1In the days when the first shelves were filling at Alexandria, there was a land on the eastern shore of India called Kalinga. It lay between the hills and the sea. It had rice, and ships, and elephants, and it bowed to no one.
2All the rest of India bowed. From the snow mountains to the southern rivers, the land belonged to one house, and the head of that house was a king named Ashoka. His grandfather had won the empire and his father had widened it. Kalinga sat in the side of it like a stone in a shoe.
3In the eighth year after he was crowned, Ashoka came to take the stone out.
4There was a boy in Kalinga named Kesava, ten years old. His father cut stone. His mother was dead. He had one sister, Uma, who was six, and who followed him everywhere and whom he found a great trouble.
5When the king's army came down the coast road, the men of Kalinga went out to meet it by the river Daya. Kesava's father was no soldier. He went all the same, with the long hammer he used for splitting rock. He said to his son, "Take your sister into the reeds. Do not come out for any voice but mine."
6So the children lay in the reeds all that day with the water up to their ribs. They heard it. They heard the elephants scream, and the drums, and a sound like a great crowd at a festival that went on and on and was not a festival. Toward evening the river began to bring things past them. Uma asked why the water was that colour. Kesava put his hand over her eyes.
7At night the sound stopped. No voice came to call them. They waited through the dark, and no voice came in the morning either.
8Kesava knew by then. But his father had said, for any voice but mine, and it is a hard thing to be ten years old and to decide that an order has ended. At noon he took his sister by the wrist and they came up out of the reeds.
9The field was a wide one, and you could not see the ground. That is all that will be told of it here. The boy walked across it looking for a long hammer, and he made his sister walk with her face against his back.
10He found the hammer near the middle. He found the one who had carried it. He sat down there. Uma sat down too, and neither of them cried, for they had gone to the place that is past crying.
11While they sat, a man came walking over the field.
12He was alone. Far behind him stood a knot of officers and horses, as though they had been told to stay. He was a broad man, not tall, in plain cloth with the dust of the road on it. He walked slowly. He stopped often, and looked down, and went on. Once he crouched beside a woman who lay with a water jar still in her hand. She had only come out to bring her husband a drink.
13Kesava did not know who he was. He knew he was of the enemy, from the cut of his hair. The boy's hand found a stone the size of a fist.
14The man came within ten paces and saw them: a boy, a small girl, a dead man, a hammer. He stopped.
15Kesava stood up with the stone. He meant to throw it. He had never meant anything so much. But he looked at the man's face first, and the face stopped his arm.
16It was not a winner's face. Kesava had seen that look once before, on his father, on the day a great block had split wrong under the wedge after a month of work. It was the face of a man who has reckoned a thing with care, and done it, and found that the answer is not what he reckoned.
17The man looked at the stone in the boy's hand. He did not call his guards. He stood and waited for it, as if it were owed.
18Kesava could not throw. He hated himself for that for many years. The man bowed his head to the two children, low, as one bows to elders. Then he walked on across the field.
19That was Ashoka. He had won. Kalinga was his, and all India with it. No king before him had held so much.
20Soldiers came that evening and gathered up the living. The king's officers counted them and sorted them, as officers do. Those who could work were roped in lines and marched away north and west, to clear forest and dig in lands they had never seen. The very young went one way and the rest another.
21A soldier took Uma by the arm. Kesava held her other arm. The soldier was not cruel about it. He simply was a man and Kesava was a boy, and he opened the boy's fingers one at a time. Uma did not scream until she was far down the line. Then she screamed her brother's name, and he heard it for the rest of his life.
22He himself was left, because an uncle claimed him. The uncle was a stone-cutter too. So the boy grew up with a chisel in his hand among the burned villages of Kalinga, and he grew up silent.
23Now hear what the king did.
24He went home to his capital on the Ganges. A king who has won a great war holds a feast and plans the next war. Ashoka held no feast. For a long time he did little that anyone could see. He had heard the teaching of the Buddha before, as a man hears rain on the roof. Now he went to the monks and listened as a man listens who is drowning.
25Then he began to give orders that no one at his court understood. He ordered wells dug along the roads, and shade trees planted beside them, so that travellers and their beasts might rest. He ordered that healing plants be grown and sent where there were none, for people and for animals alike. He told his officers to go out among the people and ask after their troubles. He cut down the killing of beasts for his own kitchen, from hundreds a day to almost none.
26He kept his army, for he was not a fool. But he sent it to no new war, then or ever.
27And he did one more thing. He had his words cut into rock and into tall pillars of stone, in the common speech of each region, at the edges of his land and beside its roads, where anyone could stop and have them read.
28Five years after the battle, officers of the king came to a hill called Dhauli, in Kalinga, a short walk from the river and the field. They brought a scribe with a bundle of written leaves. They asked for the best stone-cutters in the district.
29Kesava was fifteen then. He had the surest hand of any cutter on that coast, and he could not read a word. They set him before a broad face of rock on the hillside. The scribe painted the letters on with a brush, line by line, and Kesava's work was to cut where the paint was.
30He cut for three days before he asked whose words they were.
31"The king's," said the scribe.
32Kesava put down his mallet. He walked off the hill. That night he sat in his uncle's house and told him.
33The uncle had lost two sons at the river. He was quiet for a while. Then he said, "There is a seam in that rock face. I saw it when I was young. Three iron wedges in the right place, on a cold night, and the whole face will come away and lie in pieces at the bottom of the hill. Let him talk to the gravel."
34Kesava said he would do it. He went back in the morning and cut letters all day with a face like wood, and all day he studied the seam.
35But a thing nagged him. He was cutting these marks deep and true, and he did not know what they said. It is not in a craftsman to work blind. At evening, when the officers had gone down, he said to the scribe, "Read it to me."
36The scribe was an old man from the north with ink-black fingers. He read. Much of it was instruction to the king's officers in Kalinga. They were not to jail anyone without cause. They were not to be harsh, or hasty, or lazy. They were to remember that they answered for it.
37And in the middle of it was a line that the scribe read slowly: "All men are my children."
38Kesava laughed. It was not a good laugh. "I saw his children," he said. "I saw them lying by the river. I saw one of them roped and led away, six years old. Does he say that on his rock?"
39"Not on this rock," said the scribe. He looked at the boy for a time. "But I have copied the other one. It is cut in the far north-west, and in the south, and in many places. I will tell you what it says, for I know it by heart. No one who copies it forgets it."
40And he said the king's words about Kalinga: "One hundred and fifty thousand were deported, one hundred thousand were killed and many more died."
41Kesava said nothing.
42"He does not hide it," said the scribe. "He does not say the enemy was wicked, or that heaven willed it. He says that he did it, and what it weighed, and that it is a grief to him. He says that if even a hundredth part of it were to happen again, it would lie heavy on him. I am old, boy. I have copied the boasts of three kings. I never before copied a king's shame."
43"Then why not here?" said Kesava. "Why does he say it to the north-west and not to us?"
44"I do not know," said the scribe. "Perhaps he could not say it to your faces. Perhaps he thought that here no stone was needed to tell it."
45That night was cold. Kesava went up the hill alone with three iron wedges and his mallet. The moon was on the rock. The painted lines and the cut lines stood out clear, and below them ran the seam, thin as a hair.
46He set the first wedge. He lifted the mallet.
47And he stood there with it lifted, as he had once stood with a stone.
48He thought: a king's spoken word is breath. He can say the next day that he never said it, and who will dare to remember? But this is rock. If I cut this deep, it will be here when he is old and angry. It will be here when his son is king, and his son's son. Any traveller who can read may stand on this road and say to any officer, Look. It is written. All men are his children. Why then have you done this to me?
49He thought: he had the whole world in his hand, and nothing in it could stop him. So he has made something to stop himself, and asked a Kalingan to make it strong.
50He thought of Uma. He did not forgive. Let that be said plainly, for it would be a lie to say otherwise, and a lie is a Closing. He did not forgive the hand that had opened his fingers. But he saw that there were two things he could do with his own hands that night. One would leave gravel. The other would leave a road that someone might one day walk back along.
51He pulled the wedge out of the seam. In the morning he was at the rock before the scribe, and he cut that whole edict deeper than the paint asked. His uncle did not speak to him for a year.
52When the words were done, the cutters shaped the rock above them. They freed the front half of an elephant from the stone, so that it seems to be walking out of the hill. Kesava cut the brow and the eye. It is there to this day. The words beneath it can still be read.
53The king's messengers went farther than his army had ever gone. They went to the south, and to the island beyond the south. They went west over the mountains to the Greek kings who had cut up Alexander's world. One of the kings they went to was Ptolemy of Egypt, the son of the old soldier with the broken nose. The messengers carried no demand for tribute. They carried a teaching, and the news that the greatest king in the east had put away conquest.
54Ashoka ruled for many years after. He had been called Ashoka the Fierce when he was young. No one called him that at the end.
55When the rock was finished, Kesava asked for his pay in a strange coin. He asked the scribe to write him a leaf, in the king's letters, saying that he was a cutter of the king's edicts and was seeking a girl of Kalinga named Uma, taken north in the year of the war. The scribe wrote it and put a seal to it.
56Then Kesava took his mallet and his chisels and walked north. The road was long. But there were wells on it now, a day's walk apart, and young banyan trees beside the wells, each one with a little wall around it to keep off the goats.
57It is not told whether he found her. It is told that he drank from the king's wells the whole way, and rested under the king's trees, and that at each well he thought the same thought, and could not finish thinking it.
58The trees are very large now.