Kansa’s fear had hardened into a plan. Every report out of Vrindavan reached him in the end, and each one was worse than the one before it. Putana dead. The twin trees torn out of the ground by a child who crawled between them. The serpent Kaliya driven from the deep pool of the Yamuna. Dhenuka broken, Pralamba broken, the bull Arishta broken. The hill Govardhana held up on one hand like a lid over the cowherds while Indra spent his whole storm against it and gave up. Kansa had sent his own demon allies into that country to end the boy, and the boy had ended them instead, one by one, and gone on growing.

He knew by now what he was dealing with. Narada had told him plainly, seasons ago, that the daughter dashed against the stone had been a cowherd’s child, and that the son marked for his death had been carried across the river that same night and was alive in Nanda’s house. Kansa had turned the warning over so many times it had worn smooth. This was no cowherd running loose in the pastures. Some power had put on a herdsman’s body the way a man throws on a cloak, and it had come for him. Sending more killers into Vrindavan was pointless; he had watched that road swallow everyone he sent. The boy would have to be brought to Mathura, onto Kansa’s own ground, inside Kansa’s own walls, where the wrestlers waited and the elephants waited and the whole weight of the throne could fall on him at an hour of Kansa’s choosing.

So he built a reason for the summons. A bow-sacrifice, a great festival with guests riding in from far countries, and under its cover an invitation that would draw Krishna and Balarama out of the meadows and through his gates. Nanda and the cowherds were to come with their yearly tribute of milk and curd and butter and take their ease in the pastures outside the city. The two boys were to come and be looked at, and Kansa’s wrestlers, who had heard how the brothers fought, were more than willing to meet them in the ring. For the errand he chose Akrura, a Yadava of his own court, and gave him a chariot, and told him to speak gently and bring the brothers back.

What Moved in Akrura’s Heart

Of all the men Kansa could have sent, he sent the one whose heart was already turned the other way. Akrura had the inner sight. He understood at once who Krishna was, and where a colder man would have felt only the weight of a king’s errand, Akrura felt that he was being sent, at last, to the two he had been aching to see. He left that same hour. On the road he was a thirsty man who has just been shown water. He kept turning the thought over: the boys he was driving out to fetch were no common herdsmen, they were the ones whose story had kept his eyes wet for years, and today he would see them with his own eyes and seat them in his own chariot. The thought alone filled his eyes again and again.

He came into Vrindavan as the sun went down and the cattle came in, when the cowherds were calling the animals home by name and the smoke of the evening fires was rising off the dung. He left the chariot at the gate and went in on foot, and there in the milking yard, standing easy among the calves, was Krishna. Akrura’s voice went heavy in his throat. He looked at the boy and saw straight past the boy. Here was the one who floats on a single leaf upon the waters when the worlds are unmade, the one who had once crossed all three worlds in three strides as a dwarf and taken them back from Bali. The mark of Srivatsa was on his chest and the yellow cloth was at his waist, and the whole of it stood in a cow-pen wearing the shape of a herdboy. Akrura understood what the wise men had been saying for years. This was the one who would raise the almost-dead line of Yadu back to its full height, who would put Ugrasena on the throne that had been taken from him, who would rule the crowned heads of the world without wearing a crown himself.

That night he said the thing he had truly come to say. He gathered the older cowherds and gave them Kansa’s message, the tribute, the festival, the road to Mathura at first light. But to Krishna he spoke low and close, about a different matter. Your father Vasudeva has grown old waiting for you, he said. His body has gone thin, and Kansa grinds him down day after day for the one crime of being your father. And your mother. Devaki has never once held you at her breast. She has counted out her years in a soiled cloth with her eyes sunk back into her face, wasting like a cow that has lost its calf, wanting only one thing in this world, the sight of you. You have driven Kaliya out of the river and lifted Govardhana and killed Keshi and Arishta; turn some part of that strength now toward the two who gave you up in order to keep you alive. Krishna, who had known all of it before Akrura opened his mouth, took no offense at being instructed by him. He said only, so be it.

By dawn the whole of Vrindavan was on the move. The cowherds dressed and loaded the carts with their vessels of curd and milk and butter, roped the young calves, and set out along roads already crowded with cattle and calling voices. Akrura had not slept. He had spent the night beside Krishna and Balarama and meant to waste none of it. Then the three of them mounted the chariot and drove for Mathura.

What Akrura Saw Under the Yamuna

Where the road came down to the Yamuna, Akrura drew the horses in. Wait here a little and see to the team, he told the brothers, and give them barley from the vessel on the car. He wanted, he said, to go down to the water and make his prayer to Ananta, the serpent without end who carries all the worlds on his hoods, and he asked them not to leave without him. Krishna smiled and told him to go, only not to be long, because the two of them would not go on without him either.

Akrura stepped into the river and went under, and beneath the water he found an entire world, as wide as the one he had left behind. He saw the lord of the serpents himself, a thousand crowned heads above a body coiled white beneath him like a couch of his own making, robed in dark blue, a garland of golden lotuses across his chest and a bright tiara leaning a little to one side. In one hand he held a plough, and near him rested a heavy mace, the very weapons Balarama carried in the pastures above. Vasuki and the great serpents stood in attendance, fanning him, pouring water over him from golden jars, worshipping the one king among them.

And resting on those coils, wholly at his ease, was a figure Akrura already knew. Dark as deep water, dressed in yellow, the Srivatsa on his chest, it was the same face he had watched standing among the calves that evening. Beside him sat a second form, moon-bright, unmistakably the brother. Akrura opened his mouth to speak and found he had no voice; the presence in front of him had quietly taken it away. He rose to the surface shaking.

He climbed out onto the bank, and there sat Krishna and Balarama in the chariot, exactly where he had left them, looking at each other. Akrura could not stop himself. He went under a second time, and a second time he found them below, Krishna resting on the thousand-headed serpent, worshipped by the whole of that serpent world. When he came up at last and walked back to the chariot, Krishna was watching him with open amusement. What did you see down there, he asked, that kept you so long and shook you so badly? Akrura had his answer ready. What is there anywhere in this world, he said, that could happen at all without you? The wonder I went down to look for under the river, I have been riding beside all day. I have seen it, and I want to see nothing greater than it. Let us reach the king’s city before the sun goes down.

Signs in the City Streets

They reached Mathura while the sky was still red. Akrura took the brothers first to his own house and asked them to hold back a little, and not to go straight to Vasudeva, who was watched too closely for that; better, he said, to do the thing that would finally set the old man free. Krishna told him to go on ahead to Kansa. The brothers would walk the city first, look at its bright streets, and come into the king’s house when it suited them. So the two of them went out into Mathura like a pair of young elephants let off the stake, and everything they met on the way turned into a sign of what was coming.

A washerman met them on the road with an armful of fine dyed cloth for the king. Krishna asked him easily for a few of the garments. The man looked at their herdsman’s clothes and poured contempt over them: forest boys, raised among the deer, begging for a king’s colors; they must have given up all hope of their lives to speak to him like that. He should have chosen his words with more care. Krishna’s patience with him ran out, and a single blow of his fist, heavy as a falling bolt, put the man dead on the road. His widows ran wailing toward the palace, and the brothers dressed themselves in the beautiful cloth and walked on.

Further along they came to the shop of a garland-maker named Gunaka, a prosperous, soft-spoken man with a great stock of flowers. Krishna asked him for garlands, and Gunaka, delighted, heaped them on the two brothers and told them to take whatever they liked. Krishna gave him a blessing in return: that Lakshmi, who belongs to Krishna and answers to him, would live in that house always and never let its wealth run dry. Gunaka bent and touched his feet, certain now that these were no ordinary customers, that some pair of gods had walked into his shop, and he was too full of awe to say another word.

Then a woman came toward them carrying sandal paste and sweet unguents, her back bent in a deep curve. This was Kubja, on her way to the king’s bath. Others had spent their whole lives laughing at her crooked shape. Krishna spoke to her kindly and asked whom the perfumes were for, and something in her lit up. They were the king’s, she said, but he was welcome to them, because the sight of him had undone her. She anointed the brothers gladly, and their dark and fair bodies shone under it. Then Krishna reached out and pressed, and the deep curve went out of her back; she straightened where she stood, tall and lovely, a bent creeper suddenly grown upright. Made beautiful, she did not want him to go. She asked him to come home with her. He smiled and promised her another day, and the brothers walked on toward the court, laughing between themselves at the whole of it.

The Bow Breaks, and the City Wakes

They came at last to the house of bows, where the great weapon of the festival was kept. It stood upright like a pillar, and the keeper told them the plain truth about it when they asked to see it: not even the gods, with Indra at their head, could bend a string onto that bow. Krishna took it up in one hand as though it weighed nothing, and with a glad look on his face he set the string and began to draw. The bow bent, and bent further, and then the iron of it broke clean across the middle like a snapped serpent.

The sound of it went out over the whole of Mathura like a thunderclap, and the palace shook down to its inner rooms. The keeper ran to Kansa with his breath tearing in his throat. Two boys, he said, came into the armory out of nowhere, dressed in blue and yellow and shining like new fire, one of them white as Mount Kailasa and the other dark as a hill of black paint. The dark one lifted the bow the gods themselves cannot lift, strung it as if it were a toy, and drew it until it broke, and the crack of it dimmed the sun and moved the earth under our feet. Then they walked out the way an elephant walks through a fence and were gone on the wind. I do not know who they were. Kansa said nothing. He had known the shape of this since Narada first spoke, and the breaking of his bow only set a date on it. He sent the man away and shut himself in his room, and there the old dread came back over him in full. Destiny was not a thing a strong arm could push aside. Everything the sage had foretold was arriving on schedule, and he thought of the six infants of Devaki he had killed out of his own fear, and it had bought him nothing at all. He went out and walked the arena where the contest would be held, and gave the order that its platforms and galleries be dressed with flags and garlands for the morning, and that the bow-sacrifice and the wrestling go forward at first light. Then he waited out the night with sleep refusing to come, sick with dreams and ill omens, certain that the coming day would be the largest of his life, or the last one. That arena is where the next episode belongs.

Source: Harivamsha (the khila-parva of the Mahabharata), Vishnu Parva, chapters 66 to 72; critical edition (P. L. Vaidya, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune). Told as story, following the original sequence of events.