Kurukshetra Day 11: The Teacher Takes Command

The eleventh morning broke over an army that had forgotten how to stand in ranks. For ten days the Kaurava host had been a single body with a single head, and every captain in it had known where to look when the horns sounded. Now Bhishma lay a bowshot beyond the lines on the bed his own students had made for him, held above the earth on the shafts of Arjuna's arrows, and the men who filed past him at dawn walked back to their chariots not knowing whose banner to follow.

Grief in an army does not sit down and weep. It spreads outward as confusion. Horses were harnessed twice. Standards went up in the wrong quarter of the field. Officers argued over precedence that had not needed arguing over since the war began, and the great host of eleven divisions stood in the cold light like a body whose limbs had stopped hearing one another.

It was into that stillness that Karna rode at last. For ten days he had sat in his tent while the war he had waited his whole life for went on without him, because Bhishma had refused to take the field beside him and Karna had refused to fight beneath a commander who named him half a warrior. Now he went first not to the battle line but to the bed of arrows.

He knelt in the churned dust. "Grandsire," he said, "it is Karna, whom you never loved."

The old man's hand moved a little where it lay. "It is Karna," Bhishma answered, "whom I know better than he thinks. I have known since before this war was spoken of. Lay down your quarrel with the sons of Pandu. Even now there is time."

"There is no time," Karna said. "There is only Duryodhana, who gave me a kingdom when the world gave me nothing. Bless me and let me go."

And Bhishma, who had spent ten days trying to keep this man off the field, blessed him, and let him go.

In the council tent the question could not be put off past the sounding of the first horn. An army without a commander is only a crowd with weapons, and outside the canvas the crowd was waiting.

Duryodhana turned to Karna first, because Karna was the friend whose counsel he trusted before any other. "Say the name," he said. "You have been kept from this war ten days. Take the host and lead it."

"Not mine," Karna said. "There is a man in this tent whom every warrior on our side was taught by, and half of theirs. There is no other name. Let Drona lead."

Drona had been sitting apart with his bow across his knees, and he did not rise at once. He was old, and he had been old for a long while, and the war had already taken from him the last comfortable illusion that a teacher can love his students and stand outside their quarrel. He had trained the five sons of Pandu with his own hands. He had trained the hundred sons of Dhritarashtra with the same hands. Now he was being asked to point one set of them at the other and call the aim true.

"You know what you ask of me," he said.

"I ask you to lead," Duryodhana said.

"You ask me to be the head of the arrow," said Drona, "and the arrow flies where the hand throws it." But he rose, because he had eaten Duryodhana's salt for twenty years and there was no honest way for him to refuse.

They consecrated him there on the field in the manner the shastras require, the sacred waters poured over his white head, the brahmanas chanting, the drums beginning slow and building until the whole eleven divisions took up the sound. The old teacher stood in golden armor in the middle of the roar, and no one who watched him could tell whether the thing on his face was pride or something much closer to dread.

The consecration entitled Duryodhana to ask a boon of his new commander, and he did not waste it on the obvious thing.

"Do not kill Yudhishthira," he said. "Bring him to me alive."

For a moment Drona felt something in his chest unknot. He had been braced all morning for the order he did not know how he would obey, and this was not it. Of all the men on the other field, the eldest son of Pandu was the one he could least imagine putting an arrow through. "You do me a kindness and I think you do not know it," he said. "You could have asked for his death. Very well. If Arjuna can be drawn away from him, even for an hour, I will take the king alive and set him at your feet. While Arjuna stands beside him, no power in this world can reach him, and I will not pretend otherwise."

Duryodhana laughed with real delight, and turned to the captains behind him, and said the rest of it aloud, because it had never occurred to him that it was a thing to be ashamed of.

"You hear? Alive. Kill him and the four brothers become five furies and the war goes on until we are all bones. But take him living, and he sits in my hall, and I offer him the dice again. He will play. He cannot refuse a challenge at the board, it is his one weakness and it has never failed me yet. Twelve more years in the forest, and the war ends without another day of it, and the kingdom is mine by their own hands a second time."

The captains cheered him. Drona did not.

He stood in his golden armor and understood, some seconds too late, exactly what he had just promised. He had thought he was being spared the killing of a man he loved. He had in fact agreed to hand that man over to a dice board and a lie, and to spend however many days it took, and however many lives, doing it. The vow was already given. He was a brahmana and a teacher and he had never in seventy years taken back a word.

"It will be done," he said, "if it can be done," and went out to array the host.

One condition stood between Drona and his vow, and he had named it himself: Arjuna. So the Kauravas set about buying an hour of Arjuna's absence at the only price that would purchase it.

Susharma, king of the Trigartas, came forward with his brothers, and they had a grievance older than the war. Arjuna had ground their country under his wheels in the days of Yudhishthira's great sacrifice, and they had been swallowing it ever since. Now they kindled a fire on the southern edge of the field and spread the kusha grass and put on armor made of tree bark and hair, and swore, with the flames as their witness, the oath of the samsaptakas - those who are sworn together, who go out as one and come back as one or do not come back.

"We will kill Arjuna," they said into the fire, "or Arjuna will kill us. There is no third way out of this field. May the worlds reserved for cowards and for men who murder their teachers and for those who betray a friend be our portion, if we turn."

Then they went to the southern quarter and shouted their challenge across the plain, and it carried, and the whole army heard it. That was the point of it.

Arjuna heard it too, and turned his head, and Krishna at the reins already knew.

"You have a vow of your own," Krishna said. "You have never let a challenge stand unanswered. They know it. That is the whole of their plan."

"Then they have planned well," Arjuna said, "because I cannot break it and remain the man who made it." He rode to his brother instead, and found Yudhishthira among the standards, and said what a soldier says when he is being pulled off the one post that matters. "They are calling me south. I must go. Keep the Panchalas close about you, and do not let the old man near you, whatever the day looks like. He has sworn something. I can read it in how he has drawn up the line."

"Go," Yudhishthira said. "I have brothers enough."

The white horses turned south, and the gap they left in the Pandava center was the gap Drona had asked for.

Drona came for the king before the sun was high.

He drove into the Pandava center in a wedge of chariots with his golden altar banner above him, and the old man who had spent his life teaching young men how to hold a formation now took one apart from the inside, breaking wheels, cutting bowstrings, dropping horses in their traces and never once shooting to kill where he did not have to. The line bent. Yudhishthira stood his ground where it bent, so that the men around him would stand theirs.

What saved him was not one warrior but a dozen. The Panchalas closed in front of the king's chariot and were driven back and closed again. Drupada's sons put themselves in the path of a man who had taught them how to stand in it. Bhima's chariot came across the field like a landslide. Every time the old teacher opened a road to the king, someone filled it with his own body, and Drona had to cut the same distance twice, and then three times, and the sun climbed while he did it.

In the south, Arjuna was killing samsaptakas by the hundred and getting nowhere, because there were always more of them and that was the design. Only when the day tilted toward evening did he break free, and the white horses came back across the plain at a gallop with the Gandiva already singing, and the sound of that bow reached the Pandava center before the chariot did.

Drona heard it and knew the day was over. He drew off in good order, and the horns sounded the retreat while it was still light.

In the tent that night Duryodhana wanted to know why the king was not standing before him in chains.

"Because Arjuna returned," said Drona. "Draw him off again tomorrow and I will try again. And the day after. I have given my word and I will keep coming for him."

He would keep coming. The vow would live four more days and cost more than any of them guessed, and somewhere in those days a formation would be drawn on this same plain that only a handful of living men knew how to enter - and one of the few who knew the way in would be a boy of sixteen who had never been taught the way out.