The Curse of the Undead - Selected Vampire Books and Legends. Richard Francis Burton

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СКАЧАТЬ ye,” said the king to his messengers, “and look in the mouth of the woman’s lover who has fallen dead. If the nose be there found, then has this thief-witness told the truth, and the husband is a guiltless man.”

      The nose was presently produced in court, and Shridat escaped the stake. The king caused the wicked Jayashri’s face to be smeared with oily soot, and her head and eyebrows to be shaved; thus blackened and disfigured, she was mounted upon a little ragged-limbed ass and was led around the market and the streets, after which she was banished for ever from the city. The husband and the thief were then dismissed with betel and other gifts, together with much sage advice which neither of them wanted.

      “My king,” resumed the misogyne parrot, “of such excellencies as these are women composed. It is said that ‘wet cloth will extinguish fire and bad food will destroy strength; a degenerate son ruins a family, and when a friend is in wrath he takes away life. But a woman is an inflicter of grief in love and in hate, whatever she does turns out to be for our ill. Truly the Deity has created woman a strange being in this world.’ And again, ‘The beauty of the nightingale is its song, science is the beauty of an ugly man, forgiveness is the beauty of a devotee, and the beauty of a woman is virtue-but where shall we find it?’ And again, ‘Among the sages, Narudu; among the beasts, the jackal; among the birds, the crow; among men, the barber; and in this world woman-is the most crafty.’

      “What I have told thee, my king, I have seen with mine own eyes, and I have heard with mine own ears. At the time I was young, but the event so affected me that I have ever since held female kind to be a walking pest, a two-legged plague, whose mission on earth, like flies and other vermin, is only to prevent our being too happy. O, why do not children and young parrots sprout in crops from the ground-from budding trees or vinestocks?”

      “I was thinking, sire,” said the young Dharma Dhwaj to the warrior king his father, “what women would say of us if they could compose Sanskrit verses!”

      “Then keep your thoughts to yourself,” replied the Raja, nettled at his son daring to say a word in favour of the sex. “You always take the part of wickedness and depravity—”

      “Permit me, your majesty,” interrupted the Baital, “to conclude my tale.”

      When Madan-manjari, the jay, and Churaman, the parrot, had given these illustrations of their belief, they began to wrangle, and words ran high. The former insisted that females are the salt of the earth, speaking, I presume, figuratively. The latter went so far as to assert that the opposite sex have no souls, and that their brains are in a rudimental and inchoate state of development. Thereupon he was tartly taken to task by his master’s bride, the beautiful Chandravati, who told him that those only have a bad opinion of women who have associated with none but the vicious and the low, and that he should be ashamed to abuse feminine parrots, because his mother had been one.

      This was truly logical.

      On the other hand, the jay was sternly reproved for her mutinous and treasonable assertions by the husband of her mistress, Raja Ram, who, although still a bridegroom, had not forgotten the gallant rule of his syntax—

      The masculine is more worthy than the feminine;

      till Madan-manjari burst into tears and declared that her life was not worth having. And Raja Ram looked at her as if he could have wrung her neck.

      In short, Raja Vikram, all the four lost their tempers, and with them what little wits they had. Two of them were but birds, and the others seem not to have been much better, being young, ignorant, inexperienced, and lately married. How then could they decide so difficult a question as that of the relative wickedness and villany of men and women? Had your majesty been there, the knot of uncertainty would soon have been undone by the trenchant edge of your wit and wisdom, your knowledge and experience. You have, of course, long since made up your mind upon the subject?

      Dharma Dhwaj would have prevented his father’s reply. But the youth had been twice reprehended in the course of this tale, and he thought it wisest to let things take their own way.

      “Women,” quoth the Raja, oracularly, “are worse than we are; a man, however depraved he may be, ever retains some notion of right and wrong, but a woman does not. She has no such regard whatever.”

      “The beautiful Bangalah Rani for instance?” said the Baital, with a demonaic sneer.

      At the mention of a word, the uttering of which was punishable by extirpation of the tongue, Raja Vikram’s brain whirled with rage. He staggered in the violence of his passion, and putting forth both hands to break his fall, he dropped the bundle from his back. Then the Baital, disentangling himself and laughing lustily, ran off towards the tree as fast as his thin brown legs would carry him. But his activity availed him little.

      The king, puffing with fury, followed him at the top of his speed, and caught him by his tail before he reached the siras-tree, hurled him backwards with force, put foot upon his chest, and after shaking out the cloth, rolled him up in it with extreme violence, bumped his back half a dozen times against the stony ground, and finally, with a jerk, threw him on his shoulder, as he had done before.

      The young prince, afraid to accompany his father whilst he was pursuing the fiend, followed slowly in the rear, and did not join him for some minutes.

      But when matters were in their normal state, the Vampire, who had endured with exemplary patience the penalty of his impudence, began in honeyed accents,

      “Listen, O warrior king, whilst thy servant recounts unto thee another true tale.”

      THE VAMPIRE’S THIRD STORY

       —Of a High-minded Family.

       Table of Contents

      In the venerable city of Bardwan, O warrior king! (quoth the Vampire) during the reign of the mighty Rupsen, flourished one Rajeshwar, a Rajput warrior of distinguished fame. By his valour and conduct he had risen from the lowest ranks of the army to command it as its captain. And arrived at that dignity, he did not put a stop to all improvements, like other chiefs, who rejoice to rest and return thanks. On the contrary, he became such a reformer that, to some extent, he remodelled the art of war.

      Instead of attending to rules and regulations, drawn up in their studies by pandits and Brahmans, he consulted chiefly his own experience and judgment. He threw aside the systematic plans of campaigns laid down in the Shastras or books of the ancients, and he acted upon the spur of the moment. He displayed a skill in the choice of ground, in the use of light troops, and in securing his own supplies whilst he cut off those of the enemy, which Kartikaya himself, God of War, might have envied. Finding that the bows of his troops were clumsy and slow to use, he had them all changed before compelled so to do by defeat; he also gave his attention to the sword handles, which cramped the men’s grasp but which having been used for eighteen hundred years were considered perfect weapons. And having organized a special corps of warriors using fire arrows, he soon brought it to such perfection that, by using it against the elephants of his enemies, he gained many a campaign.

      One instance of his superior judgment I am about to quote to thee, O Vikram, after which I return to my tale; for thou art truly a warrior king, very likely to imitate the innovations of the great general Rajeshwar.

      (A grunt from the monarch was the result of the Vampire’s sneer.)

      He found his master’s armies recruited from Northern Hindustan, and officered СКАЧАТЬ