[date:-465|flashback,x]
That morning in the city altar of Ayodhya, a sheep was sacrificed.
Emperor Ajātaśatru received the news that the city’s king had been deposed by its Prime Minister, a certain Dīrghachāryaṇa.
“What is the message that they are sending us?” Prince Udayin thought aloud. “That they celebrate the destruction of their sheep-like administration, and welcome our rule? Or that their sheep of a king has been eliminated, and their new administration will be more effective in countering us?”
Ajātaśatru was annoyed by the question.
“It is irrelevant, my son,” he replied. “What it means is that their new administration is just as sheep-like and foolish as the previous. For if they were truly wolves, if they were truly my worthy enemies – or allies – they would not bother sending me any sort of message – much less a cryptic, poetic and meaningless one. The purpose of the ritual is not to send me any message of meaning, it is to IMPRESS me.”
“And even in that purpose, they have failed,” Udayin commented.
Yet, Ajātaśatru could not quite shake off the fear that he was, for the first time, fighting a mind equal to his own – not only in sheer intellect, but also in cunning and ambition.
Upon conquering Vaiśālī, Ajātaśatru had set his eyes on the patchwork of an empire that was Ayodhya’s: the supposed lion of the jungle, before whose sovereign’s very sandals the monarchs of the world bowed to. He had first urged the tribes of the Daṇḍaka forest to rebel against the rule of their region by South Kosala, the tributary established so many centuries ago by the famous Rāma of Ayodhya. To do so, he had sought the aid of Vidarbha, a distant Southern kingdom, and had Rukmiṇī, the princess of Vidarbha, betrothed to Śiśupāla, a chief of wild tribes who was Ajātaśatru’s puppet.
Shortly thereafter, Princess Rukmini had been mysteriously kidnapped, with clearly fabricated incriminating evidence of an inside-job by her father. This had left Ajātaśatru with two options: to forgive the Vidarbhas and appear weak to his own followers, or to sabotage his alliance with them.
But Ajātaśatru was not a fool who merely responded to circumstances – he was creative, he was intelligent, and he played on his own terms. Thus, he had sent spies to find the true culprits, and to locate Princess Rukmini – and had found her in Ayodhya under the care of Prime Minister Dīrghachāryaṇa. But rather than taking the obvious bait – of accusing Dīrghachāryaṇa, having him dismissed from employment and giving the Brāhmaṇas cause to rebel against the king and install a prince in Ayodhya less sympathetic to Magadha – he had chosen to instead plant false evidence incriminating the King of Ujjain, a faraway and irrelevant country, in Rukmini’s abduction.
However, it appeared that whoever he was playing the game against had anticipated even this, and planning yet another step in advance, had caused a regime change in Ujjain – placing on its throne an indignant, ambitious hothead by the name of Pradyota, who was so enraged by the accusation against him that he marched his army to Magadha, set waste to its countryside and seized large treasures, then returned to invade and conquer Vidarbha. It had not done Ajātaśatru well to earn the ire of Pradyota, who had now apparently become a rival empire-builder of his own, and had began to compete with him for the alliance of Ayodhya.
At last, after seven long years, Ajātaśatru had taken Kāśī with his own forces – and enslaving its population to fill his army once more, declared war on the centre of civilization itself: on the city of Ayodhya, the capital of the nation that had once dominated the Mahājanapadas like a lion among lesser beasts.
Through his march through their country, his army had been harassed by thieves, skirmishers, poisoning attempts and seers and spies sent to demoralize the superstitious members of his army. And after spending three years capturing strategic forts and defeating armies sent to intercept him, three years of dealing with unending guerrilla warfare – he had finally reached the frontiers of the city of Ayodhya itself, ready to cross its uncrossable moat, to penetrate its impregnable bounds, to scale its unscalable walls and conquer the invincible city.
The resistance put up by the city was unlike anything that Ajātaśatru had seen in any fort he had captured previously – and unlike anything he had expected from an enemy.
For every attack, the city launched a most creative and unusual defence or counter-attack – they had captured some of his mechanics to learn the secret of the catapult, and created, in response, a more powerful bow – the crossbow – based on the identical technology and mounted it on their walls to harass the invading army. When Ajātaśatru battered their walls with his catapults, they reinforced it with rawhides and metal fibres to soften his blows; when he attempted to burn their fortifications by launching jugs of oil and fire-arrows at them, they repurposed their oil cauldrons – which were designed to be used against siege towers – to hurl water down the walls and extinguish the fires; when the Magadhas took advantage of lowered visibility from the smoke and steam to charge the doors with armoured elephants equipped with battering rams, the defenders located them with sound. The Magadhas sowed confusion by beating drums, but even when they made a hole in the wall at last, the insides were defended – not by archers as Ajātaśatru had anticipated, but by fiery traps that instantly killed the invaders; when Ajātaśatru sent in soldiers in wet clothing to avoid the flames, the fiery traps were supplemented by spike traps.
The Emperor of the Magadhas was impressed.
“Are we doomed?” asked his foolish son.
Ajātaśatru laughed. “Our goal is not to win a battle, silly boy. Our goal is the extermination of the people of Ayodhya – and there are many means to accomplish this. We employ this method because it is the most fun.”
All across civilized world – from the University at Takṣaśilā to the Port at Tāmraliptī, from the snowy mountains in the North to the ordinary ones in the South, in royal courts and in the Annual Debates in Yājñavalkya’s honour, in the camps of the defenders and the attackers alike, a mysterious name formed on the lips of men.
