Kurukshetra Day 6: Into the Formation

The sixth morning began, as so many mornings on this field now did, with a question posed in the shape of an army. Bhishma arrayed the Kaurava troops into the krauncha, the heron, with Drona himself stationed at its beak, a formation with a long probing beak of a vanguard and wings swept back on either side, built to peck through a defense at one chosen point while the wider mass held its shape around that strike.

Dhrishtadyumna, born from the sacrificial fire for the single purpose of ending Drona's life and commanding the Pandava host by right of that birth as much as by skill, had already been told by Yudhishthira to build the makara, the sea-monster, the same driving wedge Bhishma had used against them only the day before, with Bhima at its beak. Bhishma saw it and shaped the heron against it, and Dhrishtadyumna studied the heron's shape from across the field the way a student reads a problem set by his own master.

There was something almost unbearably intimate in it, a teacher and his student reading each other's intentions from the shape of moving men, each knowing exactly what the other meant to attempt because the one had taught the other exactly how such attempts were made. Drona had shaped Dhrishtadyumna's understanding of war as surely as he had shaped his own son's, not knowing, or perhaps knowing too well, that the shape he gave would one day be turned back against him.

The two arrays came together soon after sunrise, beak against wedge, and the ground between the armies filled, within minutes, with a chaos that neither formation's elegant design had quite predicted.

Somewhere inside that chaos, Bhima did what Bhima always eventually did, which was decide that the battle in front of him was moving too slowly for a chariot to keep pace with his intentions. He climbed down, told Vishoka to hold the horses and wait for him, took up his mace, and went forward on foot into the packed heart of the Kaurava mass, with little thought for the ground behind him.

He did not mean to be cut off. No warrior means that. But the krauncha's wings, even broken at the beak, still held their shape along the flanks, and as Bhima drove deeper and deeper, chasing whatever resistance still stood in front of him, those wings closed quietly behind his path the way water closes behind a swimmer, and by the time anyone thought to look for him from the Pandava side, he was no longer visible at all, only a distant commotion somewhere in the middle of an army that was entirely the enemy's.

Dhrishtadyumna, cutting through the Kaurava ranks, came upon Bhima's empty chariot and Vishoka waiting beside it, and asked in a voice choked with tears where the man was whom he loved more than his own life. The Pandavas' strongest fighter, the one whose mace-work had shaken the Kaurava center twice already this war, was somewhere inside the formation with no visible way back out, surrounded on every side by soldiers who would count his death the single greatest prize the war had yet offered them.

Dhrishtadyumna did not hesitate over the decision the way a lesser commander might have. He had spent his whole life being told what he was born for, and none of the tellings had ever mentioned standing at the edge of a battle while Bhima was lost inside it. He turned his own chariot toward the place the commotion was thickest and began, immediately, to cut his way in after him.

To reach him, Dhrishtadyumna followed the path Bhima himself had cut, a trail marked by elephants crushed under the mace, driving down it faster than the Kaurava soldiers around him could close it again, until at last, in the trampled churn at the formation's very heart, he found what he had come for: Bhima, mace still swinging, ringed by more enemies than any one man should have been able to face and somehow, impossibly, still standing at the center of the ring rather than beneath it.

There was no time for either man to ask the other how the day had gone so far. Dhrishtadyumna pulled the arrows from Bhima's mangled limbs, lifted him onto his own chariot and embraced him there in the middle of the enemy. Duryodhana saw it and sent his brothers against the son of Drupada, and when they closed around him with their bows, Dhrishtadyumna loosed the Pramohana, an astra built not to kill but to bewilder, and the sons of Dhritarashtra fell senseless in their chariots while the Kuru soldiers around them fled.

What followed was not the kind of fighting either army could easily narrate afterward, no clean duels, no single blows worth naming, only a long, grinding, close-quarters ruin visited on whatever came within reach of the two of them. Soldiers who had been certain, minutes before, that they had trapped and would soon kill the Pandavas' strongest warrior discovered instead that they had merely given him a second warrior to trap alongside him, and that the two of them together were considerably harder to hold than either had been alone.

Then Drona came, and with the counter-weapon called prajna he woke the stunned princes, who turned back to the fight. Yudhishthira, uneasy, sent twelve rathas led by Abhimanyu in a needle-shaped array to find the two, and together they turned the krauncha's own strength against it. A formation depends on every part of it holding its position relative to every other part, and Bhima and Dhrishtadyumna, fighting from inside rather than against it, needed only to keep moving, keep breaking whatever line tried to close around them, to turn the heron's careful shape into a chaos no order could survive.

Sons of Dhritarashtra were wounded and driven back in that grinding heart of the formation, and Duryodhana himself, trading arrows with Bhima, was struck senseless in his chariot. When he came to, he felt the day curdle into something achingly familiar: another gap opening in his center, another handful of brothers bloodied, another formation that had looked unbreakable at dawn proving, by afternoon, to hold no better than the ones before it.

Drona struck back hard, killing Dhrishtadyumna's horses and charioteer and forcing him onto Abhimanyu's chariot, but by evening Bhima and Dhrishtadyumna were back on the Pandava side, and Yudhishthira smelled their heads in joy. The two of them emerged marked and exhausted but alive, and the soldiers who had feared Bhima lost for good that morning met his return with the kind of relief usually reserved for men risen from actual death.

Duryodhana did not wait for the fighting to fully end before his grief found its target. He had watched this same story play out too many times in six days now, his own carefully built strength undone from within by Pandava daring his side could neither predict nor match, and by nightfall his grief had curdled into something that wanted, urgently, somewhere to place the blame.

He found that place in Bhishma's tent. The old man was alone when Duryodhana entered, still in the plain dress he wore between battles, and Duryodhana did not trouble himself with any of the courtesies he usually observed toward his grandfather.

'Six days,' he said. 'Six days, and you have not ended this war, though every man on this field knows you could end it in an afternoon if you chose to fight the way you are capable of fighting. Bhima walks into the heart of our own army and walks back out again alive. Arjuna trades astras with you and loses nothing for it. Bhima's arrows left me senseless in my own chariot today, and you, the greatest warrior either side possesses, fight as though your whole heart were still with the men you are supposed to be killing.'

The accusation hung in the tent's lamplight, treachery, though he did not use the word outright, dressed instead as a question about loyalty that did not need the word to wound.

Bhishma's face, when he finally answered, held more grief in it than Duryodhana had ever troubled himself to look for there. 'I told you what this war would cost before the first conch ever sounded,' he said. 'I told you it was ruin, and you would not hear it, and now you come to my tent at night to ask why I have not made the ruin larger and faster to please you. I fight for your throne because I gave my word long ago that I would, and I will keep fighting until that word or my life runs out, whichever comes first. But do not ask me to hate them. I raised those boys on my own knee before I ever raised a bow against them, and there are debts a man owes that even a king's grandson cannot cancel with an accusation. Still, for your sake I will strive against them tomorrow as though I no longer wish to live.'

Duryodhana left the tent content with that promise, for a night, but the question he had carried into it did not die with the conversation. It would return, sharper and less patient, before many more days of this war had passed.