Samba and the Dragged City

Word of the svayamvara came into Dwaraka the way such news always came, by merchants first and by heralds three days after. Duryodhana's daughter Lakshmanaa had come of age; the Kuru house had fixed her choosing-day at Hastinapura; and half the kings of the middle country were already on the northern roads with their best horses and their second-best manners.

In the sea hall the announcement was heard with the mild interest of a city that had its own affairs. One man in Dwaraka heard it the way a dry field hears thunder.

Samba was Krishna's son by Jambavati, daughter of the bear king, and the city watched him the way it would watch a spark carried through a granary. He was beautiful in a way that made older women stop what they were doing. He was quick with a bow, he laughed easily and often at the wrong moment, and he had been born without whatever faculty it is that tells a young man where an edge lies and how close he is standing to it. He had seen the Kuru girl once, at a river festival two winters back, and had said nothing about it to anybody since.

He did not go to his father. He went down to the stables before light, took the fast chariot and the four white horses, and was a full day gone before the household understood that the noise at dawn had been the gate.

Krishna was told at his midday rest. He heard it out with his eyes shut and did not sit up.

"He did not ask me."

"He would not," Balarama said from the doorway. "You would have said yes. Then there would have been envoys, and gifts, and a month of it. A boy of that temper would rather be a thief than a delegation."

"The whole Kuru host will be standing in that hall."

"Yes," said Balarama, and reached for the water jar. "It will be an education."

The hall at Hastinapura had been swept and hung and filled since morning. Kings sat in rows on cushions of river silk with their bowmen behind them, and the old men of the Kuru house sat above on the dais, and the air had the particular closeness of a room in which a great many men are pretending not to be nervous.

Lakshmanaa came in with the garland in her hands and her eyes down, and walked the length of the aisle at the pace such things are walked, and did not lift her head for any of them.

The doors were still open at the far end. A chariot came through them.

It came at a canter, into a hall, which no one there had ever seen done, and the four white horses were flecked to the shoulder with the dust of five hundred kos of road. The young man driving them was laughing. He put the chariot broadside at the foot of the dais, leaned out with one hand on the rail, and said something to the girl that nobody afterward could agree on, and she looked up at him for exactly as long as it takes to decide a life, and set her hand in his, and he swung her aboard.

Then he wheeled for the doors.

He had the law with him and he knew it. A kshatriya may take a bride by capture and answer for it with his body; the custom is old and it is honest, and it assumes only that the man is willing to be killed for what he wants. What the custom does not assume is one chariot against the standing army of the Kurus.

They came off the dais as one animal. Bhishma's voice went over the noise like a rope thrown; the doors were shut and barred; and the arrows came from three sides at once. Samba fought from the platform until they cut his bowstring, and then with the axle-bar until they cut the axle. They took him alive out of the wreck because Bhishma had shouted twice for it, and they took the girl out of his arms, and both of them were carried away in different directions through a hall that had begun, disgracefully, to cheer.

Dwaraka heard of it at dusk and was under arms before the tide turned.

The Vrishni chiefs came into the hall still buckling their harness. Satyaki wanted the fleet loaded by morning. Kritavarma wanted the northern road. Ugrasena, who was old and slow to speak, said the word war twice and both times as though it were already decided, and the assembly took it up, and the shouting went on until the man sitting at the end of the dais stood up.

"No," said Balarama.

The hall stopped. He came down among them without hurry.

"Count who it is you are proposing to burn. Bhishma is our elder and the elder of every man in this room. Drona and Kripa taught half of you. Duryodhana learned the mace from my own hands, standing in my own yard, for six years, and I have never had a better pupil or a worse one. They have done a wrong thing. They have not yet done an unforgivable one. Between those two there is a road, and a road can be walked by one man."

"They have your nephew in irons," somebody said.

"Then I will go and ask for him," said Balarama. "Kinsmen ask. Enemies invade. I would like to know, before I take up the second, whether the first has failed."

Krishna said nothing at all through any of it, which everyone present understood, and let his brother go.

He went the way a guest goes: one chariot, a driver, the priests of the household, and no army whatever behind him. Hastinapura saw the dust two hours out and came pouring through its gates to meet him. They brought the honey-water and the cow and the seat of honor; Bhishma embraced him at the roadside; Drona took his hand; the drums went before him all the way up the ramp, and the city hung out its cloth as though a festival had arrived early.

Balarama, seated at last in the hall he had come five hundred kos to reach, thought that he had rarely been received so warmly, and waited to see what the warmth was for.

He put it plainly, because he had come to put it plainly.

"The boy did a rash thing and he has paid for it once already, in that hall, against all of you. I am not here to argue the custom. I am here as an elder of one house speaking to the elders of another. Give me my brother's son, and give the girl to him openly, and let there be a wedding in this city instead of a grievance, and both our houses will be the better for it before the month is out."

The silence that followed had been arranged in advance. He could hear that it had.

It was not Bhishma who answered. The younger men had been waiting for this, and one of them spoke from among them, and the rest let him, and their faces said that the words had been decided the night before.

"A daughter of the Kuru house," he said, "is not carried out of her father's hall like a cow taken off a field. The boy came in as a thief and he lies where thieves lie. As for the marriage - Bharata's line does not give its girls to cowherds."

Duryodhana did not stop it. He let it stand, and then he improved on it, in the pleasant voice of a man stating a fact of arithmetic.

"You are guests here and honored guests, and you have eaten in my hall. But let us speak as men who know the world. Kingship in this land is a thing the Kurus hold and the Yadavas do not. Your fathers were barred from the throne by an old word, and the bar has held for how many generations now? You are lords of a rich city and a good harbor. You are not kings. It was we who taught you the mace, Rama. You would do well to remember which of us stands where."

And Balarama sat with his hands on his knees and said nothing for a long moment.

The men of that court had been told all their lives that this was the mild one, the brother who forgave. They had never once thought to ask what mildness costs a man who has the strength to end an argument any time he chooses, or what happens to a debt like that when it is finally called in.

He rose, and the rising was not loud.

"I came with my hands open," he said. "You have answered a guest with the ranking of his blood. Very well. Since the Kurus will not walk out to me, I will bring the Kurus."

He walked out of the hall and down through the streets and out of the eastern gate, and the court came after him laughing, because it was a strange thing to say and they had drunk well. He went along under the ramparts until he found the place where the great wall met the raised ground, and there he took up the plough.

He set the blade in beneath the foundation the way a farmer sets it in at the head of a furrow. Then he leaned back on the haft and pulled.

Hastinapura moved.

The sound came first, out of the earth, a long grinding groan that stood every animal in the city up on its feet at once. Then the towers went over some hands' breadth toward the river and stayed leaning. Cisterns emptied themselves sideways. The great gate came off its pivot. Lamps walked off their brackets, and the roofs began to shed tiles in sheets, and in the women's quarters the floor tilted enough that a dropped cup ran, and did not stop running.

And the city went on moving, slowly, steadily, toward the Ganga, and every man in it could see the water coming up to meet the walls.

The laughter had ended somewhere in the first few moments. They came out of the gate and down the slope and they came running, and they went onto their faces in the dirt in front of him, and Duryodhana with them.

"Rama. Enough. Enough. It is ours to give and we give it."

Balarama set the plough down.

They brought Samba out of the cellars themselves and washed his feet themselves, and the wedding was made in that hall with every honor the Kuru house could put its hands on, and the bride went to Dwaraka with elephants and horses and chariots and a dowry that beggared the treasury for a year. Balarama accepted all of it courteously and forgave the whole matter, which cost him nothing, since he had never wanted anything else.

And the walls of Hastinapura that face the river are said to lean toward the water to this day.