The Conquest of the West

The west fell to Nakula, youngest but one of the five Pandava brothers, when Yudhishthira sent his kin to the four horizons to gather tribute for the rajasuya. His was a road that promised open country before it promised any city, the dry marches beyond the Kuru heartland where scattered desert tribes lived by raiding and by grazing rather than by any settled crown, and where the horizon itself seemed to stretch further than any of the other three roads his brothers had taken.

He rode out with a great host, larger than the road at first seemed to need, for the desert tribes were nothing if not stubborn, striking at supply columns from the dunes and vanishing before a proper battle line could form against them. Nakula matched their own tactics back at them, sending light riders ahead to scout the wells and oases the tribes depended on, cutting off their water before ever needing to cut down their warriors, and learning the shape of the desert's few lifelines faster than any raider could relocate a camp around them.

One by one the tribal chieftains of the western desert came to his camp rather than wait for their wells to run dry under siege, laying down what tribute their harsh country could yield: horses bred tough on thin grazing, salt, hides, and oaths of peace with the empire rising in the east. It was not a rich beginning to the road, but it was a necessary one, clearing the sands so that the richer kingdoms further west, Shibi and Sauvira and at the road's end Madra itself, could be reached without a raiding tribe at his army's back.

Beyond the desert lay the Shibi country, a kingdom whose name the epic already carried with a certain honor, remembered elsewhere for a king who had once given his own flesh to save a dove from a hawk rather than break a vow of protection. The Shibis Nakula found on his road were no less proud of that inheritance, and their army met him in the open rather than waiting behind walls, trusting their reputation as much as their spears.

The battle, when it came, was hard fought but short. Nakula's cavalry, seasoned already by the running skirmishes of the desert crossing, broke the Shibi formation within a single day, though not without respect earned on both sides for how long the line held before it gave. When the Shibi king came to Nakula's tent that evening to yield, he did not come as a man broken in spirit, only as one who had tested an army and found it the stronger.

"Your people gave a king's flesh once to keep a promise," Nakula told him, accepting tribute rather than the surrender of the throne itself. "I will not ask more of Shibi than my brother's sacrifice needs, and I will leave your crown exactly where I found it." The Shibi king sent gold and fine wool and warriors of his own to escort the tribute onward, and Nakula's column, its numbers barely thinned by the fighting, turned further west still, toward Sauvira and the horse country that lay along the Indus beyond it.

Sauvira, when Nakula's army reached it, proved a harder and stranger country than the Shibi lands behind him, its people scattered across river country and grassland where the great horse herds of the west were bred and traded, animals prized across every kingdom the digvijaya had touched so far. Its chieftains fought with the same skill their horses were famous for, mounted archers who struck and withdrew before Nakula's heavier ranks could close on them.

He answered speed with speed, splitting his own cavalry into smaller companies that could match the Sauvira riders stride for stride rather than trying to run them down with a single unwieldy mass. The campaign stretched longer than Shibi's single day, weeks of running engagements across open grassland, until at last the Sauvira chieftains, worn down as much by the persistence of the pursuit as by any single defeat, sent word that they would submit rather than lose their herds to a war of attrition they could not win.

What Nakula took from Sauvira was, fittingly, horses beyond counting, the finest breeding stock of the western marches, added to the gold and tribute already swelling his baggage train. Further still toward the Indus lay smaller principalities of the horse country proper, whose chieftains, hearing how Sauvira had fallen, sent tribute ahead of any army reaching their own gates, unwilling to test what had already proven unstoppable. The road that remained now led only to Madra, and to the one kingdom on it where Nakula expected, for the first time since leaving Indraprastha, to need no army at all.

Madra was ruled by Shalya, brother of Nakula's own mother Madri, and as Nakula's column came in sight of the capital's walls he found no army drawn up to meet it, only Shalya himself riding out alone from the gate, ahead of any guard, to close the distance between them on foot the moment they were near enough to embrace.

"Nephew," Shalya said, holding Nakula by the shoulders and studying his face as if measuring how much of Madri he could still see in it, "you come to my gate with an army as though Madra were a kingdom to be conquered rather than a house to be visited. Put away whatever you brought here to fight with. There is nothing in Madra I would not give you for love before I would give it to any other king for fear."

There was no battle at Madra, not even the show of one. Shalya opened his treasury himself, walking Nakula through storerooms of gold, gems and fine horses bred in the Madra hills, pressing gifts on him faster than his officers could inventory them, all the while asking after Yudhishthira and Kunti and the brothers he had not seen since Nakula and Sahadeva were boys learning to ride. The western quarter's richest submission, richer by far than the desert tribes or Shibi or Sauvira combined, came not from Nakula's army but from an uncle's open arms, tribute given so freely that it barely resembled tribute at all, more nearly a family's gift to a nephew grown into a warrior worth being proud of.

When Nakula's column finally turned east again, it took ten thousand camels to carry what the western road had gathered, the animals loaded so heavily with Madra's gold and gems, Sauvira's horses driven alongside in their own great herds, and the tribute of Shibi and the desert tribes besides, that the march home moved slower than any single stage of the outward campaign had. Shalya himself rode with the column for the first day's distance, unwilling to let his nephew leave without one more embrace at the border of his own kingdom.

"Tell your brother," Shalya said at the parting, "that Madra's gate will always open faster for a Pandava than for any stranger who thinks to knock on it with an army." Nakula carried the words home along with the gold, and the epic remembered them fondly, a western quarter won by kinship rather than conquest, its wealth given rather than seized.

But the same story that treasured that embrace never let the warmth of it stand as the whole truth. The bond between Madra and the Pandavas ran deep enough that Duryodhana himself would come to fear it before the war at Kurukshetra, and deep enough that he would find a way to bend it to his own purpose, tricking Shalya with lavish hospitality on his very road to join Yudhishthira, until the Madra king found himself bound by a rash promise to fight for the Kauravas instead. The gate that opened for love at Madra, the epic's memory insists on holding beside its brighter twin, was also the gate through which betrayal would later walk in, dressed as the same hospitality that had once meant nothing but kinship.