67 CE – 193 CE   Go buy us pizza. With extra cheese, Richie Rich."  Maggie StiefvaterOvercaution, on behalf of the last (albeit fraudulent) Vijayan king, propelled the new Lambakarnan dynasty and its first king to the throne. The soothsayers had been busy whispering appalling forecasts into the ear of Subharaja, the reigning Anuradhapuran king, foretelling of his certain destiny with death at the hands of someone called Vasabha. Herod-like, the troubled monarch ordered the execution of anyone of that name – not quite on the scale of the massacre of the innocents as in Bethlehem in 2 BCE – but certainly in a similarly bloodthirsty league. Had Subharaja not acted as he did, it is quite possible that he would not have created a persecution complex in one particular Vasabha, now bent on excising the source of his danger. Subharaja had come into the throne by impersonating the then king, Yassalalaka Tissa, so convincingly it seems that he successfully managed to hill him, and carry on ruling.  The story, coming to us via the famous Mahāvaṃsa Chronicle, is too bizarre to wreck with close questioning. But true or not, Subharaja was no Vijayan despite his pretence to belonging to the ruling dynasty and his grip on power would have been modest at best. Just a few decades earlier the Lambakarna family had exerted their considerable familial power and plunged the country into a civil war that saw at least one legitimate ruler vanquished. They were ready to do it all over again, unimpressed as any half way decent aristocrat might be by the pretentions of an imposter king. Needless to say as the wretched bodies of perfectly innocent men called Vasabha piled up across the island, the one the soothsayer actually had in mind manged to evade capture, betrayal, and execution. Prince Vasabha was the kind of Lambakarnan that the dynasty could have well done with a few more of as it migrated from aristocratic family to ruling family  Rather like the Calvery in old American Westerns, the new king arrived in the nick of time.  The state, if not quite worn out, was stumbling on with the political equivalent of one leg, two broken hips and a congenital heart disease Recruiting an army, Vasabha wasted little time in putting it to proper use. By 67 CE King Subharaja was dead and the Vijayan dynasty deposited at the sorrowful gates of the historical cul de sac into which they would disappear. Having taken one prediction to heart and with such apparent rewards, the new king took the next one just as seriously. He would die, the soothsayers now warned, within 12 years. Given that his reign lasted an astonishing 44 years (a feat both credible and unusual), modern pollsters who also went awry can take comfort from the long history of erroneous prophecies (Brexit, "Dewey Defeats Truman," or more locally the 2015 presidential election that saw out Mahindra Rajapaksa). But the effect of their severe projections turbo charged the new king marking him just the kind of man Benjamin Franklin might have had in mind when he said: "you may delay, but time will not." Almost immediately  the new king started a major programme of building works - not only of the obligatory monasteries and stupas which he constructed in a feverish haste to appease his maker, but of massive infrastructure works too. Eleven reservoirs, such as those at Mahavilachchiya and Nochchipotana, some with a circumference of two miles, were built.  Twelve canals were dug to distribute their water. Rivers were dammed, and crops raised in new places with greater certainty than ever before. With plentiful water and the restitution of agriculture, the building blocks on which any centralized power rested were back in place, better than ever before.  The state could prosper. Island-wide inscriptions testify to the power of the resurgent Kingdom stretching once again to Jaffa in the north, Situlpawwa and Tissamaharama in the south, Trincomalee and Batticaloa in the east and Kurune