[date:-492|flashback,x]
“Kṣatravṛddha can slice a tree in one blow, how impressive!” Ajātaśatru’s voice dripped with indignance. “Do you know what else can uproot a tree in one blow? An elephant! Do you know what an elephant cannot do? This!”
He struck his contraption again, sending a rock hurling past the palatial walls and crashing somewhere out of vision with a noise that was still deafening.
“Truly, I do not comprehend what you believe your great feat is, son,” said King Bimbisāra. “You merely struck a latch. It is your assistants who are doing the heavy work.”
Ajātaśatru stumbled, astonished by his own father’s stupidity.
“Does the strength of my intellect mean nothing to you, father?” he pleaded.
It was Bimbisāra’s most trusted advisor, an Ājīvaka monk by the name of Varṣākāra, that answered.
“If it is your scholarship that you wish to be respected for, young prince,” he suggested, his voice soft, “Perhaps you ought to seek refuge in one of the Western realms, like Vaiśālī, Kāśī, Ayodhya, Mathura, even Takṣaśilā—”
“Ah yes!” cried Ajātaśatru. “The Vedic lands! Where the Brāhmaṇas, who brag about their incredible scholarship, believe that archery is really about building bridges out of arrows, that the hallmark of a great archer is the ability to shoot an arrow at the sky and make it rain! Yes, perhaps THERE I will be respected for my strategic acumen and my ingenuity at creating military technologies.”
“I studied at Takṣaśilā,” Varṣākāra tried to argue. “And even as I have many differences with the ways of the Brāhmaṇas, you are being unfair in your assessment of them, as you are in your critique of your own people.”
“Or perhaps you are a clown who does not comprehend my genius,” Ajātaśatru spat at the ground.
“Perhaps,” Varṣākāra admitted. “Perhaps you are ahead of your time.”
This seemed to invoke a new fervour in Ajātaśatru, who threw the key of his catapult towards the ground and unsheathed his sword.
“History is littered with the corpses of forgotten men who were ahead of their time,” he muttered, his face red.
Ajātaśatru then strode towards the pedestal upon which Princess Vapuṣmatī was tied, slashed through her chains with his sword, and kissed her lips with cutting rage.
The crowd gasped; the king, the queens and princes, the army and all were completely thrown off, if they hadn’t been already, finding themselves in a rather unusual situation and not having a faintest instinct for how to react; the other princes unsheathed their swords, and Vapuṣmatī was shaking, terrified, by the civil war that was unfurling around her between the Magadhi princes.
Ajātaśatru spoke loud and clear: “Allow me to defile the sanctity of this entire ceremony by saying the following words: the woman you believe is now your wife, my dear brother, has already been enjoyed by me! Not only this, Kṣatravṛddha: the evening prior to this contest, she cried into my arms, proclaiming her undying affection for me, telling me that she would forever hold me to be her Lord, regardless of Father’s unwise judgement in today’s contest.”
Vapuṣmatī was sobbing.
The noble family and everyone else was at a loss for words.
Kṣatravṛddha charged with a guttural cry of fury, brandishing his sword.
It was not clear if he meant to attack Ajātaśatru or the princess, but Ajātaśatru certainly made no effort to defend her.
“Kṣatravṛddha!” cried Queen Kosala Devi at her son, breaking out of her stupor, and the said prince stopped in his tracks, fuming in indignance.
“But if despite all your pretenses, brother,” Ajātaśatru continued, striking his own sword against the ground, heedless to the hurt that his words caused to the woman who hailed him as her savior, “You are yet willing to marry a woman defiled by me, then I shall myself throw her at your feet. Truly, I care very little for her myself, and only took her to spite you, the favourite son of our idiot father.”
“Ajātaśatru!” cried Queen Chellana, deciding to put an end to her own son’s tirade. “If what you say is true, you have committed a grave crime against the chastity of this maiden, against the honour of your brother, against the honour of our tribe—”
“YOU speak to me of honour and chastity?” snapped Ajātaśatru. “YOU, mother? You were a princess of Vaiśālī, and yet you married a barbarian man whom you despised in order to secure his favour towards your kingdom. There is a word we have, for women who sell their bodies in exchange for favours!”
Bimbisāra’s eyes were colder than the iciest peaks of the Himalayas. Queen Chellana rose, shocked beyond words to so much as chastise her son—
“And was it not a grave crime against the chastity of this maiden to murder her family before her eyes?” Ajātaśatru continued, a perverted grimace on his face, “To chain her and parade her through the streets of Rajagriha, to announce to every beggar and criminal of this country that he too may have an opportunity to make her his sex slave if he can chop down a tree in one hit?”
“Enough!” cried King Bimbisāra.
But Ajātaśatru continued.
“Do you know how I would chop down a tree, father?”
He held out his left hand, and one of his attendants scrambled over, bowing before him and bestowing him with a bag of jingling coins. Ajātaśatru then strode towards Kṣatravṛddha, unbothered by the unsheathed sword in eldest prince’s hands, and tossed the coins in his brother’s face, letting them scatter onto the ground.
Ignoring his brother’s indignant cries, Ajātaśatru hollered across the arena:
“I would pay my brother – or one of the thousands of other young fools in this kingdom whose strength equals or exceeds his – the small sum of money that he is worth, and take him as my slave. Indeed, much as you purchased your wives, father!”
“Enough,” King Bimbisāra said again, his voice more authoritative than before. “I have allowed this insanity to progress for far too long. This is a svayaṃvara, not an auction, and Princess Vapuṣmatī is a bride, not a sex slave.”
Ajātaśatru folded his hands and gave an exaggerated bow, preparing to leave.
Not one person said a word – not the king, not the minister, not the queens, not the princes, and certainly not any of the attendees. The only human sounds that could be heard – if it was even regarded as that – were the sniffles of Princess Vapuṣmatī, who knew not of what would be done with her.
They were too thrown off by the bizarreness of his rant and of his antics, and for the most part were just grateful to have him go.
Ajātaśatru picked up the key that he had earlier tossed to the ground in rage—
—and struck the device with one mighty blow, launching a boulder straight at the balcony that housed the royal attendees—
—the balcony separated from the rest of the palace—
—and crashed into the ground, inclusive of its inhabitants and of the shards of the stone that had shattered against it.
The crowd screamed, too shocked to begin to even process the far-reaching consequences of what had just occurred before their very eyes, to even process whether they ought to flee for their own lives. The imperial guard started yelling contradictory orders, and some rushed towards the site of the collapse.
A growl sounded, and King Bimbisāra’s arm rose from underneath the rubble, pulling himself out.
His booming voice came out like his body, bloody and broken:
“Capture the traitor!”
Some of the Imperial Guard had surrounded Ajātaśatru, but they were too frightened, and too out of protocol to know what to do.
“As you command, Great King,” said a squadron of the Imperial Guards to Bimbisāra, and arrested him.
