The Iron Maces

Thirty-six years had passed since the great war ended, and a long quiet had settled over the kingdom. Yudhishthira ruled in Hastinapura with his brothers beside him, the wounds of Kurukshetra grown over but never wholly healed. Then, one season, the omens began.

Harsh winds rose, dry and gritty, dragging dust across the plains. Birds wheeled to the left in unnatural circles. The rivers turned and ran backward against their courses, the horizons drowned in a copper mist, and meteors fell by broad daylight. The sun rose without rays, ringed by headless trunks of fire, and the four quarters of the sky seemed to burn. Cranes called like owls in the eaves of the palace, and tame goats cried like jackals in the night.

Yudhishthira had seen such things only once before - on the eve of Kurukshetra, when eighteen armies marched to their deaths. He summoned his brothers and his ministers, and they spoke in low voices of what such signs could mean. They feared for their own people. But the omens were not for the Kurus this time. They were for the Vrishnis and the Andhakas, the proud Yadava clans of Krishna, grown rich and idle and quarrelsome in their sea-built city of Dwaraka far to the west.

Unknown to the Pandavas, the hour of an old curse had come round at last. On the battlefield after the war, the grieving Gandhari, her hundred sons all slain, had turned upon Krishna and cursed him: because he had the power to halt the slaughter and chose to let it run its course, his own clan would one day destroy itself in just such madness, and he would die alone and friendless in the forest, thirty-six years hence. The thirty-sixth year had now arrived.