Kansa had been Jarasandha’s son-in-law, and the killing of a son-in-law lit a fire in the lord of Magadha that would not go out. Jarasandha ruled from Rajagriha, son of Brihadratha, the most powerful emperor of his age. His two daughters, Asti and Prapti, had been given in marriage to Kansa, and when Krishna and Balarama struck Kansa down in his own arena, the two widowed sisters came weeping to their father’s court. Jarasandha heard them out and swore an oath. He would pay his debt to the dead, and he would erase the Yadavas from the world, and above all that dark young cowherd, Krishna, who had done the killing.

He did not come alone. Every king who had ever been beaten and made to bow by Jarasandha, and every king who counted him a friend or kinsman, brought his own army and fell in behind him, all of them glad of a reason to move against Krishna. Shishupala of Chedi came, and Dantavakra of Karusha, and Bhishmaka’s son Rukmi, who liked to boast that he could out-shoot Krishna and Arjuna both. The kings of Kalinga and Anga and Vanga came, of Kashi and Kosala, of Madra and Trigarta and Gandhara, and a dozen more. Duryodhana came, and the rest of Dhritarashtra’s sons with him. Twenty akshauhinis, twenty full armies of foot and horse and elephant and chariot, rolled into the barley country of Shurasena and closed a ring around Mathura. The Yadavas inside were few.

Then began a thing that would go on for years. Jarasandha would arrive, ring the city, and force a grinding pitched battle. Somehow he would be broken and thrown back. And somehow, a season later, he would return with an army larger than the last.

The first time the two brothers rode out through the gates, something happened that the old accounts refuse to leave out. As Krishna and Balarama took their places and their ancient knowledge of arms woke in them, weapons came down out of the sky. They fell burning and garlanded, alive in their own light, terrible enough to frighten the very air. Four of them were the weapons of Vishnu. Balarama put out his right hand and took up the plough Samvartaka, which rose over him like a standard and moved like a serpent, and the mace Sunanda that breaks the heart out of an enemy line. Into Krishna’s hands came the great bow Sharanga, that all the worlds are said to long to see, and the club Kaumodaki, and his own discus blazed on his finger like a fallen piece of the sun.

For twenty-seven days the fighting did not stop. Chariot took chariot, horse took horse, the field turned to a mud of blood, and above it the gods and gandharvas and siddhas crowded the sky to watch, so that the air itself seemed hung with lamps. In the middle of it Balarama and Jarasandha found each other. They emptied their bows, lost their chariots and charioteers, and came at last to clubs, two men with arms like mountain ridges circling each other while every other fighter stopped to watch. Jarasandha, schooled and patient, took the full weight of Balarama’s club and did not fall. In anger Balarama set the club aside and lifted his heavier mace, the sure one, meaning to end the king of Magadha then and there. A voice came out of the sky, sweet and enormous, the voice of the one who watches all the worlds, and it spoke to Balarama by name. This king of Magadha is not for you to kill. Do not grieve over it, and let your arm down. His death is already prepared, by means I have set in place, and it will find him at its own hour and by another hand. Balarama lowered the mace. Jarasandha, who had heard the words too, lost heart, and when the sun went down he broke and ran. The Yadavas did not chase a beaten man into the dark. They gathered their people and went home behind their walls, and the weapons that had come from the sky went back into it and were gone.

Victories That Wore Them Down

That was the first time. It was not the last. Eighteen times over the years Jarasandha came, and eighteen times he was beaten, and not once in all those years could the Yadavas kill him. Each victory cost them. Twenty akshauhinis pressed against a few clans, season after season, and every win left the winners thinner. The walls of Mathura grew ragged under the constant battering. The fields outside were trampled flat, planted, and trampled again. And the people, who had cheered the first victory and the third, began to dread the next siege more than they savored the last win.

Worse was coming, and it came out of the counsel of the beaten kings. Sitting together after another failure, they reasoned it through, and the king of Saubha, whose chariot could ride the open air, named the real difficulty. No king of Mathura could kill Krishna. That was settled. But there was one man alive who had been made expressly to defeat him, and his name was Kalayavana.

Years before, a sage named Gargya, teacher to the Vrishni and Andhaka houses, had been shamed in open court by his own brother-in-law, who called him impotent. Gargya walked out, gave up the wife he had never touched, and went to do penance for a son. For twelve years he lived on powdered iron and worshipped Shiva, and when the god offered him a boon he asked for one thing: a son whom the kings of Mathura could never kill. Shiva said, so be it. The childless king of the Yavanas, hearing of the boon, took the sage into his own country, and there a celestial apsara named Gopali, in the shape of a cowherd woman, conceived by Gargya the child that would be Kalayavana. He was raised as the Yavana king’s own heir, and when the old king died he took the throne. When Kalayavana asked the sages who in all the world was worth fighting, Narada named the heroes of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas. This was the man the king of Saubha now proposed to loose on Mathura.

Jarasandha heard the plan and it galled him. He had spent his life as the king that smaller kings ran to for shelter, and now his allies were telling him to go begging shelter of another. He would not do it. His own death, a voice had already told him, was set aside for another day and another hand, and he meant to meet whoever that was, god or man, on his own feet. But he let the embassy go. The king of Saubha rode his sky-chariot to the Yavana capital, laid out the whole quarrel with Krishna, and Kalayavana, delighted to be asked, offered fire to the gods, gathered the Shakas and the Tukharas and a hundred foreign chiefs from the skirts of the Himalayas, and turned his enormous army toward Mathura. Krishna tried the oldest trick on him first. He sealed a black serpent, coiled like a lump of soot, inside a jar and sent it with a message: Krishna is a snake like this one. Kalayavana read the threat perfectly. He filled the jar with fierce sharp-jawed ants, let them eat the serpent down to nothing, sealed it again, and sent it back. Now two armies were on the road at once, Jarasandha from the east and Kalayavana from the north, both converging on the same walls.

Krishna saw the shape of it before anyone else. There are times when the wise move is to change the ground under a war instead of winning on the same ground until there is nothing left to defend. A city that becomes a battlefield every year, however many times it wins, is not being saved. What he began to turn over in his mind looked, from the outside, like retreat, and held inside it a farsightedness that the years would keep proving right.

Westward

He had already sent a scout. Long before, Krishna had asked Garuda to fly west and look at an old abandoned city called Kushasthali, which sat at the foot of Mount Raivata on the shore of the western sea, its former demon inhabitants long gone. Garuda had gone, circled it from the air, and come back to say it was perfect: ringed by ocean, cooled by sea wind, rich, defensible, a place that could become famous. So when Krishna stood before the assembled Yadavas and said that Mathura was too small and too open to hold them, that a city hemmed by enemies was no place to raise their children, and that they should build somewhere new, he already knew where. The Yadavas heard him and agreed. Do whatever is best for all of us, they said.

They left that same day. The whole people went, Vasudeva and Ugrasena at the head of them, wives and elders and children, herds and treasure, chariots and war-elephants, a river of Yadavas pouring west with a noise like surf. Nobody pretended it was easy. Leaving the city of your ancestors is a wound. But the survival of a people outweighs the brick and stone they leave behind, and Krishna had weighed it and was sure. After a long march the leading clans came down at last to the edge of the ocean, to a broad copper-colored stretch of coast under Mount Raivata, and knew they had found it.

To build what he had in mind, Krishna called on the architect of the gods. Vishvakarma came at once and stood before him, ready to raise whatever he was told, and told Krishna the plain truth: the site was good, but there was not enough of it. A city for this many people, with room for the ocean itself to move around it, needed more ground than the coast could give. If the sea would only draw back a little, the city could be as vast as it needed to be. Krishna turned to the ocean and asked it, if it had any regard for him, to withdraw its waters across twelve yojanas, many miles of open seabed. The ocean gathered itself by its own yogic power and gave up its bed.

On the ground the sea surrendered, Vishvakarma built Dwarka. It rose with walls of golden light and deep encircling ditches, with palaces and gardens and clear pools, with wide public roads and high houses that seemed to catch the clouds, with temples set in their proper places for Brahma and Indra and the gods of fire and water, and with four great gates. Classical memory would call it Dwaravati and rank it with Amaravati, the city of Indra himself. Though it stood on the earth it looked like something that belonged in the sky, a city ringed by sea, its air always damp with the spray of the waves.

Krishna was not finished furnishing it. He sent the wind god, Vayu, up to the heavens with his respects and a request, and Vayu came back carrying Sudharma, the assembly hall of the gods themselves, which was set down in Dwarka for the Yadavas to gather in. Then Krishna sent for Sankha, a keeper of the treasures of the gods, and told him plainly that he would not have a single hungry or ragged or begging person in his city. Sankha poured wealth into every house in Dwaravati until there was no poor man left in it. Ugrasena took his throne as king, the clans were given their quarters, and a new life on the western shore began.

The Foundation of a New Age

One thread was still loose. Kalayavana was coming, and no weapon the Yadavas carried could touch him. So once his people were settled safely inside Dwarka, Krishna walked back toward Mathura alone, on foot, carrying nothing but his own two arms. Kalayavana saw him and gave chase, thrilled to have caught the man he had crossed the world to kill. Krishna let himself be chased. He ran, easy and unhurried, and the Yavana king could not lay a hand on him, and step by step Krishna drew him exactly where he wanted him, into the mouth of a mountain cave, and into the dark.

Inside the cave a man was sleeping, and had been sleeping for ages. He was Muchukunda, an ancient king, a son of Mandhata, who had fought for the gods in their war against the demons and had asked, when they offered him a reward, only for sleep. They had granted it, and granted more: that whoever woke him would burn to ash under his first waking glance. He had slept since the Treta age, through the long turning of the world. Krishna stepped quietly past him and stood in the shadows at the head of the sleeping king. Kalayavana came in behind, saw a figure lying there in the dark, took it for Krishna, and kicked the sleeper to wake him. Muchukunda opened his eyes, ancient and furious at being torn out of his sleep, and looked at the man standing over him. The look was enough. The fire the gods had set behind the old king’s eyes went out of them like lightning into a dead tree, and Kalayavana was ash before he could speak. Krishna came out of the shadows then and told the bewildered king who he was and how long he had slept, that whole ages had turned while he lay there and the world outside had grown small and short-lived. Muchukunda climbed into the Himalayas to spend what was left of him in penance. And Krishna gathered up the vast leaderless army the Yavana had brought, marched it back to Dwarka, and handed it to Ugrasena. The second enemy was finished, and not one Yadava had died doing it.

Dwarka was more than a safer address. It opened a whole new age for the Yadavas. Where Mathura had woken every morning to the possibility of a siege, Dwarka woke to the sea and to peace, to prosperity, and to room enough to begin again. The decision that had looked from the outside like a retreat had bought the clan a future, and in the years ahead it would go on proving itself right.

And in this new city, in these new days, the stories of Krishna’s life that now began to open were stories of bonds and of the heart: a princess’s daring message, the freeing of sixteen thousand women from a demon’s prison, and much more. The next episode belongs to that princess, the one who made the decision of her life herself.

Source: Harivamsha (the khila-parva of the Mahabharata), Vishnu Parva, chapters 79 to 86; critical edition (P. L. Vaidya, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune). Told as story, following the original sequence of events.