The Flight to Dwaraka

Kamsa was dead, pulled off his high seat by a boy from the cowherd camps and killed in front of his own court, and how that was done is told in its own place. What followed is less often told.

Kamsa had married two daughters of Jarasandha, emperor of Magadha, the strongest king then living. In one afternoon Jarasandha had lost a son-in-law twice over, and his two daughters came home to Girivraja in white and would not stop weeping outside his door.

He came the first time before the year was out.

Twenty-three akshauhinis crossed the country and stood along the Yamuna until the far bank was nothing but iron, and Mathura shut her gates. Krishna and Balarama went out through them with the Vrishni horse and broke that army and sent what was left of it home on foot. Jarasandha went with them, alive, because Krishna would not let anyone finish him.

"You had him," said Balarama afterwards, cleaning the plough blade. "You had him at the ford."

"He is not mine to kill," said Krishna, "and he is useful. Every king in the east who hates us marches under his banner. So long as he lives they come here in one heap, and we break one heap."

He came again the next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. Seventeen times Jarasandha brought the armies of the east against Mathura, and seventeen times the two brothers went out and broke them, and the seventeenth victory was as complete as the first.

It was the city that was not the same.

There were streets now with no young men on them. There were quarters where every second house kept a lamp burning for somebody who had not come back from the river. The granaries emptied a little earlier each spring, because seed grain had been eaten in the sieges. The cattle had been driven inside the walls so often that the pasture east of Mathura had gone to thorn. Old men who had spent eighteen years being proud of their sons now had nothing to be proud about except the number, seventeen, which they said often.

Krishna walked the walls at night and did the arithmetic that nobody else in the council was willing to do out loud. Seventeen victories. And an eighteenth army was already being counted somewhere in Magadha, by a man who did not have to win, only to come back.

The news came up the western road in the month before the rains.

Kalayavana was moving. The Yavana king out of the far country beyond the deserts, whom no Yadava had ever fought and every Yadava had heard of, had put an army on the road, and the men who had seen it could not give a number. They said it took a day and a half to pass a given tree. They said the dust of it stood in the sky like weather.

The council of the Yadavas met that night and shouted at each other until the lamps burned down, which was the custom of the Yadavas.

"Then we do what we have done seventeen times," said one of the Andhaka elders. "We shut the gates and we go out at dawn."

"Against which of them?" said Krishna.

The hall did not answer.

"Say we fight the Yavana," he said. "Say we win. Say it costs what the last one cost, and we bury our dead, and while we are burying them Jarasandha comes up from the east with the eighteenth army and finds this city held by widows. Or say we turn east first. Then the Yavana is in Mathura in eight days and there is nothing standing between him and the Yamuna but the walls, and I have walked those walls. They were built to hold cattle raiders."

"We have never lost," said the elder.

"We have never lost," Krishna agreed, "and that is the most dangerous thing anybody has said in this hall tonight. Uncle, count with me. There are two of them and one of us. Even a river cannot flow two ways. There is no plan under this roof by which the Vrishnis hold Mathura against both, and every man here who is honest knows it, and we have been sitting in the dark for an hour because none of us wants to say the word out loud."

"What word?" said Balarama.

"Leave," said Krishna.

It went through the hall like cold water. Somebody laughed. Somebody said the word coward, not loudly, but in a hall of Yadavas nothing is ever said quietly enough.

Krishna heard it and let it stand, and went on drawing in the spilled water on the table: the Yamuna here, Magadha there, and away to the left, past the desert, past everything, the western sea.

"Hear me before you name me," said Krishna, and the hall quieted, because he had not raised his voice.

"What is the first duty of a king? Not glory. Not the reputation of his house. The lives of the people who cannot leave when the gates come down. The potter's family in the south quarter. The women who carry water at the third hour. The children who play in the tank behind the cattle market. None of them chose this war. All of them will pay it, and they will pay it in a currency no victory ever gives back.

"I can win here. Understand that clearly. I can hold this city, and the songs will say so, and I will pay for those songs with the young men of Mathura, and go on paying until there are none. That is not courage. That is a man buying his own name with somebody else's sons.

"A wall can be rebuilt. A city is not its walls. A city is its people, and its people can walk. So let them call me what they like. Let the poets of Magadha say the Yadava ran. I will take the name and I will keep the children."

Old Ugrasena on his seat said, "They will call you Ranchhod. He who left the battlefield."

"Then I have a new name," said Krishna, and smiled. "It cost me nothing and it saves a hundred thousand people. I have never in my life been offered a better bargain than that."

What happened to Kalayavana afterwards, when one man went out of the gate alone on foot and let a king chase him into the dark of a mountain cave where somebody very old lay sleeping, belongs to another telling. That was Krishna's business, and he settled it himself.

This telling is about the road.

It took months. A city of that size does not move the way an army moves. They went out in trains of carts by clan and by quarter: the Vrishnis, the Andhakas, the Bhojas, the Madhus, the Kukuras, herds ahead of them and the old people riding, going west and south by ways that had never carried so much traffic. They took the images out of the temples and the fire from the household hearths and the deeds of houses they would never see again. Vasudeva went with them, and Devaki, and Ugrasena, who had been put back on a throne only to be carried away from it. Behind them Mathura stood empty in the sun with its gates open, the wells still sweet, the flowers still on the tank, and nobody at all in the streets.

The land ran out at last, as they had been told it would.

They came through the Anarta country and out onto the western shore, and there in front of them was the sea, which most of them had never seen: grey to the horizon, moving, saying the same thing over and over. On that shore stood the ruin of an old city called Kushasthali, that Raivata had built and time had taken back, and around it a strip of ground far too small to hold a nation.

"This is the place," said Krishna.

Balarama looked at the water and then at the crowd stretching two days back along the road behind them. "It is a headland," he said. "There is no room here for the cattle, let alone the clans."

"There is room," said Krishna, "under that."

What the Harivamsa says is that he went down to the edge and asked, and the sea gave. Twelve yojanas of ground came up out of the water, dark and streaming and new, and stood there in the sun waiting to be built on. And Vishvakarma, who is the architect of the gods and had built the halls of Indra and the seat of Varuna, came down at Krishna's asking and looked over that ground once, the way a good workman looks at timber.

"How long?" said Krishna.

"How long have you got?" said Vishvakarma.

"They are sleeping in carts."

"Then tonight," said the architect.

The people camped, and the sun went down on bare wet ground, and when it came up again there was a city.

It stood inside a rampart the colour of the sun with the sea running all around it. The streets had been laid as a mandala is laid, cut square and true to the four quarters, wide enough for eight chariots abreast, and every quarter had its own tank and its own market and its own grove. There were houses of white stone with crystal in the windows, and gardens where nothing had been planted the evening before and everything was in flower. There were assembly halls, and stables cut for a hundred thousand horses, and towers, and terraces where you could stand and look at nothing but water.

And there were gates. Gate after gate after gate, in every wall and on every side, more doors than any city on earth had ever needed. They named it for them. Dwaraka, the city of doors, the many-gated, the place with a way in from every direction.

Over the highest tower they ran up the flag with Garuda on it, and the wind off the sea took it straight out and held it there.

The settling took longer than the building, because clans are harder to arrange than streets.

Each house was given its quarter and each quarter its gate, and there was arguing, and the arguing was itself a comfort: it was the sound of the Yadavas being the Yadavas, and it meant they were alive to do it. Ugrasena sat in the assembly hall as he had sat in Mathura. Vasudeva walked in the sea gardens in the evening with Devaki beside him, an old man now, who had once carried a child across a river in the dark and had never expected to see the ocean.

And the sea kept the city. That was the whole point of it, and everyone understood the point within a month of living there. No army marches on water. Jarasandha could put a hundred thousand men on the eastern shore and stand there looking at a wall he could not reach across a moat that was six hundred miles wide. The Yadavas slept. It was the first year in eighteen that the young men were all at the evening meal.

Krishna went up on the rampart when it was quiet and looked back east over the water at nothing.

"You are not glad," said Balarama, coming up beside him.

"I am glad. Look at them down there."

"And?"

"And I was a cowherd," said Krishna, "and I knew every calf in Vraja by the sound of it, and I put that down. Then I was a prince in Mathura, and I put that down too, and the city with it. Now I am a founder, and men here already speak to me the way men speak to something they have decided not to argue with. A man takes off a life the way he takes off a garment that has worn through, and you cannot mend it and you cannot keep it, and there is no use standing in the road holding it."

"You made all of this in a night," said Balarama.

"The sea made it," said Krishna. "We asked and it gave. Remember which of those two things is the one we did."

Balarama looked at him for a while, and then out at the water, which went on saying the same thing over and over, patiently, the way something says a thing that it intends to say again later.

"How long does a city last that the ocean lends you?"

"As long as the people in it are worth the loan," said Krishna, and went down off the wall into the streets, where the lamps were being lit for the first evening in the city of doors.