Chitraratha at the Ganga

The demon of Ekachakra was dead at the town gate, and a new rumor was walking the roads of the world. In Panchala, men said, King Drupada had proclaimed a swayamvara for his daughter, the dark and beautiful Draupadi, born of the sacrificial fire. Brahmins from every land were drifting toward Kampilya to see the festival and eat the king's charity, and five Brahmins in particular, tall beyond the ordinary and walking with their mother in their midst, joined the drift. The Pandavas had spent a year being nobody. Something in all of them had begun to lean toward Panchala, the way a bent bow leans toward the loosing.

They traveled by night, for the roads were safer for fugitives in the dark, and Arjuna walked ahead carrying a torch. So they came, in the middle of a moonless night, to the bank of the Ganga at a lonely ford.

The river at that place was not empty. A gandharva, a celestial of the airy race that serves the gods with music and war, had come down with his wives to sport in the water in the secret hours, for the twilight and the night belong to the unearthly kind, and they do not love to be seen. His name was Angaraparna, and he was proud of three things: his heavenly chariot, his forest along the river given to him by Kubera, and his right to the darkness.

He heard footsteps and saw torchlight coming down to his river, and he rose out of the water in wrath. "Stop where you stand," he called. "The night is ours. Even kings with armies do not walk abroad in the hour that belongs to the wandering spirits. I am Angaraparna, friend of Kubera, and this river and this forest are mine. Men who come near me in the dark do not leave."

Arjuna did not lower the torch. He was tired, he was landless, and he had spent a year bowing his head in disguise, and something in him refused to bow it to this.

"Ocean, mountain, and river belong to no one," he answered. "The Ganga is open to all beings at every hour. There is no ownership in her waters, and there is no hour when the weak must ask the strong for permission to be thirsty. Only those without strength appease. We are the sons of Kunti; move aside."

The gandharva loosed his weapons then, and the fight came on in the dark. Arjuna warded the celestial arrows with the torch and with his own shafts, and then he spoke a weapon he had been keeping like a coal banked under ash: the agneya astra, the weapon of fire, which had come down from teacher to teacher, from Bharadvaja to Agnivesha to Drona, and from Drona to the best pupil the world had ever given him.

The fire weapon took the gandharva's chariot whole. The painted wood, the celestial fittings, the banners that had glittered above the river went up in one white blaze, and Angaraparna, scorched and senseless, tumbled from it headlong. Arjuna caught him by the hair of his flower-crowned head and dragged him, as a man drags a sack, to the feet of his brothers.

His name until that night meant "the beautiful chariot," Chitraratha. He would say afterward, with a defeated man's bitter honesty, that the boy at the river had renamed him: Dagdharatha, "the burnt chariot," was all he could call himself now.

Out of the dark water came a woman crying. She was Kumbhinasi, the gandharva's wife, and she ran past Arjuna, past the torch, and threw herself before Yudhishthira, because grief knows where mercy lives. "Great one, I take refuge in you," she wept. "Release my husband. I am asking for his life."

Yudhishthira looked at the singed celestial in his brother's grip. "He is beaten, his fame is gone, and his wife is begging," he said to Arjuna. "Who kills an enemy that a woman is shielding with her own body? Let him go." And Arjuna, who had not fought for a corpse but for a principle, let him go at once.

What Angaraparna did next set him apart from prouder men. He sat up in the mud of his own river, looked at the five who had ruined him, and laughed at himself. "My chariot is ash and my boast is ash with it," he said. "Very well. A celestial should know a marvel when it defeats him. I offer you friendship, and gifts with it."

He gave Arjuna the chakshushi vidya, the science of sight, by which a man may see whatever in the three worlds he wishes to see, as if it stood before his eyes. He promised each brother a hundred horses of the gandharva breed, born of divine mares, swift as thought and obedient to the mind of the rider, to be given whenever they should be wished for. And Arjuna, refusing to take without giving, taught the gandharva the weapon of fire in return. The two clasped hands in the torchlight, the burner and the burned, and were friends.

Then Arjuna asked the question a modest victor asks. "You are a celestial, and the night is your hour, and you attacked us first. Why did you fall to me?"

"Because of what you are," said Angaraparna plainly. "I have overthrown men of might in this river before. But anger and appetite make a spirit heavy, and I came at you full of both. You five keep your vows. You are pure, you honor your mother, you walk in dharma even while the world believes you dead. Against a man in whom the fire of discipline is burning, celestial weapons lose their way. It was not your arrow that beat me. It was what stood behind it."

The rest of the night the enemy-turned-friend spent as gandharvas best spend nights: telling stories. He addressed Arjuna as Tapatya, descendant of Tapati, and when Arjuna asked what the name meant, Angaraparna told him of Tapati the daughter of the sun and King Samvarana, the ancestor of the Kurus, a story of the line's own blood that the princes of the line had never heard. He told them of Vasishtha and Vishvamitra, of the power of sages and the ruin of kings who anger them, until the sky over the Ganga went gray with dawn.

Last of all he gave them the most practical gift of the night: advice. "You are kings, whatever you are wearing," he said. "And kings do not prosper without a priest. A man of the Veda must walk ahead of your fortunes, as fire walks ahead of a sacrifice. You were beaten tonight by no one, but you will not always be five swords in the dark. Find a purohita."

The Pandavas heard him. At a shrine called Utkochaka they sought out a young Brahmin named Dhaumya, austere and steady, and asked him to be the priest of their house, and he accepted the five landless boys as if they were already emperors. It was the first act of state of a dynasty that owned nothing. Then, with a priest before them and a friend behind them, they walked on toward Panchala, where a bow was waiting to be bent, and a fire-born princess was waiting to garland the winner.