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Brahma’s hymn, the grandsire’s last piece of advice, and the fifth morning: a hawk drawn up against a sea-monster
Now hear the hymn that Brahman himself uttered, king, Bhishma said, the one the twice-born rishis and the gods carried down to men on Earth in the old days. Narada described you as the Master and the Lord of the god of gods, of all the Sadhyas and all the celestials, and as the one who knows the nature of the Creator of the worlds. Markandeya spoke of you as the Past, the Present and the Future, as the sacrifice of sacrifices and the austerity of austerities. The illustrious Bhrigu said of you that you are the God of the gods and that the ancient form of Vishnu is yours. Dwaipayana said of you that you are Vasudeva of the Vasus, the establisher of Shakra, the God of the gods and of all creatures. Long ago, at the time when creatures were first being brought forth, the sages spoke of you as Daksha, the Father of creation. Angiras said you are the creator of all beings. And Devala said that everything unmanifest is your body, that everything manifest is in your mind, and that the gods are all the result of your breathing.
The hymn went on in that vein, and the pictures in it got larger the further it went. The heavens are pervaded by your heads. Your two arms hold up the Earth. The three worlds are inside your stomach, and you are the Eternal Being; men lifted high by asceticism know you in exactly this way. You are the Sat of Sat, and rishis who have been satisfied by the sight of the Self see you so. And for royal sages of liberal minds, the ones who never retreat out of a battle and who keep morality as their highest end, you are the only refuge there is, slayer of Madhu. That is how the illustrious Supreme Being, Hari, has been adored and worshiped by Sanatkumara and by other ascetics joined to Yoga. The truth about Keshava is now told to you, sire, in brief and in detail both. Turn your heart in love toward Keshava.
Something in your son shifted while he listened, Sanjaya said. When the story ended he was holding both Keshava and those mighty chariot-warriors, the sons of Pandu, higher in his mind than he had held them an hour before. And Bhishma, watching that happen, pressed once more on the place that had opened. You have now heard truly, king, about the glory of the high-souled Keshava and of Nara, which is what you asked me for, he said. You have heard why Nara and Narayana have taken their births among men. You have been told why those heroes are invincible and have never been beaten in battle, and why nobody can kill the sons of Pandu in a fight. Krishna loves the sons of Pandu greatly. That is why I say to you, king of kings, make peace with the Pandavas. Hold your passions in and enjoy the Earth with your mighty brothers around you. If you disregard the divine Nara and Narayana you will certainly be destroyed. Then your father fell silent, dismissed the king and went into his tent; and the king went back to his own tent, having worshiped the illustrious grandsire on the way, and lay down on his white bed to sleep the night through. Whatever had shifted in him did not survive the night.
The night passed, the sun came up, and the two armies moved toward each other, king. Each host looked at the other and went forward in ranks, angry, wanting to break what stood opposite. By your evil policy the Pandavas and the sons of Dhritarashtra went at each other in mail and in formation. The array Bhishma protected on every side that morning had the shape of a Makara, the great creature of the sea, and the Pandavas guarded the array they had built with the same care. Your father Devavrata, best of chariot-warriors, went out in front of it supported by a large division of chariots, and the rest followed him, chariots and infantry and elephants and cavalry, every man in the place he had been allotted. Watching them come on, the sons of Pandu drew their own troops into that invincible prince of arrays called the Syena, the hawk. In the beak of it stood Bhimasena of the great strength. In its two eyes were Shikhandi and Dhrishtadyumna of Prishata’s race, neither of whom could be turned back. In the head was Satyaki, whose prowess nobody had ever managed to baffle. In the neck was Arjuna, shaking Gandiva. The left wing was the high-souled and blessed Drupada with his son, an akshauhini of every kind of troop behind him, and the right wing was the king of the Kekayas, who had an akshauhini of his own. In the back were the sons of Draupadi and the son of Subhadra, and in the tail was king Yudhishthira himself with the twins on either side of him.
Bhima went into the Makara through its mouth. That was the first thing that happened on the fifth day, and it tells you what kind of day it was going to be: he drove in at the opening where the teeth were, came up on Bhishma, and covered him over with shafts. Bhishma answered with weapons that confounded the Pandava combatants standing in their formation, and while they were still reeling, Dhananjaya came up fast at the head of the fighting and put a thousand arrows into Bhishma. Cutting apart the weapons Bhishma shot at him, Arjuna held his place and stood ready, his own division cheerful around him. Then Duryodhana, that great chariot-warrior, looking at the slaughter of his troops and remembering his brothers cut down the day before, drove over to Bharadvaja’s son. Preceptor, sinless one, you have always wished me well, he said. Relying on you and on the grandsire Bhishma, we expect to beat the gods themselves in battle, let alone the sons of Pandu, who have neither energy nor prowess in them. Blessings on you: act in such a way that the Pandavas are killed. So Drona drove into the Pandava array with Satyaki watching him do it, and Satyaki moved across and checked him, and what followed was fierce in its particulars and terrible to watch. Drona, furious, and with something like a smile on him, put ten shafts into the grandson of Sini at the shoulder joint. Bhimasena, furious in his turn, shot Bharadvaja’s son to get him off Satyaki, and Drona and Bhishma and Shalya all three turned and covered Bhimasena over with their arrows, and Abhimanyu and the sons of Draupadi came in with sharp-pointed shafts against every one of those warriors with their weapons up.
And then Shikhandi came. The great bowman rushed at the two who were doing the most damage, Bhishma and Drona, holding a bow whose twang was like the roar of massed clouds, and he put up so many arrows that the sun went out of sight behind them. What happened next decided the war, though nobody on that field would have said so at the time. The grandsire of the Bharatas, with Shikhandi directly in front of him and inside his range, turned away from him, because he remembered that this warrior had been born a woman. Drona, urged on by your son, rushed in to protect Bhishma in that dangerous moment, and Shikhandi, coming up against the foremost of all wielders of weapons, went around him out of fear, since Drona in that hour looked like the fire that appears at the end of a Yuga. Then your son came forward with a large force, wanting the glory of it, to stand between the Pandavas and Bhishma, and the Pandavas came on with their hearts fixed on winning, and the battle that followed between men who all wanted victory and fame was fierce and strange and wonderful, of the kind fought long ago between the gods and the Danavas.
A key to reading this (names and formations): Dwaipayana is Vyasa, and Shakra is Indra. A Makara is the great sea-creature of the myths, and the Kaurava array of the fifth morning is built in its shape; the Syena is a hawk, and the Pandavas station their men on its beak, eyes, head, neck, wings, back and tail. The grandson of Sini is Satyaki, and Prishata’s race means Dhrishtadyumna, who is Drupada’s son. Bhishma turning away from Shikhandi comes out of a vow he made long before the war; the full story of Shikhandi’s birth is told with the story of Amba in part three of chapter 20, and this refusal is the hinge on which the tenth day will turn.
The gist: Bhishma finishes with the hymn Brahma made, in which Narada and Markandeya and Bhrigu and Vyasa and Angiras and Devala each say in turn who Vasudeva is, and then he asks for the only thing he has ever asked for: make peace. For the length of one story Duryodhana is moved, bows to the old man and goes to sleep on his white bed, and by morning it has worn off. On the fifth day Bhishma builds an array in the shape of a sea-monster and the Pandavas answer with a hawk, Bhima on the beak and Arjuna at the neck. Bhima goes in through the monster’s mouth, Arjuna puts a thousand arrows into the grandsire, Drona and Satyaki lock together, and then Shikhandi rides to the front and Bhishma, who could have killed him, lowers his bow and looks somewhere else.
The day the weapons ran out and the fists kept going, and the sound of Gandiva that emptied the Kaurava chariots
Everything Bhishma did on the fifth morning had one purpose behind it, and Sanjaya said so plainly to the blind king: the old man fought the way he fought because Bhima was loose on the field and Dhritarashtra’s sons had to be kept alive. That was the whole of his strategy that day, and it produced a battle so destructive of great men that Sanjaya seemed to run out of ways to describe it. The noise went up and touched the sky. Elephants shrieked, horses screamed, conches were blown and drums were beaten, and the combined uproar left men deaf in the middle of it. Warriors bellowed at one another across the space between their chariots the way bulls bellow in a cow-pen. Heads came off under the keen-edged arrows and kept falling, so many and so steadily that looking up was like watching a shower of stones come out of the air. The ground took them. Heads with earrings still in them, heads still wearing their turbans, heads bright with gold ornaments lay in numbers past counting, and around them the broad-headed shafts had strewn the earth with severed limbs and with arms that still carried their armlets. Within a moment the whole field was carpeted: bodies in mail, arms in ornaments, faces beautiful as the moon with the corners of the eyes gone red, and the pieces of elephants and horses and men mixed in among them. The dust the armies raised stood in the air like heavy cloud, the polished weapons flashed through it like lightning, and the clash of iron on iron came back as thunder. Out of all of it ran a river, and the river was blood.
The archers on both sides kept pouring arrows into that, and the elephants, stuck full of shafts, broke and ran shrieking wherever the crowd let them. Between the hum of the great bows and the slap of bowstrings against the leather guards on the archers’ forearms, nothing else could be heard at all. Across a field that had become a shallow lake of blood, headless trunks kept standing up and staying up for a moment before they went down, and behind them the kings came on anyway, wanting nothing but to kill the man in front of them. Men with arms like iron clubs cut each other apart with arrows and darts and maces and curved swords. Elephants pierced through and missing the drivers who steered them with hooks, and horses with nobody in the saddle, went tearing off in every direction at once. Warriors on both sides took an arrow deep, jumped, and dropped. And where Bhima and Bhishma had come together the ground itself was a heap of arms and heads, of bows and maces and spiked clubs, of hands and thighs, of feet and ornaments and bracelets, all lying together. Then the weapons ran out. Men who had nothing left in their hands went at each other with their bare arms, and the bare arms of those men were clubs; they fought with fists, with knees, with open-handed blows, with anything that would still land. Chariot fighters who had lost their chariots came down into that press with drawn swords looking for someone to kill. And through the middle of it, ringed by a large division of the Kalingas and keeping Bhishma in front of him, Duryodhana drove at the Pandavas, while the Pandava warriors came the other way behind Vrikodara on their fast animals, furious, straight at Bhishma.
Arjuna had been watching his brothers and the allied kings try to fight the grandsire. He stopped watching. He came up with his weapons already raised and drove at the son of Ganga, and the Kaurava line heard him before it saw him: Panchajanya blowing, Gandiva’s string giving its long snap, and then the standard coming through the dust. Sanjaya admitted to Dhritarashtra that a great fear entered their hearts at that. The standard carried the device of a lion’s tail, and it stood in the air like a mountain on fire; it was celestial work, beautiful, shot through with many colors, and it rode above the field like a comet that had just risen, and trees could not obstruct it. Then they saw Gandiva itself, the back of the staff plated in pure gold, lovely the way a stroke of lightning is lovely inside a mass of cloud. What they heard over the top of everything, while Arjuna killed his way forward, were his shouts, which sounded like Indra roaring, and the clap of his palms, which was frightening simply as noise. Like a thundering bank of cloud driven by a gale he poured arrows out on every side until all ten directions were shut. He had terrible weapons and he was using them, and under that assault, Sanjaya said, four of our senses stopped working and we could no longer tell the east from the west. Dhritarashtra’s soldiers, their animals spent, their horses killed under them, their courage gone, crowded in against one another and went looking for Bhishma, and every one of the king’s sons went with them. In that battle the son of Shantanu was what they had. Chariot fighters were climbing down off their chariots, cavalrymen were sliding off their horses, and the infantry simply sat down where they stood. The twang of Gandiva came across the field like thunder, and the army seemed to melt.
What Duryodhana sent to hold the line was a wall of allies. Thousands of Kamboja horses came up, and thousands of Gopas with the great Gopayana force behind them, and the Madras and the Sauviras and the Gandharas and the Trigartas, and the king of the Kalingas ringed by all his chief Kalingas, and king Jayadratha with every ally he had, and a mixed host of many nations with Duhshasana at its head, and fourteen thousand picked horsemen, and all of that closed around Shakuni, the son of Subala, to prop him up where he stood. The Pandavas answered by coming at the Kaurava army together, each on his own chariot or beast, and cutting into it. The dust that the wheels and hooves and feet threw up hung over everything like weather. Bhishma, with his elephants and horses and chariots, carrying lances and bearded darts and broad-headed shafts, went to meet the diadem-decked Arjuna. The king of Avanti took the ruler of Kashi. The ruler of the Sindhus took Bhimasena. Yudhishthira, with his sons and his counselors around him, took Shalya, the famous lord of the Madras. Vikarna faced Sahadeva, and Chitrasena faced Shikhandi. The Matsyas went for Duryodhana and Shakuni. Drupada and Chekitana and the great chariot fighter Satyaki all went for Drona, who had his son at his side. Kripa and Kritavarma together rushed Dhrishtadyumna. Across the whole width of the field, bodies of horse and elephant and chariot locked into each other and stayed locked.
The sky had no clouds in it that afternoon, and lightning kept flashing anyway. Dust closed off every direction. Meteors came down with a noise like thunder in them. Violent winds got up, and dust fell from above like rain, and the sun went out of the sky behind the cloud the armies had raised. The men inside that cloud kept using their weapons and lost track of where they were. Steel hurled from strong arms, steel that would go through any armor made, filled the air with an enormous grinding roar, and the weapons themselves, bright as stars, lit the whole sky as they flew. Shields of bull’s hide worked with gold lay scattered from one end of the field to the other. Heads and limbs kept dropping, cut away by swords and scimitars that threw back the sun. Chariots whose wheels and axles and boxes had broken came down with their horses dead and their tall standards toppling. Where the fighters had been killed, their wounded horses kept running, dragging the chariots behind them, and elsewhere fine horses with their traces still on and their bodies torn open ran on dragging nothing but the yoke. Single elephants with enormous strength in them were crushing chariots whole, with the driver and the team and the man. And out in the middle of the press, elephants caught the smell of the rut fluid running down the temples of other elephants and lifted their trunks and took the air again and again.
By the end of it the field was carpeted with dead elephants, killed by broad-headed shafts and come down with the wooden howdahs and the men who rode in them still attached. Others were crushed by bigger animals whose drivers pushed them into it, and went down with their standards and their riders. Great elephants with trunks like the trunk of Airavata put those trunks around chariot poles and snapped them. Where a chariot’s netting had already been torn away, the fighter inside was pulled out like a branch coming off a tree, taken by the hair, slammed against the ground, and left as something without a shape. Other elephants got tangled chariots caught on their bodies and ran in every direction dragging them and trumpeting, and what they looked like, Sanjaya said, was elephants of their own kind in a lake, hauling lotus stalks up out of the water. That was the field when the fifth day was still only half over: cavalry, infantry, great chariot fighters and standards, lying across it in every direction.
A key to reading this (names and references): Vrikodara is Bhima, the name meaning wolf-bellied, for his appetite and his digestion. The diadem-decked warrior is Arjuna, who wears the crown Indra gave him. The son of Subala is Shakuni; the ruler of the Sindhus is Jayadratha. The Gopas and the Gopayana force are the cowherd army, the same one given to Duryodhana before the war. The netting referred to here is the woven screen on a chariot that shields the fighter and the driver. Sanjaya’s remark that four of the senses stopped working follows Ganguli’s wording; the sense of it is that dust, noise, glare and fear between them took away sight, hearing, smell and touch.
The gist: The fifth day opens with Bhishma fighting for one reason, to keep Bhima away from Duryodhana’s brothers, and it degenerates until the weapons are gone and men are fighting with fists and knees. Then Arjuna comes for Bhishma behind the lion-tail standard, and the sound of Gandiva alone empties the Kaurava chariots: fighters climb down, cavalrymen dismount, infantry sit where they stand, and the whole army goes looking for the grandsire to hide behind. The day’s pairings are set, Arjuna against Bhishma and Drona against three at once, and lightning flashes in a sky with no clouds in it.
Noon of the fifth day: Satyaki’s horses bolt with a dead driver, Arjuna spares his teacher’s son, and Kripa carries Lakshmana out of Abhimanyu’s reach
Shikhandi went for Bhishma at speed, with Virata of the Matsyas beside him, and the man they were riding at was the finest bowman on the field and had never yet been beaten. Behind them the rest of the day sorted itself into pairs. Arjuna took on Drona and Kripa and Vikarna and a crowd of brave kings who were all great archers and all strong, and the ruler of the Sindhus besides, who had his friends and his kinsmen around him and a great many kings of the west and the south. Bhimasena went after Duryodhana, who is a formidable archer and was carrying a grudge, and after Duhsaha with him. Sahadeva went after two men who between them had never been beaten, Shakuni and the great chariot fighter Uluka, father and son, both of them bowmen of the first rank. Yudhishthira, whom Dhritarashtra’s son had cheated at dice, drove straight into the Kaurava elephant division. Nakula, son of Pandu and Madri, who has a way of wringing tears out of the men he fights, engaged the best chariot fighters of the Trigartas. Satyaki and Chekitana and Subhadra’s mighty son rode at Shalya and the Kaikeyas. Dhrishtaketu and the Rakshasa Ghatotkacha, neither of whom could be beaten in battle, went at the chariot division of Dhritarashtra’s sons. And the commander of the whole Pandava army, the great chariot fighter Dhrishtadyumna, took Drona, whose deeds that week had been terrible.
By the time the sun stood at the meridian and the sky was bright with it, the two armies had settled into killing each other. The chariots moved beautifully, if a man could stand to look at them that way: standards up, pennons streaming from the tops of them, gold worked into the bodies and tiger skins stretched over them. The shouts of men trying to break one another sounded like lions. The clash between the Srinjayas and the Kurus was ferocious, and Sanjaya called it wonderful as well as terrible. There were so many arrows in the air from every direction at once that he could no longer make out the sky, or the sun, or any of the directions, principal or intermediate. What he could see was light: the blue-lotus shine of polished darts, of bearded lances in flight, of well-tempered sabers and curved swords, of painted armor and of the ornaments the warriors wore, all of it throwing brightness up into the sky and out to the horizon. In places the field itself shone, because the bodies of kings were lying on it and kings shine like the moon and the sun. The great chariot fighters still moving through all that looked like planets crossing a sky.
Then Bhishma lost his temper and stopped Bhima where he stood, in front of the whole army. The arrows he used were fitted with golden wings, whetted on stone and rubbed with oil, and they went into Bhima and stayed there. Bhima threw a dart at him, a heavy one, moving like an angry snake, and Bhishma cut it out of the air with straight shafts while it was still coming, gold shaft and all, and then took a second broad-headed arrow and cut Bhima’s bow into two pieces. Satyaki came in fast to cover him and put a great many keen arrows into Bhishma, shot from a string pulled all the way back to the ear. Bhishma answered by aiming one extremely fierce shaft at the Vrishni hero’s driver and knocking him out of the box. With nobody holding the reins, Satyaki’s horses bolted. They had the speed of wind, or of thought, and they took him across the field at that speed with no way to turn them, and the whole Pandava army began to shout at once, a noise of pure alarm with words inside it: run, catch them, check the horses, go, go now. The shouting followed Yuyudhana’s chariot wherever the horses dragged it. And while every eye was on that, Bhishma went to work on the Pandava ranks the way Indra goes to work on the Danavas. The Panchalas and the Somakas were being killed where they stood, and they made a decision Sanjaya thought worth praising: they went at him anyway. Behind them came the rest, with Dhrishtadyumna in front, aiming to cut Duryodhana’s divisions apart, and from the other side Dhritarashtra’s warriors came on behind Bhishma and Drona, and a second battle started inside the first one.
King Virata put three arrows into Bhishma and three golden-winged ones into his horses. Then Drona’s son, who is a frightening archer with a steady hand, put six shafts into the wielder of Gandiva between the breasts. Arjuna cut Ashvatthama’s bow in half and drove five arrows deep into him in return. Losing his bow like that in front of everyone took Ashvatthama’s judgment away. He picked up a tougher bow and shot ninety sharp arrows into Arjuna and seventy into Krishna, who was holding the reins and had no shield but his own body. Arjuna’s eyes went red. He and Krishna were both breathing long and hot, and for a moment Arjuna simply stood and thought. Then he gripped the bow in his left hand, laid a number of fierce arrows on the string, perfectly straight ones made to take a life, and put them through Ashvatthama’s armor, and they drank his blood. He did not go down. He shot back the same kind of arrows and held his place, because his whole purpose in being there was to keep Bhishma alive, and the best warriors of the Kuru army openly applauded him for it, because he had taken on the two Krishnas at once and was still standing. Ashvatthama could do that. He fought fearlessly in the middle of any army, every day of that war, because Drona had given him every weapon there was, along with the methods for calling each one back.
The man in front of him was his own teacher’s son, Drona’s beloved boy, and above all a Brahmin, which made him someone Arjuna owed respect. Arjuna thought it through in those terms, and then he did what the thought required: he let Ashvatthama live. Vibhatsu turned away from the son of Bharadvaja’s line, and the man with the white horses went back to work elsewhere with that extraordinary speed of hand, and the Kaurava army began to come apart wherever he was. Duryodhana put ten arrows into Bhima, vulture-feathered, gold-worked, stone-whetted. Bhima picked up a tough, well-decorated bow and ten sharp arrows, drew to the ear, and put them into the Kuru king’s broad chest. The jewel Duryodhana wore there hung on threads of gold, and with the arrows standing all around it, it looked like the sun with the planets ringed about it. Duryodhana could not take it calmly, any more than a snake can take the sound of a man clapping his hands. He was angry, and he had an army to protect, and he shot back with a great many stone-whetted, golden-winged shafts of his own, and the two of them stood there tearing each other open and looked, at that moment, like a pair of gods.
Subhadra’s son had been busy the whole time. Abhimanyu put a number of sharp arrows into Chitrasena, seven into Purumitra, and seventy into Satyavrata, and then began, Sanjaya said, to dance on the field, which cost the Kauravas dearly. The three of them shot back, ten and nine and seven. Arjuna’s son, pierced and running with blood, cut Chitrasena’s great bow in half, opened his armor, and put an arrow through his chest. At that the princes of Dhritarashtra’s army, every one of them a heroic chariot fighter, came at the boy together, and he hit all of them with keen shafts, one after another, because there was no weapon he did not know. So the sons closed in and surrounded him, and he went on burning through the army like a fire in summer walking into a heap of dry grass, and while he did it he seemed to give off light.
That was when Lakshmana came for him. Dhritarashtra’s grandson saw what Abhimanyu was doing and went at him fast, and Abhimanyu, angry now, put six sharp arrows into Lakshmana, who wears auspicious marks on his body, and into his driver. Lakshmana answered with many keen shafts of his own, and Sanjaya called the exchange wonderful, two boys of the same age trading arrows in front of two armies. Then Abhimanyu killed all four of Lakshmana’s horses and his driver, and drove at him. Lakshmana, standing on a chariot that could not move, threw a dart at Abhimanyu’s chariot, a terrible-looking thing that came on like a snake, and Abhimanyu cut it apart in the air. Kripa reached them before the next exchange. He took Lakshmana up onto his own chariot and carried him out of the fight while both armies watched him do it. After that the conflict simply became general, every man reaching for the nearest life, the best archers of the Kaurava army and the best chariot fighters of the Pandava army killing each other with no thought of surviving it. The Srinjayas fought the Kurus with their hair loose, their armor gone, their chariots gone and their bows broken, using their bare arms. And into that Bhishma came with his celestial weapons and cut the Pandava host down, until the earth was covered over with fallen elephants and the men who had guided them, with horses, with chariot fighters and with cavalry.
A key to reading this (names and references): Yuyudhana is Satyaki’s other name, and he is called the Vrishni hero because he belongs to Krishna’s clan. Vibhatsu is Arjuna. The phrase “the two Krishnas” means Krishna and Arjuna together, Arjuna being called Krishna as well. Lakshmana is Duryodhana’s son and so Dhritarashtra’s grandson; he is Abhimanyu’s contemporary, and the two of them will meet again on the day of the wheel array. Ashvatthama is called the son of Bharadvaja’s line because Drona is Bharadvaja’s son. One textual oddity is worth flagging: at the close of the Bhima and Duryodhana exchange Ganguli’s text calls the pair of them both sons of Dhritarashtra, which can only be a slip, since Bhima is Pandu’s son; the telling here calls them simply the two of them.
The gist: At noon on the fifth day the pairings are set, and Bhishma takes the two men who matter most: he cuts Bhima’s bow in half, then kills Satyaki’s charioteer so that Satyaki’s horses bolt across the battlefield with the whole Pandava army running behind them shouting at the horses. Ashvatthama then puts ninety arrows into Arjuna and seventy into Krishna, and Arjuna, after opening his armor and drawing blood, lets him live because he is a teacher’s son and a Brahmin. The day ends with Abhimanyu holding off Chitrasena, Purumitra and Satyavrata at once, and with Kripa lifting Duryodhana’s son Lakshmana onto his own chariot to get him away from the boy alive.
Ten sons and the one man with a sacrificial stake on his banner, the fifth sunset, and a crane drawn up against a crocodile at dawn
There was a particular thing Satyaki could do with his hands that men came out of their own fighting to watch. The bow he carried that day was built to take a strain that would have splintered an ordinary stave, and he drew it, reached, nocked, and loosed in what looked to a spectator like a single unbroken motion, so that the arrows left him in a continuous stream rather than one at a time. Sanjaya, reporting it to the blind king, reached for the only image that fitted: a bank of monsoon cloud standing over a field and letting down its water all at once. The arrows themselves were fletched and came on like snakes bred for their poison. Duryodhana watched that one man burning through his ranks and answered the way a king answers, by spending men. He sent ten thousand chariots. Satyaki met them with celestial weapons and killed every one of those great chariot warriors, and when the work was done he did the thing that made the rest of the day inevitable: he went looking for Bhurishravas.
Bhurishravas was the son of Somadatta and the pride of that branch of the Kuru house, and he had been watching the Dhartarashtra line come apart under Yuyudhana’s hands with the particular rage of a man whose relatives are dying in front of him. He drew a bow whose color was the color of Indra’s own and put thousands of shafts into the air, and his hands were as quick as Satyaki’s. The difference showed at once in the men behind them. The warriors who had been following Satyaki could not stand under that fall of arrows. They broke and ran in every direction, and left the invincible Satyaki standing alone in the middle of the field. His ten sons saw it happen. They were grown men and great chariot warriors in their own right, armored, carrying their chosen weapons, each with his own standard above him, and they rode together to where Bhurishravas stood under the banner with the sacrificial stake on it. Their challenge was courteous and it was also a death sentence on somebody. Kinsman of the Kauravas, they said, man of great strength, come and fight us, all of us together or each of us in turn. Beat us and the fame is yours. Beat you and the satisfaction is ours.
Bhurishravas looked at the ten of them drawn up in front of him and told them they had spoken well. If that was what they wanted, he said, then let them come carefully and come all at once, because he intended to kill every one of them. It was the third watch of the day, the long declining afternoon, when that fight began, ten against one. They covered him the way rain clouds cover the shoulder of a mountain. He cut their arrows out of the air before the arrows could reach him, and those shafts were no light things; Sanjaya called them the darts of Death and said they had the brightness of the thunderbolt in them. The ten closed the ring and tried to finish him inside it. Somadatta’s son, working in a cold fury, cut their bows first and then their heads, and they came down out of their chariots one after another the way great trees come down when lightning takes them. Satyaki had been fighting elsewhere in that press. When he saw his sons lying in the dust he made a sound that carried over the field and drove straight at the man who had killed them. The two chariots met and locked. Each of them shot the other’s horses. Both men came down onto the ground, took up long curved swords and good shields, and squared off on foot, and for a moment every eye near them was on the two of them standing there. The moment did not finish. Bhimasena drove up at speed and lifted Satyaki bodily onto his own chariot, and Duryodhana did exactly the same for Bhurishravas, in full view of every bowman on that part of the field, so that the duel ended with both men alive and neither of them satisfied.
The rest of the fifth day belonged to Arjuna. While Satyaki and Bhurishravas were being carried out of each other’s reach, the Pandavas had gone at Bhishma again, and when the sun turned red Arjuna put out an effort that killed twenty-five thousand great chariot warriors. Duryodhana had pushed them forward specifically to bring Partha down, and they died before they could close with him, in the way moths die when they reach a fire. The Matsyas and the Kekayas, all of them trained men, then formed a ring around Arjuna and around his son Abhimanyu to hold the ground they had won. Then the sun went, and the men left on the field stopped being able to tell friend from enemy. At twilight Bhishma, whose animals were spent, gave the order to withdraw, and both armies walked back to their camps carrying the particular fear that comes after a day like that one, and rested the night the way the rules of war prescribe.
They were up before light on the sixth morning. The noise of an army arming itself is unmistakable: chariots being made ready, elephants being harnessed and caparisoned, infantry buckling armor, horses, and over all of it the conches and the drums until nothing else could be heard anywhere on that plain. Yudhishthira came to Dhrishtadyumna and asked him for the array called Makara, the crocodile, the one that scorches whatever it closes on. Dhrishtadyumna gave the order and the shape assembled itself. Drupada and Arjuna made its head. Sahadeva and Nakula were its two eyes. Bhima was the beak. In the neck stood Abhimanyu, the sons of Draupadi, the Rakshasa Ghatotkacha, Satyaki, and Yudhishthira himself. Virata, who commanded a large division, formed the back, with Dhrishtadyumna and a heavy force behind him. The five Kekaya brothers were the left wing; Dhrishtaketu and Chekitana held the right. The two feet were Kuntibhoja and Shatanika with a great body of troops, and in the tail stood Shikhandi surrounded by the Somakas, and Iravan. Armored at dawn, standards up, umbrellas raised, their weapons whetted and catching the first light, they went forward at the Kauravas.
Bhishma saw the crocodile coming and drew his own army up as a crane. Drona was its beak. Ashvatthama and Kripa were its eyes. Kritavarma, with the ruler of the Kambojas and the Bahlikas, held the head. In the neck stood Surasena and Duryodhana with many kings around him. The lord of Pragjyotisha, Bhagadatta, joined by the Madras, the Sauviras and the Kekayas and backed by a large force, stood in the breast. Susharma, king of Prasthala, armored and with his own troops, took the left wing; the Tusharas, the Yavanas and the Shakas, together with the Chulikas, took the right. In the rear, covering one another, stood Shrutayus and Shatayus and the son of Somadatta. The sun was up when the two arrays met. Elephants went at elephants, horsemen at horsemen, chariots at chariots and at elephants too; men on chariots rode down men on elephants, men on elephants rode at cavalry, chariots ran into infantry and cavalry into infantry, and every man on that plain went at whoever stood in front of him. The Pandava army, with Bhima and Arjuna and the twins holding it, looked like a night sky full of stars, and the Kaurava army, with Bhishma and Kripa and Drona and Shalya and Duryodhana in it, looked like the same sky with the planets in it. Bhima picked Drona out of that crowd and drove his fast horses straight at the division of Bharadvaja’s son. Drona met him with nine arrows made entirely of iron, aimed at the vital places, and put them deep. Bhima, bleeding, answered by sending Drona’s charioteer to the house of Yama. Drona took up his own reins, and with the reins in one hand he began to burn through the Pandava army the way fire goes through a heap of cotton. The Srinjayas and the Kekayas broke in front of him and ran. On the other side of the field the Kaurava troops, cut about by Bhima and Arjuna, lost their senses where they stood. Sanjaya told the king that the distress that day fell on both armies equally, and that he had watched men fight on with no regard at all for their own lives, each side cutting the other’s weapons out of the air.
A key to reading this (names and arrays): Yuyudhana is Satyaki’s other name, and the Vrishni hero is the same man again. Bhurishravas is the son of Somadatta; the device on his banner is the yupa, the post to which the animal is tied at a sacrifice, which is why the text keeps calling him the man with the sacrificial stake, and which advertises his house as a house of sacrificers. An array is named for the creature whose shape it takes, and the poet describes it by naming who stands at the beak, the eyes, the neck, the wings, the feet and the tail, which is how a listener is meant to picture the whole formation at once. The lord of Pragjyotisha is Bhagadatta, who fights from the back of an elephant. Partha’s son here is Abhimanyu. The son of Somadatta listed in the rear of the crane array is this same Bhurishravas.
The gist: The fifth day ends on Satyaki’s household. He cuts apart the ten thousand chariots Duryodhana throws at him, reaches Bhurishravas, and is abandoned by his own followers; his ten sons then challenge Bhurishravas and are beheaded one after another through the long afternoon. Father and killer end up on the ground with swords in their hands, and Bhima and Duryodhana each haul one of them away before either can finish it. Arjuna burns twenty-five thousand chariot warriors before dark, and Bhishma closes the day because his animals are spent. At dawn on the sixth day Yudhishthira has the crocodile array built and Bhishma answers it with a crane; the day opens with Bhima killing Drona’s charioteer, and with Drona taking his own reins and setting the Pandava army alight.
A blind king takes inventory of his own army, and out on the field Bhima steps down from his chariot and walks into the enemy with a mace
Dhritarashtra interrupted the battle report to make a case, and the case was about his army. It had every excellence, he said. It was made of many kinds of troops and its efficiency was enormous. It had been drawn up according to the science of arrays, which ought to have made it irresistible. It was attached to him, devoted to him, obedient, and free of the two vices that ruin a camp, drink and licentiousness. Its courage had been tested before. His soldiers were neither elderly nor boys, neither thin nor fat, quick in their habits, well made, strongly built, free of disease. They were armored. They were properly armed. They had been drilled in every weapon there was: swords, bare hands, maces, lances, sabers, darts, iron clubs, short arrows, javelins, mallets. They could mount an elephant and come down off one, advance and give ground, strike where a strike told, march and withdraw. Their handling of elephants and horses and chariots had been tested more times than he could count. And every one of them, he insisted, had been examined before being taken on and paid a wage, so that not one of them stood in that line because of his birth or because somebody had favored him or because he was related to somebody or attached to somebody or of the right blood. They were respectable men and honest men. Their families had been well treated and kept content. Many kindnesses had been done them. They were famous men, and their nerve was extraordinary.
Then the old king reached for the image he wanted. Over and above the soldiers, he said, stood commanders who were quick and celebrated and looked like the guardians of the four directions, men whose names were known across the earth, and beside them innumerable Kshatriyas of the highest reputation who had come in of their own choice with their own troops behind them. His army was an ocean fed by countless rivers running in from every direction. Its elephants were in it, and chariots that had no wings and still moved like things that flew. The soldiers were the water of that ocean, the horses and the other animals were its terrible waves, the swords and maces and darts and arrows and lances lay piled across it like oars, and the running horses and elephants in their gold cloth and gems were the winds that lashed it into fury. Shoreless, roaring, that was his host. Drona guarded it, and Bhishma, and Kritavarma and Kripa and Duhshasana and the men behind Jayadratha, and Bhagadatta and Vikarna and Drona’s son and Shakuni and Bahlika and a hundred more. And it was being butchered. Neither men nor the blessed sages of old, he said, had ever seen such preparations made on earth, and this host, assembled by the book and bound to him by wealth, was dying in the field, and what could that be except the working of fate. All of it seemed to him unnatural. Vidura had told him, over and over, what was useful and what was right, and his wicked-minded son had refused to hear it, and Dhritarashtra was now fairly sure that his high-souled brother had seen all of this coming and had given his counsel because he had seen it. Or else, he said, the whole of it down to the last detail had been arranged beforehand by Him, since what the Creator ordains happens as ordained and cannot happen any other way.
Sanjaya had listened to that speech to its end, and he answered it without softening anything. This calamity, he told the king, has overtaken you through your own fault. The flaws you could see in that unrighteous treatment of the Pandavas were flaws Duryodhana could not see. The dice match happened through your fault. This war happened through your fault. You committed the sin, so eat the fruit of it, here and hereafter, because a man eats what he himself has cooked. Then, having said it, he told the king to be calm and listen, and went back to the field. Bhima had broken the great array with his arrows and gone straight at the younger brothers of Duryodhana, and Sanjaya named them as they closed: Duhshasana, Durvishaha, Duhsaha, Durmada, Jaya, Jayasena, Vikarna, Chitrasena, Sudarshana, Charuchitra, Suvarman, Dushkarna, Karna, and a crowd of other great chariot warriors of that house. They saw him in the middle of them and said it out loud to each other: kings, let us take this one’s life. So the son of Pritha stood ringed by cousins who had all agreed to kill him, looking, Sanjaya said, like the sun at the end of a world age with the malignant planets crowded around it. Fear did not get into him, any more than it got into Indra when the Danavas closed on him in the old war. Thousands of chariot warriors in full armor buried that single man under their arrows. He ignored the sons of Dhritarashtra entirely and killed the best of the men fighting around them, off chariots, off elephants, off horses. Then, having worked out exactly what his cousins intended, he decided to kill all of them, and to do it he stepped down off his chariot, took up his mace, and began to walk into that sea of troops on foot.
Dhrishtadyumna was engaged with Drona when he heard. He broke off, left the preceptor standing, and drove hard toward the place where Shakuni was posted, slipping past uncountable numbers of Kaurava troops on the way, and what he found was Bhima’s chariot standing empty. Vishoka was still on it, holding the horses. The sight took the strength out of Dhrishtadyumna. His voice went thick and he had to breathe between the words, and what he asked was: where is Bhima, who is dear to me as my own life. Vishoka joined his hands and answered. The mighty son of Pandu has gone alone into that host that looks like the ocean, after ordering me to wait here for him. He said it cheerfully. He said, charioteer, hold the horses and wait a little while, until I have killed the men who mean to kill me. And when our troops saw him going in with the mace in his hand they were delighted, and your friend broke their great array, prince, and went inside it. Dhrishtadyumna heard that out and gave his answer to the charioteer standing on the field. What use is my life to me today, he said, if I forget what I owe the Pandavas and leave Bhima in the middle of a battle. If I go back today without him, what will the Kshatriyas say of me, when they hear that Bhima went alone into a hostile array and made a single opening in it while I stood by? The gods with Indra at their head send evil after the man who abandons his companions and walks home unhurt. Bhima is my friend and my kinsman, he is devoted to me, and I am devoted to him. So I will go where Bhima has gone, and you will see me kill the enemy the way Vasava kills the Danavas. Then he went in through the middle of the Kaurava host, following the road Bhima had opened, which was marked for him by elephants crushed flat with a mace. He came out of that press in sight of Bhima, who was consuming whole ranks and dropping Kshatriyas the way a storm drops rows of trees, and around him chariot men and horsemen and foot soldiers and elephant riders were crying out as they died. Every trained man in that part of the Kaurava army had by then surrounded Vrikodara and was pouring arrows into him from all sides. Dhrishtadyumna saw what he had come for: the greatest of all wielders of weapons on foot in the open, cut about with shafts, spitting the poison of his own anger, mace in hand, looking like the Destroyer at the dissolution of everything. He drove to him and steadied him by simply being there. He took him up onto his chariot, pulled the arrows out of his limbs one by one, and held him, in the middle of the enemy.
Duryodhana went to his brothers as soon as he saw it. Drupada’s son of wicked soul has joined Bhimasena, he told them, so let us go at him together and kill him, and let the enemy not come looking for our ranks. They came with their weapons up, ordered forward by their eldest brother and unable to stomach the sight any longer, and Sanjaya compared them to comets at the end of the world. They shook the ground with the twang of their bowstrings and the rattle of their wheels and covered Drupada’s son the way clouds cover the breast of a mountain with rain. Dhrishtadyumna, who knew every mode of warfare, did not waver under it. Instead the young man invoked the weapon called Pramohana, and their senses went out of them. Minds and strength both failed, and the Kauravas scattered in all directions with their horses and elephants and chariots, seeing the king’s brothers swooning like men whose hour had come. At that moment Drona reached Drupada and put three fierce shafts into him, and Drupada, deeply hurt and remembering an old hatred, left the field. Drona blew his conch over that small victory and the sound frightened the Somakas. Then word came to him that the princes were lying stupefied by the Pramohana weapon, and he broke off at once to save them, and found Dhrishtadyumna and Bhima working through the field and his own princes senseless on the ground. He took up the weapon called Prajna and cancelled the Pramohana with it, and when their senses came back the sons of Dhritarashtra went straight back at Bhima and Prishata’s son. By then Yudhishthira had grown anxious in his own lines. Let twelve brave chariot warriors in armor, he said, with Subhadra’s son at their head, follow the track of Bhima and Prishata’s son as hard as they can, and bring me news of those two, because my heart will not settle. The men said yes and went forward with the sun standing at the meridian: the Kaikeyas, the sons of Draupadi, Dhrishtaketu, a large force behind them and Abhimanyu leading, formed into the array called Suchimukha, the needle’s mouth, and they drove into the Kaurava chariot division. That part of the army had already been frightened out of its wits by Bhima and stunned by Dhrishtadyumna, and it could not hold the rush. The bowmen with the gold-worked standards cut their way through and went for the two men they had come to bring out, and Bhima saw them coming and went on knocking down ranks with fresh appetite.
Dhrishtadyumna saw something else coming. His own teacher was bearing down on him at speed, and the prince of Panchala lost interest in killing Duryodhana’s brothers. He had Vrikodara transferred to the chariot of the king of the Kaikeyas and turned in a rage on Drona, who is master of the arrow and of every other weapon. Bharadvaja’s son, in a rage of his own, cut the bow out of his hands with one broad-headed shaft as he came, and then, remembering whose bread he ate and wanting to do Duryodhana good service, sent hundreds of arrows after him. Dhrishtadyumna took up a second bow and answered with seventy shafts whetted on stone and winged with gold, all of them into Drona. Drona cut that bow too, sent his four horses to Yama’s house with four arrows, and killed his charioteer with a broad-headed shaft. The chariot was finished. Dhrishtadyumna jumped down from it and climbed up onto Abhimanyu’s, and from there, with Bhima and Prishata’s son both watching, Drona set about the Pandava army and made all of it shake, chariots and elephants and horses together. The great warriors on that side could not stop the flight once it started. Cut apart by Drona’s sharp arrows, the whole formation began to turn on itself and eddy in place like a sea with a storm under it, and the Kaurava troops, watching their preceptor burn through the ranks in front of him, set up a shout and called out his name.
A key to reading this (names and weapons): One of the brothers who close around Bhima is called Karna, and he is a son of Dhritarashtra, a different man from Karna the son of the charioteer; a brother named Dushkarna stands in the same list. Prishata’s son means Dhrishtadyumna; Prishata was Drupada’s father, so the phrase strictly describes a grandson, and the poem uses it constantly. Vishoka is Bhima’s charioteer. Pramohana is the weapon that takes a man’s senses away and Prajna is the weapon that gives them back, which is how Drona rescues the princes. Suchimukha means needle’s mouth, a thin pointed formation designed to punch a hole in an enemy line and pour men through it. The old hatred Drupada remembers when Drona wounds him goes back to a boyhood friendship and the humiliation that followed it, and it is enough to take him off the field. The bread Drona remembers eating is the bond that keeps him fighting on Duryodhana’s side against his own judgment.
The gist: Halfway through the sixth day the story goes back to Hastinapura, where the blind king recites every virtue of his own army, calls it an ocean fed by rivers, and then asks why such a host is being cut to pieces, answering himself with fate and with the memory of Vidura’s ignored advice. Sanjaya tells him plainly that the fault is his. Back on the field, Bhima steps off his chariot and walks into the Kaurava array on foot with his mace; Dhrishtadyumna finds the empty chariot and the weeping charioteer, follows the road of crushed elephants, pulls the arrows out of Bhima and takes him up. He stuns Duryodhana’s brothers with the Pramohana weapon, Drona wakes them with the Prajna, and by noon the preceptor has taken Dhrishtadyumna’s bow, horses and driver, and set the Pandava army spinning.
A king comes back to his senses, an old agreement among brothers, and a field that turns into an ocean of blood
Duryodhana came out of the dark quietly, the way men do, and the first thing he understood was that Bhima was still there. He got his hands on his bow again and began to answer him, shower for shower, and his brothers closed around him as they always did, all of them great chariot warriors, all of them fighting well. Bhima had a chariot again by now. He climbed onto it, took up a stiff bow of the hardest kind, a bow bound in gold and made for taking lives, and drove straight at the place where the sons of Dhritarashtra were standing, and began to put arrows through them. Duryodhana answered with a single long shaft, very sharp, and put it into Bhima at the vitals. Bhima felt it go in. His eyes went red, and he dragged his own bowstring back by main force and struck his cousin three times, twice in the arms and once across the chest. Duryodhana did not move. He stood on his chariot the way a young mountain stands, and the men around him saw it and took heart from it, because a king who will not step back is worth a division.
What his younger brothers saw was different. They saw the two of them locked together and hammering at each other, and they remembered the arrangement they had made among themselves about Vrikodara, the one they had talked over privately and settled on, that they would take him together and that any of them might die doing it. They came in as a body. Bhima turned on them the way one bull elephant turns on another that has charged him from the flank, and the first to feel it was Chitrasena, who took a long arrow and reeled; and then the rest of them, one after another, as Bhima worked down the line with shafts that had gold in their feathers and terrible speed in them. At noon that day Yudhishthira had sent twelve chariot warriors out with Subhadra’s son at their head, telling them to follow Bhima and Dhrishtadyumna and find out what had become of them, because his heart would not settle. Those twelve now came up behind Bhima. The sons of Dhritarashtra looked up and saw them coming on their chariots, burning like the sun, burning like fire, gold on their arms and gold on their standards, and they let go of Bhima and drew off. The sons of Kunti watched them go and found that they could not bear it, that these men should walk out of this particular fight alive.
So Abhimanyu went after them with Bhima beside him, and hurt them as they ran. That was the thing the Kaurava commanders could not allow to stand, because of where it was happening. Abhimanyu and Bhima and the son of Prishata had worked their way into the very middle of the Kaurava troops, three men deep inside an army that outnumbered them past arithmetic, and the great chariot warriors of that army, Duryodhana among them, took up their bows and whipped their fast horses toward that spot to close the hole. So in the afternoon of that day the fighting there became something the men who lived through it talked about afterward. Abhimanyu killed Vikarna’s horses first and then put twenty five small arrows into Vikarna himself. Vikarna left the dead chariot and swung up onto Chitrasena’s, and Arjuna’s son covered the two brothers where they stood together on the one chariot, arrows coming down on them like weather. Durjaya and Vikarna put five shafts into him, iron all the way through, and he did not shift his feet. He stood there the way Meru stands. Off to one side Duhshasana had taken on all five of the Kekaya brothers at once, and men turned their heads to watch it. Nearer, the five sons of Draupadi came at Duryodhana in a fury, and each of them put three arrows into him, and he answered each of them with sharp shafts of his own, and stood bathed in his own blood with the red running down him like a hillside in the rains when the water comes down mixed with red chalk.
All this time Bhishma was moving through the Pandava army the way a herdsman moves through cattle with a stick in his hand, and from the right of the line came the sound of Gandiva, where Partha was doing what Partha did. In that part of the field the headless trunks stood up out of the press by thousands, Kaurava and Pandava together, upright for a moment and then gone. And the field itself had stopped being a field. It had become an ocean: the water of it was blood, the eddies in it were the arrows men were shooting, the islands in it were elephants, the waves were horses, and the boats by which brave men crossed it were their chariots. Hundreds and thousands of men lay in that water with their arms cut away and their armor gone and their bodies ruined past recognizing. Elephants lay dead in their own blood in such numbers that the ground looked as though hills had been scattered over it. And Sanjaya, telling it afterward to a blind king who had asked for all of it, said that the strangest sight of that whole afternoon was a simple one: in neither army, on neither side, was there a single man who did not want to fight.
A key to reading this (names and references): Vrikodara, wolf-belly, is one of Bhima’s names. Partha is Arjuna. The son of Prishata is Dhrishtadyumna; Prishata was Drupada’s father, and the epic keeps calling Drupada’s son by the grandfather’s name. The twelve chariot warriors mentioned here are the ones Yudhishthira sent out at midday in the previous scene, when he lost sight of Bhima and Dhrishtadyumna inside the Kaurava array. About the brothers’ arrangement against Bhima the text says only that they had made it beforehand; it gives neither the occasion nor the terms. Vikarna is the one son of Dhritarashtra who stood up in the assembly hall and said that Draupadi had been won unlawfully, which is worth remembering while watching Abhimanyu take his chariot apart.
The gist: Duryodhana wakes from the swoon Bhima put him in and goes straight back at him, takes three arrows in the arms and chest and refuses to give ground. His brothers fall on Bhima together, honoring a private agreement to bring him down as a group, and break off only when Abhimanyu arrives behind him with the twelve chariots Yudhishthira sent at noon. The afternoon that follows belongs to the young men: Abhimanyu unhorsing Vikarna and standing like Meru under five iron shafts, Duhshasana against five Kekaya brothers, and Draupadi’s five sons putting Duryodhana in a coat of his own blood. By the end of it the field has turned into an ocean with elephants for islands and chariots for boats, and not one man in either army is willing to leave it.
The hour Bhima had waited years for: thirty-six arrows, an elephant standard cut out of the sky, and the promise Bhishma made that night
The sun went red, and Duryodhana came looking for Bhima to kill him. Bhima watched him come, saw the old hatred riding on the man’s face, and spoke before either of them shot. The hour has come, he said, that I have wanted for all these years. If you do not leave this battle today I will kill you today. Killing you, I will take the grief out of Kunti and out of Draupadi, and all the misery that was ours in the woods will end with you. You were swollen with pride once and you humiliated the sons of Pandu; look now, son of Gandhari, at what that behavior has ripened into. You listened to Karna and you listened to the son of Suvala, you reckoned the Pandavas at nothing, and you did to them exactly what you had promised yourself you would do. Krishna came and asked you for peace and you brushed him aside. You sent Uluka to us with your messages and you were cheerful while you did it. For all of that I am going to kill you today, and your kinsmen with you.
Then he bent the bow and drew it again and again and took up arrows that flashed like lightning, and sent thirty-six of them at Duryodhana at once, arrows that looked like the flames of a fire in full burn and went as straight as thunderbolts. Two of them took Duryodhana’s bow. Two more took his driver. Four went into his four horses and sent them to Yama. Two, shot hard, cut the umbrella off that beautiful chariot, and three cut down the standard, and when it was cut Bhima put his head back and roared so that his cousin would be sure to hear it. Every king on that part of the field saw the standard of the lord of the Kurus come down, the one with the elephant on it, studded with gems, blazing like the sun, falling out of the air like lightning coming out of a cloud. Then Bhima put ten arrows into Duryodhana himself, smiling while he did it, the way a mahout works a big tusker with the hook. Jayadratha, the mighty king of the Sindhus, brought a crowd of brave men up onto Duryodhana’s flank to cover him. Kripa brought his own chariot alongside and got the king onto it, and Duryodhana, pierced deep and in serious pain, sat down on the floor of that chariot. And Jayadratha, wanting Bhima dead for it, ringed him around with several thousand chariots.
Dhrishtaketu came into that ring, and Abhimanyu came, and the Kekayas, and the sons of Draupadi, and they met the sons of Dhritarashtra head on. Abhimanyu put five straight shafts into each of them, arrows off that excellent bow of his that came like the bolts of heaven or like Death arriving in person. They could not take it calmly. They poured arrows down on Subhadra’s son the way rain clouds pour on the flanks of Meru, and he stood inside the downpour and worked, and made every one of the king’s brothers shake the way the Asuras shook when Indra came at them with the thunderbolt in his fist. Then he chose Vikarna again. Fourteen broad-headed shafts went out, fierce, looking like snakes with poison in them, and Abhimanyu seemed to be dancing as he shot: the standard came off Vikarna’s chariot, the driver went down, the horses went down. Then more arrows, well tempered, dead straight, made to go through any armor a man could buy. They had kanka feathers on them, and they passed through Vikarna’s body and buried themselves in the ground beyond him like snakes going into a hole, hissing; and the ones with gold on their points and wings, wet with his blood, looked as though they were spitting that blood back onto the earth.
His full brothers saw Vikarna standing there full of holes and came for the men around Subhadra’s son, and the two lines of cousins closed and began shooting into each other. Durmukha put five shafts into Shrutakarman, took his standard down with a single arrow, put seven into his driver, then came in close and killed his horses with half a dozen, wind-fast horses in golden armor, and dropped the driver too. Shrutakarman, standing on a chariot that could no longer move, threw a dart that burned as it went like a meteor coming in, and it went through Durmukha’s hard mail and on into the ground. Sutasoma saw his brother stranded and pulled him up onto his own chariot in front of both armies. Shrutakirti went for Jayatsena meaning to kill him, and Jayatsena, smiling, cut Shrutakirti’s bow in half with one horseshoe-headed arrow while he was still drawing it. Shatanika saw his own brother’s bow cut and came up roaring like a lion, over and over, and drew hard and put ten arrows into Jayatsena and shouted like an elephant in rut, and then put one more, a shaft that would go through any armor, deep into Jayatsena’s chest. Dushkarna was standing near his brother and he cut Shatanika’s bow and the arrow on it at a stroke. Shatanika picked up another bow, one built to take a heavy pull, laid a handful of sharp arrows on it, told Dushkarna to wait, wait, with Jayatsena listening, and sent them into him like so many snakes. One arrow took Dushkarna’s bow. Two took his driver. Seven went into Dushkarna. Twelve killed every one of his horses, quick as thought and colored like nothing else on that field. And then one broad-headed arrow, aimed well and traveling fast, went deep into his chest, and he came down like a tree taken by lightning. Five great chariot warriors closed on Shatanika to kill him for it and stood over him pouring arrows down, and the five Kekaya brothers came in furious to get him out; and seeing them come, the sons of Dhritarashtra went at them the way elephants go at elephants. Durmukha and Durjaya and young Durmarshana, Shatranjaya and Shatrusha, all of them known men, all of them in a rage, went at the five Kekayas. Their chariots were like walled towns, their horses were dressed in ornaments, their standards were bright and various, their bows were good and their mail was beautiful, and they went into the enemy army the way lions go from one forest into the next. The fight they made lasted a short time, around sunset, and in that short time it enlarged the kingdom of Yama considerably: chariot fighters and horsemen lay strewn over that ground by thousands. And Bhishma, angry now, began cutting into the Pandava troops with his straight shafts and sending the Panchalas down to Yama’s house one after another, and when he had broken their ranks he pulled his own troops back and went to his camp. Yudhishthira found Dhrishtadyumna and Vrikodara alive at the end of it. He smelled their heads, and went to his tents happy.
Both armies came in bloody that night and rested as the rule required, and praised each other for what they had done that day, and were seen again in armor before long, wanting more of it. Duryodhana came to the grandsire with the blood still running down him and his mind full of the afternoon. Our troops are fierce and frightening, he said, and they carry standards past counting, and they are properly arrayed. And still the brave chariot warriors of the Pandavas got inside our array, cut up our men, killed them, and came out untouched. They made fools of all of us and they won great fame doing it. Bhima got into our Makara array, which is as strong as the thunderbolt, and hurt me with those terrible shafts of his, every one of them like the rod of Death. When I saw him in his rage, king, I lost my senses, and I have not got my peace of mind back even now. By your grace, you who are firm in truth, I want victory, and I want the sons of Pandu dead. Bhishma understood that the man in front of him was being eaten by grief. He laughed, though there was no cheer anywhere in him, and answered. Prince, he said, I go into their army with everything I have and my whole soul in it, wanting to hand you victory and the joy of it. I do not pretend with you, not even a little. The men who have made themselves allies of the Pandavas in this war are fierce and there are many of them: great chariot warriors of great name, very brave, finished in arms, men who do not tire and who vomit out their anger as they come. They hate you and they are strong and they will not be beaten easily. Even so I will fight them with my whole soul and throw my life away doing it. For your sake, today, in battle, my own life will be spent recklessly. For your sake I would burn up all the worlds with the gods in them and the Daityas too, so what are these enemies of yours standing here. I will fight the Pandavas, king, and I will do everything that pleases you. Duryodhana heard that and filled up with confidence, and his heart went light. He gave the order cheerfully to every division and every king on his side: advance. And the army moved, chariots and horses and foot soldiers and elephants, a huge force carrying every kind of weapon and thoroughly pleased with itself, and it looked magnificent on that ground. The big tuskers stood in masses and were handled well and shone all across the field. Kings skilled in one weapon or another rode visible among the troops. The dust those chariots and elephants and horses and men raised as they were walked across the field came up red as the morning sun and beautiful, and hid the sun’s own rays. The banners on the chariots and the elephants waved and traveled along the sky and looked like lightning going through clouds. The bowstrings of all those kings being pulled made a noise so loud and so savage that it was like the sea when the gods and the great Asuras churned it in the Krita age. And the army of Dhritarashtra’s sons, proud of itself, full of men of every color and shape, shouting like that, able to kill anything in front of it, looked like the cloud banks that pile up at the end of a Yuga.
A key to reading this (names and references): The son of Suvala is Shakuni. Uluka is Shakuni’s son, the messenger Duryodhana sent to the Pandava camp before the war with a set of deliberate insults. The Makara array is the crocodile-shaped formation the Kauravas used on this sixth day. Shrutakarman, Shrutakirti, Shatanika and Sutasoma are sons of Draupadi; Durmukha, Durjaya, Durmarshana, Shatranjaya, Shatrusha, Jayatsena, Dushkarna and Vikarna are sons of Dhritarashtra, which is why this stretch of the battle reads like a family being taken apart from both ends. Smelling the head was the period’s most intimate gesture of affection and blessing, which is what Yudhishthira does to Dhrishtadyumna and Bhima when he finds them alive. The churning of the ocean by gods and Asuras in the Krita age is the epic’s standard measure for a noise larger than anything in the present.
The gist: With the sun going red, Duryodhana comes for Bhima and gets the speech Bhima has been carrying since the dice hall: the humiliation, the forest years, the peace embassy he waved away, Uluka’s errand. Then thirty-six arrows, a dead team, a cut umbrella, and the elephant standard of the king of the Kurus falling out of the air, after which Kripa has to carry a wounded Duryodhana off on his own chariot. What follows is cousin against cousin, Draupadi’s sons against Dhritarashtra’s, and Shatanika killing Dushkarna in front of his brother. Bhishma breaks the Pandava line at sunset and goes to camp. That night Duryodhana admits he has not been right since Bhima got inside the crocodile array, and Bhishma, laughing without any cheer in it, promises to spend his own life the next day, which is the sentence the rest of this chapter is built on.
Mandala and Vajra: a healing herb, an array counted out in sevens, and Shankha falling in front of his father
Duryodhana had come off the field that evening with his wounds still open and his mind somewhere else entirely, and it was the grandsire who sent for him. Bhishma spoke to him the way a man speaks to a boy he has carried, and he began with an inventory, because an inventory is the one comfort a frightened king will accept. Myself, he said, and Drona, and Shalya, and Kritavarma of the Satvata line, and Ashvatthama, and Vikarna, and Bhagadatta, and the son of Subala, and Vinda and Anuvinda of Avanti, and Bahlika with his Bahlikas, and the mighty king of the Trigartas, and the unconquerable lord of the Magadhas, and Brihadbala the king of the Kosalas, and Chitrasena and Vivimshati. Behind those names he set thousands of chariot warriors under tall standards, horses bred in every country with good riders on them, elephants in rut with the juice running down their mouths and cheeks, and foot soldiers born in a dozen realms carrying every sort of weapon. All of these, he said, are ready to put down their lives for you, and to my mind they are equal to beating the gods. Then he did the harder thing and told the boy the truth in the same breath. The Pandavas cannot be conquered, he said, not by the gods with Indra at their head. They have Vasudeva on their side, and in prowess they match the great Indra himself. As for me, I will always do what you tell me to do. Either I will beat the Pandavas in this war, or they will beat me. He finished, and then he gave his grandnephew an excellent herb of great potency for the wounds, and the wounds closed.
At dawn the sky came up clean, and Bhishma, who knew every array a field has ever held, drew his troops up himself in the one called Mandala, and it stood there bristling like a thicket of blades. It had the best of the warriors in it, and tuskers, and infantry, and thousands of chariots ringed it on every side along with great bodies of horsemen carrying swords and lances. The arithmetic of it was the frightening part. Near every elephant seven chariots were set, and near every chariot seven horsemen, and behind every horseman seven bowmen, and behind every bowman seven men with shields, so that the whole host was knotted into itself and there was no seam anywhere for an enemy to open. Ten thousand horse, ten thousand elephants and ten thousand chariots stood around the grandsire with Chitrasena and the other sons of Dhritarashtra in armor among them, and while they guarded Bhishma, Bhishma in his turn was guarding them. Duryodhana sat his chariot in his mail with every grace on him and looked like Indra in heaven. The shouting of the sons of Dhritarashtra went up, and the clatter of the chariots, and the noise of the instruments, until a man could not hear himself, and that impenetrable wheel of an army began to move off facing west, beautiful from every angle a man could look at it. Yudhishthira watched it come and answered it with the array called Vajra, the thunderbolt, and when the divisions were set the chariot fighters and the horsemen stood in their places and roared like lions, and both hosts went forward wanting nothing except to break the shape the other had made.
The day then broke into pairs, the way those days did. Drona went for Virata the king of the Matsyas, and his son went for Shikhandi. Duryodhana himself rushed at the son of Prishata. Nakula and Sahadeva went out against the ruler of the Madras. Vinda and Anuvinda of Avanti proceeded against Iravan. A great many kings together took on Arjuna. Bhimasena put out his full strength against the son of Hridika. Abhimanyu fought Chitrasena and Vikarna and Durmarshana. The son of Hidimba came at the lord of the Pragjyotishas the way one elephant in rut comes at another. The Rakshasa Alambusha, furious, threw himself at Satyaki where he stood among his followers. Bhurishravas worked hard against Dhrishtaketu, Yudhishthira went for king Shrutayus, Chekitana fought Kripa, and the rest of the Kuru warriors turned on Bhima. Around Arjuna the thing thickened until thousands of kings had him ringed in with darts and lances and arrows and maces and spiked clubs in their hands, and Arjuna, with his anger up, turned to the man holding his reins. Look at them, Madhava, he said. Look at the army the high-souled son of Ganga has arrayed, a man who knows every array there is. Look at these brave men, past counting, all of them wanting me. Look at the ruler of the Trigartas there with his brothers. This very day I will kill all of them, Janardana, in front of your eyes. Then he rubbed his bowstring and poured arrows into that crowd of kings, and the great bowmen poured them back, the way clouds fill a lake in the rains, and when the two Krishnas disappeared under the arrows a shout went up out of the Kaurava army. The gods and the celestial sages and the Gandharvas and the Uragas were watching, and even they were astonished. Then Arjuna called up the weapon of Indra, and what the army saw next was hard to credit: every shower his enemies sent at him was stopped in the air by his own arrows, and out of those thousands of kings and horses and elephants there was not one left unwounded. The survivors he pierced with two arrows each, or three, and then they ran, and they ran to Bhishma, and the grandsire took them in the way a shore takes men who have been going down in deep water. With the fugitives folding back into the ranks, the whole Kaurava line began to heave like the sea under a storm.
Susharma had stopped fighting by then, the other heroes had been driven off by Arjuna, the army was rolling, and the son of Ganga was already moving fast toward Arjuna’s chariot. Duryodhana saw what was coming and went to the kings, with Susharma standing at their head, and gave them something to be glad about. This Bhishma, he said, the first man of the Kurus, is careless of his own life and means to fight Dhananjaya with his whole soul. All of you together, with your troops, put out your best and guard the grandsire of Bharata’s line while he goes at that army. They said yes, and every division belonging to those kings moved out behind him. So Bhishma came on, and Arjuna came the other way on that enormous shining chariot with the white horses and the ape screaming on the standard and a rattle to it like thunder rolling. The whole Kaurava army cried out from fear at the sight of the man in the diadem, and when they looked at Krishna with the reins in his hands, burning like the noon sun, they could not hold their eyes on him. The Pandavas, for their part, could not look at Bhishma either, white horses, white bow, the planet Shukra come up into the sky, with the Trigartas around him on every side, their king and his brothers and his sons, and many another great chariot fighter besides.
Meanwhile Drona had reached Virata. He cut the standard away with one shaft and the bow with another, and Virata threw down the ruined bow, took up a stronger one that would bear a heavy pull, and picked out arrows that blazed like snakes full of poison. Three of them went into Drona and four into his horses; one took the standard, five took the charioteer, and one more split the bow, and at that the bull among Brahmins lost his temper. Eight straight shafts killed Virata’s horses and a single shaft killed his driver, and Virata jumped down from the dead chariot and climbed onto the chariot of his son Shankha. Father and son stood on the one floor and worked hard to hold Drona off with a thick rain of arrows, and Drona, in a rage, chose one arrow like a poisonous snake and sent it at the young man. It went through Shankha’s chest, drank his blood, and fell to the ground wet and smeared, and Shankha came down off the chariot in front of his father with his bow and arrows loose in his hands. Virata looked at his dead son and ran, avoiding that man who stood there like Death with his mouth open, and Drona did not waste the moment: he checked the whole Pandava host, holding off fighters by the hundred and the thousand. Elsewhere Shikhandi got at Drona’s son and put three quick shafts between his brows, so that Ashvatthama stood there pierced and looked, for a moment, as handsome as Meru with three gold peaks on it. In less time than a blink Ashvatthama brought down Shikhandi’s driver and standard and horses and weapons under a cloud of shafts, and Shikhandi sprang off the dead chariot with a polished sword and a shield and went across the field quick as a hawk, so quick that Drona’s son, shooting thousands of arrows after him, could not find the opening to strike, and everyone who watched it thought it a wonder. What Ashvatthama could do was cut, and he cut: first the beautiful shield with its hundred moons, then the sword itself, then Shikhandi’s body with a mass of winged arrows. Shikhandi whirled the broken stub of the blade, still burning in his hand like a snake, and threw it, and Ashvatthama showed the lightness of his hands and cut that out of the air too. Bleeding, Shikhandi climbed onto Satyaki’s chariot. Satyaki was busy with Alambusha, who cut his bow with a crescent-headed arrow, pierced him with a great many shafts and then threw a Rakshasa illusion over him, and the wonder of the grandson of Sini was that he showed no fear at all inside it. He laid the mantras on the weapon of Indra, which he had learned from Arjuna, and it burned the illusion to ash and buried Alambusha under arrows the way monsoon clouds bury the breast of a mountain, and the Rakshasa who could not be beaten by Indra himself turned and ran. Satyaki roared where the whole army could hear him and then began killing until the Kauravas broke away from him. And Dhrishtadyumna, covering Duryodhana with straight arrows, found the king neither frightened nor shaken; Duryodhana pierced him with sixty shafts and then thirty more, which was itself a wonderful thing to see, until the Pandava commander cut his bow, killed his four horses and put seven keen arrows into him. Duryodhana came down off the dead chariot with his sabre up and ran at the son of Prishata on foot, and Shakuni, who was devoted to him, arrived at a gallop and took the king up onto his own chariot in front of everyone. Kritavarma had Bhima covered like a cloudbank over the sun, and Bhima, laughing, sent arrows back, and killed the four horses and dropped the driver and the lovely standard and left Kritavarma mangled in every limb, so that he had to cross to Vrishaka’s chariot while Shalya and Duryodhana both watched him do it. After that Bhima went through the Kaurava troops like the destroyer with his club.
A key to reading this (names and numbers): Mandala and Vajra are names of shapes: a closed wheel and the thunderbolt of Indra. The sevens in the Mandala are the point of it, since seven chariots to each elephant and seven horsemen to each chariot and so on downward ties the whole army into one fabric with no loose edge. The son of Prishata is Dhrishtadyumna, Prishata being Drupada’s father; the son of Hridika is Kritavarma, the grandson of Sini is Satyaki, the son of Bharadvaja is Drona, and the son of Subala is Shakuni. Satyaki’s weapon of Indra is Arjuna’s, learned from him, which is why it answers a Rakshasa illusion. Shankha is Virata’s son, and Virata’s sons are being taken from him one at a time in this war. The king Shrutayus whom Yudhishthira rides at here is a different man from Shrutayus the ruler of the Kalingas, who was killed earlier in this same war; more than one king in this army carries the name.
The gist: Bhishma heals Duryodhana’s wounds with a herb, recites the roll of everyone fighting for him, and then tells him plainly that the Pandavas cannot be beaten, and that he will obey anyway and either win or die. At dawn he builds the Mandala array on a scheme of sevens and Yudhishthira answers with the Vajra, and the seventh day breaks into single combats. Arjuna, ringed by thousands of kings, calls up the weapon of Indra and empties the ring, and the survivors run to Bhishma. Drona sends one arrow through the chest of Virata’s son Shankha in front of his father. Shikhandi loses his chariot and fights on foot with a sword until that is cut too. Satyaki burns off a Rakshasa illusion with Arjuna’s weapon, and Shakuni has to lift Duryodhana bodily out of Dhrishtadyumna’s reach.
“All of this is Destiny”: a blind king’s complaint, the answer he did not want, and three duels in one forenoon
Dhritarashtra had been listening for a long time before he let the thing out. Many and wonderful, Sanjaya, are these single combats you describe between the Pandavas and my warriors, he said. You never once speak of anyone on my side being cheerful. You always tell me the sons of Pandu are glad and never routed, and you always tell me mine are downcast and drained of energy and beaten again and again. All of this, without doubt, is Destiny. It is the oldest move he has, the one he made in the dicing hall and the one he will make again when the field is empty, and the man he made it to was his own charioteer, sitting in the dark with the whole battle inside his head.
Sanjaya declined it. Your men, bull of Bharata’s race, exert themselves to the measure of their might and their courage, he said, and show their valor to the last inch of their strength. And then he gave the king an image to keep. As the sweet water of the celestial river turns brackish the moment it touches the properties of the ocean, so the valor of the illustrious warriors of your army becomes futile on contact with the heroic sons of Pandu. They strive to their utmost and they achieve the hardest things, and you should not find fault with your troops. This great and awful destruction of the world, monarch, which is swelling the population of Yama’s kingdom, has come out of your conduct and the conduct of your sons. A man should not grieve over what has grown from his own fault. Kings in this world do not always protect their lives; these rulers of the earth, wanting to win the regions of the righteous by battle, ride into hostile divisions every day with nothing in their eyes but heaven. Having said it, he went back to the seventh morning, and to a forenoon whose carnage, he warned, resembled the old war between the gods and the Asuras.
The two princes of Avanti, great bowmen, exceedingly strong, terrible in a fight, saw Iravan and came for him, and what followed made the hair rise. Iravan in his anger put many sharp straight shafts into the two brothers of celestial form, and the two of them, who knew every mode of warfare, put as many back into him, and they strove so evenly to undo each other’s work and to kill that no one watching could tell the two sides apart. Then Iravan sent Anuvinda’s four horses to the house of Yama with four arrows, and with a pair of sharp broad-headed shafts he cut away the bow and the standard as well, which everyone thought a wonderful piece of work. Anuvinda left his own chariot and climbed onto Vinda’s, took up a strong bow that would bear a great strain, and the two foremost chariot fighters of Avanti, standing now on one floor, sent shaft after shaft at Iravan, gold on them, so fast through the air that they covered the sky. Iravan answered with a downpour and dropped their charioteer, and when the dead man went over the side the horses had nobody holding them and bolted away with the chariot. Having beaten the two of them, the grandson of the king of the Nagas began burning through the Kaurava ranks with great speed, and that enormous host of the sons of Dhritarashtra started reeling in every direction like a man who has drunk poison.
Elsewhere the prince of the Rakshasas, Hidimba’s mighty son, came on in a chariot that shone like the sun with a standard over it, and the man he came at was Bhagadatta. The lord of the Pragjyotishas sat his prince of elephants the way the wielder of the thunderbolt sat his in the ancient battle over the carrying off of Taraka. The gods and the Gandharvas and the sages had all come to watch, and they could find nothing to choose between the two of them. As the chief of the celestials in his anger once put fear into the Danavas, so Bhagadatta put fear into the warriors of the Pandava army, and the men looking around for someone to stand between them and him could not find one anywhere in their own ranks. Only Bhimasena’s son was still there on his chariot; the other great chariot fighters had gone off with their hearts out of them. When the Pandava troops rallied, the noise that went up in the Kaurava army was frightful. Ghatotkacha covered Bhagadatta with arrows the way clouds cover the breast of Meru with rain, and the king baffled every one of them and struck the son of Bhimasena in all his vital places, and the Rakshasa, pierced through with straight shafts past counting, did not waver at all and stood like a mountain that has been shot at. Bhagadatta in his fury threw fourteen lances and Ghatotkacha cut all fourteen out of the air, and then put seventy shafts into Bhagadatta, every one of them coming with the force of a thunderbolt. The king laughed, and sent the Rakshasa’s four horses to the domain of Death. Ghatotkacha, standing on the wreck, threw a dart with everything he had at the elephant, and Bhagadatta cut that gold-shafted dart into three pieces as it came, so that it dropped at his feet, and Hidimba’s son looked at his broken dart and ran, the way Namuchi, first of the Daityas, once ran out of a battle with Indra. Having beaten a hero whom neither Yama nor Varuna could beat, Bhagadatta took his elephant into the Pandava troops and went through them like a wild elephant walking down the lotus stalks in a lake.
And in another part of the field the ruler of the Madras was fighting his sister’s sons. He covered the twins with clouds of arrows, and Sahadeva, seeing his mother’s brother engaged with him, covered him back the way clouds cover the maker of day; and under that cloud the king of the Madras wore a delighted expression, and the twins were delighted too, for their mother’s sake, and none of that slowed any of them down. Shalya, smiting well, sent Nakula’s four horses to Yama’s house with four excellent shafts, and Nakula jumped off the ruined chariot and went up onto his famous brother’s, and the two of them standing together, both fierce, both angry, drew with all their strength and buried the chariot of the Madra king under arrows. That tiger among men stood in it unmoved, like a hill, and laughing he smote them both with showers of his own. Then Sahadeva, with his anger fully up, picked out one powerful shaft, drove at the ruler of the Madras and loosed it, and the arrow went with the speed of Garuda clean through Shalya and out the other side and fell on the earth. Pierced that deeply, and in great pain, Shalya sat down on the floor of his chariot and lost consciousness, and his charioteer saw him lying there and carried him off the field. The sons of Dhritarashtra watched the chariot of the Madra king going away from the battle and turned cheerless, and thought that he was finished. The two sons of Madri, having beaten their uncle, blew their conches with real gladness and roared like lions, and then went at the Kaurava forces the way Indra and Upendra go at the host of the Daityas.
A key to reading this (kinship and comparisons): Shalya, the ruler of the Madras, is Madri’s brother and therefore the maternal uncle of Nakula and Sahadeva, which is why the pleasure on his face and the pleasure in the twins are described in the same breath as the arrows. Iravan is Arjuna’s son by the Naga princess Ulupi, which is what makes him the grandson of the king of the Nagas. The battle over the carrying off of Taraka is the old war of the gods and the Asuras in which Indra rode an elephant, and the comparison here is to Bhagadatta on his own. Namuchi is the Daitya who fled from Indra. Upendra is a name of Vishnu as Indra’s younger brother. The celestial river whose water turns brackish is the Ganga, reaching the sea.
The gist: Dhritarashtra finally says what has been building in him, that every story Sanjaya brings has the Pandavas glad and his own men beaten, and he closes it himself with the word Destiny. Sanjaya refuses the word. His men are spending everything they have, he says; their valor goes flat against the sons of Pandu the way the Ganga goes salt in the sea, and this whole destruction grew out of the king’s own conduct and his sons’. Then three duels from that forenoon: Iravan beats both princes of Avanti and starts burning through the Kaurava line, Bhagadatta on his elephant turns Ghatotkacha back and tramples the Pandava troops, and one arrow from Sahadeva goes clean through his own uncle Shalya and puts him unconscious on the floor of his chariot.
Noon, and the anger that made the three worlds pray: Chekitana and Kripa falling together with swords in their hands, and a mace that ended Chitrasena’s chariot
The sun came to the top of the sky on the seventh day, and Yudhishthira saw king Shrutayus in front of him and put his horses at the man. Nine arrows went first, straight ones, keen at the point, and they were good arrows, but Shrutayus was a bowman of the first rank and he stopped every one of them in the air. What came back was worse. Seven shafts went through the king’s armor and stayed in him, and the poet says they drank his blood the way a thing drinks the vital heat out of a body. Yudhishthira answered through the pain. One arrow shaped like a boar’s ear went into the enemy’s heart, and a second, broad at the head, cut the standard off his chariot and dropped it in the dirt. Shrutayus watched his own colors go down and put seven more arrows into Yudhishthira. And then something happened on that field that almost never happens in this story, because the eldest son of Pandu, the man whose entire reputation rests on his patience, lost his temper.
What the armies saw was a face. He was licking the corners of his mouth, and his expression had gone into a register that men have no name for, and the poet reaches for the only comparison that fits: the sun as it looks on the last morning of a world. The gods shook. The Gandharvas shook. The Rakshasas shook. The universe itself was reported to be unsteady, and the same thought arrived in every living creature at the same moment, which was that this king was about to burn the three worlds down before the afternoon was out. The rishis and the celestials began to pray, and what they prayed for was not victory for anyone. They prayed for the peace of the world. On the Kaurava side every warrior gave himself up for dead. And then Yudhishthira, holding all of that inside a body that had seven arrows in it, put the anger down again. He simply kept it, the way he had kept everything else for thirteen years. What he did with the hand that was still free was cut Shrutayus’s bow off at the grip, drive a long arrow into the center of his bare chest in front of the whole army, kill his horses, and kill his driver, all of it inside the space of a few breaths. Shrutayus got off the dead chariot and ran. Duryodhana’s troops turned their faces away from the sight, and for a while after that the man of peace went through them like Death with his mouth open.
Elsewhere on the same field two men were taking each other apart by stages. Chekitana of the Vrishnis covered Kripa in arrows where everyone could see it, and Kripa, son of Sharadvat, brushed them aside and answered, and then took Chekitana’s bow with a broad-headed shaft, and then his driver, and then his horses, and then both of the warriors who guarded his chariot wings. So Chekitana came down onto the ground with a mace, and since he was the finest mace fighter on that part of the field, he used it to kill Kripa’s horses and bring down Kripa’s driver, which left the two of them standing on the same earth with nothing under them. Kripa shot sixteen arrows from where he stood. They went through Chekitana’s body and buried themselves in the ground behind him. Chekitana threw the mace a second time, the way Purandara wanted Vritra dead, and Kripa stopped a weapon with the weight of adamant in midair with some thousands of arrows. Then the swords came out. Chekitana drew his from the sheath and came on, and Kripa threw his bow away, took up a polished blade, and came to meet him, and the two of them stood there hitting each other with sharpened edges until both of them went down on the earth that holds everyone. They lay still, out cold, emptied by what they had spent. Karakarsha rode to the spot out of pure friendship and lifted Chekitana onto his chariot in front of both armies, and Shakuni, your brother-in-law, got Kripa up onto his.
Dhrishtaketu put ninety shafts into the chest of Somadatta’s son, and Bhurishravas wore them the way the noon sun wears its rays, and then took Dhrishtaketu’s chariot out from under him, driver and horses together, and buried him in arrows until he had to climb across onto Shatanika’s chariot. Three of your sons in golden mail, Chitrasena and Vikarna and Durmarshana, went at Subhadra’s son all at once, and the fight that followed is compared to the quarrel of wind and bile and phlegm inside a sick body, three forces at war in one small space. Abhimanyu took the chariots out from under all three of them and then let them live, because he remembered what Bhima had sworn about who was allowed to kill them. That was the moment Arjuna looked up and saw Bhishma moving toward the place where his son was fighting alone, a boy, a great chariot warrior and still a boy, and Bhishma was a man the gods could not beat. “Urge the horses, Hrishikesha,” he said, “to the place where all those chariot fighters are. There are many of them, they are brave, they are trained, and they cannot be beaten in the field. Drive so that the enemy cannot cut our army down.” Krishna took the white horses into it, and a sound went up out of your army when they saw where that chariot was heading. Arjuna came up to the ring of kings guarding Bhishma and picked out Susharma first. “I know you for the best of them in a fight,” he said, “and for an old and bitter enemy. Look at what that behavior has earned you today. I am sending you to your fathers before the sun is down.” The lord of the Trigartas said nothing at all, good or bad. He brought a great many kings with him instead, closed a circle around Arjuna, and with your sons helping him covered the man from the front and the back and both flanks, the way cloud covers the maker of day. Blood ran like water where those two armies met.
Arjuna took that shower standing and began to breathe long and hard, like a snake that has been stepped on. Then he cut their bows. He did it in a moment, all of them, and while their hands were still empty he pierced every one of those kings at once. Some of them went down bloody, some came apart at the limbs, some lost their heads, some died with their mail cut through and their bodies ruined, and a great many of them fell together. The lord of the Trigartas came forward again over his own dead friends, and thirty-two more chariot fighters who had been guarding the rear of the slain turned on Partha, ringed him, and poured arrows on him like clouds emptying on the breast of a mountain. Arjuna killed all thirty-two with sixty arrows steeped in oil, and having done it he was cheerful, which is its own kind of terrible. Then he set off for Bhishma. Susharma came at him a third time with kings in front of him, and the Pandava warriors under Shikhandi came forward with their weapons out to keep them off Arjuna’s chariot, and Arjuna cut through what reached him with shafts out of Gandiva. Ahead of him he could see Duryodhana and the ruler of the Sindhus and the kings around them. He fought them for exactly as long as it took to check them, left Duryodhana and Jayadratha standing, and went on toward the son of Ganga with his bow in his hand. Yudhishthira had the same idea from the other side. He left the ruler of the Madras, who had been assigned to his share, and went for Shantanu’s son with Bhima and the two sons of Madri beside him. Bhishma took all the sons of Pandu at once and did not move. Jayadratha, who could shoot, cut the bows out of the hands of every one of those great chariot warriors. Duryodhana, with rage for a seat under him, put arrows like flames into Yudhishthira and Bhimasena and the twins and Partha, and with Kripa and Shala and Chitrasena shooting as well the Pandavas stood there looking like the gods on the day the Daityas had them surrounded.
Then Yudhishthira saw Shikhandi leaving the field with his weapon cut out of his hands by Bhishma, and the anger came back. “In front of your own father you said this to me,” he said. “I will kill Bhishma of the high vows with arrows the color of the burning sun. I speak the truth. That was your oath, and you are not keeping it, because Devavrata is still alive. Do not be a man with an unfulfilled vow. Look after your dharma, your family and your name. Look at him, scorching my whole army with those arrows of his, destroying everything in a moment like Death. Your bow is cut, you are leaving the battle, Shantanu’s son has beaten you, and where are you going, away from your own brothers and kinsmen? This does not become you. You have seen Bhishma and you have seen our army running, and you are frightened, son of Drupada, because the color has gone out of your face. Dhananjaya has gone into the worst of it and you do not even know. The whole world knows your name. Why are you afraid of Bhishma today?” The words were hard and they were also reasonable, and Shikhandi took them as good counsel and turned around and went at Bhishma. Shalya came across to stop him with weapons that are difficult to baffle, fire weapons, the kind that look like the blaze at the dissolution of everything, and Drupada’s son stood in front of them without being confounded in the least. He checked them with his own shafts, held his ground without stepping back, and then raised the Varuna weapon against them, and the gods in the sky and the kings on the earth all watched Shalya’s fire go out. While that was happening Bhishma cut the bow and the painted standard away from Yudhishthira of the Ajamida line. And Bhimasena, seeing his brother standing there with fear all over him, threw away his own bow and arrows, took up a mace, and went at Jayadratha on foot. Jayadratha put five hundred arrows into him as he came, each one like the rod of Death, and Bhima paid no attention to any of them and killed every Aratta-bred horse the king of the Sindhus owned. Your son Chitrasena, seeing a man on foot, came at him on a chariot with his weapons up to finish him. Bhima roared and came on with the mace. The Kauravas nearby looked at that mace going up and left your brave son where he stood and ran, because nobody wanted to be underneath it when it came down. Chitrasena kept his head in the middle of a stampede that was taking everyone else’s. He took a bright scimitar and a shield, left the chariot, and came down onto level ground like a lion coming off the top of a cliff, and the mace arrived a moment later and destroyed the chariot he had been standing in, horses, driver and all, and dropped into the earth like a meteor coming loose out of the sky. Your troops saw that, and the shout they sent up went across the whole field, and every warrior there praised your son.
A key to reading this (names, and two puzzles): This is noon on the seventh day. Gautama and the son of Sharadvat are both Kripa. Vibhatsu, Jishnu, Dhananjaya, Partha and the son of Kunti are Arjuna. Ajatashatru is Yudhishthira and Ajamida is his line. Devavrata and the son of Ganga are Bhishma, Vrikodara is Bhima, the lord of the Trigartas is Susharma and the ruler of the Sindhus is Jayadratha. Two things are worth flagging. The Shrutayus who fights Yudhishthira here is a different man from Shrutayus the king of the Kalingas, whom Bhima killed on the second day earlier in this chapter; the poem carries more than one king of that name, and this one survives to fight again. And the morning’s list of pairings gave Shalya to Nakula and Sahadeva, who left him unconscious and carried off the field at the end of the previous scene, yet here the poem calls him the share assigned to Yudhishthira and has him back on his feet fighting Shikhandi. Both oddities are kept as the original has them. Karakarsha appears once, at this spot, and nowhere else.
The gist: At noon on the seventh day Yudhishthira takes seven arrows through his armor and loses his temper, and the effect on the universe is so alarming that the gods and the rishis stop what they are doing and pray for the world. He puts the anger away again, disarms Shrutayus and drives him off the field. Chekitana and Kripa dismantle each other by stages until both are on the ground with swords, and both collapse in the same moment and are carried off by friends from opposite armies. Abhimanyu strips three cousins of their chariots and spares them for Bhima’s sake. Arjuna cuts down thirty-two rear guards with sixty arrows and starts for Bhishma. And Yudhishthira shames Shikhandi into turning around, which matters more than anything else that happens today.
Source: the Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Bhishma Parva, Bhishma-vadha sub-book. This part belongs to K. M. Ganguli, sections XLIII to CXXII (43-122); the Gita Press Hindi edition numbers these chapters differently. Names, order, and events were checked against Ganguli’s complete translation. Dialogue and commentary are adapted, not a verbatim translation. About the sources.
Based on: The Mahabharata, Vyasa (Gita Press, Gorakhpur)