Kurukshetra Day 3: The Garuda and the Crescent

On the third morning Bhishma answered Dhrishtadyumna's heron with a bird of his own.

He set the eleven akshauhinis in the garuda vyuha, the array of the eagle, and it was a shape built for one purpose, which was to come down on something and carry it away. Bhishma himself stood at the beak. Drona and Kritavarma took the two eyes, where the sharpest sight was needed. Ashwatthama and Kripa held the head. Along the right wing stood the kings of the Trigartas; along the left, Bhurishravas and the Bahlikas, and in the great body of the bird, guarded on every side by his brothers and by the pick of the Kaurava chariots, rode Duryodhana. The tail was made of Madra and Sindhu, and the whole of it lifted and moved together when it moved, which was the frightening part.

The Pandavas had watched it being built and made a shape that could not be carried away.

Dhrishtadyumna drew them into the ardhachandra, the half-moon, a long crescent with the horns pushed forward so that whatever drove into the hollow of it would find itself with enemies on three sides. Bhima took the right horn. Arjuna took the left, with Krishna at the reins and Abhimanyu and Satyaki behind him. Yudhishthira held the centre of the curve with the elephants, and Nakula and Sahadeva rode at his wheels.

So the two formations stood a bowshot apart in the early light, an eagle and a crescent moon, each one drawn to swallow the other, and for a moment the whole plain was quiet enough to hear the banners.

Then Bhishma lifted his conch, and the eagle came down.

By midmorning the crescent had held twice and the eagle had come back both times with its wing torn. Duryodhana drove up out of the body of the formation to the beak, where Bhishma sat under the palm banner with his bow across his knees, and he did not trouble to keep his voice down.

"Grandfather, I have watched you all morning. You strike and you do not press. You break their line and you let it close. Yesterday my Kalinga allies were destroyed while you fought a long and beautiful duel with my cousin and killed nobody who mattered." He leaned out of the chariot. "Say the thing plainly. You fight half-heartedly for love of them. You are an old man with two armies in his chest and you have chosen to spend my soldiers instead of your affection."

There were captains within hearing who looked at the ground.

Bhishma did not stand up and did not raise his voice.

"Many times," he said, "I told you this war would come to nothing. Many times I told you the Pandavas cannot be beaten while Krishna drives that chariot. You did not want counsel then and you do not want it now; you want an old man to be ashamed. I have taken your salt and I command your army and I will do everything a man can do. I will not do what a man cannot."

"Then do what a man can, today."

"Watch, child," the grandsire said. "You have asked. Do not complain afterwards that you were given it."

He put his hand out for his heavy bow, the one he had not touched since the war began, and his charioteer gave it to him and then looked away.

Duryodhana went back to the body of the eagle well pleased with himself, which was the last easy feeling anyone on either side had that day.

What Bhishma did that afternoon had no shape to it that anyone could describe afterwards. There was simply a place on the field where the Pandava army stopped and did not go on.

He went along the inside of the crescent from the centre outward, and the divisions he passed came apart behind him. Men said the bow was never seen at rest, that the string made one continuous sound like a hard wind in a doorway, that the arrows went in sheets and the sheets went in wherever a Pandava standard was raised. Standards were the first thing to go. Then chariot wheels, then horses, then the men themselves in numbers that the scribes gave up recording.

Dhrishtadyumna threw the Panchalas at him and they broke. Yudhishthira sent the elephants and they came back without their riders. Abhimanyu drove at the beak and was turned away twice, and even the boy could not get inside the range where an arrow had to be aimed. The crescent, which had been a shape all morning, began to be a crowd.

And Arjuna, on the left horn, fought Bhishma and did not fight him.

He shot and his arrows were true and none of them went where an arrow goes when a man means to finish something. He cut the grandsire's bowstring and let him restring. He broke his standard and did not follow it with anything worse. In front of four million men he was performing the outward motions of killing his grandfather and refusing, in the small final moment that decides a duel, to do it.

Bhishma saw it. He was too old and too good to miss it.

"Shoot, child," the old man said across the noise, almost kindly. "You will have to do it eventually. It may as well be while I can still enjoy the quality of it."

And Arjuna's next arrow, like the one before it, took the banner and not the man.

Krishna had said nothing for a long time, and that was how Arjuna knew.

He was driving as he had driven all day, taking the chariot through the wreck of the Pandava left, past men who were being killed faster than they could be counted, and his voice when it finally came was level and very quiet.

"Look at your army."

"I am looking."

"No. Turn your head and look at it." The white horses came round. "Those are the men who followed you here because you asked them to. That is Drupada's infantry. That was a division this morning. You have the Gandiva in your hands and the grandsire of the Kurus in front of you and you are shooting at his flagstaff."

"Govinda, that is Bhishma."

"I know what it is," Krishna said, and Arjuna heard something in it he had never heard before, not in thirteen years of exile, not in the assembly hall at Hastinapura.

He looked down.

Krishna's knuckles had gone pale on the reins. His arms were locked, his shoulders were set the way a man sets them before he rises, and his eyes were on the golden chariot with an expression that had nothing in it of the friend who teased him about his hair. For one long breath, in the middle of the third day of the war, the man who had sworn before all the kings of the earth that he would not lift a weapon in this fight was leaning very slightly forward.

"Krishna." Arjuna put a hand on his arm. "Your oath. You swore you would carry nothing into this war but the reins. If you break it for me today, they will say the Pandavas won by cheating, and they will be right, and I will have to live in that afterwards."

The hands did not move for a moment. Then they eased.

"Then fight," Krishna said. "Fight as though you have not decided to lose. Or I will keep my word, and you will watch your brothers keep theirs into a bed of ashes."

Arjuna drew Gandiva to his ear, and the left horn of the crescent began, at last, to push.

The last hour of the third day belonged to the two youngest men on the field.

Abhimanyu came into the body of the eagle where Duryodhana rode with his brothers packed around him, and Satyaki came in behind him with the lion banner, and between them they took that guard apart. The boy shot with a speed that men compared out loud to his father's, and nobody who saw both that day was willing to say which was faster. Chariot after chariot of the royal guard was emptied. Duryodhana's own bow was cut in his hands and his charioteer was struck down beside him, and the king who had spent the morning lecturing Bhishma on half-heartedness was carried backward out of the fighting by bolting horses with his brothers closing frantically around the wreck.

The eagle folded its wing to save its body, and the sun touched the western dust, and the conches called the fighting off.

That night the two camps did what the terms of the first morning allowed. Men crossed the field to sit with cousins in the enemy's lamplight and ask after uncles who were dead. Physicians of one army treated the wounded of the other and went back before dawn.

Bhishma sat outside his tent, still in the day's blood, and let the count be read to him and did not comment on it.

In the Pandava camp Yudhishthira asked what the day had cost, and was told, and asked for the figure again because he did not believe it the first time.

"We are winning," Dhrishtadyumna said carefully.

"Yes," said Yudhishthira. "We agreed to fight this war righteously, with rules, and no man on either side broke them today, and that is the number you have just read me."

Outside, the field went on making its noise in the dark, and neither army slept much.