Kurukshetra Day 16: The Sun-Born Commander

The fifteenth night was the worst the Kaurava camp had known. Bhishma lay on his arrows beyond the lines, still living, still refusing to die. Drona was dead - the old teacher had let go of his bow and sat down in his chariot to meditate when a lie about his son reached him, and Dhrishtadyumna had taken his head while he sat. Two commanders in fifteen days, and both of them men who had held the host together simply by standing in it.

Duryodhana walked through his own camp and did not recognize it. The great avenues of tents had gaps in them now like a mouth with teeth knocked out. Whole contingents had been reduced to a few chariots and a standard nobody wanted to carry. The wounded were laid in rows outside the surgeons' fires because there was no longer room inside them. Somewhere in the dark a man was weeping without trying to hide it, and no officer told him to stop.

He came at last to the tent he had been walking toward all along.

Karna was awake, sitting on the ground with his bow across his knees, oiling the string as though it were an ordinary evening before an ordinary day.

"They are broken," Duryodhana said. "Twice broken. I have no one."

"You have me," Karna said. "You have had me since the day of the tournament. You gave me a kingdom in front of an assembly that was laughing at me. There has never been a day since when I was not yours."

"Ten days you stood aside while Bhishma led."

"Ten days," Karna agreed, "and five more fighting under another man's orders." He set down the oil. "Make me commander and I will end this. Tell the heralds tonight. I want the army to hear it before the sun does."

Duryodhana embraced him, and for the first time in three days he slept.

They consecrated Karna that same night, in the camp, with the kings of the host crowding in to watch.

Golden jars and earthen jars were filled and blessed over, and the tusks of elephants and the horns of great bulls brimmed with sacred water, and Duryodhana and the other kings poured it over him as he sat on a seat of fig wood spread with silk, the way the gods once anointed Skanda to lead their armies. The bards and the brahmanas called their blessings down on him. Defeat Partha and Govinda, they sang. Be the rising sun that drives out the dark. Karna sat in the wet and the noise with his face lifted, and no one who saw him there would have said the word charioteer's son aloud, though every man present had thought it at some point in his life, and Karna knew that too.

He did not wait for the sun. He gave orders that the army be yoked and standing ready before it rose.

When that long night ended the whole camp broke into one roar of "Array! Yoke!" and Karna came out on a chariot with white flags and horses the colour of the dawn, his bow backed with gold, blowing a conch wrapped in a net of gold. He drew the host up in the shape of a makara, the great beast of the sea, and put himself at its mouth. Shakuni and Uluka were its eyes, Ashvatthama its head, Duryodhana and his brothers its neck. Men who had spent the night thinking about Bhishma and Drona looked at him standing there and, for a while, stopped thinking about them.

Across the plain Yudhishthira looked at the same sight and turned to Arjuna. "What is left of them is like dry grass," he said. "There is only one archer over there who matters. Kill him today, and the stake that has sat in my heart for twelve years comes out." Arjuna drew the Pandavas up in a half-moon to meet it, Bhima on one horn and Dhrishtadyumna on the other, and himself at the centre with Krishna at his reins.

The drums went up on both sides, and the two lines went forward.

There was a thing Karna carried that morning that no one on either army knew, except one woman in a house in Hastinapura and one man driving a chariot on the Pandava side.

Days before the war, at the river, standing waist-deep in the water with his hands raised to the sun as he had stood every morning of his life, he had heard a woman's voice behind him waiting for him to finish. When he turned she told him what she had carried all his life: that she was Kunti, that he was her firstborn, that the basket she had set on the water had been her own child, and that the five men he meant to kill were his brothers. Come to us, she had said. Be the eldest. Take the kingdom, it is yours by birth, and every one of them will bow to you.

He had refused. Not out of anger, in the end, though there was anger in it. He had eaten Duryodhana's bread since the day of the tournament and he would not go over to the winning side on the day the winning side was decided. But he had given her something, because she was his mother and had come to him herself.

"Of your sons," he had said, "you will still have five when this is over. I will kill no son of yours but Arjuna. Either he dies or I do, and either way the number holds."

The promise had already been tested. Two days before, in the great slaughter around Jayadratha, he had beaten Bhima down to the ground and stood over him, and had only touched him with the tip of his bow and laughed at him, glutton, go back to your food, go back to the forest, and let him live. That same night, in the fighting by torchlight, he had beaten Sahadeva and sent him away with a jeer instead of an arrow. Nobody had understood either kindness. Nobody was meant to.

Now, on his first day in command, he fell on the Panchalas and the Srinjayas like fire in dry reeds. Chariots came apart under his arrows. Elephants went down with his shafts in them. Five Panchala heroes and ten of their chariot-warriors died in front of him with their drivers and their horses and their standards, and the foremost fighters of the Pandava host closed round him from every side and could not hold him. He went through them into the heart of their line.

And in the afternoon, cutting his way through the wreck of the elephant charges, Nakula came looking for him.

Nakula had been fighting well all day. He had taken the head of an elephant-lord from Anga that morning, and he laughed when he saw who was waiting for him.

"At last," he called. "Destiny has been kind and put you in front of me. You are the root of all of it, the hatred, the quarrel, every Kuru who has died on this field. I will kill you today and be free of this fever."

"Strike, then, child," Karna said. "Show me what you have. A brave man boasts after the fighting, not before it."

It was a real fight, and a long one. Nakula cut Karna's bow in two, and when Karna took up another he cut the ends of that one too, and for a while the arrows between them were so thick that the sun went dim and the soldiers of both sides drew back and simply watched. Then Karna grew angry and the fight changed. He cut Nakula's bow, struck his driver from the seat, killed his four horses with four arrows and broke the chariot to pieces, its flags, its standard, the sword, the shield with its hundred moons. Nakula jumped down with a club in his hands, and Karna shot the club into fragments. Then he shot at him again and again, with arrows that stung and were meant only to sting.

Nakula ran. Karna went after him, laughing, and dropped the string of his great bow over the young man's head and pulled him up short with it around his neck, like a garland.

"Where are those brave words now?" he said. "Can you say them again, as cheerfully? Do not fight men who are stronger than you, son of Madri. Fight your equals, and do not be ashamed of it. Go home, or go back to where Krishna and Arjuna are."

He lifted the bowstring away and let him go. He could have killed him with one arrow. He remembered what he had promised Kunti, and he did not.

Nakula went back to Yudhishthira's chariot and climbed into it and sat there hissing with shame, like a snake shut in a pot. Karna had already turned his horses toward the Panchalas again.

Three times now the greatest archer on the Kaurava side had held a son of Pandu at the end of his arrow and lowered it, and three times he had made the mercy look like scorn, because scorn was the only disguise available to him. He could not say why. To say why was to hand the Pandavas his birth, and Duryodhana his betrayal, and his mother's secret to two armies.

Late in the day Arjuna came through at last, breaking bows and standards as he came, Duryodhana's, Ashvatthama's, Kripa's, Kritavarma's, and Karna turned away from Satyaki to meet him and put three arrows into Arjuna and twenty into Krishna. Then the whole Pandava host closed in around him, Satyaki and the twins and Draupadi's sons and Dhrishtadyumna and Yudhishthira himself, and Arjuna filled the sky with a storm of arrows that sent the Kaurava ranks running with their eyes shut. The sun touched the western mountain. In the dark and the dust no one could tell friend from enemy, and both armies drew apart.

The Pandavas went back to their camp with music, roaring like lions, dancing, praising Krishna and Arjuna. The Kauravas went back like snakes that had been trodden on after their fangs were drawn.

Karna rode through his own lines past men who did not cheer. They had watched him break the Panchala ranks and scatter the Srinjayas, but they had also watched what Arjuna did in the last hour of the light, and it was the last hour they remembered. The wounded were laid in rows outside the surgeons' fires again.

Nakula had gone back to his brothers humiliated, as Bhima and Sahadeva had two days before. Not one of them had any idea that the man who let them live had done it because he could not bear to make his mother a liar.

The kings gathered in Duryodhana's tent, grieving and talking over one another, and Karna stood among them, rubbing one hand hard against the other, and looked at Duryodhana.

"Arjuna is steady and skilled and never tires," he said, "and Krishna tells him what to do when the moment comes. That sudden storm of weapons took us by surprise today. Tomorrow I will undo everything he means to do."

Duryodhana gave his assent, and the kings went to their beds.

Karna sat alone afterwards with his bow across his knees the way he had sat the night before. Beyond the tents, on the other side of the plain, the Pandava fires were burning in a line that seemed to have no end to it.

He had one day left. The vow to his mother had held, and it would hold once more, because the one son it had never covered was the one he meant to meet. Tomorrow was the seventeenth day, and before the armies moved he would go to Duryodhana and ask for a charioteer who could match Krishna.