The Gandiva Quarrel

The tent of the eldest Pandava stood a little apart from the rest, and the noise of the field came into it thinned by distance, which somehow made it worse.

Yudhishthira lay on a low bed with his mail off. They had drawn the arrows out of him one at a time that afternoon, three of them deep, and the physicians had washed the wounds with wine and bound them and gone away, and the pain had arrived properly afterward, as it always does. Karna had put those arrows into him. Karna had ridden him down in front of the army, had taken hold of him, had let him go with a word, because a promise made long ago to a woman by a river did not permit the killing of any son of Kunti but one. Being spared by Karna was a thing Yudhishthira had not yet found anywhere to put.

So he had come off the field. The king of the Pandavas had turned his chariot and left the fighting, and he had heard what the men did not say as he passed them.

Outside, the seventeenth day was still going on. Bhima was somewhere in the middle of it doing terrible work, and the ground was giving up its sons by the thousand, and Karna was moving through the Pandava host like weather.

Then there were feet at the tent mouth, and Arjuna came in with Krishna behind him, the both of them grey to the eyes with dust, and Yudhishthira raised himself on one arm with his whole face changed.

"You have killed him," he said.

Arjuna stopped.

"You have. You would not come off the field for anything less. Tell me. Say it and I will get up."

"Brother," said Arjuna, "he lives. I came because I heard you were wounded, and no man could tell me how badly, and I would not fight another hour without seeing you with my own eyes."

The light went out of Yudhishthira's face so completely that Krishna, who saw everything, took half a step forward and did not manage to speak in time.

"You came to look at me," Yudhishthira said.

"I came because you are my king and my brother, and you were bleeding."

"I have been bleeding since noon. I was bleeding while you were where? Where were you, Arjuna? I sent you word. I sent word twice. The Sutaputra came through my guard and through my shield and through my armour and took hold of me by the mail like a man picking up a dog, and let me go, and laughed, and told me to go home and leave the fighting to those who understand it. Sixty thousand men heard him. And you were away in the left of the field somewhere, chasing the samsaptakas, who chase you precisely so that you will be away."

"That is why they do it. If I do not answer them they come in behind us."

"You are afraid of him."

Arjuna went very still.

"Say it is not so. Thirteen years I have carried this. I gambled and you paid. Draupadi was dragged by her hair into a hall of men and you sat with your bow at your feet because I had made you sit. And every year of the forest I told myself, no matter. The Gandiva is ours. When the day comes there will be one hour, and Arjuna will meet him, and it will be finished. That hour has been offered to you three times today and you have found business elsewhere on every one of them.

"So it was all noise. The vow was noise. The bow is noise. What use is a weapon in the hands of a man who will not use it when his king is being carried off the field? Give it away, Arjuna."

Krishna said, "Yudhishthira."

But the king was past hearing anything.

"Give the Gandiva to some other man," he said. "Put it in the hands of someone who will do with it what it is for. There must be one somewhere in this camp. Anyone. Anyone at all would be better than you."

Something in the tent changed its nature.

Arjuna's sword came out of the sheath.

It was not a threat and it was not a flourish. It came out the way a tool comes out when the work has arrived, and he took one step toward the bed with it, and the tent was suddenly very small.

Krishna moved into the space between them and put a hand flat on Arjuna's chest.

"No further."

"Let go of me."

"Tell me first what I am letting go of. This is your brother. This is your king, lying down, with three of Karna's arrows out of him and the holes still open. Have you gone mad in the dust?"

"There is a vow." Arjuna's voice was almost level, which was the frightening part. "It is not known. I made it long ago and told no one, and I hold it as I hold every other. Whatever man on this earth says to me, give your Gandiva to another, that man dies by my hand. There is no clause in it. There is no exception for kinship and none for kingship. He has said it, Krishna. He said it in front of you. So either I kill him or I break my word, and if I break my word I am nothing, and everything I have ever done with this bow becomes a lie told slowly over many years."

"And there," said Krishna, "is the whole fruit of vows sworn in anger by young men who never asked anyone."

He did not move his hand.

"You swore it alone. You did not go to the elders. You did not sit at the feet of one man who could have told you what a vow costs and what it is for. So you made a rope in the dark and tied it to your own throat, and now you tell me the rope is holy. What dharma is this? Answer me as a student and not as a swordsman. What law of the earth is served by a younger brother killing an elder brother, a warrior killing his own king, over the words of a wounded man in a bed on the worst afternoon of his life?

"You are not keeping a vow, Arjuna. You are obeying one. There is a difference, and it is the whole of it."

Arjuna did not put up the sword, but he stopped pushing against the hand.

"Then tell me what to do," he said. "Do not lecture me. I cannot lie. You know that of me at least."

"I know it. It is why I have to say this next thing carefully." Krishna let his hand fall. "Truth is not a rule, Partha. It is a direction. It is said, and rightly said, that there is nothing higher than truth, and men who repeat that have usually stopped listening at the point where it flatters them. Truth is spoken for the good of all beings. Where speaking it destroys the innocent, the speech is not truth any longer, it is only accuracy, and accuracy is a small and cold thing to be killed by.

"You know the story of Kaushika, who had never told a lie in his life, and told the robbers exactly which way the frightened people had run, and went to hell for it while his truthfulness was still ringing in his own ears."

"I know it."

"Then hold both these things at once, because a man who can only hold one of them is a danger to everyone near him. Your vow was sworn to protect the bow from insult. It was never sworn to open your brother's throat. If keeping the letter of it makes you the murderer of the king in whose name this whole war is being fought, then the letter has eaten the meaning, and you will have kept nothing except a sentence."

"The sentence is what I swore."

"Very well," said Krishna. "Then let us satisfy the sentence, and let the man live." "There is an old rule and you were taught it as a child. To speak insolently to a person worthy of reverence is to kill him. Say to Yudhishthira what no younger brother may say to an elder. Address him as you would address a servant. Strip him with your mouth in front of me. He will be dead in the way that matters to your vow, and he will be breathing when you have finished, and the world will have to be content with that."

Arjuna looked at his brother for a long moment.

"That is a worse thing than the sword," he said.

"Yes," said Krishna. "That is rather the point of it."

So Arjuna did it.

He put the sword down and used the harsh address that a man uses to an inferior, and he told his eldest brother that the whole ruin came out of him, that he had thrown away a kingdom at dice out of a taste for a game he could not play, that better men than he would ever be had died all afternoon to pay for one night's foolishness, that he had never in his life been able to protect anything, and that he had no right on this earth to speak of the Gandiva, which had done more for him than he had done for himself. Every word of it was true. That was what made it a killing. Yudhishthira lay and heard it and did not turn his face away, and when it was finished the tent was quiet, and the vow was satisfied.

Then Arjuna picked the sword up again and turned it around.

"Now what?" said Krishna.

"A kshatriya who says such things to his king has no further use. I have kept my word and I have earned my death, and I will take it here."

"Put the point down and listen. There is one more death available to you, and it costs nothing but your dignity. For a good man, self-praise is a form of self-slaughter. Sing your own greatness aloud, boast of yourself like a fool at a feast, and the man you were will be dead, and you may then go and do the day's work with the corpse."

And so Arjuna stood in his brother's tent and praised himself, which he had never once done in his life, and it came out of him like a funeral chant: the Khandava burning, the gods held off, the northern raid where an army broke around one chariot, the years of the bow. He said all of it, and his voice shook by the end of it, and when he stopped he went down on his knees by the bed and took hold of his brother's hand and wept, and Yudhishthira wept, and asked forgiveness first.

"It was my fault," said the king. "It was always my fault. Go."

"Bless me."

"Kill Karna today," said Yudhishthira, "and come back to me by dark."

Arjuna went out into the noise and the falling light, and Krishna took the reins.