The Horse Among Old Enemies

When the horse of the ashvamedha was set loose to wander where it would, Yudhishthira gave Arjuna one order above all others. He was to follow the animal wherever it led, to accept the submission of any king who bowed before it, and to fight only those who barred its path. But where he must fight, he was to spare whomever he could. The war had already taken enough sons from enough mothers, Yudhishthira said, and this year was not meant to take more.

The horse turned first toward Trigarta, and Arjuna's chariot rolled behind it into a country he knew well from the worst days of the war, for it was the Trigartas who had sworn the samsaptaka oath, to kill Arjuna or die trying, and most of them had kept that oath at Kurukshetra by dying. What met the horse now was only a remnant, the sons and younger brothers of men Arjuna had already faced once, raising old banners over a diminished army.

They struck first, as their fathers had, with the same reckless courage and none of the numbers. Arjuna first tried to turn them back with words, and when they would not hear him his bow answered, though he held it back as he had not in the war, killing young Ketuvarma and some eighteen others only when they pressed him hard. When their charge broke and the Trigartas called themselves his servants, he accepted their submission and let them live. He had no wish to finish at Trigarta what Kurukshetra had already all but finished. The horse, unmolested, moved on, and Arjuna followed it east, wondering how many more of these small wars waited for him in the coming year, each one a debt the great war had left unpaid.

In Pragjyotisha the horse was met by Vajradatta, son of Bhagadatta, the old king who had once been Pandu's friend and had died at Kurukshetra fighting for Duryodhana on his great war elephant, felled at last by Arjuna's own arrow after Krishna had taken the old king's Vaishnava weapon on his own chest. Vajradatta rode out now on that same line of elephants, his father's mount and his father's fury both inherited, and the ground shook under a charge that Arjuna met without giving way.

The fighting was fierce, elephant against chariot, and for a time Vajradatta pressed him hard, matching his father's old skill with a young man's rage. But Arjuna, even as he fought, found himself thinking of Bhagadatta, of the debt of friendship that had bound the old king to Pandu long before Duryodhana claimed his loyalty, of how much of Vajradatta's fury was simply a son who had lost his father to the war Arjuna had helped to win.

On the fourth day, when the moment came that would have ended the fight for good, Arjuna brought the great elephant down with a single arrow and then held his hand. He called out to the fallen king that he would not take a second life from that house, for Yudhishthira had forbidden him to slay any king. Vajradatta, spent and disbelieving, lowered his weapons. Arjuna restored him to his throne on the spot, asked only his submission to the horse, and invited him to attend the rite itself as an honored guest rather than a conquered enemy. The horse moved on toward Sindhu, and Arjuna rode after it, one more debt set gently down instead of collected in full.

Sindhu gave Arjuna the hardest fighting of the whole year. The Saindhavas had not forgotten that it was Arjuna who killed their king Jayadratha at Kurukshetra, cutting his head from his shoulders in vengeance for Abhimanyu, and they met the horse now with an army that fought less for the animal's freedom than for an old grief that had never been allowed to close. Wave after wave came against Arjuna's chariot, and for the first time that year he found himself fighting in earnest, unable to find the gap between duty and mercy that had served him at Trigarta and Pragjyotisha.

It was Dussala who closed that gap. Jayadratha's widow, sister to Duryodhana and so Arjuna's own cousin, whom he called sister, walked out onto the battlefield itself while the fighting still raged, carrying her infant grandson in her arms, heedless of the arrows still crossing the air around her. She came to plead, but first she simply stood where the two armies could see her, a woman who had already buried a husband to this same war and had just lost her son Suratha to grief, holding up the one child left to her house, and let the sight itself make its argument.

Arjuna cast aside the Gandiva before she had said a single word. Whatever claim the war still had on Sindhu, he decided then, would not be collected from that child. He called off the attack, accepted Sindhu's submission without further bloodshed, and gave Dussala his word that her grandson's throne would stand. The Gandiva, which had not paused for the sons of kings, paused without hesitation for a grandmother carrying an infant across an open field.

Long after Sindhu, by way of Manipura and the far shores of the earth, the horse turned homeward through Magadha, ruled now by Meghasandhi, Jarasandha's young grandson, who had inherited a throne still bruised from the war. He rode out on his chariot with a boy's boastful challenge, owed to his own honor rather than any real hope of turning Arjuna back.

Arjuna, who had spent Sindhu exhausting every reserve of restraint he had, met Meghasandhi's token defiance with something close to relief. Arjuna shot away his horses, his charioteer, his bow and at last his club, taking care never to strike the king himself, until Meghasandhi, having proven what needed proving, joined his hands and offered his submission. There was no widow to walk onto this field, no old wound reopened, only a young king reading the moment correctly and choosing to yield before the moment demanded more of either of them.

Arjuna received the submission with the same courtesy he had shown at Pragjyotisha, restoring Meghasandhi's authority over his own kingdom entirely and asking nothing more than the acknowledgment the horse's passage required. He extended the same invitation he had carried across every kingdom that year, that Magadha's king should come to Hastinapura when the horse returned home and stand among the honored guests at the ashvamedha itself, welcomed rather than merely spared. Meghasandhi accepted, and the horse, its path clear again, moved on, by way of the south and Dwaraka, toward the far west and the last kingdom of Arjuna's long year.

The horse's final trial came in Gandhara, homeland of Shakuni, whose schemes had done as much as any single hand to bring the great war into being, and who had died at Kurukshetra. The throne now belonged to Shakuni's own son, who had not forgotten the old quarrel. He refused Arjuna's words of peace and fought hard, and Arjuna cut down many of his followers and struck the helmet from the king's head before the Gandharas broke. Then the king's mother came out with an aged minister and a gift to restrain her son and plead for him.

Arjuna, remembering Gandhari and Dhritarashtra, spared him exactly as he had spared Vajradatta and Meghasandhi before him, and extended the same invitation to the coming sacrifice, closing the circuit of that long year with a mercy that had held from the first field to the last.

Riding home at last behind the horse that had led him the length of the fallen world, Arjuna turned over what the year had actually been. Not a conquest, though every kingdom he had entered now owed him submission. Not even truly a war, though he had fought battle after battle. It had been, he understood now, a year of choosing again and again not to take what his strength and his grief both would have allowed him to take. Trigarta's sons, Bhagadatta's son, Dussala's grandson, and the quiet heirs of Magadha and Gandhara all lived because at each field he had chosen mercy over the finishing blow. He carried that discipline home with him more carefully than he carried news of the horse's safe return, knowing that Yudhishthira's rite would mean far less if the year that funded it had been bought with more blood than the war itself had already spilled.