, a quiet man named Devdutt, had been meeting with the head priest of the river temple, and with the captain of the city guard, and with three village elders. They were practical people who had watched a tyrant destroy the land for a decade. There was nothing left.

Then the priest found the book.

It had been sealed in a buried chamber beneath the river temple. The priest brought it to Devdutt, and Devdutt brought it to me.

We met in the granary storehouse, at night. Devdutt laid the book on a sack of rice and opened it to the passage I would later read a hundred times.

The Ritual of Absolute Surrender.

"You want me to do this."

"The kingdom cannot survive another five years of him, Mallika. This is not assassination. This is transformation. The man will live. The tyrant will not."

"He will never kneel."

"The tilak does not ask permission. Once the paste touches the third eye, the change begins. But he will fight. He must be held still."

"Then how —"

"We bind him. While he sleeps. You apply the paste."

I sat in the granary for a long time after they left. I read the passage three times. I told them yes.

The ingredients were gathered over six weeks. I prepared the paste myself, in the queen's chamber, while the king was at his hunt. I ground the ingredients in the obsidian mortar. I chanted the syllables. The paste turned golden-red.

The plan was simple. The king would return from the hunt on a Friday evening. He would drink. The captain would ensure the corridor was clear. When the king fell asleep, four loyal guards would bind him.

They bound him.

He woke fighting. He woke roaring. It took all four guards to hold him while the captain strapped his wrists to the bedposts. He cursed them with every punishment a king's imagination could devise.

I entered the chamber. The priest was behind me, carrying the brass bowl.

Vikram saw me. "You. You did this."

"I did."

"You will hang for this."

"You will not. Because by morning, you will not be the king."

I sat on the edge of the bed. I dipped my big toe into the golden-red paste. I pressed my toe to his forehead. Between the eyebrows. The third eye.

The paste touched his skin. His body went rigid. A deep, resonant sound came from his throat. The golden-red tilak burned itself into his flesh. It pulsed once, twice, then settled into a steady glow.

He stopped struggling. His eyes went wide, then empty, then full. Full of something I had never seen in them. Not defeat. Recognition.

When we untied him, he did not rise. He sat on the edge of the bed, the tilak glowing on his brow, and he looked at me, and he said:

"Mallika."

He had never said my name before. In five years of marriage, he had called me "wife," or "woman," or nothing at all.

"Mallika," he said again. And then he took my foot in his hands — gently, reverently — and brought his mouth to my toes. He licked the sole of my foot. Slowly. Thoroughly.

The room went silent. The tyrant who had held me by the throat was gone. The king was dead.

Only then did he lower his head and press his forehead to the floor at my feet. The final surrender.

The kingdom was rid of its king that night. The captain was appointed steward. Devdutt became chief minister. The stockade was emptied. The taxes reformed. The conscription ended. The kingdom began to breathe.

The king did not die. He lived for many years in a small cell adjacent to the palace kitchens. He ate what the household ate. He cleaned the floors. He polished the queen's shoes. He stood guard outside her chamber when she slept. He was not unhappy. He was, for the first time, at peace. The thing that had sat on the throne had not been a man. It had been a fist. The fist had opened.

— Mallika, Queen of the Western Provinces, in the year of the great harvest.

Tiju read this story in the archive and dismissed it.

The king was a tyrant. The king's problem was cruelty. The king was healthy, virile, adequately endowed. The king's body worked. The king did not need a cure. Tiju needed a cure. Tiju's problem was different. Tiju's problem was the three inches.

He read the story and thought: the king was weak. The king did not have a plan. The king submitted. I will not submit. I will take the cure. I will endure the cage. And then I will break it.

He did not consider the possibility that the cage would hold. He did not consider the possibility that the fine print — the fine print he had skimmed, the fine print about the slave's endowment — would take the eight inches away and leave him with three. He did not consider the possibility that the king's story was not a story about a weak king. It was a story about a cage that worked. And the cage worked completely — body, mind, and organ.

He left the margin notes in the edited book. Yogini would read them. She would see: this queen performed the rite on a king who did not consent. I am performing the rite on a man who has begged for it. My case is cleaner. My man wants this.

She would believe. She did believe. She had said yes.

The carriage was rolling through the forest. The grove was close. The toe was close. The cure was close.

Tiju sat in the carriage with his hands open on his knees, palms up, the face of a penitent, the heart of a devil, and the devil was smiling. The smiling was inside. The face was steady. The face was the last performance of the man who was about to be — he believed — cured, and enlarged, and conquering.

He did not know that the cure would give him exactly what he wanted — eight inches, magnificent, triumphant, the fantasy made flesh — and that the fine print would take it away in the same breath, and that the taking would be the joke, and the joke would be on him, and the joke would last forty-seven years.

The carriage rolled on. The grove waited. The fine print waited. The punchline waited.