After the King: Stories in Honor of J.R.R. Tolkien

The Naga Peter S. Beagle

Let us begin with a creature of which report has reached us only from those half-mythical lands beyond the Indus, where dwell many dragons and unicorns as well. The naga is described by such traders as travel between India and the Roman provinces of Mesopotamia as being a great serpent with seven heads, like the beast known to us as the hydra. Leaving aside the history of Hercules’ conquest of the Lernaean Hydra, authorities have related numerous encounters with these animals off the coasts of Greece and Britain. The hydra has between seven and ten heads, like dogs’ heads; these are generally depicted as growing at the ends of prodigiously muscular necks or arms, and they do not devour the prey they seize but drag it to a central head, much larger, which then tears it apart with a beak like that of a monstrous African parrot. Further, it is said that these heads and necks, cut in two, do grow again: on the instant, according to the Greek writers, but their capacity both for lying and credulity surpasses all bounds that one might reasonably impose on other peoples. Nevertheless, of the hydra’s actual existence there can be little doubt—I have myself spoken with sailors who had lost comrades to the voracity of these beasts, and who, in vengeance, would boil one alive and devour it themselves whenever they should capture one. I am advised that the taste of the hydra is quite similar to that of the boots of which soldiers often make soup in desert extremities. The flavor is not easily forgotten.

But the naga is plainly another nature of being from the hydra, whatever their superficial resemblances. Such accounts as I have received indicate that the folk of India and the lands beyond generally revere this creature, indeed consider it almost as a god, yet at the same time somehow lower than the human. The contradictions do not end here, for though the bite of the naga is reputedly poisonous to all that lives, only certain individuals are regarded as physically dangerous to man. (Indeed, there appears to be no agreement among my sources as to the usual prey of the naga: several authorities even suggest that the beast does not eat at all, but lives on the milk of the wild elephant, which it herds and protects as we do cattle.) Water is the nagas’ element: they are believed to have the power to bring rain, or to withhold it, and consequently must be propitiated with sacrifices and other offerings, and treated with constant respect. As do dragons here, they guard great hoards of treasure in deep lairs; but much unlike the dragons we know, the nagas reportedly construct underground palaces of immense richness and beauty, dwelling there in the manner of kings and queens in this world. Yet it is said that they are often restless, pining for something they cannot have, and then they leave their mansions and stir forth into the rivers and brooks of India. The philosophers of that region say that they are seeking enlightenment—there are sects in Rome who would assure us that they hunger for a human soul. I have no opinion in this matter.

It may be of some interest to those who have served the Emperor in Britain to know that a creature similar to the naga is rumored to exist in the far northern marches of that island, where it is worshipped as a bringer of fertility, perhaps because it sleeps out the winter months underground, emerging on the first day of spring. But whether or not these serpents amass treasure in the same manner as the nagas, and as to how many heads they have, I know not.

All nagas are said to possess a priceless jewel, located either in the forehead or the throat, which is the source of their great power. They are, like the elephant, of a religious and even reverential nature, frequently keeping up shrines to the gods of India and making rich offerings of the same sort as they themselves receive. In addition, there are accounts of naga kings presenting their bodies as couches for the gods, spreading their hoods to keep off the rain and sun. Whether or not these tales are true, that they should be credited at all certainly indicates the regard in which the nagas are held in these lands.

A further puzzling contradiction concerning the naga is the general understanding that the female serpent—referred to as a nagini—is capable of assuming the human shape, while this is not so for the male of the species. In this counterfeit form, the nagini is frequently of remarkable beauty, and it is said that there are royal families who trace their descent from the marriage of a mortal prince with a nagini. Regarding this matter, the following tale was related directly to me by a trader in silks and dyestuffs who has traveled widely both in India and in the neighboring realm to the east called by its folk Kambuja. I will repeat it in the manner of his telling, as well as I am able.

In Kambuja, a little way from the palace of the kings, there stands to this day a tower sheathed completely in gold, as is often the style of royalty in those parts. This tower was built very long ago by a young king, as soon as he rose to power, to serve as apartments for himself and his queen when he should marry. But in the arrogance of his youth, he was impatient and impossible to please: this maiden was too plain, that one too dull; this one pretty enough but too quick-tongued, and this other was an unsuitable match for family reasons, and smelled of dried fish to boot. Consequently, his first youth passed in the solitude of majesty, which—as I am often advised—can surely be no substitute for the companionship and loving wisdom of a true wife, whether queen or bondservant. And the king was ever more lonely, though he would not say so, and ill-tempered because of this; and while he was not cruel or capricious in his ways, still he ruled in a listless fashion, doing little of evil and no good, having no heart for either. And the golden tower went untenanted, year on year, save for spiders and small owls raising their own families in the topmost spire.

Now (said the trader), this king was much in the habit of walking disguised among his people in the warm twilight of the streets and the marketplace. He fancied that he gained some knowledge of their true daily lives thereby, which was not at all so: first, because there was no least urchin but recognized him on sight, however wearily cunning his incognito; and secondly, because he had no real desire for such understanding. Nevertheless, he kept his custom faithfully enough, and one evening a beggar-woman with a dirty and ignorant face approached him on his meanderings and inquired in a vulgar dialect, “Your pardon, master potter”—for so he was dressed—“but what is the nature of that shiny thing there?” And she pointed toward the golden tower that the king had designed for his happiness so long ago.

Now the king was apparently not without humor, albeit of a bleak and comfortless sort. He replied courteously to the beggar-woman, saying, “That is a museum consecrated to the memory of one who never lived, and I am no potter but its very guardian. Would you care to satisfy your curiosity? for we welcome visitors, the tower and I.” The beggar-woman assented readily, and the king took her by the hand and led her, first through the gardens that he had planted with his own hands, and then through the great shining door to which he always carried the key, though it had never turned in the lock until that day.

From room to room and spire to spire the king led the beggar-woman, conversing with her all the time in grave mockery of his own past dreams. “Here is where he would have dined, this man who never was, and in this room he would have sat with his wife and his friends to hear musicians play. And this place was to have been for his wife’s women, and this for children to sleep—as though the unborn could father children.” But when they came to the royal bedchamber, the king drew back from the door and would not go in, but said harshly, “There are serpents here, and plague, come away.”

But the beggar-woman stepped boldly past him and into the bedchamber with the air of one who has been long away from a place, yet remembers it well. The king called to her in anger, and when she turned he saw (said the trader) that she was no creeping beggar, but a great queen, clad in robes and jewels far richer than any he possessed himself. And she said to him, “I am a nagini, come from my palace and my estates far under the earth, for love and pity of you. From this evening forward, neither you nor I shall sleep elsewhere but in this tower ever again.” And the king embraced her, for she was of such royal loveliness that he could do no other; and besides, he had been much alone.

Presently, some degree of order having returned to their joy, the king began to speak of their wedding, of festivals to last for months, and of how they would rule and keep their court together. But the nagini said, “Beloved, we are twice wed already: once when I first saw your face, and again when we first held one another in our arms. As for counselors and armies and decrees, that is all your daytime world and none of mine. My own realm, my own folk, need my care and governance as much as yours need you. But in our night world we will care for each other here, and how can our dutiful days but be happy, with night always to come?”

The king was not content with this, for he wished to present his people with their long-awaited queen, and to have her by his side at every moment of every day. He said to her, “I can see that we shall come to no good end. You will tire of journeying constantly between two worlds and forget me for some naga lord, compared to whom I will seem as a sweeper, a date-seller. And I, in my sorrow, will turn to a street-singer, a common courtesan, or—worse—a woman of the court, and be more lonely and more strange than ever for having loved you. Is this the gift that you have come all this long way to bring me?”

At that, the nagini’s long, beautiful eyes flashed, and she caught the king by his wrists, saying, “Never speak to me of jealousy and betrayal, even in jest. My folk are faithful through all their lives—can you say the same of yours? And I will tell you this, my own lord, my one—should night ever come to this tower and not bring you with it, it will not be morning before a terrible catastrophe befalls your kingdom. If even once you fail to meet me here, nothing will save Kambuja from my wrath. That is how we are, we nagas.”

“And if you do not come to me each night,” said the king simply, “I shall die.” Then the nagini’s eyes filled with tears, and she put her arms about him, saying, “Why do we vex each other with talk of what will never happen? We are home together at last, my friend, my husband.” And of their happiness in the golden tower there is no further need to speak, save to add that the spiders and serpents and owls were all gone from there by morning.

Thus it was that the king of Kambuja took a nagini as his queen, even though she came to him only in darkness, and only in the golden tower. He told no one of this, as she bade him; but since he abandoned all matters of state, all show and ceremony, as soon as the sun set, to hurry alone to the tower, rumors that he met a woman there every night spread swiftly through all the country. The curious followed him as closely and as far as they dared; and there were even those who waited all night outside the tower in hopes of spying out the king’s secret mistress as she came and went. But none ever saw even the shadow of the nagini—only the king, walking slowly back into the day, calm and pensive, his face shining with the last light of the moon.

In time, however, such gossip and fascination gave way to wonder at the change in the king. For he ruled more and more with a passionate awareness of his people’s real existence, as though he had awakened to see them for the first time, in all their human innocence and wickedness and suffering. From caring about nothing but his own bitter loneliness, he now began to work at bettering their lot as intensely as they themselves worked merely to survive. There was no one in the realm who could not see and speak freely to him; no condemned criminal, overtaxed merchant, beaten servant or daughter sold into marriage who could not appeal and be heard. Such zealous concern bewildered many who were accustomed to other sorts of rulers, and a half-mocking saying grew up in the land: “By night we have a queen, but by day we have at least five kings.” Yet slowly his people came to return their king’s love, if not to comprehend it, and it came also to be said that if justice existed nowhere else in the entire universe, still it had been invented in Kambuja.

The reason for this change, as the king himself well knew, was two-fold: first, that he was happy for the first time in his life and wished to see others happy; second, that it seemed to him that the harder he worked, the faster the day sped its course, carrying him to nightfall and his nagini queen. In its turn, as she had told him, the joy that he took in their love made even their hours apart joyous by reflection, as the sun, long since set, yet brightens our nights through the good offices of the moon. So it is that one learns to treasure, without confusing them, day and night and twilight alike, with all that they contain.

The years passed swiftly, being made up of days and nights as they are. The king never spent a night away from the golden tower—which meant, among many other things, that during his reign Kambuja never went to war—and the nagini was always there when he arrived to greet him by the secret name that the priests had given him as a child, the name that no one else knew. In return she had told him her naga name (and laughed fondly at his attempts to speak it correctly), but she refused ever to let him see her in her true shape, as she went among her own folk. “What I am with you is what I am most truly,” she said to him (according to the sworn word of my trader). “We nagas are forever passing between water and earth, earth and air, between one form and another, one world and another, this desire and that, this dream and that. Here in our tower I am as you know me, neither more nor less; and what shape you put on when you sit and give judgment on life and death, I do not ask to see. Here we are both as free as though you were not a king and I were not a naga. Let it remain so, my dear one.”

The king answered, “It shall be as you say, but you should know that there are many who whisper that their night queen is indeed a naga. The land has grown too bounteous, the rainfall is too perfect, too reliable—who but a naga could command such precise good fortune? Most of my people have believed for years that you are the true ruler of Kambuja, whatever else you may be. In truth, I find it hard to disagree with them.”

“I have never told you how to govern your country,” the nagini answered him. “You needed no instruction from me to be a king.”

“You think not?” he asked her then. “But I was no king at all until you came to me, and my people know that as well as I. Perhaps you never taught me to build a road or a granary, to devise a just tax or keep my land’s borders free of enemies, but without you I would never have cared that I could do such things. Once Kambuja was only to be endured because it contained our golden tower; now, by little and little, the tower has grown to take in all Kambuja, and all my people have come inside with us, precious as ourselves. This is your doing, and this is why you rule here, by day as well as night.”

At times he would say to her, “Long ago, when I told you that I would die if you ever failed to meet me here, your face changed and I knew that I had spoken more truth than I meant. I know now—so wise has loving made me—that one night you will not come, and I will die indeed, and for that I care nothing. I have known you. I have lived.” But the nagini would never let him speak further, weeping and promising him that such a night would never be, and then the king would comfort her until morning. So they were together, and the years passed.

The king grew old with the nagini as he had been young with her, joyously and without fear. But those most near to him grew old too, and died or retired from the court, and there emerged a rabble of young soldiers and courtiers who grumbled increasingly loudly that the king had provided no heir to the throne, and that the realm would be torn to pieces by his squabbling cousins at his death. They complained further that he was in such thrall to his nagini, or his sorceress, or his leopard-woman (for the belief in such shape-changers is a common one in Kambuja) that he took little care for the glory and renown of the kingdom, so that Kambuja had become a byword for well-fed timidity among other nations. And if none of this was true, still it is well-known that long tranquility makes many restless, ready to follow anyone who promises tumultuous change for its own sake. It has happened so even in Rome.

Several attempted to warn the king that such was the case at his court, but he paid no heed, preferring to believe that all around him were as serene as he. Thus, when a drowsy noon hour abruptly shattered into blood and shouting and the clanging of swords, and even when he found himself with his back to his own throne-room door, fighting for his life, the king was not prepared. If the best third of his army, made up of his strongest veterans, had not remained loyal, the battle would have been over in those first few minutes, and there would be no more than this to my trader’s story. But the king’s forces held on doggedly, and then rallied, and by mid-afternoon were on the attack; so that as the sun began to set the insurrection had dwindled to a few pockets of a few desperate rebels who fought like madmen, knowing that no surrender would be accepted. It was in combat with one such that the king of Kambuja received his mortal wound.

He did not know that it was mortal. He knew only that night was falling, and that there were yet men standing between him and the golden tower, men who had screamed all afternoon that they would kill him first and then his leopard-woman, his serpent-woman, the monster who had for so long rotted the fiber of the realm. So he struck them down with all his remaining strength, and then he turned, half-naked, covered with blood, and limped away from battle toward the tower. If men barred his way, he killed them; but he fell often, and each time he was slower to rise, which made him angry. The tower seemed to grow no closer, and he knew that he should be with his nagini by now.

He would never have reached the tower, but for the valor of a very young officer, far younger than boys in Rome have ever been permitted to enter the Emperor’s service. This boy’s commander, whose personal charge was the safety of the king, had been slain early in the rebellion, and the boy had appointed himself the king’s shield in his stead, following the king through all the dusty turmoil of battle and ever fighting at his side or his back. Now he ran forward to raise the king and support him, all but carrying him toward that distant door through which he had jestingly led a beggar-woman so long ago. None of either side came near them as they struggled through the twilight; none dared.

By the time they at last attained the tower door, the boy knew that the king was dying. He had no strength to turn the key in the lock, nor could he even speak, save with his eyes, to order the boy to do it; yet once they were within, he pulled himself to his feet and climbed the stairs like any eager young man hastening to his beloved. The boy trailed behind, frightened of this place of his parents’ nursery stories, this high darkness rustling with demon queens. Yet care for his king overcame all such terrors, and he was once again at the old man’s side when they stood on the bedchamber threshold with the door swinging open before them.

The nagini was not there. The boy hurried to light the torches on the walls, and saw that the chamber was barren of everything but shadows; shadows and the least, least smell of jasmine and sandalwood. Behind him, the king said clearly, “She has not come.” The boy was not quick enough to catch him when he fell. His eyes were open when the boy lifted him in his arms, and he pointed toward the bed without speaking. When the boy had set him there, and bound his many wounds as best he could, the king beckoned him close and whispered, “Watch the night. Watch with me.” It was no plea, but a command.

So the boy sat all through the night on the great bed where the king and queen of Kambuja had slept in happiness for so long, and he never knew when the king died. He fought to stay awake as hard as he had fought the king’s enemies that day, but he was weary and wounded himself, and he dozed and woke and dozed again. The last time he roused, it was because all the torches had gone out at once, with a sound like a ship’s sails cracking in the breeze, and because he heard another sound, heavy and slow, some cold, rough burden being dragged over cold stone. In the last moonlight he saw her: the immense body filling the room like greenish-black smoke, the seven cobra heads swaying as one, and a flickering about her, as though she were shimmering between two worlds at a speed his eyes could not understand. She was close enough to the bed for him to see that she too bore fresh, bleeding wounds (he said later that her blood was as bright as the sun, and hurt his eyes). When he hurled himself away, rolling and scrambling into a corner, the nagini never looked at him. She bowed her seven heads over the king as he lay, and her burning blood fell and mingled with his blood.

“My people tried to keep me from you,” she said. The boy could not tell whether all the heads spoke, or only one; he said that her voice was full of other voices, like a chord of music. The nagini said, “They told me that today was the day appointed for your death, fixed in the atoms of the universe since the beginning of time, and so it was, and I have always known this, as you knew. But I could not turn away and let it be so, fated or not, and I fought them and came here. He who hides in the shadows will sing that you and I never once failed each other, neither in life nor in death.”

Then she called the king by a name that the boy did not recognize, and she took him up onto the coils of her body, as the folk of these parts believe that a naga named Muchalinda supports this world and those to come. Nor did she leave the bedchamber by the door, but passed slowly into darkness, vanishing with no more trace than the scent of jasmine and sandalwood, and the fading music of all her voices. And what became of her, and of the remains of the king of Kambuja, is not known.

Now I find this story open to some question—there is more evidence to be offered for the existence of nagas than proof positive that they do not exist; but of their commerce with men, much may safely be doubted. But I set it down even so, in honor of that boy who waited until sunrise in that silent golden tower before he dared walk out among the clamor of kites and the moans of the grieving to tell the people of Kambuja that their king was dead and gone. One of his descendants it was—or so he swore—who told me the tale.

And if there is any sort of message or metaphor in it, perhaps it is that sorrow and hunger, pity and love, run far deeper in the world than we imagine. They are the underground rivers that the nagas forever traverse; they are the rain that renews us when the right respect has been paid, whether to the nagas or to one another. And if there are no gods, nor any other worlds than this, if there is no such thing as enlightenment or a soul, still there remain those four rivers—sorrow and hunger, pity and love. We humans can survive for terribly long and long without food, without shelter or clothing or medicine, but it is a fact that we will die very soon if the rain does not come.