Chapter 7 — The Princess of Mithila

The place Vishvamitra chose stood near water, away from the busiest paths of Janaka's sacrificial enclosure. There the three travelers rested while the great rite continued around them: priests came and went; guests arrived in carts from distant countries; smoke rose in ordered intervals from the fires.

When Janaka, king of Mithila, heard that Vishvamitra had come, he went out to meet the sage with Shatananda, his priest, before him and the officiants carrying formal offerings of welcome.

Janaka received Vishvamitra according to custom and asked after the rite at Siddhashrama, the sages there, and the long road. Only then did he look at the two young men beside the sage. They stood alike in the equipment of travelers and princes: bows, quivers, and swords; the dark locks worn at the sides of their heads; the alertness of those who had come on foot for many days.

“Whose sons are they?” Janaka asked. “Why have they come to Mithila?”

Vishvamitra told him. They were Rama and Lakshmana, sons of Dasharatha of Ayodhya. He told of their protection of the rite, of Tataka and the attackers at Siddhashrama, of the road through Vishala, and of Gautama's hermitage. He told, too, that Ahalya had received the princes and that Gautama had returned to her.

At that, Shatananda's attention changed. Ahalya was his mother; Gautama, his father. He asked whether Rama had been received by her with the honor due a guest, whether Gautama had met her again in peace, whether his father had welcomed the prince. Vishvamitra answered that all had happened as it should.

Shatananda turned to Rama with a warmth that had not been present a moment before. “You have come under the care of Vishvamitra,” he said. “Hear what that care has cost him.”

Then, before Janaka and the gathered guests, Shatananda told the longer story of Vishvamitra's life. He had once been a king. He had encountered Vashishta and learned that the force of arms could not command everything. There had been losses, humiliations, vows, and austerities prolonged through years beyond ordinary reckoning; anger not yet mastered, desire not yet mastered, and the discipline by which Vishvamitra continued rather than turning back. At the end of that labor, even Vashishta had named him a brahmarshi, one whose spiritual authority had been won through the hardest self-command.

Rama listened. He had known Vishvamitra as the demanding sage who had led him from Ayodhya, taught him sacred disciplines, and ordered him into danger. Now he understood something more of the long path behind the man walking before him.

The account lasted into evening. Janaka, mindful that the next day's ritual work awaited them, asked leave to return at dawn.

In the morning Vishvamitra said, “These sons of Dasharatha have come to see the great bow kept in your house. Show it to them.”

Janaka folded his hands. “Then hear why it remains with us.”

Long before, he said, Rudra, a name of Shiva, had drawn the bow in anger against the gods after they had failed to grant him a share in a sacrifice. The gods had made their peace with him. In time the bow came into the keeping of Devarata, an ancestor of Janaka's line, and his descendants had guarded it as a trust.

Then Janaka spoke of his daughter.

“Once, while I was preparing a field with a plough, I found a child arising from the earth. Because she came from the furrow, she was called Sita. She grew as my daughter.”

His voice was neither ceremonial nor light. “When kings came seeking her, I set a condition. The man who would marry Sita must show the strength to command this bow. It was not a sum of money that I asked for, but prowess. They came to test themselves. None could lift it, move it, or even set it properly in his hands.”

Those kings, humiliated by their failure, had turned upon Mithila. They had surrounded the city and pressed it for a year. Janaka told how, worn down by the siege, he had sought help through austerity; how the gods had given him an army; how the besiegers had been driven away. The bow remained. So did the condition he had announced.

“Sita is dearer to me than life,” Janaka said. “If Rama, son of Dasharatha, can string this bow, I will give her to him.”

Rama and Lakshmana stood beside Vishvamitra, still and listening. Sita herself does not speak, but Janaka's words make clear the regard in which she is held: a princess of exceptional beauty and presence, dearer to him than life, whose birth and future had already drawn kings to Mithila. Outside, the sacrifice went forward under the bright morning sky. Within the king's words lay a daughter born from the earth, a promise made before many kings, and a bow no man had moved.

Janaka could not know what claim the earth would one day make upon the daughter it had given him.