Satyavati's Bargain

So Satyavati came to Hastinapura as queen, and Bhishma kept the throne warm for children not yet born, standing beside it and never on it, as he had sworn at the ferry.

She bore Shantanu two sons. The elder, Chitrangada, grew proud and formidable and died young, killed in a long single combat by a heavenly being who happened to share his name and would not tolerate the duplication. The younger, Vichitravirya, was still a boy when the crown reached him, and Shantanu by then was dead, so Bhishma governed in the child’s name and raised him toward a kingship the boy showed little appetite to grow into.

When Vichitravirya came of marrying age, Bhishma heard that the king of Kashi was holding a contest of suitors for his three daughters — Amba, Ambika, and Ambalika. Bhishma went to it himself, alone, on his brother’s behalf. The assembled kings, seeing an ageing celibate arrive where young princes competed for brides, laughed at him openly. He answered the laughter the only way the age understood: he took up his bow, carried off all three princesses in his chariot in front of the whole court, and fought down every king who pursued him, defeating even the formidable Shalya without taking a life he did not need to take. It was abduction by the custom of warriors, and entirely lawful by it, and entirely a catastrophe.

For the eldest, Amba, told him the truth he had not thought to ask: she had already given her heart, and her word, to the king of Shalva, and meant to marry him. Bhishma, who honoured such bonds as he honoured everything, sent her at once to Shalva with escort and apology. But Shalva, his pride cut by having watched his bride won and carried off by another man’s arm, refused to take her back — a woman handed to him as a returned thing was a humiliation he would not house. Amba went back to Bhishma and demanded that he marry her, since it was his arrow that had unmade her life. His vow made that the one thing in the world he could not do. Refused by the man she loved, refused by the man who had ruined her, refused a place anywhere, Amba walked out carrying a hatred too large to die with her body. She swore she would be the instrument of Bhishma’s death, and went to the forests to make that vow come true through fire and penance. The epic does not forget her. It keeps her promise for her, years and a lifetime away, on a battlefield.

Ambika and Ambalika married Vichitravirya. He was gentle, indulgent, and short-lived; he loved his two wives, lived softly among them, and died of a wasting of the lungs while still young and still childless. Now the line of Shantanu had no king and no heir and no obvious way to make one. The throne that Bhishma had guarded so absolutely had, by the very absoluteness of his guarding, nothing left to guard it for.

Satyavati turned to Bhishma and asked the only thing that could save the dynasty: that he set the vow aside, marry the widowed queens or father heirs upon them by the old law, and continue the family that was otherwise ending in his own honourable hands. He refused her without anger and without an inch of movement. Sooner, he told her, would fire turn cold and the sun rise dark than he would loosen his given word; she might command anything of him except that. It is the first time the story shows its hardest truth openly — that a virtue held past the point where it serves becomes indistinguishable, in its results, from a vice.

So Satyavati went another way, and revealed a thing she had carried since before she was a queen. As a girl at the ferry, long before Shantanu, she had borne a son to the wandering sage Parashara — a child grown now into Vyasa himself, the very arranger of this story, living apart in the forest, matted and dark and ascetic. She summoned him in her mind, as he had once told her she could, in any need, and he came. By the law of niyoga — by which a designated kinsman might father children for a dead man’s widows, the children counting as the dead man’s own — Vyasa was asked to give the line its heirs. The two widowed queens were prepared and sent to him in turn. What came of those nights would decide the shape of everything after: which of the next kings would be blind, which pale, which born too low to rule — and, following from exactly that, which of their grandsons would one day burn the Bharatas to the ground.