Prologue
Many years ago ...
… in distant Mandalay, beside the mighty Ayeyarwady River, Maung the Salon Sea-gypsy, has decided to tell a story. The firewood pops and hisses. Embers circle lazily among the overhanging boughs. The annual fish-feeding festival is at an end and the people have come to listen to a story they’ll never tire of hearing:
The Tale of One Low Peasant, Two Great Kings and the All-Seeing Eye of a Lesser God
One day, in a farmer’s field below the great Ruby mines of Mogok, in Myanmar, east of the Ayeyarwady River, a poor man made the richest discovery: a ruby so huge that, he being very, very old, the Low Peasant could barely manage to pick up, even with both hands. But before the Ruby had won the name of ‘The All-Seeing Eye of a Lesser God’, before it had even gained the more modest title of ‘The All-Seeing Eye’, it was a simple, earthly rock and deserved no name at all.
The Low Peasant, whose name history has entirely forgotten, worked a certain field, every day, summer and winter, for his Master, Dulataingsandra. Coming upon the Low Peasant, Dulataingsandra, being a sharp-eyed fellow, realised that his man was hiding something beneath his threadbare garment. What the old fellow had forgotten was that the intense red light emanating from a ruby can be clearly seen through cloth or even thin leather. Every educated man knows this, but not the Low Peasant, who had never once been to school.
“What are you hiding from me, Low Peasant?” demanded Dulataingsandra, and the old man immediately began to sweat, fidget and stutter:
“N-n-nothing, Master.”
“Nonsense! You’re hiding something and I think that it must of tremendous value because you have also … just … lied to me!”
Now then, lying to one’s owner is the gravest of crimes and the old man began to perspire and tremble all the more.
“N-no, Master. It’s only a s-s-simple rock.”
“Oh! So you lie to me for the sake of a rock? This means you are not only deceitful and wicked, but clearly stupid as well! I will now summon my Strong Foreman Amyathu and see you soundly whipped!”
Dulataingsandra span around to call out for Amyathu, but when he turned back to lay hold of the Low Peasant the old man had disappeared! Ah, but there on the ground lay the Ruby! Dulataingsandra, being a superstitious man and one who knows that rubies possess great power, deduced that the old man had been burned to ash by the light of the Great Ruby as a punishment for his outrageous lying. That, or perhaps the Low Peasant had simply run off into the jungle rather than be flogged by the Strong Foreman Amyathu, but who really knows?
Now then, the greedy Dulataingsandra was heavily in debt to his even greedier Fat Overlord Punnaka and he sensed an opportunity to repay all he owed. But woe! The loan had attracted huge amounts of interest from the day it had been agreed and even the Ruby’s immense size was not necessarily a good thing: it was far too big to cut into the skin of a warrior in the ranks of the King’s ‘Invulnerables’ to make him mighty in battle, stupendously courageous and have no fear at all of becoming dead. In any case, there was not a ruby in the world so valuable as to repay Dulataingsandra’s debt to the Fat Overlord Punnaka.
The stone was indeed crude, so Dulataingsandra took it to a man he knew to have its shape improved a little. Some of the stone was lost, but what was left glowed all the more, as if its heart had been coaxed a little closer to the world.
While he might indeed be a superstitious fellow, Dulataingsandra was also cunning, so this is what he did: he made sure that the story of the Low Peasant’s incineration spread over the land by first telling one person, who promptly told ten others, who gossiped to a hundred more, and so on until all the people from this river to the next were talking about both the Great Ruby and the Low Peasant’s painful death. So, in a very short time Dulataingsandra’s Fat Overlord Punnaka came to see him, as Dulataingsandra hoped he would.
“Dulataingsandra,” wheezed the Fat Overlord Punnaka, much out of breath, having come there in great haste, “what’s this I hear of a magnificent Ruby possessing a deadly power that can burn up a village in the time it takes to blink an eye?”
Dulataingsandra saw the familiar, greedy glint within the man’s soul and smiled, but only on the inside, so as not to give away his plan .
“I don’t know about annihilating an entire village, my Lord, but I do know that my Great Ruby, my All-Seeing Eye, can burn a man to dust with its fearful beam of blood-red light should he utter even the tiniest of lies. I’ve seen it myself, so I know it to be true.”
You see, Dulataingsandra had most cunningly credited the commonplace jewel with two rare attributes: a name and a legend, and all of this in less than a week.
“Dulataingsandra,” said the Fat Overlord Punnaka. “I must without doubt possess this All-Seeing Eye. It will be most useful when I sit in judgement, you see, for I know there are those living in my lands who lie to me about everything: who really owns which cow, or whose wife is sleeping with whom, or which cheating peasant is telling me the truth about how bad his crops have been. So now you must tell me your price.”
Dulataingsandra would once have been happy to receive sufficient money to clear his debt, and then buy a man to replace the Low Peasant who’d been turned to ash. Oh, and perhaps also acquire a comely female servant. But now that the Fat Overlord Punnaka had come all this way in person to purchase the Eye, he realised that the Ruby’s price was his to command, so this he promptly did. His debt was cancelled and he became a wealthy man as well.
But one thing was immediately obvious to Punnaka. The stone was a crude-looking thing, having been hacked about by a jeweller of little ability, so Punnaka took it to a man he trusted in order to have its shape refined. More of the jewel was cut away, but what remained glowed all the brighter, as if its beating heart had been persuaded a little closer to the light of day. But when the Fat Overlord Punnaka returned home with the Eye, gloating and loudly proclaiming his good fortune to anyone who would listen, far from being pleased his Best Wife was outraged:
“What have you done, you silly, fat man? It’s only a big red stone!” said she.
To regain face the Fat Overlord told her such exaggerated stories of the Eye’s great power and staggering value that his Best Wife soon forgot her anger. More than this, so her husband wouldn’t appear foolish in the eyes of her cousin, who was none other than the Great King in Mandalay, she told still more exaggerated tales to anyone who would listen.
The Great King Who Sat Resplendent upon the Lion Throne in Mandalay came to hear of these amazing events and, being the cleverest of men, devised a plan to defeat his ancient enemy in Chittagong who glared at him from over the border.
“I must have this ‘All-Seeing Eye’ and once my jewellers have made it into a worthy gift I will make a present of it to that ugly rogue, the Little King Mong-Saw-Mwan in Chittagong, for don’t we already know that he and his subjects would sooner sell their mothers than speak the truth? In this way, the Little King Mong-Saw-Mwan and every last one of his mean-spirited people will be burned up, turned to ash, and blown away on the double-dealing east wind, whereupon my armies will march into Chittagong and cook their rice in the Little King’s palace that very same evening.”
It was an excellent plan, but it didn’t work; not at all. Not one of the Chittagongese was burned up, but Mong-Saw-Mwan, the Eye’s new owner, decided that an Eye without a head to hold it was a sorry thing indeed, so after his personal jeweller had refined it a little he had the Eye placed in the forehead of an ancient idol in his palace—a thing so old that the priests had long ago forgotten what it was called and, more importantly, what it was for. In this way the Ruby became ‘The All-Seeing Eye of a Lesser God’. By naming it ‘lesser’ the priests thought that the other gods living in the Little King’s palace wouldn’t be offended by their actions and punish them. Mong-Saw-Mwan then sat the idol, complete with its new Eye, on a rock, turned it towards his Burman enemies and then congratulated himself like this:
“There. Perhaps now we will suffer no more wars with The Great King Who Sits Resplendent on the Lion Throne in Mandalay, for don’t we all know that those Burman dogs would rather eat their own heads than tell the truth? Why, if they step across the border they’ll all be burned up with a single look from my All-Seeing Eye of a Lesser God!”
But the idol with the Great Ruby eye in its forehead was a restless spirit and refused to sit still for long. It was stolen from Chittagong, then sold, then stolen again, then hidden out of sight and lost for many years, then rediscovered, then stolen once more, but then found a home at last in a little village in the hills by the side of the mighty Pindar River. Once there it was utterly forgotten by the world for a long, long time. But the Eye would not stop looking about, here and there, for an Eye without an eyelid cannot sleep. In fact, while it never once so much as blinked, it did shed ruby-red tears from time to time.
The moral of this story is this: even the smallest of lies can make a dupe of anyone; great or little kings, or the very wisest of men; it can bring embarrassment to them all. But also remember this: somewhere deep in the Burman forest, below the ruby mines of Mogok, east of the Ayeyarwady River in Myanmar, there’s a Low Peasant who smiles with relief every time he remembers the beating he escaped.
