The Wedding at Upaplavya

Virata came home from the south to find his city already garlanded for a second victory, and his son sitting in the hall being praised, and he was so full of pride that he could not stop talking about it.

"One boy," he said, over and over. "One boy against Bhishma and Drona and Karna, and he turned them all and brought the cattle back. Where is my son? Bring dice, we shall play, Kanka, and you shall hear the whole of it again."

"It is no wonder," said Kanka mildly, casting the pieces. "Where Brihannala holds the reins, no army on earth wins the field."

The old king's pleasure turned in an instant. "You praise a eunuch over my son. In my own hall, on the day of his triumph." And Virata took up the dice in his fist and flung them, and one struck Kanka across the face, and the blood came from his nose and ran.

Kanka did not cry out, and he did not lift his hand to it. He caught the blood in his cupped palm. Sairandhri the serving-woman crossed the hall at once with a golden bowl and held it under his hands so that not one drop should reach the floor, and when the king asked her why, she said only that it was better so.

Then Prince Uttara came into the hall, and heard what was being said of him, and went white.

"Father, stop. It was not I. I did not turn them. I ran. A son of the gods came down and drove for me and fought them all himself, and I only held the horses and watched." He looked around the hall at the cook, at the groom, at the cowherd, at the bleeding dice-player. "And I am forbidden to say his name until he gives me leave."

On the third day the five of them came into that hall dressed as kings and sat down on the royal seats, and Virata understood everything at once, and was afraid, and then wept.

"Thirteen years," said the old king, when he could speak. "Thirteen years in my house, and I set the emperor of Indraprastha to amuse me with dice, and struck him in the face across my own floor. Forgive me. Whatever I have is yours. My treasury, my army, my throne if you will have it."

"You gave us shelter when the earth had no other corner for us," said Yudhishthira. "The debt is not on your side."

But Virata was a father as well as a king, and he had been thinking. He turned to the tall one, the one who had spent a year in bangles and a braid teaching his daughter to dance, and he made the offer that seemed to him the most honorable thing a man could give.

"Arjuna. Take my daughter Uttaraa to wife. Take her with all the wealth I can put on her, and let the houses of Matsya and Bharata be one house."

The hall waited. Arjuna did not take long.

"Great king," he said, "you honor me past my deserving, and I must refuse."

Virata's face changed. "Is my daughter not good enough for a son of Pandu?"

"Hear me before you are angry. For a year I have lived inside the women's apartments of your palace. I taught that girl her steps. She has sat beside me and sung, and pulled my braid, and told me her secrets as a child tells them to a nurse, because to her I was neither man nor stranger. Your people trusted me with her because they believed I could not be a husband. If I take her now as a bride, every one of them will look back over that year and wonder, and I would stain her and myself together."

He paused. "But she is a daughter to me, and a man does not give his daughter away lightly. So let me take her as a daughter in truth. I have a son, Abhimanyu, born of Subhadra, and Krishna of the Vrishnis is his uncle. He is a boy like a young lion, and there is not his equal in the world for beauty or for arms. Give Uttaraa to him, and you have not lost me. You have gained me twice."

Virata took Arjuna's hands in both of his, and the thing was settled before the lamps were lit.

They kept the wedding at Upaplavya, the second city of the Matsyas, and the invitations went out along every road, and what came back along those roads was not only a wedding party.

Krishna came from Dwaraka, and Balarama with him, and Satyaki and Kritavarma and the Vrishni and Andhaka chiefs behind them, with a train of horses and elephants and chariots and ten thousand cows for the bride's people. Drupada came from Panchala with his sons, Dhrishtadyumna who had been born out of fire to kill a certain teacher, and Shikhandi who had been born to end a certain grandfather. The king of Kashi came, and the Shaibyas, and the chiefs of the hill peoples, and Subhadra came bringing her son.

The city could not hold them. They pitched camp along the river until the plain outside Upaplavya was a field of pavilions with a hundred banners over it, and the Pandavas walked out among them every evening and were embraced by men who had waited thirteen years to embrace them.

Yudhishthira, standing at the edge of that camp with Krishna beside him, looked at the ordered rows of tents and the picketed horses and the smoke of the cooking-fires going straight up in the still air, and said what everyone had been carefully not saying.

"This is not a wedding party. This is an army with garlands on."

"It is both," said Krishna. "It was always going to be both. Duryodhana knows by now that Arjuna emptied his saddles in the north and that the thirteen years are paid. He will not give back one field of Indraprastha because you asked politely. Every man who came here for the wedding will be asked, before he leaves, which side of the field he means to stand on. Better they are asked over sweets than over a summons."

Yudhishthira was quiet a while. "Then let them have the wedding first," he said. "Let there be one good day before we begin."

Abhimanyu was sixteen years old. He had his mother's eyes and his father's shoulders and a way of standing very still before he moved that people who knew Arjuna found unsettling, and when he was brought into the pavilion in white and gold with the sandal-paste on his forehead, the Matsya women crowded the screens to see him.

Uttaraa was brought out by her mother and her attendants, and the girl who had spent a year learning to dance from a stranger in bangles now came slowly forward under the weight of every ornament her father's treasury could put on her.

Yudhishthira gave the boy away, standing in place of the family that could not be there. Krishna stood at his nephew's shoulder. Virata gave his daughter with water poured over their joined hands, and the priests fed the fire, and the two of them walked the seven steps around it while the conches went off outside and the drums came in over them, and the Vrishni women sang, and old Drupada wept without embarrassment.

Then the gifts were brought out and there was no end to them. Virata gave chariots and elephants and cattle in numbers that made the accountants stop writing. Krishna gave his nephew horses of the Sindhu breed and jewels out of the sea, and gave the bride's family gold enough to build a temple. Balarama gave a plough of his own iron, laughing, and Satyaki gave armor.

And in the middle of it, Arjuna sat and watched the girl he had taught to dance take his son's hand, and Bhima ate more than any three men and made the whole tent laugh, and Draupadi wore her hair unbound and dressed for the first time in thirteen years, and the fires burned all night in the pavilions on the river.

For one day nobody spoke of Hastinapura at all.

The talking began the morning after, and it never really stopped again. In the same hall where the marriage fire had burned, Krishna stood up among the kings and said what had to be said: that the Pandavas had kept every letter of the compact, that Indraprastha was theirs by right and by law, that an envoy should go to Hastinapura and ask for it in plain words before anyone reached for a sword, and that every man in that room should decide now what he would do when the answer came back no. Drupada named the priest who would carry the message. Balarama argued for softness and Satyaki for war. The wedding hall had become the council of the alliance between one meal and the next.

Uttaraa's marriage bower stood at the other end of the same camp, and the noise of the arguing carried across to it in the evenings.

She was very young. She had married a boy of sixteen whose whole education had been the bow, in a city full of men counting chariots, and she was not a fool; she understood well enough what all those tents outside meant. What no one in that camp could have told her was how much of it would come to nothing. That in a little over a year the boy in the bower would ride into a wheel of chariots at Kurukshetra and not ride out. That her father Virata and her brother Uttara would die on that field too, and Drupada, and Dhrishtadyumna, and nearly every man who danced at her wedding.

And that she would be carrying a child when it happened, and that the child would be struck in the womb by the last weapon of the last surviving Kuru and would be given back his life; and that when the smoke cleared over the ruin of both houses, the whole line of Bharata, the line of Kuru and Shantanu and Bhishma and Pandu, would run forward into the future through one thread only, through a girl of Matsya and a boy who died at sixteen, in the person of a son named Parikshit.

But that was still ahead. That night there was only a lamp in a bower at Upaplavya, and two young people, and the sound of their elders outside deciding the shape of the world.