The Foundations of Paradise - Arthur C. Clarke [10]
The string had broken, just at the point of capture, and the kite had rolled crazily away in the summer sky, slowly losing altitude. He had rushed down to the water’s edge, hoping that it would fall on land; but the wind would not listen to the prayers of a little boy.
For a long time he had stood weeping as he watched the shattered fragments, like some dismasted sailboat, drift across the great harbor and out toward the open sea, until they were lost from sight. That had been the first of those trivial tragedies that shape a man’s childhood, whether he remembers them or not.
Yet what Morgan had lost then was only an inanimate toy; his tears were of frustration rather than grief. Prince Kalidasa had much deeper cause for anguish. Inside the little golden cart, which still looked as if it had come straight from the craftman’s workshop, was a bundle of tiny white bones.
Morgan missed some of the history that followed. When he had cleared his eyes, a dozen years had passed, a complex family quarrel was in progress, and he was not quite sure who was murdering whom. After the armies had ceased to clash and the last dagger had fallen, Prince Malgara and the Queen Mother had fled to India, and Kalidasa had seized the throne, imprisoning his father in the process.
That the usurper had refrained from executing Paravana was not due to any filial devotion, but to his belief that the old King possessed some secret treasure, which he was saving for Malgara. As long as Kalidasa believed this, Paravana knew that he was safe. At last, however, he grew tired of the deception.
“I will show you my real wealth,” he told his son. “Give me a chariot, and I will take you to it.”
But on his last journey, unlike little Hanuman, Paravana rode in a decrepit oxcart. The chronicles record that it had a damaged wheel, which squeaked all the way—the sort of detail that must be true, because no historian would have bothered to invent it.
To Kalidasa’s surprise, his father ordered the cart to carry him to the great artificial lake that irrigated the central kingdom, the completion of which had occupied most of his reign. He walked along the edge of the huge bund and gazed at his own statue, twice life-size, which looked out across the waters.
“Farewell, old friend,” he said, addressing the towering stone figure that symbolized his lost power and glory and that held forever in its hands the stone map of this inland sea. “Protect my heritage.”
Then, closely watched by Kalidasa and his guards, he descended the spillway steps, not pausing at the edge of the lake. When he was waist-deep, he scooped up the water and threw it over his head, then turned toward Kalidasa with pride and triumph.
“Here, my son,” he cried, waving toward the leagues of pure life-giving water, “here—here is all my wealth!”
“Kill him!” screamed Kalidasa, mad with rage and disappointment.
And the soldiers obeyed.
* * *
So Kalidasa became the master of Taprobane, but at a price that few men would be willing to pay: as the chronicles recorded, always he lived “in fear of the next world, and of his brother.” Sooner or later, Malgara would return to seek his rightful throne.
For a few years, like the long line of kings before him, Kalidasa held court in Ranapura. Then, for reasons of which history is silent, he abandoned the royal capital for the isolated rock monolith of Yakkagala, forty kilometers away in the jungle.
There were some who argued that he sought an impregnable fortress, safe from the vengeance of his brother. Yet in the end he spurned its protection. If it was merely a citadel, why was Yakkagala surrounded by immense pleasure gardens whose construction must have demanded as much labor as the walls and moat themselves? Above all, why the frescoes?
As the narrator posed this question, the entire western face of the rock materialized out of the darkness