Vikram and the Vampire: The King’s Ultimate Test

On the banks of the Godavari River there was a city called Pratishthana, and long ago it was ruled by a king named Trivikramasena, as mighty as the god Indra. Every day, while he sat in his hall of audience, a wandering holy man named Kshantisila came to pay his respects and gave the king a piece of fruit. And every day, as soon as the king took the fruit, he handed it to his treasurer, who stood beside him.

Ten years went by like this. Then one day, just after the holy man had left, a young pet monkey slipped away from its keepers and scampered into the hall. The king gave the fruit to the monkey instead. As the monkey bit into it, the fruit split open, and out fell a splendid jewel, more precious than anything the king had seen.

The king picked up the jewel and turned to his treasurer. “All those fruits I have been handing you, where did you put them?”

The treasurer went pale. “Your Majesty, I tossed them into the treasury through the window without ever opening the door. If you wish, I will go and look.” The king told him to go, and the treasurer soon came hurrying back. “The fruits have all rotted away,” he said, “but lying among them is a heap of jewels, blazing with light!”

The king was delighted and gave the jewels to the treasurer. The next day, when Kshantisila came with his fruit, the king said, “Holy man, why do you spend a fortune on me every day? I will not take your fruit today until you tell me.”

Kshantisila drew the king aside. “I have a magic ceremony to perform,” he said quietly, “and I need the help of a brave man. I ask you, hero, to help me.”

The king gave his word that he would. Pleased, the holy man went on, “Then come to me at nightfall in the coming dark fortnight, when there is no moon. I will be waiting in the great cremation ground, under a banyan tree.” The king agreed, and Kshantisila went home very happy.

When the dark fortnight came, the king remembered his promise. As soon as night fell, he wrapped his head in a black cloth, slipped out of the palace unseen with his sword in his hand, and walked boldly into the cremation ground. It was a terrible place. The darkness was thick, and the only light came from the eerie flames of funeral fires. Bones and skulls lay scattered about. Goblins and Vetalas, the restless spirits that live in dead bodies, were busy at their grim games, and jackals howled on every side. The king searched until he found the holy man beneath a banyan tree, drawing a circle on the ground.

“Here I am, holy man,” he said. “Tell me what I can do for you.”

Kshantisila’s eyes lit up. “King, if you truly wish to help me, go a long way south from here, alone. You will come to an ashoka tree with a dead man hanging from it. Bring him to me.”

“I will,” said the king, true to his word, and off he went. By the glow of the fires he found his way at last to the ashoka tree. It was blackened with smoke, and it looked like a demon itself. Hanging from its trunk was a dead body. The king climbed up, cut the rope and let the body drop to the ground. The moment it landed, it cried out as if it were hurt. Thinking the man might still be alive, the king climbed down and rubbed the body gently, out of pity. At that, the corpse let out a loud, unearthly laugh.

Now the king knew that a Vetala was living inside it. “What are you laughing at?” he said, without a flicker of fear. “Come on, let’s go.” But the body was gone from the ground. He looked up, and there it was, hanging from the tree as before. So he climbed up and brought it down a second time, for a hero’s heart is harder than diamond. He threw the body over his shoulder and set off in silence.

As he walked, the Vetala spoke from his shoulder. “King, I will tell you a story to make the road seem shorter. Listen.”

It told him a long tale about a prince who fell in love with a girl he saw at a lake, and about the prince’s clever friend, a minister’s son, who worked out her secret signals and played tricks to win her for the prince. In the end the girl’s parents died of grief. Then the Vetala said, “Now answer my question. Who was guilty of the parents’ deaths: the minister’s son, the prince or the girl? And if you know the answer and keep it to yourself, your head will burst into a hundred pieces.”

The king knew the answer. “None of those three was to blame,” he said. “The guilty one was King Karnotpala, who ruled their land. He never troubled to find out what was really going on among his own people, and he did not see through the tricks being played under his nose.”

The king had given the right answer, but he had broken his silence. In a flash, the Vetala was gone from his shoulder, carried off by its magic to test how stubborn he was. The king made up his mind at once to fetch it back.

So he went back to the ashoka tree, found the body lying on the ground groaning, lifted it onto his shoulder and hurried off without a word. And the Vetala began another story. Every story ended with a riddle, and every time, the king knew the answer and spoke up, and every time, the Vetala flew back to its tree, and the king trudged back through the dark to fetch it.

After twenty-three riddle tales had sent him back, the Vetala told a twenty-fourth, the strangest of all. A father and son out hunting found two sets of footprints in a forest, one small and one large, and agreed that the son would marry the owner of the small feet and the father the owner of the large ones. The small feet turned out to belong to a queen, and the large ones to her daughter, a princess. So the son married the mother and the father married the daughter, and in time both couples had children. “Now, king,” said the Vetala, “how are all those children related to one another? Tell me if you know.”

The king turned the puzzle over and over in his mind, but he could not work it out. So for the first time he walked on in silence.

The Vetala laughed quietly to itself. “This king does not know the answer, so he is happy to keep walking. I can’t trick a hero like this any further. But that holy man still means to play his wicked game with me. So I will trick the trickster, and give this king, who has a glorious future ahead of him, the prize the holy man was hoping to win.”

Then it spoke to the king. “King, you have walked to and fro across this terrible ground all night, and you have never once lost heart. I admire your courage. So carry this body on, for I am leaving it. But first, listen carefully. The holy man you are working for is wicked. He will call me into this body and worship me. Then, because he means to sacrifice you, he will say, ‘King, bow down so low that your whole body touches the ground.’ When he says that, you must answer, ‘Show me how to do it first, and then I will do exactly the same.’ When he bows down to show you, strike with your sword. Then the prize he wants, to rule over the Vidyadharas, the magical beings of the air, will be yours. If you don’t, he will sacrifice you. That is why I have kept you busy all this time. Now go, and good fortune go with you.” And the Vetala left the body.

The king now knew Kshantisila was his enemy. He carried the body back to the banyan tree, where the holy man sat alone, waiting eagerly. Kshantisila had drawn a circle on the ground with bone-dust. Lamps burned all round it, a fire was blazing, and everything was ready for a dark ceremony.

“Great king,” he cried, jumping up, “you have done me a service that few could manage! They say truly that you are the bravest of kings, for you keep your promises even when your life is in danger.” He took the body from the king’s shoulder, washed it, hung a garland on it and laid it in the circle. He smeared himself with ashes and sat for a while in meditation. Then, with his spells, he called the mighty Vetala back into the body, laid dark offerings before it and worshipped it.

When he had finished, he turned to the king. “King,” he said, “fall flat on the ground and bow to this great lord of spells, so that he will grant you your heart’s desire.”

The king thought of the Vetala’s warning. “I don’t know how to do it, holy sir,” he said. “Show me first, and then I will do exactly as you do.”

So Kshantisila threw himself down on the ground to show him, and in that instant the king’s sword came down. The wicked ascetic never rose again.

All around, the goblins shouted with delight. “King,” said the Vetala from inside the body, “the rule over the Vidyadharas that this man wanted will come to you when your years on earth are over. I have given you a great deal of trouble tonight, so choose any wish you like.”

“Your goodwill is all I could want,” said the king. “But since your words must come true, here is my wish. Let these twenty-four riddle tales, and this last tale that makes twenty-five, become famous and honoured all over the earth.”

“So be it,” said the Vetala. “They shall be known as the Twenty-five Tales of a Vampire. Anyone who reads even one verse of them, or hears it read, will be freed from any curse, and no spirit or demon will have any power wherever they are told.” With that, the Vetala left the body and vanished.

Then the great god Shiva appeared, with all the other gods around him. The king bowed low, and Shiva said, “Well done, my son! You have destroyed that false holy man who longed for power over the Vidyadharas. Long ago I made you from a part of myself as Vikramaditya, to defeat the demons who troubled the earth. Now I have made you Trivikramasena, to defeat this wicked man. You will rule the whole world, and soon the Vidyadharas too. Take this sword, called Invincible. With it you will win all I have promised.”

Shiva gave him the shining sword and disappeared. By now the night was over, and the king walked home to Pratishthana. When his people heard what he had done, they cheered him, and the whole city spent the day in prayer, music, dancing and gift-giving. With Shiva’s sword the king defeated every enemy, and in time he ruled the Vidyadharas just as the god had promised.

About this telling

This frame belongs to the Vetala Panchavimshati, or Twenty-five Tales of a Vetala. A Vetala is a spirit that takes over a dead body. In the stories a king carries a corpse with a Vetala inside it, and on each journey the Vetala tells him a tale that ends in a riddle. This page tells the frame story that holds the riddle tales together: how the king came to carry the Vetala, and how the night ended.

This retelling follows C. H. Tawney’s translation of the Katha Sarit Sagara (“Ocean of the Streams of Story”), which the poet Somadeva wrote in Sanskrit in Kashmir in the eleventh century. Tawney’s English version came out in Calcutta in two volumes (1880 and 1884). In Tawney the king is called Trivikramasena; the familiar title uses King Vikram, or Vikramaditya, and Shiva links the two names at the end of the tale. Richard Burton’s Vikram and the Vampire (1870) tells a freer version of the same tales.

Read the original: C. H. Tawney (trans.), The Katha Sarit Sagara, Vol. II (1884), Book XII: the Twenty-five Tales of a Vetala (Internet Archive)

Suggested for ages 9–12 with an adult: includes a corpse, funeral fires, threatened human sacrifice and a magician killed by a sword.

Knowing when not to answer

The king’s silence at the last riddle matters because it follows the rule exactly: the threat applies if he knows and withholds an answer. He does not pretend to know. That limit allows the journey to continue where his confident answers had repeatedly interrupted it.

The holy man’s gifts and praise also change meaning once the plot is exposed. Keeping a promise does not require the king to cooperate with his own murder. The first riddle’s ruling is the king’s judgment within the tale; readers can still question whether it excuses the other people’s harmful choices.

Separate judgment from fact

Make three notes: what the king knows from the first tale, what he cannot resolve in the twenty-fourth, and what the Vetala reveals about the ceremony. How does each kind of knowledge change his next action? This page gives the surrounding frame and brief examples, not all twenty-four riddles in full.

Questions to ask

• Why does the king keep answering the Vetala’s riddles even though he knows the Vetala will fly away?
• Why do you think the Vetala decided to help the king in the end?
• How did the king turn the holy man’s trick back on him?

You may also like

• Harisarman — another tale from the Katha Sarit Sagara, about a man who has to keep solving mysteries by luck and nerve
• The Brahmarakshas And The Hair — another Indian tale of a spirit who is outwitted by a clever human
• The Story-Teller At Fault — another strange night of magic, dice and a stranger with secret powers