The Moon's Son

Long before the boy drew breath, the account was settled in a place where no mortal keeps records. The earth had grown heavy under the weight of proud kings and swollen armies, and the gods had agreed among themselves to come down into the line of Bharata, each lending a portion of himself to be born and to lift the burden, and to lift it quickly.

One by one they consented. Dharma consented, and Vayu, and Indra, and the twin physicians of heaven. Then the roll came to Soma, lord of the moon, cool master of herbs and of the mind, and Soma did not answer.

'You have not spoken,' the assembly said.

'Because I have one son,' said Soma, 'and his name is Varchas, and he is the light of me. Ask the others for portions. You are asking me for the better part of my own body. If I send him down among men I will stand in the sky each night looking for a face that is not there.'

The assembly did not command him, for the moon is not commanded. They waited instead, as one waits on a man who is bargaining with himself.

'Set a term,' Soma said at last. 'I will give him, but not without limit. Sixteen years. He will enter the house of the Pandavas through Arjuna. He will outrun every teacher set over him and shame men twice his age with the bow. He will break into a formation that grown warriors cannot enter. And in the sixteenth year of his life he will fall in battle among heroes, and he will come back to me.'

'Sixteen years,' the gods agreed. 'It is enough.'

So the thing was written, and what was written was a loan and not a gift. Far below, at Indraprastha, where five brothers were raising a city out of cleared forest and calling it the finest in the world, no one heard a word of it. They only knew, later, that a child was coming.

Subhadra, sister of Krishna and Balarama, had come to Indraprastha as Arjuna's wife at the end of his year of wandering, carried away from Dwaraka in her own chariot with her brother's quiet blessing behind the whole affair. The Yadavas had raged and then been talked out of raging, and the marriage that began as an abduction settled into one of the great affections of that house.

When her time came, the city held its breath in the way cities do for a first child of a beloved prince. The birth was easy. The infant did not cry the thin, questioning cry of most newborns; he opened his eyes and looked steadily at the ceiling of the birth chamber as though he had already decided what he thought of the world.

Arjuna came in from the practice ground with his forearms still bound and stood over the cot a long while without touching anything.

'He is not afraid,' he said.

The brahmanas performed the rites, and when it came to the naming, Krishna spoke before any of them could. 'Look at him,' he said. 'There is no fear in that face, not of me, not of you, not of anything he has not met yet. Call him Abhimanyu, the one who bows to nobody's anger. Give him a name he will have to live up to and he will live up to it.'

Yudhishthira gave gifts to the twice-born; Bhima carried the child around the hall on his forearm like a man carrying a lamp; the twins argued over which of them the boy resembled. Kunti held her grandson and wept, though she could not have said precisely why, and put it down to the ordinary weeping of grandmothers.

And Krishna, who had spoken the name so easily, went out afterward and stood for a while under the early moon without saying anything at all.

The women of Dwaraka told a story afterward, the way families tell stories that grow truer with age. They said that while Subhadra was carrying the child, Arjuna had begun explaining to her the entering of a wheel formation, the discus array that turns as it swallows, and how a man cuts his way inward through its revolving gates. They said she fell asleep partway through, and that the voice went on, and that what she stopped listening to the child did not. He learned the way in, and never heard the way out.

Whether or not the tale is old, the boy's speed with the bow was not in dispute. He was set to the string at an age when other children are set to letters. Arjuna taught him first, and taught him too seriously, correcting his stance the way an instructor corrects a rival. Whatever was shown to him once he could do; whatever was shown twice he could do better than the man showing it.

Then came the dice, and the exile, and the forest. His father's brothers walked out of Indraprastha in bark cloth, and Krishna took Subhadra and the boy west to Dwaraka, because there was no sense in a child eating the fruits of a punishment he had no part in.

So Abhimanyu grew up by the sea among Krishna's own sons, Pradyumna and Samba and the rest, in a city that was rich and busy and had no idea it was raising a Kuru prince for a war. Pradyumna trained him, and Balarama put a mace in his hands and found the grip natural, and Krishna watched from a distance with an expression his household had learned not to ask about.

By the time the boy was fourteen there was no one on that coast who could stand against him at long range. He was not arrogant about it. He simply had never encountered the sensation of being outmatched, and had no reason to imagine it existed.

The thirteenth year ended. Word came west that the Pandavas had come out of hiding at Virata's court, that the concealment had held, that the exile was discharged in full and the kingdom would now be demanded back.

Dwaraka emptied itself northward. Krishna went, and Balarama, and the Yadava host with its chariots and its horses, and among them rode a young man of sixteen who had been sent away as a child of three and was going back to a father he had seen perhaps twice since. At Upaplavya, where the allies were gathering, he was married to Uttaraa, the daughter of Virata, in the wedding that sealed the alliance and is told in its own place.

What those who were present remembered was not the wedding but the meeting.

Arjuna came out of the assembly hall and stopped, because the boy standing in the courtyard had his mother's face and his own shoulders and was wearing a bow strung to a draw weight no sixteen-year-old had any business managing.

'You have grown,' Arjuna said, which was a foolish thing to say and the only thing available.

'You have not,' said Abhimanyu, 'so I am told, and I have been told a great deal about you.'

They embraced. Subhadra stood back and let it happen and did not trust her voice.

In the councils that followed, the boy sat where a boy sits and said nothing until asked. When Yudhishthira, going around the hall, asked what each of them thought could be done against Bhishma and Drona and the ocean of Kaurava troops, Abhimanyu answered plainly that he had never yet met a formation he could not enter. Nobody laughed. Several of the older kings looked at him with the particular pity reserved for the young who are entirely correct.

He was sixteen that season. The term set in heaven was nearly spent, and only Krishna, perhaps, knew how nearly.

On the thirteenth day of the war the Kauravas locked the wheel formation shut behind him, and the loan came due exactly as the moon had written it, in the way that is told elsewhere.

What can be said here is what came after. The camp that evening was not a camp but a wound. Arjuna, riding back late from the far end of the field, understood before anyone spoke to him, because there is a particular silence men keep when they are waiting to tell a father something. He made a vow that night that would consume the next day entirely, and the war never recovered its shape afterward.

Subhadra's grief was of the kind that has no ceremony adequate to it. Krishna sat with his sister and did not offer her the argument he could have offered, that the boy had been on loan from the sky and had been returned on the day agreed, that Soma had asked for sixteen years and had been given sixteen years and not one hour less. It was true and it was no use, and Krishna, who knew when the truth is useful, kept it.

One thing had been arranged before the term expired. Uttaraa was carrying a child. Through her the line of the Pandavas would run on past the war, past the burning of the great families, down to the boy Parikshit who would one day sit at Hastinapura and hold in his hands the whole inheritance of five brothers and one dead prince of sixteen.

That is the last of the accounting. Varchas went back to his father in the sky, having done in sixteen years what most men do not do in eighty; the earth, which had been meant to be unburdened, was unburdened at a price nobody had explained in advance.

Some lives are loans. Their shortness is not a cruelty added at the end. It was the contract from the beginning, and everything bright in them was bright because the term was short.