Karna and Shalya

Drona had fallen, and the army of the Kauravas had a new commander. On the night before Karna's second day at its head, Duryodhana did not sleep. He walked from lamp to lamp among the tents, counting what was left to him, and what he counted was not enough.

He came at last to the tent of Shalya, king of Madra, and there he did a thing that no king of the Kurus had done in living memory. He folded his hands.

"Lord of Madra," he said, "I have come to beg."

Shalya rose from his seat. "You have never begged in your life."

"I have never needed to. Hear me. Tomorrow Karna goes against Arjuna, and tomorrow Karna will end this war, or Arjuna will. In the bow they are equals. I say that standing in front of you, who have watched kings shoot since before I was born, and I do not think you will contradict me."

"I will not," Shalya said.

"Then hear the rest. Arjuna does not ride alone. Krishna holds his reins. Krishna, who knows the temper of every horse and the turning of every wheel, who reads a battlefield the way a priest reads a text, who has never yet set his archer in a bad place at a bad moment. Against a driver like that, the finest bowman in the world is a man shooting from a boat in rough water."

Duryodhana came a step closer.

"There is one horseman living who is Krishna's equal upon the front board of a chariot, and he is standing before me. Drive Karna tomorrow, and the scales are level. Refuse, and they are not, and I have no second plan, and I will not insult you by pretending otherwise."

For a long moment Shalya said nothing. Outside, a horse shifted in the dark and blew through its nose.

"You are asking me," Shalya said slowly, "to hold reins."

"I am asking you to win me a war."

"Those are not the same sentence, Duryodhana, though you have spoken them as though they were."

But Duryodhana had already gone down on one knee, and a kneeling king is a very hard thing to answer.

Then the anger came, and it came as flood water comes, all at once and from underneath.

"A charioteer's son," said Shalya. "You have knelt in my tent to ask me to serve a charioteer's son."

"I have asked you to serve me."

"You have asked me to sit below Karna with a whip in my hand where two armies can watch it happen. I am a king with an akshauhini of my own. Madri was my sister, so that half the men I must help kill tomorrow call me uncle. And you would set the lord of Madra on the front board of the son of Adhiratha, who was taken out of a river in a basket and raised in a chariot yard, and whom your own father's court laughed at until you bought him a kingdom to stop the laughing. Find another man. There is no other man in this camp I would not rather be."

Duryodhana did not argue. He praised.

"When the gods went out against the three cities of the asuras," he said, "Rudra rode with the bow. And who held his horses? Brahma, the grandfather of the worlds, who sat below Rudra with the reins in his hands and was not diminished by one hair. The rein is not lower than the arrow, lord of Madra. The rein is what the arrow rides upon. There is no shame in the seat of a man on whom everything depends. You are the elder. You are the horseman without equal on this earth. If you sit in that place tomorrow, men will not say that Shalya drove for Karna. They will say that Karna was given Shalya."

The old king heard it. He knew exactly what it was, and it worked, as such things do.

"I will drive," Shalya said at last. "On one condition, and I will have it from your mouth. Whatever comes into my head, I will say to him. Whatever it is. He will not silence me, and neither will you."

"Say what you please," said Duryodhana, in the happiness of a man who has got what he came for and has not thought about the price.

And Shalya turned away to his lamp, and remembered another tent, on another night, and a quiet promise made to Yudhishthira, and he kept his face very still.

The seventeenth morning came up red over the field, and Karna came out of his tent into it like a second sunrise.

He had put on the great mail and the earrings that were not the ones he had been born with, for those he had given away years ago and did not speak of. His bow Vijaya was strung. His quivers were full. Men who had followed him for twenty years said afterward that they had never seen him as he was that morning, and could not say what the difference was, only that there was one.

Duryodhana came to him at the chariot.

"I have brought you a gift," he said. "Look at your driver."

Karna looked, and saw the king of Madra standing at the horses' heads with the reins already gathered, and for a moment even Karna was silent.

"You have given me Krishna's match," he said.

"I have given you the war."

Karna raised his voice then so that the front ranks could hear it, and the front ranks passed it back, and it went through that army like fire through dry grass.

"Hear me, king of the Kurus. Today there is no third thing. I will find Arjuna wherever he stands on this field, and I will not turn aside for Bhima, or for Satyaki, or for the sons of Draupadi, or for anything that lives. Before the sun goes down, either the Gandiva will be lying in the dust with its owner, or I will be. Order your drums."

The drums went. The Kaurava host moved forward with a sound like the sea coming in, and Karna stepped up into the chariot, and the horses of Madra felt the hands of a master on their mouths and settled at once into a stride so smooth that the war seemed for a moment a pleasant thing.

Then the voice came up over Karna's shoulder, from the seat below, mild and conversational, and began its work.

"Do not shout so loudly about Arjuna," said Shalya. "The men can count."

Karna looked down. "What?"

"I say only that it is a large promise, and there are witnesses to it. That bow you propose to leave in the dust burned the Khandava forest with Agni for a partner while the king of the gods threw rain on it and could not put it out. Its owner went alone into the sky and killed the Nivatakavachas, whom the gods themselves had given up. And at Virata, when the cattle were driven off and the whole of this army stood in his way, he went through it like a man walking through long grass, and there was a warrior in that line who was carried off the field. Remind me of his name."

"Drive the horses," said Karna, "and keep your mouth off my bowstring."

"I am driving them. A driver may talk; your king granted me that much." Shalya let a little silence go by, the way a good storyteller does. "There was a crow," he said, "who lived on the seashore."

Karna said nothing.

"He lived on what was thrown out from the houses of merchants, and he grew fat on it, and proud, and he took to hopping about among the swans at the water's edge and telling them how well he flew. One hundred and one kinds of flight he knew, and he named every one. The swans were polite. They are polite birds. At last one of them said, we do not know a hundred and one kinds. We know one. Come out over the water and use whichever of yours you like.

"So they flew. The crow went up and dropped and circled and turned upon his back and did every trick he had ever been admired for, and the swan flew straight, and did not look at him. And after a while there was no shore behind the crow at all, only water, and his wings began to fail him, and he came down and struck the sea and lay there with his beak full of salt, crying. And the swan turned back, and took him up on his own wings, and carried him to land, and set him down without a word, because there was nothing left to say to him.

"That is you," said Shalya pleasantly, "beside Arjuna."

Karna's hand left the bow.

"Madraka," he said, and the word came out of him like something torn. "I have heard of your people. There was a brahmana who came east out of your country and would take no food in it. He said the Madrakas eat and betray in the same hour, that they praise a man in his house and sell him at his gate, that a friendship with a Madraka is a rope of sand. You were made a king by accident and you have been useful to no one since. Say one more word to me about crows and I will come down off this seat and put my mace through your head, and drive myself."

"Come down, then," said Shalya, without turning, his hands steady. "The horses will stand. I have driven for better men than you and buried most of them, and I will tell you the truth in front of your own army if I choose, because the truth is what a driver owes a fool."

They were shouting at each other now, and the ranks nearest the chariot had gone quiet and were watching their commander and his charioteer make war upon one another with the enemy in plain sight ahead. Duryodhana came up at the gallop and got between them the only way he could, taking hold of Karna's arm and speaking low and fast to them both, calling them the two halves of his hope, begging them to spend their hatred where it would do some good.

And then Karna did the thing that was greatest in him, which was not the archery.

He stopped. He looked a long moment at the back of the old king's head. He needed this man. There was no one else on the earth who could put him where he had to be by sunset, and he knew it, and he let it be enough.

"Drive on, lord of Madra," he said. "Say whatever you like. I forgive it in advance."

"I shall," said Shalya.

So they went forward together, bound by hatred and by duty, which are stronger cords than affection and hold a great deal longer. The wheels turned across the trampled ground toward the far side of the field, where a white banner with an ape upon it stood above the dust, and did not move, and waited for them.