The King Who Would Be Stronger Than Fate

Once upon a time, far away in the east, there lived a king who loved hunting so much that once a deer was in sight he forgot all about his own safety. He often got separated from his nobles and servants, and in fact he rather enjoyed adventures on his own. Another favourite trick of his was to announce that he was ill and could see no one. Then, with only his trusted chief minister, his Grand Wazeer, knowing the secret, he would disguise himself as a pedlar, load a donkey with cheap goods, and travel about the country. That way he found out what ordinary people said about him and whether his judges and governors were doing their jobs.

One day his queen gave birth to a baby daughter as lovely as the dawn. The king was so happy that for a whole week he forgot to go hunting and spent the time celebrating.

Not long afterwards, though, he went out after deer in a far corner of his forests. His dogs startled a beautiful snow-white stag, and the moment he saw it, the king decided he must have it at any cost. He galloped after it as hard as he could. His servants followed as fast as they were able, but the king had the best horse and the stag was swift, and at the end of an hour only the king and his favourite hound were left in the chase. All the others were far behind.

On he went, until he found himself riding into a valley surrounded by great rocky mountains. His horse was so tired it trembled at every step, and the sun was setting. He had shot arrow after arrow at the stag, but every one fell short or flew wide, and as darkness fell he lost sight of it altogether. Now his horse could hardly move, his hound staggered along panting beside him, and he was lost among mountains he had never seen, with no person or house in sight.

The king would not have minded so much if he had not lost the beautiful stag. But he never worried about what he could not help. So he got down, led his horse along the rough path, and looked for a shepherd’s hut or a cave where he might spend the night.

Soon he heard rushing water. He scrambled over a steep rocky ridge, and below him he saw a stream tumbling down a narrow valley. Almost at his feet, close to the water, a dim light flickered. The king, his horse and his hound slid and stumbled down the stony path towards it. At the bottom was a narrow strip of grass beside the stream, lit by a rough lantern at the mouth of a cave. At the water’s edge sat an old hermit with a long white beard. He did not speak or move as the king came near. He just sat throwing dry leaves into the stream.

“Peace be with you,” said the king.

“And with you, peace,” replied the hermit. But he did not look up or stop what he was doing.

The king watched him for a minute or two. He noticed that the hermit threw in two leaves at a time and watched them closely. Sometimes the stream carried both away. Sometimes it carried off only one, and the other swirled slowly round at the edge of the current and came circling back on an eddy to the hermit’s feet. Sometimes both leaves were caught in the eddy and never reached the main stream at all.

“What are you doing?” asked the king at last.

The hermit said he was reading the fates of men. Everyone’s fate, he said, was decided from the beginning, and whatever it was, there was no escaping it.

The king laughed. “I don’t much care what my own fate is,” he said, “but I’d like to know my little daughter’s.”

“I cannot say,” said the hermit.

“Don’t you know, then?”

“I might know,” said the hermit, “but it is not always wise to know too much.”

The king was not satisfied. He kept pressing the old man, and for a long time the hermit refused. But at last the king pushed him so hard that he said:

“The king’s daughter will marry the son of a poor slave woman named Puruna, who belongs to the king of the land to the north. There is no escaping fate.”

The king was furious, but he was also very tired, so he only laughed and said he hoped there would be a way out of that fate, at least. The hermit gave him shelter for the night. The king watered and tied up his horse, ate a supper of bread and roasted peas, and lay down in the cave with his hound at his feet. But he could not sleep. He lay awake thinking about the prophecy, and the more he thought, the angrier he grew, until he ground his teeth and swore that it would never, never come true.

In the morning he got up pale and sulky, asked the hermit the way, and rode home. As soon as he reached the palace, he wrote to the king of the land to the north, asking him, as a favour, to sell him the slave woman Puruna and her son. For five days he waited for an answer, hardly eating or sleeping and as cross as could be. On the fifth day the reply came: the northern king would not sell them, but he would gladly give them as a gift.

The king was delighted. He told his Grand Wazeer that he was going off on one of his secret journeys and that the Wazeer must make some excuse for his absence. Then he disguised himself as a messenger, rode a swift camel to the border river where the woman was to be handed over, and thanked the northern king’s men with gifts. He took the poor woman and her tiny baby boy up onto his camel and rode away into a wild desert. After a day and a night, he stopped at a great cave, took the woman and the baby inside, and there, in his anger, he killed her with his sword. But even he could not bring himself to harm the helpless baby. Surely, he thought, it would soon die alone in this empty place. So he left it in the cave and rode home as fast as he could.

Now in a small village in his kingdom there lived an old widow with no children or family at all. She earned her living by selling the milk of her goats, and she was very poor and not very strong. Every morning she drove her goats into the desert to graze on the bushes, and every evening they came home by themselves to be milked.

One evening her best nanny goat came home without a drop of milk. The old woman thought some naughty child must have caught the goat on its way home and milked it. But it happened evening after evening, so she decided to find out who the thief was. The next day she followed the goats at a distance. In the afternoon, she saw the nanny goat slip away from the others, and she went after it. The goat walked a long way and disappeared into a cave in the rocks. The old woman followed, and what should she see but the goat giving her milk to a baby boy! Nearby lay the body of the baby’s poor mother. Frightened and full of wonder, the old woman thought that this baby might become a son to her in her old age, and grow up to look after her. So she carried him home to her hut, and the next day she went back with a spade and buried his mother.

The years passed, and the baby grew into a fine, handsome young man, as daring as he was good-looking and as hard-working as he was brave. The old woman named him Nur Mahomed. When he was about seventeen, he came home from the fields one day to find a strange donkey eating the cabbages in their garden. He grabbed a stick and chased it out.

“Hey!” called a passing neighbour. “Why are you beating the pedlar’s donkey?”

“The pedlar should keep it out of my cabbages,” said Nur Mahomed. “If it comes back this evening, I’ll cut its tail off!” And he went indoors whistling.

But the neighbour was a gossip and a troublemaker. That evening he met the pedlar at the inn and told him what had happened, adding, “And that young hothead said that if beating the donkey didn’t work, he’d beat you too, and cut off your nose for a thief!”

A few days later two men came to the village asking who had threatened to attack and kill an innocent pedlar. The pedlar, they said, had complained to the king, and they had been sent to bring the young man to trial. Nur Mahomed swore he had never said anything about killing anyone, but they arrested him anyway and carried him off, while his old mother wailed. What Nur Mahomed did not know, and nobody else knew either, was that the pedlar had been the king himself in disguise.

The king was angry at what he had been told, and he meant to make an example of this young man. But just as he was about to pass a heavy sentence, there was a stir in the court. Nur Mahomed’s old mother pushed her way forward, weeping and begging to be heard. She pleaded for the boy, saying how good he was and how he looked after her, and that she would die if he were sent to prison.

“Who are you?” asked the king.

“His mother.”

“His mother? Surely you are too old to have such a young son!”

In her fright, the old woman told the whole story of how she had found the baby in the cave and brought him up, and she begged for mercy. As the story came out, the king’s face grew darker and darker, until he nearly fainted with rage and shock. This was the baby he had left to die! He remembered the hermit’s prophecy as clearly as ever, and he wished he had an excuse to put the young man to death. But the boy had done nothing that deserved it, and everyone would call the king a tyrant. He did not dare.

At last he pulled himself together. “If this young man joins my army, I will let him off,” he said. “We need men like him, and a little discipline will do him good.” The old woman was almost as frightened of his becoming a soldier as of his going to prison, but the king, determined to get the young man into his power, calmed her by promising her a pension big enough to live on in comfort. And Nur Mahomed, to his great delight, became a soldier.

As a soldier, Nur Mahomed seemed to have all the luck. He was surprised, but pleased, to find that he was always chosen whenever there was a dangerous mission. He had some very narrow escapes, but every desperate situation gave him a chance to show his courage, and because he was modest and generous too, his officers and fellow soldiers liked him. Before long he was chosen for the king’s own bodyguard. The truth was that the king had hoped he would be killed in battle. Since he only seemed to grow stronger, the king decided to try more direct ways.

Soon afterwards, Nur Mahomed was one of the guards escorting the king through the city when a man with a dagger rushed out of an alley straight at the king. Nur Mahomed was nearest. He threw himself in the way and took the blow himself. Luckily the dagger glanced off his breastbone, and although he was badly hurt, he soon recovered. The king had to reward such bravery, so he made him one of his personal attendants.

After that, the young man’s strange adventures never stopped. Officers of the bodyguard were often sent on secret and difficult errands, and those errands had a curious way of coming up when Nur Mahomed was on duty. Once a footbridge gave way under him. Once he was attacked by armed robbers. A rock rolled down on him in a mountain pass. A heavy stone fell from a roof at his feet in a narrow street. Nur Mahomed began to think he must have an enemy somewhere, but he was light-hearted and it did not trouble him much. He escaped every time and was more amused than worried about what might come next.

In that city, the officer in charge of the palace guard for the day was always sent his meals from the king’s own kitchen. One day, when it was Nur Mahomed’s turn, he was sitting down to a delicious stew from the palace when a thin, hungry street dog put its nose round the guardroom door and looked at him longingly. The kind-hearted young man picked out a piece of meat and threw it outside. The dog gulped it down, turned to go, staggered, fell over and died. Nur Mahomed stood still for a moment. Then he came back inside, whistling softly. He wrapped up the rest of his dinner to take away and bury, and sent back the empty plates.

How furious the king was the next morning, when Nur Mahomed appeared at court as fresh and smiling as ever! He decided to try once more. That evening he called the young man to him and told him to carry a secret letter to the governor of a distant province. “Get ready at once,” he said, “and be prepared to leave in the morning. I will give you the letter myself at the last moment.”

The province was four or five days’ journey away, and its governor was the most faithful servant the king had. He could keep a secret like the grave and was proud of always obeying orders. His wife had been almost a mother to the princess ever since the queen had died some years before. And as it happened, the princess was staying at the governor’s house at that very time.

Early the next morning, Nur Mahomed set off with the sealed letter hidden in his turban. The king had told him to give it to no one but the governor himself. The weather was very hot, but he rode most of each night and rested only in the hottest part of the day, and by noon on the third day he reached the town. He was let into the castle at once, because he wore the uniform of the king’s bodyguard, but the governor was resting and could not see him until evening. So Nur Mahomed wandered down into the beautiful gardens and lay down in the shade. He watched the birds in the trees and the kites circling in the sky, and listened to the bees humming over the flowers, and in a few minutes he was fast asleep.

Every afternoon nearly everyone in the palace lay down to rest through the heat. But the princess was restless and liked to wander in the garden instead. Sometimes she pretended to sleep until all her ladies had dozed off and then slipped out alone. That afternoon she was rambling among her favourite corners of the garden when she almost tripped over a young man lying fast asleep, dusty from travelling, in the uniform of the king’s guard.

The princess was intensely curious about what she had found. Out of a fold of the young man’s turban peeped the corner of a letter. Who was it for? She crept up on tiptoe and pulled it, just a little, and then a little more, until a big seal came into view. It was her father’s. She stopped for a moment, half ashamed. But the temptation was too strong, and in another moment the letter was in her hand. Then she remembered that losing the letter could mean death for this poor officer, so she must put it back. Yet she was burning to know what it said. The seal had gone soft and sticky in the hot sun, and with a little effort it came away from the paper. She opened the letter and read:

“Behead the messenger who brings this letter, secretly and at once. Ask no questions.”

The princess went pale. How dreadful! She would not let a fine young man like that be killed. She hurried back to her room, took a fresh piece of paper and wrote: “Marry the messenger who brings this letter to the princess, openly and at once. Ask no questions.” She managed to move the seals onto her new letter so that no one could tell it had been opened. Then, shaking with fear and excitement, she slipped back to the sleeping officer, tucked the letter into his turban, and ran back to her room. It was done!

Late that afternoon Nur Mahomed woke, checked that the letter was still safe, and went to see the governor. He handed it over as he had been ordered. The governor was certainly surprised when he read it. But the letter said “ask no questions,” and he knew how to obey orders. He sent for his wife and told her to get the princess ready to be married at once.

“Nonsense!” said his wife. “What on earth do you mean?”

“These are the king’s orders,” he said. “The letter says ‘at once’ and ‘ask no questions.’ So the wedding must be this evening.” His wife argued, but the more she argued, the more determined he became. “I know how to obey orders,” he said, “and these are as plain as the nose on my face!”

The princess was sent for, and to everyone’s surprise she took the news very calmly. Nur Mahomed was astonished, but of course delighted at the great honour he thought the king had given him. The whole castle was turned upside down, and when the news spread, the whole town was turned upside down too, while the old governor went about with his hair on end, muttering about obeying orders. And so the wedding took place, with a great feast in the castle and another in the soldiers’ barracks, and lights all over the town and gardens. Everyone said they had never seen anything so wonderful.

The next day the governor sent the princess and her bridegroom to the king with a troop of splendidly dressed horsemen, and sent a messenger ahead with a letter telling the king about the wedding.

When the king read it, he went so red in the face that everyone thought he would burst. He rushed off, locked himself in a room, and stamped and raged until he was worn out. Then, after a while, he began to think he had better make the best of it. The clever old governor had sent back the letter, and the king was fairly sure it was in the princess’s handwriting. He was fond of his daughter, and although she had defied his orders, he did not want to punish her. Nor did he want people to know the truth, because it would make him look foolish. The more he thought about it, the more he felt it would be wise to put a good face on it and let everyone believe he had planned the marriage himself.

So when the young couple arrived, the king welcomed them with great ceremony and gave his son-in-law a province to govern. Nur Mahomed soon proved to be as wise and honourable a governor as he was a brave soldier, and when the old king died, he became king and reigned long and happily. His old mother lived for many years in her son’s palace and died in peace. The princess had won her husband by a trick, but she found that she could never trick him, so she never tried, and busied herself teaching her children and scolding her maids. As for the old hermit, no one ever found him, but the telling closes with an image of the cave still standing and leaves lying thick before it.

About this story

Andrew Lang printed this tale in The Brown Fairy Book (1904). Lang’s preface identifies it as an Indian story told to Major Campbell, who wrote it out. The preface does not establish a specific Punjabi teller or locality for this tale.

The plot follows a widespread folktale pattern: a powerful man hears that a poor boy is fated to marry his daughter and does everything he can to stop it, even sending the boy with a letter ordering his own death, only for the letter to be changed. Versions are told from India to Europe; the Brothers Grimm have one called “The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs.”

Read the original: Andrew Lang, ed., The Brown Fairy Book (Project Gutenberg #3282)

Reading guidance: For mature readers. The tale includes the murder of an enslaved mother, abandonment of a baby, repeated attempts to kill her son, a poisoned dog’s death and a secret beheading order.

A closer reading

The king treats an enslaved woman’s child as an unacceptable match before either child can choose anything. His effort to protect rank produces the cruelty: he kills Puruna, abandons the baby and later engineers repeated dangers. The prophecy supplies the narrative pattern, but each attempted killing remains his decision rather than a necessity imposed by fate.

The princess reverses the deadly letter by using the same authority and the same command to ask no questions. That symmetry exposes the governor’s obedience: either execution or marriage can follow because he refuses to examine the order. Her curiosity discovers what unquestioning duty would have carried out.

The happy ending restores Nur Mahomed to honor and keeps his adoptive mother safe, but Puruna remains dead and the king never publicly answers for her murder. His welcome protects his reputation. Reading only for fate’s victory misses both the care that kept the boy alive and the violence that the marriage celebration leaves unresolved.

Try this with the story

Trace three of the king’s interventions and the opposite result each produces. Beside that chain, list the goat, adoptive mother, hungry dog and princess, explaining what each contributes to survival. Distinguish an intentional rescue from an accidental warning.

Talk about it

• What did the hermit’s leaves in the stream show about fate?
• How many times did the king try to get rid of Nur Mahomed, and why did each attempt fail?
• Was the princess right to open the letter? Why or why not?

More stories like this

• The King Who Would See Paradise — another tale from Major Campbell about a king who tries to know too much
• Wali Dad the Simple-Hearted — another Punjabi tale from Lang’s Brown Fairy Book
• Savitri and the Lord of Death — another Indian story about facing a fate that has been foretold