The Offer on the Chariot

The embassy had failed. Krishna had asked for five villages and been refused even that, and the last words spoken in the Kuru assembly had settled the matter beyond retrieval, as is told in its own place. He came down the steps of the hall into the late afternoon with the dust of Hastinapura hanging gold in the level light, and the elders followed him out to the gate, and the city watched him go.

Daruka had the chariot ready. Krishna set his foot on it, then paused, and turned back to where Karna stood a little apart from the Kaurava lords, having said nothing all afternoon.

'Ride with me,' Krishna said. 'A little way. To the edge of the fields.'

The court noticed. Everyone noticed. Karna looked once at the men he had stood beside for thirteen years and then stepped up onto the chariot floor beside the man who was about to make war on them, and the horses moved off, and the two of them went out of the gate together with the whole city behind them and nobody within earshot.

For a while Krishna said nothing. The road ran between fields that would be trampled flat within the month. Karna stood with his hands at his sides, a big man with a soldier's stillness, waiting.

'You are wondering,' Krishna said at last, 'why I called you and not another.'

'I am wondering what it is worth,' said Karna, 'and to whom.'

'Then I will not spend your time.' Krishna turned to face him fully, and the ordinary warmth was gone out of his voice, replaced by something plainer. 'You know the law of the shastras, Karna. You have heard it argued in that hall all your life. Do you know what a woman's son is, when he is born to her before her marriage?'

Karna did not move. But the horses ran on, and the distance from the gate grew, and something in his face had already begun to close.

'By the law,' said Krishna, 'a son born to a maiden before her marriage is the son of the man she afterward marries. That is not my opinion. It is the ruling of the sages, and any brahmana in that hall would say it aloud if he were asked.'

'Say what you have brought me out here to say.'

'You are Kunti's son. She bore you before Pandu married her, in her father's house, by a mantra she was too young to understand and a god who could not refuse it. The Sun is your father. She set you on the river because she was a frightened girl, and Adhiratha the charioteer drew you out of it. You are not a suta's son, Karna. You are a kshatriya twice over, by the father who begot you and the husband who by law claims you, and you are older than Yudhishthira.'

The chariot ran on. Karna's hands had not moved from his sides.

'Do you understand what follows?' Krishna said. 'Come with me now. Today. The moment the Pandavas learn what I have just told you, Yudhishthira will fold his hands and step down, because that is the kind of man he is and the throne was never his if it was yours. You will be consecrated today. Yudhishthira will be your heir and ride behind you on your chariot, and Bhima will hold the great white umbrella over your head. Arjuna will drive your chariot as I drive his. The five of them and their sons and Drupada's line and the Yadavas will touch your feet. Draupadi herself would come to you. Both houses, Karna. Not half a kingdom. All of it, and no war, and a hundred thousand men who will otherwise be carrion in a month walking home to their villages instead.'

He let it stand there in the open air between them.

'That is the offer,' Krishna said. 'It is not a trick. I want you to take it.'

Karna was quiet for a long time. When he spoke his voice was steady, and he did not once raise it.

'I do not doubt you,' he said. 'You would not lie about this, and it explains a great deal that I stopped asking about years ago. So let me answer you honestly, since you have been honest with me.

'Kunti bore me and put me on the water. Radha took me out of the arms of her husband and put me to her breast, and when I was fouled she cleaned me, and when I would not sleep she went without sleeping. Adhiratha calls me son in front of men who laugh at him for it. He had the birth rites performed for me. She still sends word before every campaign. If I go with you today, then everything that woman did becomes a mistake that a highborn accident has now corrected, and she becomes the servant who kept the goods until the owner came. I will not do that to her. Say what the law says. I am Radha's son.

'And there is Duryodhana. Krishna, you have never had to be nobody. When I was nobody he gave me a kingdom in front of the whole assembly because a boy he had never met was being humiliated for his birth. Whatever he has become since, whatever he has done, and I know what he has done, he did that. He has fed me and armed me and set me at his right hand for thirteen years, and he has made this war believing that I will be standing in it. If I cross this field now, on the last evening, and take his enemies' crown, then every meal I ever ate at his table was theft.

'A man is not what he was born. A man is what he refuses. Ask me for anything else and I will give it to you. Do not ask me to be somebody else's son on the day it becomes profitable.'

'Besides,' Karna said, and something in him eased, the way it eases in a man who has stopped hoping and found the ground firmer than he expected, 'it is already begun. You know it is. I have been reading the sky for a month.

'Saturn presses on the star of Prajapati. Mars turns back on itself. Rahu gnaws at the sun and meteors fall. Jackals cry into the fires at dusk and the horses weep and will not eat. Blood falls on the roofs at Hastinapura and no rain with it. What is that, if it is not a summons?

'So let it be a sacrifice, and let us name the parts. Duryodhana is the one who undertakes it. You, Krishna, will be its witness and its chief priest, and Arjuna will pour the offerings, with Gandiva for his ladle. The chariots are the sacrificial posts, the drums and conches are the chanting, and blood is the oblation. The kings of the earth are the guests who have come from far off and will not leave. And when you see me killed by Arjuna, Krishna, that will be the rite of piling the altar anew. That is a good sacrifice. Few men are offered so complete a one.

'I have seen your Arjuna. He is my equal and he has you standing at the front of his chariot, which no man is equal to. I know how this ends. I have known since the night I dreamed of Yudhishthira and his brothers in white, climbing a palace of a thousand pillars, while I rode south toward Yama's country with Bhishma and Drona and Duryodhana.'

'Then you go to it with your eyes open,' Krishna said.

'How else would a man go to it? I do not need to win, Govinda. I need to be the man who stood there. Let them say afterward that Karna paid what he owed, and let them argue about whether he chose his side well. He chose it. That is the part that is mine.'

The chariot had come to the edge of the cultivated land. Daruka slowed the horses without being told, because he had been driving Krishna long enough to hear when a conversation had reached its end.

'One thing I ask you,' Karna said. 'Do not tell Yudhishthira. Do not tell any of them until it is over.'

'Why?'

'You said it yourself. The moment he hears it he will give me the kingdom, and he will mean it, and he will not take it back. And if I took it I would only hand it to Duryodhana, so he will stand there holding a throne neither of us can keep, and his brothers will have to watch him do it, and Draupadi will have to look at me. That is a cruelty to five people and it buys nothing. He is the eldest in every way that has been earned. Let him keep it. Let him find out afterward, when it costs him only grief and not his kingdom.'

Krishna was silent, and then inclined his head. 'It will be kept,' he said. Kunti herself would soon come to him with the same truth, a meeting told in its own place.

Karna stepped down onto the road. The dust of the fields was on both of them now.

'If we live through it,' he said, 'we will meet here again on this road. If not, we will meet in heaven, and I think that is the meeting we are actually arranging.'

Karna embraced him tightly and let him go. The horses turned and the chariot went west, and Karna mounted his own chariot and drove back toward the gates of Hastinapura, where a war was waiting that he had just refused to prevent, having been offered the earth and having declined it in order to remain himself.