The Stake on the Table

Sanjaya said: "After that army had been routed, and Arjuna and Bhimasena had all gone after the ruler of the Sindhus, thy son proceeded towards Drona."

It was the afternoon of the fourteenth day, and the Kuru line had been opened three times.

Arjuna had gone through it first, with Krishna driving him, because he had sworn the night before that he would kill Jayadratha before the sun went down or else walk into fire. Then Satyaki had been sent after Arjuna, and had crossed the whole host on one car. Then Bhima had been sent after Satyaki, and had crossed it too, roaring as he went, so that Yudhishthira could hear from far off that his brothers were still alive. Three men, in succession, through an array that Drona had built forty-eight miles deep for the express purpose of keeping one man out of it.

Duryodhana turned his car around and went back to find his commander.

He went alone. Sanjaya says so, and says also what the king was doing on the way: thinking, by the way, of diverse duties. He had a great many of them and they were all coming due at once. That car of thy son, endued with the speed of the wind or of thought, proceeded with great celerity towards Drona.

It is worth pausing on the picture, because it is not the one usually painted of Duryodhana. There is no boasting in it and no gloating. There is a man on a single chariot going back down the length of his own army, past his own dead, to ask the oldest and most honoured person on his side of the field a question he did not want to have to ask.

His eyes were red with wrath when he got there. But the wrath, when it came out of him, was not aimed where anyone would have expected.

"O grinder of foes," Duryodhana said to the preceptor, "Arjuna and Bhimasena, and unvanquished Satyaki, and many mighty car-warriors, defeating all our troops, have succeeded in approaching the ruler of the Sindhus. Indeed, those mighty car-warriors, who vanquished all the troops, themselves unvanquished, are fighting even there."

Then the question, put to a Brahmana who had been his teacher since he was a boy in the practice ground at Hastinapura.

"O giver of honours, how hast thou been transgressed by both Satyaki and Bhima? O foremost of Brahmanas, this thy defeat at the hands of Satwata, of Arjuna, and of Bhimasena, is like the drying of the ocean, exceedingly wonderful in this world."

Satwata is Satyaki, of the Vrishni house. Duryodhana names all three of them twice over, because the number is the whole of his complaint. Not that the line had been broken, but that it had been broken three separate times by three separate men while the greatest living master of arms stood in it.

"People are loudly asking," he said, "how, indeed, could Drona, that master of the science of arms, be vanquished? Even thus all the warriors are speaking in depreciation of thee."

That is a young king telling an old man what the camp is saying behind his back, and it is very close to an accusation, and both of them knew it. Then Duryodhana said the thing underneath it.

"Destruction is certain for my luckless self in battle, when three car-warriors, O tiger among men, have in succession transgressed thee."

And then, having said it, he did something he was not always capable of. He stopped.

"When, however, all this hath happened, tell us what thou hast to say on the business that awaits us. What hath happened, is past. O giver of honours, think now of what is remaining. Say quickly what should next be done for the ruler of the Sindhus on the present occasion, and let what thou sayest be quickly and properly carried out."

"Listen, O great king," Drona said, "to what I, having reflected much, say unto thee about what should now be done."

He did not defend himself. Nowhere in the answer does he explain how three men got past him, or remind Duryodhana whose idea the array had been, or point out that a line built to hold out an army is not built to hold out one chariot driven by Krishna. He took the reproach, and went straight to the arithmetic.

"As yet only three great car-warriors among the Pandavas have transgressed us. We have as much to fear behind those three as we have to dread before them."

That is the position stated in one line. The Kaurava host now had enemies on both sides of it. Ahead, at the front of the array, stood Dhrishtadyumna and the Panchalas and the Srinjayas and the whole remaining Pandava force, pressing in. Behind, deep inside the formation, where the ruler of the Sindhus had been hidden with six great bowmen around him, were the three who had come through.

"There, however, where Krishna and Dhananjaya are, our fear must be greater. The Bharata army hath been attacked both on the front and from behind."

Then the priority, given plainly, with the reasoning attached.

"In this pass, I think, the protection of the ruler of the Sindhus is our first duty. Jayadratha, afraid of Dhananjaya, deserves of everything else to be protected by us. The heroic Yuyudhana and Vrikodara have both gone against the ruler of the Sindhus."

Afraid of Dhananjaya. Drona says it in front of the king without softening it, because it is simply true and because it is the reason the whole day has taken the shape it has taken. Jayadratha had come to Drona the night before and asked to be allowed to go home to his own kingdom, and had been told that he would be protected, and had stayed on that promise.

Everything the Kaurava army had done since sunrise had been done to keep one frightened man alive until dark.

And having got that far, the preceptor stopped talking about the day in front of him, and began talking about a game of dice played thirteen years earlier in a hall in Hastinapura.

"All this that hath come," Drona said, "is the fruit of that match at dice conceived by Sakuni's intellect."

He was speaking to the man who had commissioned that match, in the hearing of the army it had produced, on the fourteenth day of the war it had caused. Shakuni himself was somewhere on that field with his Gandhara horsemen. Nobody present needed the reference explained.

"Neither victory nor defeat took place in the gaming assembly. Now that we are engaged in this sport, there will be victory or defeat."

This is the first turn of the thought and the sharpest one. Drona is saying that nothing was settled in the sabha. The dice fell, the kingdom changed hands, Draupadi was dragged in by the hair and asked her question and got no answer, and five men walked out toward fourteen years in the woods, and none of that was a decision. It was only a wager made and not yet paid. What was going on in the dust around him was the same game still being played, and this time it would end.

Then he told the king what the dice had been.

"Those innocent things with which Sakuni had formerly played in the Kuru assembly and which he regarded as dice, were, in reality, invincible shafts. Truly, there where, O sire, the Kauravas were congregated, they were not dice but terrible arrows capable of mangling your bodies."

Innocent things. Small pieces of bone and nut rattling in a cup, harmless enough to be handled by an old blind king's brother-in-law in a hall full of laughing men, and Drona tells Duryodhana that every one of them was an arrow the whole time, and that the arrows had been aimed, from the first throw, at the bodies of the people throwing them.

There is no gloating in it either. He is not saying I told you so, though he had been in the hall and had said nothing. He is a commander explaining to his king, at the point where the campaign is coming apart, exactly what kind of engagement they have been fighting since long before the armies were drawn up.

Having named the dice, Drona named the rest of the board.

"At present, however, O king, know the combatants for players, these shafts for dice, and the ruler of the Sindhus, without doubt, O monarch, as the stake, in this game of battle."

Three substitutions, made in one breath, and the whole of Kurukshetra becomes a gaming table.

The men fighting are the players. The arrows going through the air by the hundred thousand are the throws. And the thing on the table, the thing that changes hands when the last throw is made, is a living man sitting on a chariot half a mile away with six great bowmen standing around him.

"Indeed, Jayadratha is the great stake about which we are playing today with the enemy."

It is a terrible thing to say about a member of your own side, and Drona says it to the king who is Jayadratha's brother-in-law, and neither of them disputes it. That is what the Sindhu king had been reduced to by Arjuna's vow. Not a warrior and not an ally but a counter, and both armies had spent the whole day pushing everything they had toward the square he was standing on.

"Under the circumstances, therefore, O monarch, all of us becoming reckless of our very lives, should make due arrangements for the protection of the ruler of the Sindhus in battle. Engaged as we are in our present sport, it is here that we shall have victory or defeat, here, that is, where those great bowmen are protecting the ruler of the Sindhus."

Then the order.

"Go thither, therefore, with speed, and protect those protectors. As regards myself, I will stay here, for despatching others and checking the Panchalas, the Pandus and the Srinjayas united together."

Protect the protectors. The guard around Jayadratha needed a guard now, and the king of the Kurus was to be it, in person, because there was nobody left of sufficient weight to send. Drona would hold the front with what remained and feed men backward into the gap for as long as the light lasted.

The whole war had come down to whether the sun could be kept in the sky over one man's head.

Thus commanded by the preceptor, Duryodhana went, quickly, with his followers, resolutely setting himself to a fierce task.

He did not get far before he ran into two young men who were on precisely the same errand as he was, from the other direction.

The two protectors of the wheels of Arjuna's car, the Panchala princes Yudhamanyu and Uttamaujas, were at that time proceeding towards Savyasachin by the skirts of the Kuru array. Their whole assignment in this war was to ride at Arjuna's chariot wheels, one at each side, and keep anything from getting at him where his own eyes were not. That morning Arjuna had gone into the Kaurava host without them, and they had been trying ever since to reach him.

Sanjaya reminds the blind king why. Thou mayest remember, O king, that formerly, while Arjuna penetrated thy host from desire of battle, those two princes had been checked in their progress by Kritavarman, who commanded at the mouth of the array. They had been cut off at the entrance hours before, and had been working their way around the flank ever since, and now they came along the outside of the formation looking for a way back in to their man.

And there was the Kuru king, coming the other way along the same edge, going in to guard the guards of Jayadratha.

The mighty Duryodhana of Bharata's race lost no time. Those two foremost of Kshatriyas, reputed as mighty car-warriors, rushed at him in that battle with outstretched bows, and the three of them fought there on the skirts of the host while the thing each of them had been sent to protect stood waiting somewhere out of sight.

Yudhamanyu pierced Duryodhana with twenty shafts, and his four steeds with four.

Duryodhana with a single shaft cut off Yudhamanyu's standard, and with another cut his bow, and with a broad-headed arrow felled his charioteer out of his niche in the car, and then put four shafts into the four horses. It was, for a little while, an exhibition. Whatever else may be said of him, on the fourteenth day Duryodhana fought like a man who had finally understood what the wager was.

Then Yudhamanyu, excited with wrath, sped thirty shafts at the centre of thy son's chest. And Uttamaujas, also excited with wrath, pierced Duryodhana's charioteer with shafts decked with gold and despatched him to Yama's abode.

Duryodhana killed Uttamaujas's four horses and both his Parshni charioteers, the men who ride at the flanks of a car and manage its wheels. Uttamaujas, steedless and driverless, climbed up onto his brother's chariot, and from there struck Duryodhana's horses with many shafts, and they fell down on the earth.

So the king of the Kurus was on the ground too, in the same condition as the men he was fighting. Yudhamanyu, with a mighty weapon, cut off his bow, and then, with another shaft, cut away his leathern fence, the guard strapped to the forearm that keeps the bowstring from opening a man's own skin.

That bull among men then jumped down from that steedless and driverless car, took up a mace, and came at the two princes of Panchala on foot.

They saw him coming, that subjugator of hostile towns, advancing in wrath with a mace, and both of them jumped down from the terrace of their car and got clear of it.

Duryodhana, armed as he was with the mace, pressed that foremost of cars down into the earth with it, gold and steeds and driver and standard together, and left the wreck of it in the ground.

Then, having crushed the chariot, steedless and driverless as he himself was, he climbed up onto the car of Shalya, the king of the Madras, and went on toward Jayadratha.

And meanwhile those two mighty car-warriors, those two foremost princes of Panchala, ascended two other cars and proceeded towards Arjuna.

Nobody had won anything. The stake was still on the table, and the sun was still going down.