The Serpent Prince's Sacrifice

Long before the war, in the year of his self-imposed pilgrimage, Arjuna had wandered the riverbanks of the world as a penance, his bow stilled and his heart open to whatever the road might bring. Beside the Ganga, where the current ran deep and green over old stones, the Naga princess Ulupi had seen him bathing and had been seized with longing. She drew him down through the water into her father's kingdom, into halls where the light came not from the sun but from the gems set in the hoods of serpents.

There, in Nagaloka, Arjuna stayed one night. He married Ulupi by the simple rites of the serpent people, comforted her, and went on his way at dawn with a gift of immunity from drowning and a memory he rarely spoke of. He never saw the son who came of that night, and for a long time he did not know there was one.

The boy was named Iravan. He grew up among coiled grandfathers and jeweled corridors, half a prince and half an outsider, his land-dweller's blood marking him out wherever he went. His mother's kinsmen never let him forget that his father was a human, an archer of the surface world who had once burned a whole forest full of serpents at Khandava to feed the fire-god. One of his great-uncles, who had lost kin in that burning, hated the boy for the crime of his father and at last contrived to drive him out of the underwater court.

Ulupi told her son the truth without softening it. "Your father is Arjuna, the third of the Pandavas, the greatest bowman of this age. He does not know your face, and that is not abandonment - it is only distance and water between you. A day is coming when his house will be at war, when he will need every son he has ever made. When that day comes, go to him. He will not know you by sight, but he will know you by your arm."

So Iravan waited, and trained, and grew into a warrior whose name the serpent realm whispered. And when word at last moved through the three worlds that the Kuru cousins were gathering their armies upon a plain called Kurukshetra, he saddled his horses, called up his small fierce cavalry of the Naga marches, and rode up out of the rivers toward a father he had never met and a war he had chosen.

The Pandava camp on the eve of the great war was a city that had grown in a season - a sprawl of tents, picket lines, smoking cook-fires, and counted banners that snapped in the dry wind off the plain. Into this city, unannounced and unexpected, rode a young man with rain-dark skin, a serpent device upon his standard, and a troop of horses that moved together like water finding its channel.

He asked for Arjuna, and the sentries, struck by something in his bearing, did not turn him away. When father and son at last stood face to face, neither needed an introduction spoken. The set of the shoulders, the long sure hands, the way the eyes measured distance without seeming to look - each saw himself standing in the other.

"I am Iravan," the young man said. "I am Ulupi's son, and yours. I have brought my cavalry and my own life, and I lay both at your feet - not because you sent for me, for you did not know I lived, but because my mother taught me what a son owes his father's cause."

Arjuna, who was not easily moved to silence, was silent for a long moment. Then he embraced the boy and held him, and the men of the camp who watched said afterward that the great archer wept without shame. He led his new-found son first to Yudhishthira, the eldest, who welcomed Iravan as a child of the whole house and blessed him; and then to Krishna, who looked at the young face a beat too long - the way he was known to look at those whose threads the loom had cut short.

That night Iravan sat among his half-uncles at the council fires and listened to the war being weighed: eleven divisions of the enemy against their seven, the grandsire Bhishma at the head of the Kaurava host, and ranged through its cavalry the brothers and sons of Shakuni of Gandhara. Iravan said little. He had not crossed three worlds for the counsels of the tent. He had come for the field.

There is a tradition older than the written war, kept alive most fiercely in the southern country where Iravan is still worshipped, that a field as vast and as hungry as Kurukshetra could not simply be fought upon. It had first to be consecrated. The fierce goddess of the battlefield, Kali, mistress of the cremation grounds and the drinker of the war's blood, asked a price before she would grant victory to one side: the willing self-sacrifice of a flawless warrior, a man bearing upon his body all the thirty-two marks of perfection, offered to her by his own consent. This rite the tellers called the kalappali, the offering on the field, the narabali of a perfect man.

The seers were grim when they spoke it, for no army surrenders its finest son gladly. Three men in all the host bore the thirty-two marks: Arjuna, whom the cause could not spare; Krishna, who was the cause; and Iravan, who had arrived among them only days before. The whisper of the rite ran through the Pandava camp and died at the flap of every tent it visited, until it reached the fire where the serpent-prince sat.

Iravan rose. "I will be the offering," he said, and his voice did not waver. "I crossed the worlds to give my life for my father's victory. Whether the goddess takes it on the first dawn or an arrow takes it on the eighteenth day, the gift is the same gift. Let it be spent buying the war rather than merely decorating its end."

Krishna regarded him, and in the dark god's face there was something that was neither surprise nor sorrow but a kind of recognition. "You understand," Krishna said quietly, "what you are saying."

"I understand it better than the men who flinched from saying it," Iravan answered. "A life given freely is not a death. It is a door. I would rather walk through it on my own feet than be dragged through it by a stranger's blade."

And so it was agreed. The goddess of the field would have her perfect man, and the perfect man would give himself. But the young hero, brave as he was, was not yet ready to die without first asking one thing of the living world.

When they asked Iravan whether he would have any boon before the knife, he was quiet for a while, looking out at the dark plain where so many men were sleeping their last untroubled sleep. Then he spoke a wish that was smaller and more human than anyone had expected.

"I have asked nothing of life," he said. "I will give it gladly. But I do not wish to leave the world as I have lived in it - alone, unwed, a stranger on the surface of things. Grant me this: that I do not die a bachelor. Let me know, even for one night, what it is to be a husband, to have a hand hold mine that is not afraid of me. Then take me, and I will go without complaint."

It was a wish easily spoken and almost impossible to grant. For who would marry a man fated to die at the next dawn? A bride wedded at dusk would be a widow before noon. No father would give a daughter to a corpse-in-waiting; no woman of the camps would step into a single night of marriage whose only certain morning was mourning. Messengers went out, and came back with their hands empty, and the young man waited beside the fire with the patience of someone who had already made his peace and only wanted this one small grace.

The sorrow of it settled over the camp. Here was a youth who would buy them all their victory with his blood, and the one thing he had asked in return - a companion, a wedding, a single ordinary tenderness - was the one thing none of them could supply. Even Yudhishthira, who could be generous past wisdom, had no daughter to give and no power to conjure a willing bride out of the war-torn air.

It was then that Krishna, who saw further than any counsel of the tent, said that he would see to it himself. The others did not understand, and he did not explain. He only told them that Iravan would not go to the goddess unmarried, and that his last wish, having been spoken, would be honored.

What Krishna did that night the southern tellers recount with wonder, for it is the heart of why Iravan is worshipped to this day. The dark lord who had lifted a mountain on one finger, who held the discus that ended the proud, took upon himself the enchanting female form of Mohini - the same shape in which, in an older age, he had bewildered the demons out of the nectar of immortality.

In that form Krishna was the most beautiful woman the three worlds had ever held, and into the lamplight of Iravan's tent he came as a bride comes, veiled and adorned, with bangles at the wrist and a garland in the hand. The young warrior, who had asked only not to die alone, looked up and saw a woman willing to wed him though she knew the morning. There was no deception that wounded him; the southern accounts are tender on this point. Iravan understood, or half understood, the grace that had been done for him, and he received it as the gift it was.

By the rites that need no priest when a god officiates, Mohini took Iravan as her husband. The garlands were exchanged; the sacred fire was circled; the vows were spoken into a night that both of them knew was the only night there would be. And then the bridegroom who would die at dawn was given the one ordinary human thing he had asked of an extraordinary life: a wedding, a companion, a hand in his that was not afraid.

They passed the hours that were left to them as the newly married do, and if Iravan slept at all it was without dread, for he had been made whole in the one small way he had wanted. Outside the tent the war waited, vast and patient. Inside it, for a few hours, there was only a young man and the divine bride who had refused to let him go to the goddess as a stranger to love.

When the first grey light came over the plain, Iravan rose, put on his armor, and went out to be the offering he had promised to be - to give himself, in the manner the rite required, that the goddess of the field might grant his father's house its victory. The marks of perfection were on his body; the consent was in his heart; the wedding night had been granted. There was nothing left undone.

Mohini watched him go. And when the sacrifice was complete and the serpent-prince had passed out of the morning, Krishna in that beautiful borrowed form did the thing that has bound countless devotees to Iravan's name ever since: he mourned. The god who had married Iravan at dusk became Iravan's widow at dawn. Mohini broke her bangles upon the ground, as widows do; she loosened her hair and wept; she let the garland fall and beat her breast and gave to the dead bridegroom the full keening grief of a wife who has lost her husband in a single turning of the night.

The other gods and the watching men were struck silent, for it is no small thing to see the Lord of the worlds take on a woman's widowhood out of pure compassion for a boy who had asked so little. Krishna held the mourning for as long as the rite of grief required, and only afterward set the female form aside and returned to his own.

From that night descends a living tradition in the far south of the land. There, year upon year, the people of Iravan - those who carry within themselves both the male and the female, the Aravani devotees - gather at his great festival. They garland themselves as his brides through the long night of the marriage, and at the dawn of his death they break their bangles and weep for him exactly as Mohini wept, husbands and widows of a single sacred night, keeping faith across the centuries with a young hero who only wished not to die alone. Iravan, whom they call Aravan and Kuttantavar, is their god, the bridegroom of one night, the willing offering whom the goddess could not frighten.

The epic of Vyasa keeps a second account of Iravan's death, and it is fierce and full of dust, and it belongs to the open battlefield rather than the altar. In this telling the young warrior, his last wish granted, rode out among the host of his father and fought the way swollen rivers fight - flooding where no one expected, gone before the heavy chariots could wheel to meet him.

His Naga cavalry was light and fast and impossible to pin. It appeared upon flanks that had been thought secure an hour before, struck, and dissolved back into the smoke. The serpent banner of Iravan became a thing the Kaurava captains learned to fear, for wherever it rose their lines began to fray.

On one of the early days of the war the brothers of Shakuni - the princes of Gandhara, gamblers' blood poured into soldiers' armor - came against him in a body, determined to carve the serpent banner out of the Pandava line and end the upstart son of Arjuna. The fight that followed was the bitterest cavalry action of the war's opening days. Iravan's lance and his sword took the Gandhara brothers one after another; their charge broke apart around their own dead, and the surviving riders fled the field crying his name as a curse.

Duryodhana, watching that wing of his army buckle where it should have held, understood that no ordinary captain would stop this boy. He turned to the one creature in all his host that had been made for such an opponent - the rakshasa Alambusha, a sorcerer of the old forest race, a wearer of shapes, a hater of the Pandavas with old scores of his own to settle. "The serpent-prince," Duryodhana said, pointing across the dust. "Whatever he is, end him."

Alambusha rose over the battlefield like a stormcloud given limbs, terrible to look upon, and came for the serpent banner. Iravan met him without flinching, and what followed was less a combat than a contest of monsters, for both warriors carried the old shape-changing blood in their veins.

The rakshasa hurled illusions: he scattered himself into many bodies, he loomed and vanished and struck from the air, he conjured beasts and fires out of nothing. Iravan answered with his mother's inheritance. He called the serpent-power up out of his own blood, and the great Nagas of his line rose with him, hooded and immense, coiling about the rakshasa, binding his limbs, dragging at his many arms. For a span of the battle the fighting near them stopped, and friend and foe alike stood watching two nightmares wrestle in the dust.

Alambusha felt the serpent-coils tighten and knew he could not win in that shape. So he reached for the one form that no Naga blood in all the worlds can stand against - he became Garuda, the golden devourer of serpents, the eternal enemy whose very shadow loosens a serpent's grip. At the sight of that shape the Nagas of Iravan's line recoiled in ancestral terror and fell away.

For a single heartbeat the serpent-prince stood unguarded. It was all the rakshasa needed. Alambusha in the eagle-shape struck with talon and with sword, and the blade took the head of Arjuna's son from his shoulders. The serpent banner went down into the trampled earth. So fell Iravan, slain by illusion at the one moment his own power had betrayed him - though whether he died upon the altar or upon the field, the tellers have never agreed, and perhaps both deaths are true of a hero who belonged to two worlds.

Word of Iravan's killing ran along the Pandava line, and it found Ghatotkacha, the rakshasa son of Bhima, fighting elsewhere on the field. Ghatotkacha was himself a creature of the old forest race, a master of illusion and a giant in his wrath, and when he heard that his young cousin had been hewn down by Alambusha he was seized with a fury that shook the air around him.

He came across the battlefield like a falling mountain, and the Kaurava ranks broke and ran before him as men run before a storm tide. "Alambusha," he roared, "you have killed a child of our house. Now answer to one who is your equal in every dark art you know."

The two rakshasas met, and this time the duel of shapes had a different ending. Ghatotkacha countered every illusion the older sorcerer raised, matched him form for form and terror for terror, and at last seized Alambusha in his vast hands, lifted him bodily off the earth, and dashed him down upon the ground with a force that broke him utterly. The slayer of Iravan was destroyed where he lay, and the death of Arjuna's son was paid for in full upon the same field that had taken him.

When Arjuna learned at the day's end how his unlooked-for son had lived among them only a handful of days and then died for their cause, the great archer was filled with a grief unlike the grief of ordinary battle. He had been given a son and had lost him in the same brief season, and he had not even had the years to know him. The vow he swore at that evening's sunset, the burning of his sorrow into purpose, would feed the terrible fighting of the days that came after.

Far below the surface of the world, in the gem-lit halls of Nagaloka, Ulupi knew the moment her son fell. Mothers of warriors always know; the knowledge comes without a messenger, a cold certainty that arrives before any word can travel. She had sent her boy up out of the rivers with her blessing and her warning, and now the rivers had given him to the war and the war had kept him.

She did not curse the cause for which he died, for she had raised him to give himself to it. But she grieved as only a serpent-mother can grieve, in the deep places where the light is made of jewels and not of sun, for the son she had borne for a man who never saw him and a war that swallowed him in a fortnight. Of all the women widowed and bereaved by Kurukshetra, few had given so much for so brief an acquaintance: Arjuna had known Iravan a handful of days, but Ulupi had carried him, raised him, taught him, and lost him.

Yet the same mother would later refuse to let the war take everything. Years afterward, when Arjuna himself lay dead in distant Manipura, struck down in a strange combat by another of his sons, Babruvahana, it was Ulupi who came with the serpent-jewel that could call the dead back across the threshold. The mother who had given the great war one son would not stand by and let a later quarrel keep the father too. She restored Arjuna to life with the gem of the Nagas, closing a circle that had opened by the banks of the Ganga long before, when she first drew a wandering archer down into her kingdom.

Of all the dead of Kurukshetra - the kings and the grandsires, the world-famous archers and the unbreakable warriors - Iravan won the strangest and most tender immortality. The great names of the war are remembered in recitation and carved into temple walls as heroes of a long-finished battle. But Iravan became something a hero rarely becomes: a living god of an ongoing devotion, worshipped not for the men he killed but for the love he was granted on the night before he died.

In the southern country he is Aravan and Kuttantavar, and his festival is one of grief and tenderness rather than of triumph. The faithful re-enact across many nights the marriage that Krishna gave him - garlanding themselves as his brides, wedding the deity in his presence, passing the long sacred night as the wives of a husband they know will not see the morning. And at the dawn of the festival, when the death of Aravan is recalled, they do exactly what Mohini did: they break their bangles, loosen their hair, and weep for their bridegroom, becoming his widows as the god himself once became his widow.

The Aravani devotees, who hold within themselves both the masculine and the feminine, carry this devotion as their own, for in Iravan's story they find a hero whose sacrifice was honored not by power but by tenderness, and a god who understood that even the bravest soul does not wish to leave the world unloved. What was given to Iravan in his tent on the eve of battle - a companion, a wedding, a hand unafraid of his - is given back to him every year by those who keep his festival.

When the war was long over and the survivors counted their dead, the story of Iravan settled into its quiet place among the greater tragedies of Kurukshetra - smaller than the fall of Bhishma, smaller than the death of Abhimanyu, and yet in its way harder to forget. For Iravan's was the most willing death of all. Abhimanyu was trapped and overwhelmed; Bhishma was felled at last by the long machinery of fate. But Iravan walked toward his own end on his own feet, having crossed three worlds to find a father, and having found him, chose to be spent for him at once.

He asked for so little. He did not ask for kingdoms or for fame, for a great death or a remembered name. He asked only not to die alone, not to leave the world without once being a husband, without once knowing the ordinary grace of a hand held in the dark. That a god had to take a woman's form to grant even that small wish tells how lonely the gift of his life truly was. No mortal woman would have him; only divine compassion would.

There is a particular sorrow in the figure of the young hero who gives everything for a cause that is not quite his own quarrel, for a father he barely knew, and asks in return only to be loved for a single night. The Mahabharata is full of warriors who died for glory. Iravan died for his father, and for a victory he would not live to see, and the only thing he kept back for himself was a wedding that lasted until dawn.

So the serpent-prince passed out of the great war and into worship - the bridegroom of one night, the son who came unsummoned, the willing offering whom even the fierce goddess of the field could not make afraid. And in the far south of the land, wherever his festival is kept, they remember him not as a man who killed but as a boy who loved, and who let himself be given.