Kekaya and the Five Princes

Kekaya lay in the far northwest, a kingdom cut by the rivers that fed the Punjab before they gathered into the Indus, its plains rich with barley and its stables famous across the epic world. In an older age it had given the world Kaikeyi, the queen whose ambition for her son Bharata had driven Rama into fourteen years of forest exile, and the bards who told that story to the Pandavas during their own wandering years never failed to name Kekaya as her home. It was a land, they said, where the will of one royal house could bend the fate of kingdoms far beyond its borders.

By the time of the Pandavas, five brothers of that same line had been barred from Kekaya. They were the sons of Kunti's own sister, cousins to the Pandavas by blood, great archers with armour and standards the red of fireflies' glow. The epic does not say how the land was lost to them, only that they were shut out of it and burned to win it back, while other kings of Kekaya would one day march to Duryodhana's side with an army of their own. The five had already stood by their cousins once, riding out with Krishna and the Panchalas to the Pandavas' forest camp to rage at what had been done to them at the dice.

Exile teaches a hard arithmetic. A throne cannot be won back by five men alone, however skilled with sword and bow, and the brothers knew it as they turned south and east, away from the rivers of their birth, toward the cousins who would soon need every ally they could find. Wherever the Pandavas were mustering their strength for the war that seemed at last unavoidable, there too, the brothers reasoned, might lie the army large enough to put them back on their father's seat. They rode toward Upaplavya with an akshauhini at their backs, their grievance, and the hope that another man's war might become the vehicle for their own.

Upaplavya in the kingdom of Matsya had become, in the last uneasy months before the war, a gathering point for every king and prince who felt a debt to the Pandava cause or saw advantage in it. Kings arrived daily with their retinues, their elephants, their sworn contingents, each pledging what he could to Yudhishthira's cause and receiving in turn the promise that a Pandava victory would settle whatever grievance had brought him there. Among that river of arriving allies came the five princes of Kekaya, dust of the long road still on their armor, their claim smaller than a kingdom's but no less bitter to them for that.

They came before Yudhishthira as kin as much as allies: five brothers shut out of their father's land, with nothing left but an army's worth of loyal men and the will to fight for what had been theirs. It was a story Yudhishthira understood in his bones, for it was, in its shape, his own: brothers barred from a kingdom that should have been theirs, waiting on a war to decide whether they would ever see it again. He received his mother's sister's sons warmly, and their red standards were raised among the others at Upaplavya.

The princes asked for little beyond a place in the coming battle, and Yudhishthira gave it gladly. There was a kind of understanding that passed between men who had all been shut out of what was theirs, and the five brothers took their place among the growing host at Upaplavya, their swords now bound to a cause larger than their own, their hope for Kekaya folded quietly into the hope of an empire.

When the conches sounded on the first morning at Kurukshetra and the two armies stood at last face to face across the plain, the five princes of Kekaya took their place in the Pandava ranks alongside kings whose names would be remembered far longer than their own. Bhima, who measured every ally by the weight of grief that had brought him to the field, understood something of what moved the Kekaya brothers, though the war that day had swallowed a hundred private sorrows into one enormous public one, and there was little time to speak of small kingdoms and stolen thrones.

The Kekaya princes were not among the great warriors whose duels the poets would sing of for generations. They were exiles who had bought their place in the front lines with loyalty rather than legend, brothers-in-exile fighting now for brothers-in-exile, since the Pandavas themselves had spent thirteen years driven from their own inheritance, and the Kekayas had been barred from theirs. That shared history, more than any formal treaty, was what held the smaller allies fast to Yudhishthira's cause through the long and terrible days that followed.

They fought where they were placed, in the churn of chariots and elephants and footmen that made up the vast machinery of the Pandava array, five brothers who had crossed half of Bharatavarsha to stand in a war that was not, in its origin, theirs at all. Yet by the measure that mattered to men like them, it had become entirely their own: a chance, however costly, to see their cousins' wrong put right and, if the war went well, to ride home at last to Kekaya.

The middle days of the war ground down alliance after alliance with an impartiality that spared no one for the justice of his cause. Drona, commanding the Kaurava host after Bhishma's fall, fought with the discipline of a teacher who had spent a lifetime perfecting the bow, and his arrows found their mark against ally after ally of the Pandava cause with a precision that turned entire divisions to slaughter within a single afternoon.

Among those who fell to him was Brihatkshatra, eldest of the five Kekaya brothers. He did not fall easily. He drove at Drona through an afternoon of slaughter, shrouding the old teacher in arrows, cutting down Drona's own shafts in flight until the Kaurava soldiers stared in wonder and Drona himself praised the feat. When Drona loosed the brahmastra, the Kekaya answered it with a brahmastra of his own and turned it aside, then pierced the brahmana with sixty gold-tufted arrows. But Drona's anger rose with every wound. His shafts fell thicker and faster, and at last one struck Brihatkshatra between the breasts. His heart was shattered, and he fell from his chariot, and a kingdom's hope for return ended in the space of a few breaths.

His brothers fought on, but not for long. Drona's arrows found them too, one after another, until all five brothers of Kekaya lay dead, each fallen with his face toward the old teacher, as the war consumed ally after ally on both sides in numbers too great for any single death to be mourned as it deserved. That was the war's particular cruelty: a prince who had crossed the breadth of the northwest to reclaim his father's throne might die anonymously among ten thousand others, his name recorded by the poets only because he had once stood, however briefly, in the company of kings whose stories the world would never let go.

When the war ended, the women of the Kurus came out onto the field to find their dead, and Gandhari, walking with Krishna among the fallen, stopped where the five brothers of Kekaya lay together. All five had been slain by Drona. They lay with their faces still turned toward him, as they had fallen charging, their beautiful armlets still on their arms.

Their armour, made of something like molten gold, still caught the light. Their chariots, their standards and their garlands were the colour of copper, and Gandhari said they lit the ground around them like blazing fires. She showed them to Krishna among the many dead she named that day, five brothers who had crossed half a continent for a kingdom and had found only this: a strip of trampled earth at Kurukshetra, and a queen of the enemy's house to mourn them. Later, when the funeral fires were lit along the plain, the great archers of Kekaya were among the kings whose bodies were given to the flames.

Yudhishthira had won his throne, but none of his mother's sister's sons lived to win theirs. They had given everything for a cause that was never, at its root, only their own, and they had given it without living to ask for any return. The rivers of Kekaya, which had once carried the fame of a queen who broke a kingdom for her son, now carried the memory of five brothers who rode south to win their kingdom back and never rode home.