The Valiant Son

The thirteenth day of the great war at Kurukshetra dawned grey and heavy, the air already thick with the smell of churned earth and old blood. Bhishma, the grandsire, lay on his bed of arrows. Drona, the teacher of both Pandavas and Kauravas, now carried the burden of command for the Kaurava host, and Duryodhana had grown bitter that day with reproach.

"You favour the sons of Pandu," the prince complained to his old preceptor. "You are master of every weapon and every formation, yet still Yudhishthira walks free. If you truly stood with us, the eldest Pandava would already be our prisoner, and the war would end."

Drona did not rise to anger. He answered with a soldier's flat honesty. "Listen well, Duryodhana. So long as Arjuna stands near his brother, no power on earth can seize Yudhishthira. Indra himself could not break that guard. But hear my oath - if you can draw Arjuna away from the field, if you can lure him to some far corner of the battle, then on this very day I will arrange such a formation that I shall capture Yudhishthira and place him in your hands."

The promise rippled through the Kaurava camp like a spark in dry grass. A plan was made. The warriors called the Samsaptakas, the sworn-to-die soldiers of Trigarta, would challenge Arjuna in the south, vowing to fight to the death and never retreat. Their honour would compel him. Arjuna could not refuse a challenge made in such terms, and so, before the sun had climbed high, the Pandava hero rode south with Krishna at the reins, swallowed into a separate and ferocious battle far from where the true blow would fall.

With Arjuna gone, Drona unfurled his masterwork. He marshalled the Kaurava army into the Chakravyuha, the discus array, the most fearsome of all battle formations. It was not a wall to be stormed but a living wheel, a spiral of soldiers wound ring within ring, each circle turning against the next so that any attacker would be drawn inward and crushed.

Elephants formed the great curved spokes. Chariots packed the rings. At the chosen gaps stood the deadliest warriors of the age, each a guardian of a gate that shifted and sealed and opened only by Drona's design. To look upon it was to look upon a slowly revolving maze of spears, a labyrinth that promised death to anyone who entered without knowing its secret.

And that was the cruelty of the thing. To enter the Chakravyuha was hard, but a determined hero might force a way in. To leave it alive was another matter entirely. The art of breaking out, of unwinding the spiral from within, was known to only a handful of warriors then living. Drona knew it. Krishna knew it. Arjuna knew it - and Arjuna was a world away.

The Pandava commanders rode up to the edge of the formation and reined in their horses. Yudhishthira gazed at the turning rings and felt cold dread settle in his chest. Drona's army revolved toward them like the wheel of fate itself, and there was no door through which they could pass. By nightfall, he understood, the king of the Pandavas would be a prisoner, and the cause for which so many had died would be lost.

It was then that Yudhishthira turned to Abhimanyu, the son of Arjuna and Subhadra, a youth of sixteen with the bearing of his father and the fierce blood of the Yadavas in his veins. There was no other choice, and yet the king's heart misgave him even as he spoke.

"Child," Yudhishthira said, "you are Arjuna's son, and there is no one else among us who can pierce this array. Break us a path into the Chakravyuha. Open the gate, and we shall pour in behind you, the whole host of us, Bhima and Dhrishtadyumna and Satyaki and Nakula and Sahadeva. We shall not let you stand alone."

Abhimanyu did not flinch. He had carried this knowledge his whole short life, and he answered with the steady confidence of his lineage. "I can do it," he said. "My father taught me how to enter the Chakravyuha while I was still in my mother's womb. I listened, even then, to his voice describing the breaking of the gate."

Then a shadow crossed his face, and he gave them the whole truth. "But there is one thing I must confess. I learned how to enter the array. I never learned how to come out of it. While my father spoke of the way out, my mother fell asleep, and Krishna stopped the telling, and so the lesson was never finished. I know how to go in. I do not know how to get back."

Yudhishthira reassured him quickly, his words tumbling out in his eagerness and his fear. "Open the door for us, mighty one, and break the first circle, and we great warriors will follow at your heels and guard you on every side. You need only let us in. The rest we will do together."

Abhimanyu bowed to his uncle and his elders. He thought, perhaps, of his young wife Uttara, and of his father far away, and of the honour of his house. "For the sake of my father, and for the sake of my king," he said, "I will break this army as the rising sun breaks the night."

Abhimanyu called to his charioteer Sumitra. "Drive," he said, "into the heart of Drona's army." The charioteer hesitated, for he could see what the boy was asking of him, but Abhimanyu laughed away his caution. "The burden of the whole world rests on my shoulders today. Drive on. I am the son of Arjuna and the nephew of Krishna, and I will not show my back to any enemy."

The chariot leapt forward. Abhimanyu struck the Chakravyuha at the point Drona had thought most strongly held, and the formation shuddered. His arrows flew so swiftly that the Kaurava soldiers could not see his hand move upon the bow. The first ring, which had seemed an unbroken wall of men and elephants and chariots, split open before him like a riverbank giving way to a flood.

Drona watched from a distance and could not hide his admiration even as the boy tore through his work. "See how he fights," the old master said quietly. "This is no child. This is Arjuna reborn, with all his father's skill and none of his father's restraint. I have never seen the like."

Through the first circle Abhimanyu drove, and the warriors who tried to bar his way were scattered. He pierced the array as a needle pierces cloth, and behind him, for one shining moment, the gate stood open. Yudhishthira and the Pandava host surged toward the breach to follow him in, exactly as the plan demanded, their war cries rising in a single roar of hope.

But the gate did not stay open. One man closed it.

Jayadratha, king of the Sindhus and husband of the Kauravas' only sister, threw himself across the breach that Abhimanyu had opened. He was not the greatest warrior on the field, and on any ordinary day Bhima alone would have brushed him aside. This was not an ordinary day. Long before the war, Jayadratha had performed harsh penance to win a boon from the god Shiva. The boon was strange and narrow, as such gifts often are - he could not defeat the Pandavas outright, but on a single day of his choosing he would be able to hold them all at bay, every one of them save Arjuna himself.

This was the day. As Yudhishthira and Bhima and Satyaki and Dhrishtadyumna pressed toward the opening, Jayadratha rose up to meet them with a strength not his own. The Pandavas hurled themselves against him again and again. Bhima roared and charged; Satyaki loosed his arrows; Dhrishtadyumna pressed forward with his sword. Jayadratha turned them all aside. The boon of Shiva made him for that one terrible hour an immovable wall.

And so the worst thing happened. The rings of the Chakravyuha, which had parted for an instant, wound shut once more. Abhimanyu, deep inside the spiral now, glanced back and saw the gap close behind him like the closing of a great mouth. The army he had counted on, the uncles and allies who had sworn to follow at his heels, were sealed outside. He was alone, a single boy in the centre of an entire enemy host, with no way back and no one to guard his sides.

Abhimanyu understood at once that he would not be leaving the Chakravyuha. He did not despair. He set his jaw, drew his great bow, and resolved that if he was to die that day, the dying would cost the Kauravas dearly, and his name would be remembered as long as men told tales of war.

What followed was one of the most heroic stands in all the history of the field. The boy moved through the rings of the enemy like a wildfire through a dry forest. His arrows fell in such a torrent that whole companies broke and ran. Chariots shattered under his fire, elephants screamed and turned, and the proud warriors of the Kaurava host found that they could not hold against him.

He struck down soldiers beyond counting. He wounded mighty kings. He drove Duryodhana himself back in such peril that Drona had to send warriors to shield the prince from the boy's wrath. He clashed with Karna and bloodied him and made even that great archer reel. He fought Shalya and his brother, Kripa and Ashwatthama, and not one of them could master him in fair single combat.

The Kaurava commanders watched in disbelief. This was a youth of sixteen, fighting alone in the centre of their entire army, and he was winning. Where his chariot rolled, there death rolled with it. The dust rose so thick that the sun grew dim, and through that red haze the lone figure of Abhimanyu blazed like a second sun, untouchable, terrible, and beautiful in his fury.

Duryodhana's son, the prince Lakshmana, rode out against Abhimanyu, eager to win glory by felling the son of Arjuna. He was a brave youth, but he was no match for the storm that Abhimanyu had become. The two princes, near each other in age, exchanged a fierce volley of arrows, and the watching armies held their breath. Then Abhimanyu's shaft found its mark, and Lakshmana fell dead from his chariot before his father's eyes.

A terrible cry went up from Duryodhana. To see his own son slain by this boy was more than the prince could bear. Grief turned instantly to rage, and rage to a cold resolve. "Surround him," Duryodhana commanded his greatest warriors. "Take him together. I do not care for the rules of combat now. Bring this boy down."

Drona, who had so admired Abhimanyu only hours before, knew well that no single warrior could defeat him. He gave the order that broke the sacred law of righteous war, the law that said many should never set upon one, that a warrior whose chariot was wrecked or whose bow was cut should be spared until he could fight again. "He fights like his father," Drona said grimly. "He cannot be beaten honestly. We must take him all at once, and we must take his weapons first."

So the greatest names of the Kaurava host gathered around a single exhausted boy - Drona and Karna, Kripa and Ashwatthama, Kritavarma and the others, and behind them the son of Dushasana. Six and more of the mightiest warriors alive closed in upon one youth of sixteen, and the rules of war died there in the dust beside him.

They struck him from every side at once, and not from the front where a warrior might guard himself, but from behind and from the flanks, where honour forbade.

Karna, on Drona's quiet counsel, loosed an arrow from behind that severed the string of Abhimanyu's bow and cut the great weapon from his hands. Another archer killed the horses. A third struck down the faithful charioteer Sumitra. In a few cruel moments they stripped the boy of everything that had made him a warrior - his bow, his chariot, his steeds, his driver, all gone, and he stood alone on the broken ground in his torn and bloodied armour.

Abhimanyu did not yield. He drew his sword and shield and fought on foot, whirling among them, and when the sword was shattered he caught up a chariot wheel from the wreckage and lifted it over his head. Caked with mud and blood, the wheel spinning in his grip like a great discus, he looked in that moment so like Krishna with his eternal weapon that the warriors around him faltered and drew back in awe.

With that wheel he fought still. He broke the bows of his enemies and dashed it against their chariots, and they could not come near him. But six great archers stood in a ring around him, and their arrows came without cease, and one by one the spokes of the wheel were cut away until at last that final weapon too was struck from his weary hands. He took up a mace then, and faced the son of Dushasana, and the two cousins fell upon each other with the last of their strength.

Wounded in a hundred places, his lifeblood running from him into the dust of Kurukshetra, Abhimanyu still found the strength to fight. He and the son of Dushasana grappled with their maces, and both struck their blows at the same moment, and both fell stunned to the earth. But Abhimanyu had given his last and could not rise quickly, while his cousin, fresh and whole, staggered to his feet first.

The son of Dushasana lifted his mace high while Abhimanyu still knelt, dazed and unarmed, and brought it crashing down upon the boy's head. So died Abhimanyu, son of Arjuna, sixteen years old, struck down from behind by many while he stood without a weapon - everything that the law of righteous war forbade, done all at once to a single child.

A hush fell over that part of the field. Even hardened soldiers turned their faces away. The Kauravas raised a shout of triumph, but it rang hollow, for they had won by breaking every sacred rule, and they knew it. The boy lay still at last, his face turned up to the dimmed sun, and around him in a wide ring lay the warriors and chariots and elephants he had destroyed in his lonely hour of glory.

He had fallen as the bravest fall - upright, fighting, unconquered in spirit if not in flesh. He had broken into Drona's perfect array alone. He had held the centre of an army by himself. He had slain a prince and bloodied the greatest archers of the age. The Chakravyuha had taken his life, but it had not taken his honour, and his name would outlast every man who stood against him that day.

Far to the south, Arjuna had spent the day cutting down the Samsaptakas, and as the sun lowered he felt a strange unease that he could not name. The omens were dark. The very air seemed to mourn. When he and Krishna turned their chariot back toward the camp at last, the silence of the men who came to meet them told him that something terrible had happened before any word was spoken.

They told him gently, and then they could not soften it. His son was dead. Abhimanyu had broken the Chakravyuha alone, had been sealed inside by Jayadratha's boon, and had been surrounded and slain by six great warriors against every law of war.

Arjuna fell to the ground as though his own life had been struck from him. The hero who had stood unmoved before armies wept like any father, holding his head in his hands, calling his son's name into the falling night. "He was a child," he cried. "He went in because I taught him only the half of it. He went because I was not there to go in his place." His grief shook the camp, and grown warriors who had never wept in their lives wept to see him.

Then, slowly, the grief hardened into something else. Arjuna rose to his feet, his eyes terrible and dry, and he learned how the boy had been trapped - that Jayadratha had stood at the gate and sealed it, that but for the king of the Sindhus the others would have followed Abhimanyu in and shielded him. And so Arjuna made the most fearful vow of all the war.

"Hear me," he said, and his voice carried to the gods. "Tomorrow, before the sun sets, I will kill Jayadratha for what he has done. I will cut him down before the day is out. And if the sun should set while Jayadratha yet lives, then I will build a fire with my own hands and walk into it, and end my life upon it. This I swear."

Krishna heard the dreadful oath and said nothing, for he knew the day to come would be the hardest of the entire war. The death of one brave boy had set the stage for the fourteenth day, when the whole Kaurava army would throw itself between Arjuna and Jayadratha, and Arjuna would have to break through them all before the sun went down. Abhimanyu had fallen - but his fall would reshape the war, and his memory would drive his father's bow until the end.