Unmada Chitra ; Princess who drove men mad and uncles even madder

Panduwasdewa ( 444 BC – 414BC) takes the reign and continues the laissez-faire style rule of, his predecessor, king Vijaya; highly decentralized settlements under his ministers in and around Anuradapura. Perhaps Anuradapura is  gradually  coming into prominence among the settlements but Panduwasdewa doesn’t want to shift his seat of government, he continues from Thambapanni.
He has ten sons and a daughter. The probability for the daughter to have next heir to throne is almost non-existent, but truth is stranger than fiction, that’s what happens.
When she is born soothsayers predicts that her son will kill his uncles and sit on the throne of the kingdom. Brothers wanted to kill her to preempt this, but the eldest son  and the parents   find a compromise. They build a single pillar  chamber  without an entrance other than the single door through the king’s bed chamber. Since this looks much better alternative to killing their little sister brothers agree. Reminds one of Rapunzel and mother Gothel in the Disney movie , well the similarities end here. The princess lives with one solitary maid in the tower and 100 soldiers guarding her from without, but something magical happens.
Princess Chitra become known as  Unmada Chitra because she   in love with a son of Dighayu , one of her uncles  who came and settled in Srilanka after her mother found her way into Srilanka and got married to Panduwasdew and became the queen of the land. This son, Dhigagamini having heard of Unmada Chitra, come to the capitol  , and king appoints him to the staff of vice regent , prince Abhaya.
Dhiga Gamini climbs into the one pillar chamber with the help of a hook ladder and after sometime the princess becomes pregnant.
This time father come to rescue and suggest that they should  marry her to the prince,the father of the child and kill the infant if he happens to be  a boy. Princes agree but kill the two confidants  of  Dhigagamini , herdsman  chitra and slave kalawela when they realize those two will work against them. Though the book doesn’t say anything about Dighagamini he never even once appears in Mahawamsa again, even during the formative years of the prince or when princes for many years waging a war against the uncles.
A son is born but princess with the help of her trusted maid manages to switch prince with a newborn girl from the nearby village to save him for first couple of days and then send him to a man in village near Mihinthale, whose wife has given birth to a child that day. Man tells his neighbors that his wife had twins and brings up the prince with his own son. He is named  Pandukabaya by mother and grand mother.
Prince seems a very active guy and has many tricks up in his sleeves to confuse his playmates. One of them involves a hollow of a tree underwater in a lake. Prince when he is playing with his friends in the village lake (there had been many lakes before settlers start building them) goes into water creep into that hollow of the tree underwater and stay in the hollow and surprise his playmates by pretending he has been underwater all this time.
This trick comes to his rescue when his uncles after learning that prince is still alive send a team of assassins to kill their mysterious nephew. He jumps into the lake with his cloths on and hides in the usual place when assassins slay all his friends who were in the lake naked, count the bodies and compare the number with the cloths and confirm that all the children have been killed. They go and report this to the uncles. Luckily for the prince he had jumped into lake with cloths on. Otherwise there would have been further investigations by assassins because the number of bodies is  one less than the number of set of cloths.