The Elephant King of the East

Far in the east, where the great river comes down out of the hills and the forests close like a green wall, lay the kingdom of Pragjyotisha. On its throne sat the oldest king in the world of the epic: Bhagadatta, son of the earth-born Naraka whom Krishna had slain in another age, and yet, such is the strangeness of the old order, an honored friend of Indra himself, who had fought beside the king of the gods in wars older than most of the dynasties now squabbling over Hastinapura.

He was so old by the time of Kurukshetra that his eyelids would no longer hold themselves open. He bound them up with a band of white cloth knotted behind his head and looked out at the world through that strange permanent astonishment, like a man perpetually surprised that he had lived so long. Age had taken his eyelids and nothing else. His arm was iron. His knowledge of the elephant-craft had no living equal. And beneath him moved the reason armies parted before him: Supratika, a war elephant descended from the line of the world-bearing elephants, a gray mountain trained over a lifetime into a single weapon joined to a single rider.

When Pandu had ruled in Hastinapura, before the brothers were born, Bhagadatta had been his guest-friend, and the old king never forgot it. He had watched Pandu's sons grow from the rumor of distant news. He knew, in the cold arithmetic of a Kshatriya, that war between Kuru cousins might one day put him on a field against the children of a man he had loved. He had hoped not to live to see it. He had lived to see it.

Even the Pandavas, who would in time have to kill him, spoke his name with the respect owed to something that belonged to an older world.

When the heralds of the great war went out across the world, riding to every kingdom that owed a debt or held a grudge, they came at last up the eastern roads to Pragjyotisha. They expected, perhaps, to be received by some younger regent, for surely the famous old king was long past the saddle.

They found Bhagadatta in his hall, the white band already about his brow, listening with his head tilted as old men listen, and when they had finished he was silent for a long while. He might have pleaded his years. No council on earth would have faulted a man of his age for sending tribute and staying home to die in his own bed. His ministers, who loved him, half hoped he would.

Instead he rose. "I have fought in this world since before the fathers of these princes drew breath," he said. "I will not sit in my house while the last great battle of the age is decided without me. A Kshatriya of my generation does not miss the closing of the door."

There was old loyalty in it too, and old debts. Duryodhana's house had courted him; the Kuru throne, lawful or not, had asked, and Bhagadatta's word, once given to the line of Hastinapura, was not a thing he knew how to take back. Some said he chose wrongly. He did not argue the point. He gathered his hillmen, his archers of the eastern forests, and above all his elephant corps, the terror of the Brahmaputra valley, and he turned his face to the west.

The march took the better part of a season. When the eastern host came at last onto the plain of Kurukshetra, men climbed their chariots to watch it pass: rank upon rank of war elephants, and at their head the gray mountain Supratika, and on his neck a small straight figure with a white band across his eyes. Bhishma, ranking the warriors of both armies before the killing began, named Bhagadatta the equal of any commander on the field, a maharatha, a master of his craft, and warned the younger men not to think his years made him an easy death.

In the early days, while Bhishma still commanded the Kaurava host, Bhagadatta and Supratika were one terror among many, but a terror the Pandava captains learned quickly to track across the field. Wherever the gray elephant went, formations dissolved.

There is an account of those first encounters that the bards loved to tell. Bhagadatta drove his elephant against the chariots of the Pandava left, and the warriors there, brave men, loosed their arrows at the beast as they had been taught, aiming for the eyes and the trunk. Supratika took the shafts as a hill takes rain. The old king on his neck answered with a rain of his own, javelins and broad arrows placed with an unhurried precision, and where he aimed, men fell. He fought the way a master craftsman works, without waste, without anger, as though killing were simply the last skill of a very long life.

Ghatotkacha, Bhima's mighty son, the rakshasa prince, came against him in those days with all his illusions and his giant's strength, and even he was checked. The old king met sorcery with steadiness and the giant's bulk with the elephant's greater bulk, and the duel ended without a victor, both sides drawing apart to nurse their bruises. Men who saw it said they had not understood, until then, what a single elephant under a single perfect rider could do to an army.

Bhishma, watching from the center, was pleased. He had placed Bhagadatta where the Pandava pressure was heaviest, and the pressure had broken against him. "The east holds," the old commander said. He did not yet know that within days he himself would lie on a bed of arrows, and that when he fell, the burden of the eastern king would grow far heavier.

When Bhishma fell and Drona took up the command, the war changed its shape. Drona was a teacher of strategy, and he set himself a single audacious goal: to capture Yudhishthira alive, to take the eldest Pandava off the field and so end the war without the slaughter of an age. For that he needed the Pandava center cracked open, the king exposed. And for that he reached for the hammer that lay closest to hand.

On the twelfth day, Bhagadatta and Supratika were unleashed as the spearhead of the Kaurava assault, and the day belonged to the elephant.

Supratika came through the Pandava lines like a hill that had decided to travel. The careful formations of the host meant nothing to him; he made his own geometry as he went, trampling chariots into kindling, scattering horses, plucking warriors from their platforms with his trunk and dashing them down, while the old king on his neck placed his javelins with the leisure of a man spearing fish in a shallow basket. Whole divisions began, without any order being given, to move sideways out of his path. And the path, day by day and hour by hour, bent toward Yudhishthira.

The Pandava captains threw themselves into the gap. Dasharna's lord, a king who commanded a fine elephant corps of his own, charged Supratika head to head, mountain against mountain, in the hope of buying time. The duel lasted only moments. The eastern elephant drove his tusks home like a god splitting a hill, and the brave king and his beast went down together, and the gap stayed open.

Krishna, half a field away on Arjuna's chariot, watched the line buckle and did not wait to be told. He turned the white horses. "The old man is winning the war an hour at a time," he said. "No one else on this field can stop him. Come. It must be you."

Before Arjuna could cross the field, another of the brothers met the elephant first. Bhima, who feared nothing that had a shape, leapt down from his chariot and went against Supratika on foot, mace swinging, roaring his challenge, and the whole battle seemed to pause at the meeting of its two strongest creatures.

It nearly ended him. Bhima struck the elephant a blow that would have felled a tower, and Supratika answered not with his tusks but with his trunk. The gray coil shot out and caught the son of the wind-god about the body, wrapped him like a rope around a post, and drew him up toward the tusks to be crushed. For a moment, one of the very few in all the eighteen days, Bhima's death stood plainly visible on the field, and the Pandava host cried out.

But Bhima was the strongest of mortal men, and despair was not in him. He twisted in the living grip, set his whole frame against the elephant's strength, and by main force wrenched himself loose. He dropped, dove between the great columns of the legs, and struck the beast from beneath, where even a mountain is tender, then rolled clear before the descending foot could find him. He came up filthy and gasping and alive, and for the rest of that day even Bhima chose to fight that terrible pair from a distance, with arrows, the way one fights a force of nature rather than an enemy.

The old king on the neck had not even seemed to strain. He had felt the blow, registered the threat, and answered it the way the elephant-craft taught: not with rage but with the beast's own reflexes, trained over a lifetime. He turned Supratika back toward the center, toward Yudhishthira, and went on. It was then that he saw, coming across the trampled ground with the white horses and the banner of the ape, the chariot of Arjuna.

Arjuna against Bhagadatta was the new age set against the old, and for a long and bitter hour the old age held.

The poets, listing the great single combats of the war, named two above the rest: Arjuna against Karna, and Arjuna against the old man with his eyes tied open. There was no mockery in the pairing. The king's arrows came with an economy learned in wars against the enemies of the gods themselves. He cut Arjuna's bowstrings as fast as the Pandava could replace them. He covered the sky with shafts until the sun was a rumor and the chariot drove through a falling dusk of iron. He drove Supratika at the chariot again and again with such relentless judgment that Krishna's horsemanship became a thing the bards sang of on its own, the white horses wheeling and sidestepping the tusks by a hand's breadth, the wheels never still.

Arjuna fought back with everything in his quiver. He answered cloud with cloud, sheared the elephant's armor, killed the beast's escort, wore at the old king with wounds that would have stopped a younger man. Bhagadatta bled and did not slow. He had buried more enemies than Arjuna had years; he had outlived the men who taught him; he had nothing left to fear and nothing left to lose, and a man in that condition is a difficult thing to kill.

Krishna, weaving the horses through the storm, spoke low to his friend. "He will not tire and he will not break, Partha. He has set his life on this hour. Press him. Make him spend everything. Make him reach for the last thing he has."

And at last, pressed past his strength, bleeding from a dozen wounds, the old king of the east reached for the last thing he had.

From his mother the Earth, and through his father Naraka, Bhagadatta had inherited a single missile of last resort, and he had carried it unused through sixty years of war. It was the Vaishnavastra, the personal weapon of Vishnu, given long ago by the god to the earth-goddess, and by her to her demon son, and so down to the old king of Pragjyotisha. Its nature was simple and absolute: whatever it was hurled at, it killed. It could not fail. It could not be turned aside. It had no answer in any quiver in the world.

The old king charged his elephant-goad with the mantra his mother had taught him, the iron point glowing with a light that was not of any fire men knew, and he hurled it across the narrowing field straight at Arjuna's heart.

Krishna saw it leave the goad. He had sworn before the war that he would touch no weapon and strike no blow; he had endured Bhishma's arrows in his own flesh rather than break that vow; he had been, for eighteen days, only a charioteer. He broke the vow now without an instant's hesitation. He turned, set his own body squarely before Arjuna, and took the irresistible weapon full upon his chest.

It did not strike. It bloomed. The weapon of Vishnu, meeting Vishnu, could not do the thing it was made to do. In the air against the dark god's breast it changed, the killing light unwinding into petals and gold, and where a missile had flown there settled instead the Vaijayanti, the victory-garland of the deity, draping itself about Krishna's neck like a thing coming home.

A silence went out across that quarter of the field. Bhagadatta, his last weapon spent and answered, looked through his bound-up eyes at the impossible thing he had just seen, and understood, perhaps before anyone else on the field, exactly who it was that drove the white horses.

Arjuna's joy at being alive turned, in the next breath, to a flash of real anger, and the anger was at Krishna.

"You swore," he said. "Before all the hosts you swore you would not fight, that you would carry no weapon and take no part, and now you have stepped in front of my battle and shielded me with your own body. They will say Arjuna could not win his own combat. They will say the vow of Krishna was a lie. Why?"

Krishna did not turn from the horses, and his answer was quiet under the noise of the field. "Hear what that weapon was, Partha, before you grieve for my vow. In an age before your birth I gave the Vaishnavastra to the Earth, for the protection of her son Naraka, and I set upon it a law that nothing can break: it must never return to its sender unfilled, and it must never fail to kill what it is thrown at. Once Bhagadatta loosed it at you, one of two things had to happen. Either it killed you, and the world I have spent my life arranging would fall to ruin in a single afternoon, or it struck the one breast in all creation it could not harm, and was satisfied, and did no murder. There was no third road. Against everything else on this field, Arjuna, I am content to be your charioteer and let your hands win the day. Against that, I was the only shield that exists."

Arjuna's anger lasted exactly as long as the explanation, and no longer. He bowed his head. "Then I owe you my life twice over in a single hour," he said, "and I will not waste the gift."

"Then finish this with honor," Krishna said, and now there was something almost gentle in it. "The old lion has no claws left. He has thrown his whole self at you and the throw has failed. What remains is hard. Do it cleanly, and do it as a Kshatriya owes another Kshatriya, with respect. He has earned that much from the world, and the world owes it through your hands."

Released now to fight without restraint, his great weapon spent and his last terror answered, Arjuna did first the thing that no other archer on the field could have done. He killed the mountain.

It was not done lightly, and it was not done in hatred. Supratika was no mere beast; he was the work of a lifetime, a creature trained over decades into something close to a thinking ally, and to bring him down was to undo sixty years of one man's devotion. But while the elephant lived, the old king could not be reached, and while the old king fought, Yudhishthira was not safe. Arjuna chose a long heavy shaft, an iron arrow meant for exactly this, drew it to the feathers, and drove it home between the great frontal globes of the elephant's skull, into the one place where a mountain can be felled.

Supratika did not crash down all at once. The bards insist on this, and they tell it tenderly. The great elephant's forelegs buckled first, and he sank to his knees, the way a hill might bow, and then, slowly, with a sound like the earth itself letting go of a breath, he went over onto his side and was still. Sixty years of partnership ended in the churned dust of the twelfth day.

The old king on the neck did not look down. Kings of the elephant-craft learn that early, before they learn anything else: in the moment your mount falls, you do not look at it, because looking at it kills you a heartbeat later. Bhagadatta rode the great body down, stepped onto the dead neck as a man steps onto solid ground, and stood there with his bow still in his hand, unwounded, upright, his white band still tight across his brow, ready to go on fighting from the corpse of his oldest friend.

What followed was quick, and strangely tender, as the deaths of the very old in battle sometimes are.

Arjuna fitted a crescent-headed arrow, the kind that cuts rather than pierces, and sent it flicking across the short distance between them. It did not touch the old king's body. It cut, cleanly, the band of white cloth that held Bhagadatta's eyelids up.

The lids fell.

The oldest warrior of the age stood on his dead elephant's neck in sudden darkness, unwounded and blind, his last great weapon spent, his oldest friend dead beneath his feet, and he did not cry out and he did not beg. He lifted his bow and fought now entirely from memory, loosing his final arrows at the place where the sound of the white horses had last been, where Arjuna had stood a moment before. The shafts went wide. They went into the empty churned air, and the old man could not see that they had failed.

There was a pause then that the field swears to. Arjuna held his hand. He let an old man stand a moment in the dark and understand, by the silence and the absence of any answering cry, that it was over, that the throws had failed, that there was no longer any enemy where he was aiming. It was the only mercy left to give, and Arjuna gave it: a few heartbeats in which a great king could compose himself for his end rather than be cut down in the middle of a wasted shot.

Then a single broad-headed arrow, sped without flourish, took Bhagadatta in the chest. He fell from the neck of Supratika with all his years upon him, and came to rest in the dust beside his elephant, and the east had no king.

Arjuna turned the chariot and circled the two bodies once, slowly, the great elephant and the small straight king fallen together, before the tide of the war could come up and trample the spot into anonymous ground. It was the salute the living owe the great dead, given quietly, half to himself, and the battle swallowed the gesture almost before it was made.

Of all the deaths he dealt across the eighteen days, Arjuna grieved few stranger than this one. He had killed teachers and kinsmen and the friends of his childhood, and each had its own particular weight. But Bhagadatta was something apart. Here was a man who had been the guest-friend of his own father Pandu, a man older than every grudge that had brought the armies to this plain, a friend of Indra who was Arjuna's own divine father, a king who had owned a quiet eastern country and wanted nothing that Kurukshetra could give him. He had stood to gain nothing from the war. He had come anyway, because his world was ending and he had chosen to end with it rather than watch it end from a distance.

Krishna, beside him, watched the bodies recede as the chariot drew away. "He chose his death well," the dark god said. "He was of an age that is passing, Partha. There will be no more like him after this war, no kings who tie their eyes open to keep their place in a line of battle, no elephants raised across a lifetime into the likeness of a friend. We have killed not only a man today but the last of a kind of man. Carry that gently."

The Pandava center, which Bhagadatta had so nearly broken open, closed and held. Yudhishthira was safe. Drona's bold plan to take the king alive had failed on the body of the oldest warrior on the field. And the elephant Supratika, the gray mountain of the east, lay still in the trampled dust, his long service done, the white silk band that had bound his master's eyes lying cut and forgotten on the ground between them, fluttering a little in the wind that came down off the plain of Kurukshetra.