The Spear Meant for Arjuna

The fourteenth day of the war on the field of Kurukshetra had been the most terrible yet. Arjuna had sworn to kill Jayadratha before sunset or burn himself alive, and to fulfill that vow the Pandavas had torn through the Kaurava host all day in a fury of grief and steel, until at last, in the dying light, Jayadratha's head was struck from his shoulders. But the rage of both armies was so hot, and the day's losses so vast, that when the sun went down the fighting did not stop. For the first time, the two hosts battled on into the night.

Night was the hour of the rakshasas, the night-roaming beings whose strange powers waxed strongest in the dark. And the Pandavas had among them one such being of enormous might: Ghatotkacha, the rakshasa son of Bhima and the forest-woman Hidimba, a giant warrior who loved his father's people with his whole fierce heart. As the darkness deepened, Ghatotkacha came into his full power, and he fell upon the Kaurava army like a storm out of the night.

By the light of a thousand torches and the flicker of the war-fires, Ghatotkacha worked a slaughter such as the Kauravas had not yet known. He grew vast as a hill; he conjured illusions that filled the sky with phantom warriors and rains of fire and weapons; he hurled boulders and trees and whole chariots; he seized elephants by the trunk and dashed them down. His rakshasa hosts fought beside him, and in the confusing dark the Kaurava soldiers could not tell illusion from reality, and panic ran through them like a plague.

Whole divisions broke and fled before him. Arrows seemed to pour from empty air; the night itself seemed to have come alive and turned against them. The bravest Kaurava warriors threw down their weapons and ran, trampling one another in their terror. It seemed to Duryodhana, watching his army melt away in the darkness, that this single night-stalking giant would destroy his whole host before the dawn if nothing were done.

Duryodhana, seeing his army on the edge of ruin, rushed to the one warrior he believed could save them: Karna, the great archer, the friend on whom all his hopes leaned.

"Karna!" he cried. "Look at what this rakshasa is doing to us! He will destroy the whole army before morning. There is no one who can stand against him in this cursed darkness but you. Go - go now and kill Ghatotkacha, or we are all lost. The war itself hangs on this hour. Stop him, by whatever means you must."

So Karna drove out to meet the giant, and a duel began between them that lit the night - the greatest archer of the age against the mightiest of the night-beings. Karna loosed his arrows in unbroken streams, and Ghatotkacha answered with illusions and storms of weapons, vanishing and reappearing, raining destruction. Karna shattered the giant's illusions with his celestial arms and wounded him again and again, and Ghatotkacha tore at Karna's chariot and forces in return. But for all his skill, Karna could not bring the rakshasa down. Every time he seemed to have the upper hand, Ghatotkacha's night-born power renewed him, and the slaughter of the Kauravas went on around them.

There was one weapon in all the world that could end it certainly, and Karna carried it. Long ago Indra, king of the gods, had given Karna a fearful dart called the Vasava Shakti - a single, infallible spear that would unfailingly slay whatever living being it was hurled against, and then return to Indra's hand. But it could be used only once. After one throw, its power was spent forever.

Karna had guarded that spear through the whole war like a miser guarding his last gold, and he had guarded it for one purpose only. He was saving it for Arjuna. Karna knew that in fair combat he and Arjuna were terribly matched, that the duel between them might go either way, and he had resolved that when the moment came he would settle it beyond all doubt with the one weapon that could not miss and could not be survived. The Shakti was Arjuna's death, kept in reserve. It was the single card Karna held that even Krishna's protection of Arjuna could not trump.

And now Duryodhana was screaming at him to use whatever means he must, and the giant Ghatotkacha was unkillable by any ordinary weapon, and the army was being annihilated in the dark before his eyes. Karna stood at the terrible crossroads, the infallible spear in his hand, and the whole hidden design of the war turned upon what he would do next.

On the Pandava side, in the midst of that fearful night, something strange happened that none of the brothers understood. As Ghatotkacha pressed the Kauravas to the very edge of destruction and it seemed the rakshasa might win the war single-handed before dawn, Krishna - Arjuna's charioteer and guide, the one who saw further than all of them - suddenly laughed aloud for joy. He clapped his hands and embraced Arjuna in delight, as a man rejoices at a great deliverance.

Arjuna was bewildered. "How can you rejoice," he asked, "with the battle in such doubt and so many dying?" But Krishna only smiled his deep and knowing smile, for he understood what was unfolding far better than the men in the field. He could see Karna upon the other side, hesitating with the infallible spear in his hand. He could see that Ghatotkacha was driving the Kauravas so hard that Karna would be forced to spend that spear tonight - to throw it at the rakshasa to save the army, rather than keep it for Arjuna. And Krishna knew exactly what that meant: that the one weapon in the world certain to kill Arjuna was about to be used up on someone else.

On the field, Karna made the only choice the night left him. To hold the spear for Arjuna would be to let Ghatotkacha destroy the entire Kaurava army before sunrise - there would be no war left to fight, and no Arjuna to face. To save the army, he had to spend the spear now, on the rakshasa. Duryodhana's whole host, and the cause itself, demanded it.

With a cry of grief and fury, knowing in his heart that he was throwing away his one sure victory over his great rival, Karna took up the Vasava Shakti. The dart blazed in his hand like a second sun, lighting the whole battlefield with its terrible radiance. Karna whirled it once and hurled it with all his strength straight at the descending giant.

The infallible spear streaked through the dark night like a falling star and struck Ghatotkacha full in the chest, piercing the heart that no ordinary weapon could reach. The mighty rakshasa, Bhima's beloved son, the night's great terror, was slain in an instant, for against the Shakti there was no defense and no survival. Its work done, the dart flew up and away, back to Indra's hand, its single use forever spent.

But Ghatotkacha, even in dying, struck one last blow for his father's people. As the spear took his life, the rakshasa used the last of his power to swell his body to a vast and monstrous size, growing huge as a mountain in the air above the battlefield. And then, dead, he fell.

His enormous body came crashing down upon the Kaurava army below, and where it landed it crushed a whole division - a full akshauhini's worth of soldiers, chariots, horses, and elephants - flattening thousands beneath its weight in a single thunderous fall. So even his death was a weapon, and his last act in the world was to carry a host of his enemies down with him into the dark.

A great cry went up across the field, of triumph from the Kauravas that the night-terror was ended at last, and of anguish from the Pandavas for the fall of so dear a warrior. The torches guttered, and the body of the giant lay across the broken ranks like a fallen hill.

When word reached Bhima that his son Ghatotkacha was slain, the strong man was broken with grief. Ghatotkacha had come to the war out of pure love, unbidden, to fight for the father who had begotten him in the forest years before, and now he lay dead, killed by the spear that had been meant for Arjuna. Yudhishthira too was filled with sorrow and rage, and would have rushed against Karna then and there.

But Krishna went among the grieving Pandavas, and where they saw only loss, he showed them what had truly happened. "Do not grieve as though this death were only a death," he told them. "Ghatotkacha has given you the greatest gift any warrior could give. That spear, the Vasava Shakti, was Arjuna's certain death. While Karna carried it, your brother could not be safe, for against that weapon there was no shield, not even mine. I could not let Karna keep it. Night after night I have waited and worked for this hour - for something to force Karna to spend his one infallible dart on another. Tonight Ghatotkacha was that something. By dying, he has saved Arjuna's life, and with it your whole cause. Honor him; do not pity him. He has won the war for you with his own body."

Now the deeper shape of the night's events stood revealed to all. Karna, the mightiest archer of the Kaurava side, had gone into the war holding a single weapon that could have ended Arjuna's life with certainty, defeating the very heart of the Pandava strength. As long as he held it, the outcome of the war hung by a thread, for one well-aimed throw could undo everything.

That thread was now cut. The spear was gone, spent on the giant, returned to heaven, never to be thrown again. Karna would have to face Arjuna at last with ordinary arms, in a fair fight, with no certain victory in his hand - and there, without the Shakti, the long protection that Krishna wove around Arjuna would hold. The single greatest danger to the Pandava cause had been spent in the dark on a rakshasa, exactly as Krishna had hoped.

Karna himself knew it. Even as the Kauravas cheered the death of the night-terror, the great archer understood, with a bitter and lonely certainty, that he had been maneuvered into throwing away his one sure stroke against the rival he was fated to meet. He had saved the army and lost the war in the same throw.

So ended the long and dreadful night of the fourteenth day, and Ghatotkacha's name passed into the memory of the war as one of its great and tragic turning points. He had been a being of the forest and the night, half-rakshasa, never quite at home among the proud kshatriyas of the field. Yet when his father's cause was in peril he had come without being asked, fought without counting the cost, and in the end given his own life - and, by the manner of his death, drawn out of his enemy the one weapon that would have doomed the Pandavas.

There is a hard truth folded into the tale: that victory in such a war is bought not only by the great and celebrated heroes but by the love and the lives of those the world is quick to overlook. Krishna's joy in that terrible hour was the joy of one who sees the whole board, who knows that a war is decided as much by which weapon is spent on whom as by who is brave. And the cheerful giant of the forest, dying with a god's spear in his heart and an army crushed beneath his falling body, had without knowing it spoken the last word in the long contest of the war.

Bhima mourned his son to the end of his days. But the Pandavas lived, and Arjuna lived, because on a torchlit night a rakshasa had drawn down upon himself the dart that was meant for another. That was the sacrifice of Ghatotkacha, and it was not forgotten.