The Dice That Turned Into Arrows

Sanjaya was telling the fourteenth day, and the blind king kept interrupting him to ask the same thing in different words: how one man of the Satwata race could go through a whole army.

Satyaki had been sent after Arjuna that morning, and he had been cutting his way toward him ever since. Duhsasana had thrown everything at him. Three thousand bowmen. Sakas and Kamvojas and Yavanas and mountaineers who fought with stones. Five hundred here, a thousand there, a hundred thousand after that, and the field behind Satyaki's car looked, Sanjaya said, like the autumn sky bespangled with stars, except that the stars were broken wheels and cart-shafts snapped into fragments and elephants huge as hills lying on their sides with their frontal globes split open.

The noise of it carried. Drona heard it from where he stood at the head of his own division and spoke to his charioteer.

"That great car-warrior of the Satwata race, excited with wrath, is tearing our army into diverse fragments, and careering in battle like the Destroyer himself. Take the car to that spot whence this furious uproar is coming."

The charioteer did not move. "Thou blest with length of days, the Kaurava troops are flying away. Behold, our warriors, routed, are flying in all directions. There, again, those heroes, the Panchalas and the Pandavas, united together, are rushing from all sides from desire of slaughtering thee. Determine which of these tasks should first demand attention. Should we stay here, or should we proceed? As regards Satyaki, he is now far ahead of us."

While the man was still speaking, the answer arrived on its own. The troops came out of the dust toward them, running, and behind the runners came the car-warriors who had gone out with Duhsasana, struck with panic, making for the one place on that field where a frightened Kaurava still believed he would be safe.

And among them, drawing up alongside the preceptor's chariot, was Duhsasana himself.

Drona looked at him for a moment before he spoke.

"Why, O Duhsasana, are all these cars flying away?"

It was the tone a teacher uses when he already knows the answer and intends the student to hear himself give it.

"Is the king well? Is the ruler of the Sindhus yet alive?"

Those were not idle questions. The whole day had been built around Jayadratha, the ruler of the Sindhus, whom Arjuna had sworn to kill before sunset or else enter the fire. Drona had drawn up an array forty-eight miles deep to keep that one man hidden behind it. If cars were streaming backward out of the line, the first thing a commander needed to know was whether the thing the line existed to protect was still standing.

Then he turned from the army to the man.

"Thou art a prince. Thou art a brother of the king. Thou art a mighty car-warrior. Why dost thou fly away from battle? Become thou that Prince-Regent."

Duhsasana said nothing. He was the second son of Dhritarashtra, the one who had always been where his elder brother needed a hand and a voice, the one who had dragged Draupadi into the assembly by her hair while a hall full of kings studied the floor. He had been Duryodhana's instrument for as long as either of them had been grown men, and now he was standing on a chariot with the noise of Satyaki's shafts behind him, and he had nothing to say.

Drona was not finished. He had been a Brahmana teaching arms to princes when these men were boys, and he had watched this one grow up, and he had eaten Dhritarashtra's food for thirteen years while the thing that produced this afternoon was assembled piece by piece in a hall he had been sitting in.

So he did what the old sometimes do when they have been silent too long. He went back to the beginning.

"Thou hadst formerly said unto Draupadi," said Drona, and then he said the words back to him, in front of the charioteers and the runners and whoever else on that field was close enough to hear.

"Thou art our slave, having been won by us at dice. Without being confined to thy husbands, cast aside thy chastity. Be thou a bearer of robes to the king, my eldest brother. Thy husbands are all dead. They are as worthless as grains of sesamum without kernel."

It was an exact quotation. Drona had been in that hall. He had heard it the first time, in a room where the woman it was addressed to was standing in a single cloth, and he had not stopped it then, and he was quoting it now on a battlefield to the man who had said it, while that man's army ran past them both.

"Having said these words then, why, O Duhsasana, dost thou fly from battle now? Having thyself provoked such fierce hostilities with the Panchalas and the Pandavas, why art thou afraid in battle in the presence of Satyaki alone?"

Then came the sentence men remembered afterwards, because it turned the dice game and the war into one object.

"Taking up the dice on the occasion of the gambling match, couldst thou not divine that those dice then handled by thee would soon transform themselves into fierce shafts resembling snakes of virulent poison?"

The little rattling things in his fist in that hall. The arrows going past his ear on this field. Drona was telling him they were the same objects, that the transformation had not been sudden, and that anyone paying attention could have seen it coming from the moment the throw was made.

"It was thou that hadst formerly applied diverse abusive epithets towards the Pandavas. The woes of Draupadi have thee for their root. Where now is that pride, that insolence, that brag of thine? Why dost thou fly, having angered the Pandavas, those terrible snakes of virulent poison?"

There was still no answer from the other chariot.

"When thou that art a brave brother of Suyodhana art intent on flight, without doubt, O hero, thou shouldst today protect, relying on the energy of thy own arms, this routed and panic-stricken Kaurava host. Without doing this, thou forsakest the battle in fear and enhancest the joy of thy foes. O slayer of foes, when thou that art the leader of thy host fliest away thus, who else will stay in battle? When thou, its refuge, art frightened, who is there that will not be frightened?"

Then Drona named the men who were still to come.

"Fighting with a single warrior of the Satwata race, thy heart is inclined towards flight from battle. What, however, wilt thou do when thou wilt see the wielder of Gandiva in battle, or Bhimasena, or the twins? The shafts of Satyaki, frightened by which thou seekest safety in flight, are scarcely equal to those of Phalguna in battle that resemble the sun or fire in splendour."

And then, on the fourteenth day of the war, with the Kaurava host being ground down at both ends of the field, the commander of that host said this.

"If thy heart is firmly bent on flight, let the sovereignty of the earth then, upon the conclusion of peace, be given to king Yudhishthira the Just."

He said it four more times, one clause at a time, and each clause was a clock.

"Before the shafts of Phalguna, resembling snakes freed from their sloughs, enter thy body, make peace with the Pandavas. Before the high-souled Parthas, slaying thy hundred brothers in battle, wrest the earth by force, make peace with the Pandavas. Before king Yudhishthira is enraged, and Krishna also, that delighter in battle, make peace with the Pandavas. Before the mighty-armed Bhima, penetrating into this vast host, seizes thy brothers, make peace with the Pandavas.

"Bhishma formerly told thy brother Suyodhana: the Pandavas are unconquerable in battle, O amiable one, make peace with them. Thy wicked brother Suyodhana, however, did not do it."

Then, having offered him the whole earth given away and the war ended, Drona finished by telling him to go and fight.

"Therefore, setting thy heart firmly on battle, fight vigorously with the Pandavas. Go quickly on thy car to the spot where Satyaki is. Without thee, O Bharata, this host will fly away."

Duhsasana said not a word in reply. Feigning not to have heard the words of Bharadwaja's son, he turned his car and went back toward Satyaki with a large force of unretreating Mlecchas behind him, and came upon that hero, and fought there vigorously.

And Drona let him go.

Drona turned his own car the other way, against the Panchalas and the Pandavas, and went at them with moderate speed, which is how a man moves who has decided to work rather than to charge.

He penetrated into the middle of the Pandava host and began to crush their warriors by hundreds and by thousands. And he proclaimed his name while he did it, calling it out over the field the way a bowman does who wants the men in front of him to know exactly whose arrows are arriving, and there was a great carnage among the Pandavas and the Panchalas and the Matsyas.

Then one man stopped him.

Viraketu was a son of Drupada, the ruler of the Panchalas, which made him a brother of Dhrishtadyumna and one of that house Drona had spent his life hating and being hated by. Sanjaya names him as a prince and not as a great bowman. He came at the son of Bharadwaja while the killing was at its height and put five straight shafts into him, and one into his standard, and seven into his charioteer.

And Drona could not get past him.

Sanjaya says this plainly and calls the sight exceedingly wonderful, because it was: the foremost weapon-master alive, in the middle of a rout he was himself causing, exerting himself vigorously and unable to approach one Panchala prince.

The Panchalas saw it. They saw Drona checked, and they came in from every side for king Yudhishthira's victory, and covered him with showers of fiery shafts and strong lances and every other kind of weapon they had.

Drona baffled the whole of it with his own arrows, the way the wind drives masses of cloud out of the sky, and Sanjaya, who was on the other side and had reason to notice, said that he looked exceedingly resplendent doing it.

Then he aimed one shaft at Viraketu's car, a fierce one with the effulgence of the sun or of fire in it. It went through the prince of Panchala and out of him and into the earth beyond, bathed in blood and blazing like a flame.

And Viraketu fell out of his chariot like a Champaka tree uprooted by the wind and dropping from a mountain summit.

Four brothers came for the body.

Chitraketu, Sudhanwan, Chitravarman and Chitraratha, all sons of the Panchala king, all afflicted with grief on account of their slain brother, rushed at the son of Bharadwaja together, shooting shafts at him like clouds pouring at the end of summer.

Struck from all sides by mighty car-warriors of royal lineage, that bull among Brahmanas mustered all his energy and all his wrath for their destruction.

What happened next took less time to do than it takes to tell. Drona drew his bow to its fullest stretch and shot showers of shafts, and the princes, struck with them, became confounded and did not know what to do. He saw them stupefied. And then, smiling, he deprived them of their steeds and their charioteers and their cars, so that four young men stood on four wrecks in the middle of a battle with nothing under them and nothing left to do.

Then, with sharp arrows and broad-headed shafts, he cut off their heads, like a person plucking flowers from a tree.

They fell from their cars to the earth, deprived of life, like the Daityas and Danavas in the battle between the gods and the Asuras in days of old.

Five sons of Drupada were on the ground within the space of a few minutes, and the man who had killed them stood up on his chariot and shook his invincible bow, the back of whose staff was decked with gold, so that everyone watching could see it move.

That is the image to hold, because of what it produced. Not the killing. The bow shaken afterwards, deliberately, in front of an army.

Dhrishtadyumna saw it.

He was a son of Drupada too, born out of a sacrificial fire for one purpose, which was the death of this man, and he had spent the whole war as commander of the Pandava host without once being allowed to accomplish it. He looked at those mighty car-warriors of his own house, who had resembled the very celestials, lying dead on the field.

And Dhrishtadyumna, inflamed with rage, shed tears in that battle.

Then he drove at Drona's car.

Cries of woe went up from the Kaurava side at once, because what they saw was Drona covered with arrows by the prince of the Panchalas.

Completely shrouded by the high-souled son of Prishata, Drona suffered no pain. He continued to fight, and he was smiling while he did it, which was the thing about him his enemies found hardest to bear.

Then Dhrishtadyumna, furious with rage, struck him in the chest with many straight shafts.

Deeply pierced by that mighty warrior, the illustrious son of Bharadwaja sat down on the terrace of his car and fell into a swoon.

There is no sound in the account at this point, and there should not be. An old man in gold armour sitting down on the floor of his own chariot with his eyes closed and his hands loose, in the middle of the fourteenth day, in front of the one man alive who had been made for the purpose of killing him.

Dhrishtadyumna beheld him in that condition. And he laid aside his bow.

That is the detail. He put down the weapon he had been using, because a bow is no use for what he had decided to do, and quickly took up a sword instead. Then that mighty car-warrior jumped down from his own car and in no time at all mounted the chariot of Bharadwaja's son, his eyes red in wrath, impelled by the desire of cutting Drona's head from off his trunk.

He was standing on the preceptor's car with the sword up.

He had wanted this since before he was born. His father had bought him out of a fire for it. His sister had been dragged through a hall by her hair by the man who had just ridden away from Drona's rebuke without answering it. Every day of this war had been arranged, on his side, around the possibility of this exact moment, and the moment had arrived, and there was nothing between the blade and the neck of a senseless man.

And the senseless man opened his eyes.

Drona, regaining his senses, took up his bow.

He saw who was on his car and how close, and a bow at that range is a stick. So he used the shafts that measure a span only in length, the short ones fit to be used in close fight, which almost nobody carried and fewer still could shoot, and which Drona knew.

He put them into Dhrishtadyumna at arm's length, one after another, until the Panchala was weakened and could not stand there any longer, and Dhrishtadyumna jumped down off that chariot with his impetuosity baffled, mounted his own car, and took up his large bow again.

Then they fought properly.

Sanjaya says the battle that took place between Drona and the prince of the Panchalas was wonderful in the extreme, like that between Indra and Prahlada when both desired the sovereignty of the three worlds. Both conversant with the ways of battle, both careering over the field, displaying diverse motions of their cars and mangling each other with their shafts. They stupefied the minds of the warriors watching. They shot like two mighty clouds pouring torrents in the rainy season, and their arrows shrouded the sky and the points of the compass and the earth, and all the Kshatriyas on that field, on both sides, highly applauded that battle.

The Panchalas were shouting something else.

"Without doubt, Drona, having encountered Dhrishtadyumna in battle, will succumb to us."

They were three days early. Drona, in the middle of that duel, quickly cut off the head of Dhrishtadyumna's charioteer, like a person plucking a ripe fruit from a tree, and the steeds of the high-souled son of Prishata bolted with nobody holding them and carried him off the field with the reins loose and the sword he had not used still lying in the car.

With him gone, Drona began to rout the Panchalas and the Srinjayas. Having vanquished the Pandus and the Panchalas, that chastiser of foes took up his station once more in the midst of his own array.

And the Pandavas, Sanjaya said, ventured not to vanquish him in battle.

Somewhere off to the side of all this, Duhsasana was still fighting Satyaki, having heard nothing that was said to him.