Chapter 103 — Preparing the Horse Sacrifice

When Rama had finished Ila's tale, he turned from the old king's sacrifice to the rite Lakshmana had urged for Ayodhya.

The ashvamedha was not a single offering made in an inner chamber. It was the horse sacrifice: a royal rite whose released horse, guarded by the king's representatives, made the king's authority visible beyond the capital. It demanded a great ritual ground, priests, wealth, guests, and the labor of a kingdom over time. Earlier in Rama's life, Dasharatha had performed such a sacrifice in the hope of sons. Now Rama proposed one as a reigning king. Its scale was plain. It was neither a harmless pageant nor a private act of devotion.

He told Lakshmana to summon Vashishta and Vamadeva, the senior ritual advisers of the house, with Jabali, Kashyapa, and the other foremost brahmins concerned with the horse sacrifice. Lakshmana went swiftly. When the elders had come and offered Rama their blessing, he placed the purpose before them with joined hands.

Their answer pleased him. The rite would be undertaken.

A rite on that scale could not be assembled in a season. The preparation ran on for years, and while Ayodhya gathered what it needed, the two boys in Valmiki's hermitage passed out of childhood.

Rama then gave Lakshmana the work of making a gathering large enough for it. Sugriva was to come quickly with powerful vanaras and the bears who followed him. Vibhishana was to come with many rakshasas able to move as they wished. Friendly kings, brahmins living in other regions, and rishis with their households were to be invited. The sacrifice would not be hidden inside a palace. It would be held at Naimisha, the sacred forest beside the Gomati River.

The preparations moved out before the royal party. Rama ordered great stores of rice, sesame, and mung beans, carts of wealth, gold, and silver. Bharata, wise and trusted, was to lead them. Merchants, dancers, people of every age, skilled workers, artisans, the queens, princes, and the inner households were all to go forward toward the ritual ground.

The quantities in Rama's order were immense. Grain would feed a gathering too large to live on royal display alone; gold and silver would answer the needs of guests and petitioners; workers and traders would turn a forest site into a place where distant rulers, sages, and whole households could remain. The order joined royal power to obligation. If Rama called the world to Naimisha, Naimisha had to be able to receive the world.

Among those directions was one that carried its own silence. Rama commanded that a golden image of his wife, qualified to take the place required in the rite's initiation, travel with Bharata. The order was given. Sita was not brought from Valmiki's hermitage, no message went to her, and the image was not a reconciliation.

The image did not undo what had been done to Sita. It did not speak for her, and it did not settle the wound between the king's public duty and the wife he had sent away. She remained at Valmiki's hermitage while a likeness of her was carried toward the sacrifice.

Lakshmana received every instruction and set the work in motion. The road from Ayodhya began to fill: grain carts, families, servants, royal goods, and the long movement of a kingdom gathering for a sacrifice whose consequence would soon draw the past into public hearing.

Rama's orders made the scale of the undertaking clear without pretending that the rite was mere display. Provisions went before the king so that guests could arrive without want; allied rulers and ascetics were called not as conquered ornaments but as participants in a royal obligation. Bharata's place at the head of the procession showed the trust placed in him, while Lakshmana carried the immediate work of summons and arrangement.

Beyond Ayodhya, Naimisha waited beside the Gomati. The forest would become a place of ritual, hospitality, and listening. Nothing in Rama's command announced that the two sons living under Valmiki's protection were near. But the order that brought so many people to one ground was already making room for their song.