This war began inside a dream, and no hunger for a kingdom or a jewel set it moving. It started on a riverbank, where Shiva had come to play with Parvati. Every season flowered at once in that forest, gandharvas made music, apsaras sang, and the god delighted his consort by taking one shape after another, until his own attendants put on his form to tease him and the apsaras put on hers, and the banks rang with laughter. Watching from a distance, Usha, the young daughter of the asura king Banasura, felt a wish open in her: to know that same joy one day beside a husband of her own. She said as much to her friends, and the goddess overheard. Parvati answered the wish with a promise. On the twelfth night of the bright half of Vaishakha, asleep on the terrace of her palace, Usha would meet in a dream the man she was meant to marry.

The night arrived, and the dream arrived with it. A stranger came to her in sleep and held her as a husband holds a wife, and she woke shaking and undone, certain she had disgraced a proud house, weeping before she was fully awake. Her friends, daughters of yakshas and nagas and apsaras, gathered close and reasoned with her. No vow is broken in sleep, they said, no sin is committed in a dream, and had the goddess herself not foretold this very night? What finally steadied her was harder than comfort. She did not know the man’s name. She knew only a face, one that returned the instant she closed her eyes and dissolved the instant she opened them, and a certainty that whoever had crossed the seven walls of her father’s fortress to reach her was no ordinary man.

Her friend Chitralekha was an apsara who could paint the likeness of any living being, range the whole sky at will, and pass unseen through any wall. She set herself to the task. Over seven nights she painted the great ones of every race, gods and gandharvas, yakshas and nagas and rakshasas, and the leading men of the earth, and laid the portraits before Usha row by row. Usha’s finger moved down the faces and stopped. This one. It was Aniruddha, son of Pradyumna and grandson of Krishna, and Chitralekha named his line and told her there was no one in the three worlds to match him.

Reaching him was the hard part. Dwarka stood behind seven metal ramparts and seven water-filled moats, raised by the architect of the gods, and was counted impossible to enter. Chitralekha crossed the sky and went in anyway. Near Vasudeva’s palace she found the sage Narada at his meditations, and she told him everything, for she feared Krishna’s anger if she stole away his grandson unannounced. Narada, who loved nothing in the worlds so much as the sight of a good battle, blessed the errand gladly. He gave her a learning that could cloud any eye and lull any guard, and he promised to carry word to Krishna himself when the hour came. She found Aniruddha seated among a hundred women with untouched wine at his hand and his mind plainly elsewhere. He had dreamed the same dream, and it had spoiled every other pleasure for him. When she spoke Usha’s name he asked only to be taken to her. Chitralekha wrapped him in her borrowed illusion and bore him across the world, unseen, to Usha’s chamber, and there the two were wed by the rite of mutual consent. Two dreams now stood in one room, awake.

A Father’s Fury

Banasura was no minor king. Eldest of the hundred sons of Bali, he had been born with a thousand arms, and every hand had been trained to a weapon. Long ago, watching Kartikeya blaze at the head of Shiva’s host, he had fixed on a single ambition, to belong to that family himself, and he won it by austerities so fierce that Shiva, who is easily pleased, granted the boon he named: adoption by the goddess as her own son, and with it the standing of Kartikeya’s younger brother. His city, Shonitpur, rose on the very ground where Kartikeya had once sprung from fire-born blood, and Kartikeya gave him a burning peacock standard to carry before him. So armed and so protected, Banasura beat the gods until no one was left willing to face him, and a thousand idle arms began to ache for a war worth the name. He begged Shiva for one. Shiva, smiling, told him the day would come when the great peacock banner in his own city broke. Banasura carried that promise home like a gift.

Not long after, Indra’s thunderbolt split the sky and brought the towering banner down. To Banasura it read as pure fortune, his war was coming. The heavens did not stop at the banner. A cat cowering under the earth began to wail. Indra rained blood on the palace. Fire-brands pierced the sun and dropped to earth, and though the season held no eclipse, Rahu swallowed the sun anyway. Streams of blood ran from the sacred trees, stars fell from their places, and Mars crossed into the star Krittika to menace Rohini, the very star under which Banasura had been born. The huge Chaitya tree that the Danava women tended and worshipped crashed to the ground. His minister Kumbhanda, wise and clear of sight, read every sign the same way, that the house was drawing toward ruin. Banasura, drunk on the pride of his arms, read the same signs as his promise keeping itself, and went back to his wine.

So when the guards came to report that a young man was living in the rooms of his unmarried daughter, Banasura’s rage finally had a shape to fall on. He sent soldiers to kill the intruder. Aniruddha, alone and without so much as a coat of mail, snatched an iron bar from beside the door and went to meet them, while overhead Narada hung in the empty air and called out at every stroke, “Well done, well done.” The first wave broke on the boy and fell back. He caught up a sword and a leather shield and moved through them in twelve directions at once, until the survivors staggered back to their king spitting blood. Banasura sent thousands more, then loosed the Pramathas, the ghostly host of Shiva himself. Still the one young man held the ground, and up in the sky Narada danced for the joy of watching him.

At last Banasura climbed into his own war chariot, a machine ten furlongs long, sheathed in bearskin and hung with bells, drawn by a thousand horses, and drove at the boy with a thousand hands full of swords and maces and axes. Aniruddha cut the reins and struck down the horses. Banasura buried him under arrows until the Danavas roared, sure he was finished, and then the asura took up a spear that burned like a brand and hurled it, careless of whether he widowed his own daughter. Aniruddha leapt, caught the spear out of the air, and drove it back through Banasura’s body, and the king sagged against a standard, senseless. Only then did he stoop to sorcery. He vanished from sight, poured arrows down out of nowhere, and bound the boy in the nagapasha, a noose of living serpents. Aniruddha stood inside those coils like a mountain wound with snakes, and never flinched, and felt no pain. His minister Kumbhanda watched and counseled restraint. The young man had married Usha by mutual consent, he argued, and since Banasura had never given her away he could still take her back without blood. The stranger was plainly high-born, past ordinary courage, a guest whose killing would be a sin. Kill him or honor him, said the minister, but think first. Banasura let it stand, and had Aniruddha thrown in chains.

Bound in the women’s quarter, Aniruddha turned to the goddess, to Durga who never fails the ones who call on her, and sang her praise with a purified heart. She came. With her own fingers she loosened the serpents until their grip no longer bit, and she told him to hold on a few days more. The one who carries the discus was already on his way, she said. He would shear away Banasura’s thousand arms and carry Aniruddha home.

In Dwarka the boy’s disappearance had thrown the whole Yadava house into fear and grief. Aniruddha’s wives wept without comfort, the great war-horn was sounded, the clan gathered, and Krishna sat among them silent and heavy-eyed. When they pressed him he admitted he had no answer. Some feared Indra had taken the boy out of an old grudge. Krishna would not have it. He served the gods and they were grateful to him, and no god would repay him so. The boy, he judged, had been drawn off by one of the Daitya women, whose charms were made for exactly that. Spies rode out over every mountain and river and came back with nothing. Then, in the clear of the next morning, Narada walked smiling into the hall and laid the whole of it before them, Usha and Chitralekha and the war already fought and lost, Aniruddha alive and waiting in his serpent bonds. Rise up, the sage said, and be quick. And he added a caution: Shonitpur lay eleven thousand yojanas away, past the reach of any marching army, and only one carrier in the worlds could cross that distance in a breath. So Krishna called for Garuda. He put on a towering eight-armed form, sword and discus and club and arrows in the right hands, shield and the Sharanga bow and a thunderbolt and the conch in the left, and with Balarama and Pradyumna mounting behind him the three of them rose into the sky on the great bird’s back.

When Mahadeva Became the Shield

The first thing to meet them was fire. As the city neared, the three riders lost their color and turned to gold, and Krishna knew the sign at once. A wall of sacrificial fire, kindled by Shiva’s servants, was ringing Shonitpur to keep him out, and its heat had already leached the color from their skins. Garuda opened a thousand mouths, flew up to the heavenly Ganga, drank the river down, and rained it over the flames until they drowned. The fire-gods who tended the blaze turned to fight, and Krishna struck down their chief, the fierce Angira, with a single killing arrow, and the rest fled into the city. Then Krishna lifted the Panchajanya, his conch, and blew a note that shook Shonitpur to its foundations, and rode in.

This was never an ordinary war, and the strangeness of it ran deeper than the odds. Banasura was Shiva’s most cherished devotee, kept near as one of the god’s own household, adopted son of the goddess and sworn brother to Kartikeya, and both Shiva and Parvati had bound themselves by promise to keep him from harm. So the real power set against Krishna at Shonitpur was never the asura at all. Before this was over, Shiva himself would take the field as his devotee’s living shield, and one divine power would wear two faces across a single battlefield: Shiva keeping faith with a devotee, Krishna guarding his grandson and the claim of dharma. When their weapons met, creation would shudder, and for a few breaths the balance of the worlds would seem to hang on it.

As the Danava ranks broke and ran, one of Shiva’s servants strode out alone to hold the field: Jvara, Fever itself, three-legged and three-headed, six-armed and nine-faced, dozing and shuddering and sighing like a madman, a weapon in his fist that burned whatever it touched. He went first at Balarama. The fire caught in Balarama’s chest and set him raving, his senses scattering, until Krishna folded his brother in his arms and drew the burning out of him. Then Krishna turned on Fever himself. Jvara loosed his weapon, and for a few breaths Krishna felt it scorch him, and then he put it out and the two closed and grappled. Beaten to the ground, Fever slipped instead into Krishna’s own body and slowed the lord of the worlds to a stagger, heavy-limbed and yawning, until Krishna made a second Fever out of his own energy to seize the first and drag it out of him. He had it down and was about to tear it apart when a voice out of the empty sky asked that it be spared. So he spared it. He granted it, too, the boon it begged, that it alone would be Fever in all the world with no rival to it ever, dividing itself among every creature as the daily and the third-day and the fourth-day agues, as the blight that withers leaves and fruit, as the wasting in cattle and the frost on the lotus. And he added a mercy to it: whoever ever heard or read the account of this battle would be set free of fever.

Now Shiva came on. His car was drawn by lions and crowded with his ghosts, some lion-faced, some serpent-faced, some naked, some crowned with matted hair, all of them baying and blowing conches as they rolled toward the field. He struck first, with hundreds of winged arrows, and Krishna answered with the weapons Indra had given him, and the earth shook under the two of them until elephants staggered, mountain peaks scattered, and jackals cried in the daylight. Weapon called out weapon. Shiva loosed a fiery astra that left the four riders scorched and shrunken and all but invisible, and the asuras howled, sure Krishna was dead, and Krishna answered with the water-weapon of Varuna and put the fire out. Shiva sent four astras that burned like the end of the world, Krishna broke each with an arrow of its own and loosed the Vaishnava weapon, and Banasura’s host fell senseless and fled. Then Shiva reached for the arrow that had once burned the three cities of the sky. Krishna, who knew his mind before he moved, drew first and loosed the astra called the Yawn. Sleep took the destroyer of worlds where he stood. His eyes grew heavy, his great bow drooped, and the fire pouring from his mouth guttered out. But the weight of two such powers grinding against each other on one field was more than the ground could bear, and the goddess Earth, trembling, went to Brahma and begged to be relieved before she sank back into one shoreless sea. Brahma came down and spoke to Shiva plainly. You found the way to kill this asura yourself, he said, so why shield him now, and why raise your hand against Krishna, who is your second body? Shiva turned his gaze inward and saw the three worlds entire, and saw himself standing within Krishna and Krishna standing within him, and the anger left him. He would fight no more, he said, and between the two of them this war would lift the Earth’s burden regardless. They left the field and embraced, and for as long as they held each other no one watching could tell where the one ended and the other began.

That should have ended it, but Kartikeya had not moved. Banasura’s own brother now drove his chariot at the three heroes and hurled the Brahmashira, the weapon that makes the worlds cry out, bright as a thousand suns. Krishna smothered its glare under his discus. Kartikeya sent a burning golden spear behind it, and Krishna shouted and knocked it out of the air. When he raised the discus at last against the war-god himself, a goddess stepped into the gap, naked and unmoving, at Shiva’s command. This was Kottavi, the mother who had claimed both Kartikeya and Banasura for her sons, and she set herself between the discus and her child. Krishna told her to go, and to take Kartikeya with her, but he would not drive a weapon through a bared and unresisting goddess. He lowered his arm, and the war-god was led from the field.

Pride Cut Down, a Promise Kept

That left Banasura, and he came for Krishna still boasting, a thousand arms lifting a thousand weapons, swearing he would multiply them into a million and leave the Yadavas dead in the dust of Shonitpur. From his seat in the sky Narada laughed until it seemed the heavens might split. Krishna let the boast run out. Heroes do not brag, he told the asura, so come and fight, or lie face down in the dirt for good. Then he set to work. Arrows off the Sharanga bow shattered the great chariot with its horses and standards. The next stripped away Banasura’s crown, his armor, and his bow and left him swooning against the wreck, while overhead Garuda caught the peacock that carried his banner by the head and dashed it senseless to the ground.

Shiva, watching his devotee falter, would not fight and would not abandon him. He sent Nandi down with a lion-drawn car to serve as Banasura’s charioteer, and the asura rose again and flung the Roudra astra, the Brahmashira that Brahma had forged long ago for Hiranyakashipu. Krishna dissolved it with his discus as though brushing off smoke. There was once another king with a thousand arms, Krishna reminded him, almost gently. His name was Kartavirya, until Parashurama sheared those arms down to two. Your pride will go the same way. As he lifted the discus, the naked goddess appeared before him a second time, sent now by Parvati to shield Banasura as she had shielded Kartikeya. Krishna would not be turned. I will cut away the thousand arms he is so drunk on, he told her, and your son will live with the two that are left, and will not come at me again. The goddess bowed to it and let it be.

Then Krishna raised the Sudarshana, the thousand-bladed discus that gathers into itself the strength of the fires and the thunder and the sun, the penances of the sages, the virtue of chaste women, and the force of every living thing in the three worlds. He sent it into the forest of Banasura’s arms. It moved too fast for any eye to hold, working through the thousand arms one after another, and when it came back to his hand Banasura stood in the dust with two.

Bathed in his own blood, maddened by the smell of it, the asura threw back his head and roared, and Krishna lifted the discus once more to finish him. This time Shiva himself stepped forward, with Kartikeya at his side. I know you for what you are, he said, the eternal one from whom the worlds have come, so withdraw your discus. I gave Banasura my protection, and I am asking you to keep it whole. Krishna lowered the discus. He had come for his grandson and for the breaking of a tyrant’s pride, and both were done. The life still in the asura he gave back as a gift to Shiva, and with that gift every promise made on that field stayed unbroken. Banasura lived, stripped of his arms and his arrogance together. Later, bloodied and reeling, he danced his gratitude before his god, and Shiva healed his wounds, set him at the very head of the Pramatha host, and gave him a name that would outlast him, Mahakala.

Then Krishna went to his grandson. The serpents that bound Aniruddha fled the moment Garuda’s shadow fell across them, sliding off his body as spent arrows, and the boy stood free and bent to touch his grandfather’s feet. Usha bowed too, shy among so many heroes. Krishna gave Banasura’s kingdom to Kumbhanda, the minister who had read the omens true and argued for the boy’s life, and told him to rule it in peace.

And he kept the wedding of Aniruddha and Usha with every honor. Agni, the fire-god, stood present in person as witness, the gandharvas sang, and the apsaras danced and teased the couple through the rites, trading jokes between the two sides as Narada had been longing to see.

Then they turned for home. Usha rode a peacock the goddess gave her, the Yadava heroes mounted Garuda, and the great bird rose and bent the treetops and darkened the sun with the dust of his going. Dwarka poured out to meet them with heaped flowers and brimming water-jars and the long call of the Panchajanya. The story that had opened in a dream closed at a wedding, and the long war, for all its fire and its clashing gods, had done in the end the quiet work of bringing two people together.

Source: Harivamsha (the khila-parva of the Mahabharata), Vishnu Parva, chapters 105 to 113; critical edition (P. L. Vaidya, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune). Told as story, following the original sequence of events.