The Oath of the Doomed

The Trigartas were a fighting people of the northern hills, and their king, Susharma, carried his grudges the way his country carried snow - in deep banks that did not melt.

The oldest layer of the grudge was plain geography. Trigarta lay athwart the routes of every great power's conquests, and the army of the Pandavas, in the years of their ascendancy, had trampled it most thoroughly of all. A proud little kingdom hemmed by stronger neighbours learns to hate from below, and Susharma had learned the lesson young. But the personal layer of the wound was laid down later, in the thirteenth year of the Pandavas' exile, when Susharma, allied with Duryodhana and hungry to bleed the Matsya kingdom that had so often humbled him, proposed the great cattle raid on Virata.

The plan worked perfectly until it did not. Susharma's host swept up the Matsya herds, sixty thousand cattle, and when old King Virata rode out to fight, the Trigartas broke his army and took the king himself prisoner in his own chariot. It was the sweetest hour of Susharma's life, and it lasted exactly as long as an hour.

Then a kitchen servant of Virata's court, a man somehow built like a siege engine, came through the Trigarta ranks on foot, tore a chariot apart to make a club of its axle, dragged Susharma down by the hair as Susharma had dreamed of dragging kings, and made him say aloud, on his knees, before the whole field, that he was a slave. Only Yudhishthira's quiet word freed him. The cook, of course, was Bhima in disguise. The counsellor who spared his life was the very king he had robbed at dice. The entire nest of his enemies had been hiding all year inside the court he had raided, and he had never known it.

Freed and shamed past bearing, Susharma rode home through the passes in silence. The Pandavas remembered the day as a skirmish before the real war. Trigarta remembered it as the wound that would one day choose how all of them died.

Eleven days into the great war on the plain of Kurukshetra, the Kaurava commanders faced an arithmetic problem with a single name: Arjuna. Wherever the white horses ran and the banner of Hanuman streamed, the Kaurava line dissolved. Whatever plan was laid by the night's council, the dawn brought Arjuna to the place where it would do the most harm, and the plan died with the men who had made it.

Bhishma had fallen on the tenth day, pierced to a bed of arrows, and now Drona, the teacher of both houses, held the supreme command. On the night before the twelfth day Duryodhana came to him hot with a grievance and a demand. "You promised me victory," the prince said. "You are the greatest of living warriors and you have given me nothing but funerals. If you cannot kill the Pandavas, at least take one of them. Bring me Yudhishthira alive, and the war ends in an afternoon. Captured, he must wager again, and lose again, and go again to the forest. There need be no more slaughter. Only do it."

Drona did not refuse. He was bound to Duryodhana by bread and salt and would honour the bond to his death, though he loved the men he was asked to ruin. "It can be done," he said at last, "but not while Arjuna stands in front of his brother. So long as that one is in the line, no formation will hold and no capture will keep. Draw Arjuna away to some far quarter of the field, give me one day with Yudhishthira's guard thinned of him, and I will give you the king, or such a fight as no man has seen."

The words hung in the lamplight. Everyone in the tent understood the difficulty. Arjuna was not a man one lured. He could not be tricked from his post by a feint, for he read feints as easily as he read the wind across his arrow-feathers. There was only one lever in the world that could move Arjuna against his own judgement, and a king out of the northern hills, sitting silent at the edge of the council, knew exactly what it was.

Susharma rose in the council and the murmuring stopped, for he was not a man whose voice was often heard among the great captains of the Kuru host. He had brought his own grief to this war, and it had been waiting for a use.

"I will take Arjuna away," he said. "Not by trick, for he cannot be tricked. By oath. There is one law that binds him absolutely, tighter than any rope, and it is the law of the sworn challenge. A Kshatriya called out by name, to single and to general battle, by men who have vowed his death, cannot turn aside without becoming a thing no warrior will follow. He must answer. It is the marrow of his honour, and his honour is the only door in him that I can open. My brothers and I will swear ourselves to Arjuna's death and call him out, and he will come to us, because he is Arjuna and he must."

He let them weigh it. Then he spoke the heart of the thing. "Understand what we offer. We do not promise to defeat him. No one in this tent believes we can. We promise to occupy him. We will fasten on him like a burr on a hide, and we will not be shaken loose while one of us breathes, and that is the only victory my people have left to win. Keep your Drona and your formations for the north of the field. Trigarta asks one privilege only, the privilege of the impossible task. Let us be the price you pay for your day without Arjuna."

Susharma's brothers stood with him as he spoke. Satyaratha, Satyavarman, Satyavrata, Satyeshu, Satyakarman, princes of the hills, names built from the word for truth, fitting men about to make truth a weapon against themselves. Behind them stood the captains of ten thousand Trigarta warriors and their allies, the whole fighting strength of the kingdom gathered for one purpose. Duryodhana looked at them and saw his salvation. Drona looked at them and saw, with the clear sad eyes of an old teacher, a generation of brave men volunteering to be spent.

They did not wait for morning. That same night, apart from the Kaurava host, Susharma and his people built the fire and spread the kusha grass, and the rites they performed were, in plain truth, their own funeral rites performed in advance, by living men, for living men.

The Brahmins kindled the flame and chanted the holy words. The warriors put on garments of kusha and bark and the dress of those who have renounced the world, the dress of men already dead to it. They poured the offerings of clarified butter into the fire, and the smoke rose straight in the windless dark, and into that smoke they spoke the oath that gave them their name. It was a self-curse made conditional, the most binding form of vow a Kshatriya could take. We will slay Arjuna in battle, or be slain by him. We will not retreat while he lives. If we turn our backs, if we flee, if we yield, if we let fear move us so much as a single pace, then let the hells of the oath-breaker be ours, the doom of the slayer of Brahmins, the doom of the betrayer of one who has come for shelter, the long dark places at the bottom of the worlds.

Samsaptaka, the word was. The sworn-together. Those who have bound themselves by a mutual oath. Around the camps the common soldiers gave it a plainer translation. The army of the already dead, they called it, and they were not wrong.

There was a strange exaltation among the Trigartas that night, the lightness that comes to men who have set down the heaviest burden a soldier carries, which is the hope of going home. They embraced. They forgave old quarrels among themselves. Some sang. Susharma moved among them with the calm of a man who has at last found the exact shape of his life's grievance and poured it whole into a single act. By the oath he had made his shame into something almost holy, or close enough to holy that he could die inside it without flinching.

At first light on the twelfth day the Trigartas marched to the southern end of the field, far from where Drona was already drawing up his great formation in the north. They arranged themselves in the Garuda order, wings spread wide, and they sent their herald across the open ground to the Pandava line.

The herald did not speak in riddles. He spoke Arjuna's name, again and again, and after the name he hung the old insults to be sure the iron went deep. He named the cattle raid and the court of Virata and the day Bhima had dragged a king by the hair, and he called all of it cowardice on the Pandava side, and challenge after challenge he flung, by name, in the form that no Kshatriya alive could pretend not to have heard.

Word ran down the line to where Arjuna stood beside Krishna in the great chariot. Arjuna listened, and his face took on the look of a man who sees the trap and the obligation arrive in the same instant, locked together so that he cannot reach the one without taking the other.

He turned to Yudhishthira. "This is a device," he said, "and a clever one. It is meant to empty my place in your line and carry me to the far edge of the field. I can see it as plainly as you can. And I cannot refuse it. A challenge cried by name, by men sworn to my death, is the one debt a Kshatriya pays the instant it is demanded. If I let it pass, I am no longer the man whose presence keeps you safe. So I must go, and you must be guarded twice as well in my absence. Set Satyajit at your right hand and keep close to Dhrishtadyumna. Do not let Drona near you. I will go south and kill these oath-bound men, and I will be back beside you before the sun stands at noon."

"Go," said Yudhishthira, and could not keep the unease from his voice. "But Arjuna, do not be long."

Krishna turned the white horses south, and the great chariot bore down on the waiting Garuda formation, and the war of the samsaptakas began in a single rising roar.

Arjuna had reckoned to be back by noon, and his reckoning was wrong, because he had misread the nature of his enemy. The sworn men had not vowed to defeat him. They had vowed not to leave him, and that is a different and far more terrible instrument of war. A force that means to win can be broken, for once its hope of winning dies it runs. A force that means only to die in place cannot be broken at all. It can only be killed, man by man, to the last man, and killing ten thousand men one at a time takes time, and time was the whole of what Drona had asked for.

So Arjuna entered the sea of the sworn and began to bale it like a flood. The Gandiva sang without cooling. His arrows went out in lines and sheets, and the Trigartas fell in their hundreds and their thousands, ranks folding like grass under a scythe. And the ranks behind walked forward over their own dead, smiling, weeping for joy, calling his name, asking nothing of him but the chance to make their deaths expensive. They flung javelins and loosed arrows and drove their chariots straight into the storm of his shafts. Bhagadatta of the elephants, allied to the cause that day, pressed in from the side; Susharma and his brothers struck and were struck and would not yield.

Krishna drove as only Krishna could drive, wheeling the chariot through gaps that closed behind it, holding the horses steady in a tide that would have swallowed any other team, while Arjuna stood and worked his bow with the steady horror of a man bailing against a flood that does not fall. By midday the southern field was carpeted, and still the horn of the sworn men called, and still they came, and Arjuna was nowhere near done, and far to the north a door he could not see was beginning to swing shut.

The bought day did its work in the north exactly as Drona had designed it. With Arjuna gone to the far edge of the earth, the teacher pressed straight at Yudhishthira and very nearly took him. Twice the king's guard buckled. Twice Drona's chariot broke through to within a few lengths of the throne of the Pandava line, and only the desperate valour of Satyajit and the other defenders, and the failing of the light, kept the day from ending the war then and there. The samsaptaka oath had already earned its keep before the worst of its price was even spent.

But that was the twelfth day. The thirteenth was the day the door shut for good.

Again the southern horn called Arjuna's name, and again, bound by the same iron, he went, and again the white horses carried him out to the killing field of the sworn. And on that thirteenth day, with Arjuna safely far away, Drona wove the formation he had been waiting to weave, the chakravyuha, the wheel of war, the spiral maze of soldiers that closed upon itself like the coil of a shell. There was no one left on the Pandava side who knew the way into that maze except Arjuna, and one other.

The other was a boy. Abhimanyu, Arjuna's son by Subhadra, sixteen years old, who had learned the entering of the wheel in his mother's womb but never the leaving of it. With his father held far to the south by the oath of the hill men, the boy alone could break the formation, and the brothers begged him, and he went in. He went in alone, for the Kaurava warrior Jayadratha sealed the gap behind him, and the rest of the Pandava host could not follow. Inside the wheel the greatest captains of the Kuru army surrounded one boy and brought him down together, against every law of war, while his father stood waist-deep in sworn men at the far end of the field, working his bow, hearing nothing.

Arjuna fought the sworn men all that thirteenth day and did not know. There was no messenger who could reach him through the wall of the Garuda formation, no way for the news to cross the field of the dead. He killed and killed, and the smiling men came on, and the sun went down, and only when the horn at last fell silent and the remnant of the sworn had been driven off did Krishna turn the white horses back toward the heart of the army.

Arjuna came back at dusk. He could feel it before he was told. The camp was wrong. No drums, no shouted victory, men turning their faces away from him as the chariot passed. He found his brothers sitting in a silence that had a shape to it, the shape of a thing too large to say, and at last they told him. The wheel. The boy alone inside it. The six great warriors who had ringed a sixteen-year-old and cut him down together, and Jayadratha at the gap holding back the whole host that would have died to reach him.

The scream Arjuna screamed that night was heard across both camps, and every man who heard it understood what had bought it. Part of that scream belonged to Drona, who had laid the snare. Part belonged to Jayadratha, who would die for it before the next sun set, by Arjuna's own terrible vow sworn on the spot. And part of it, though Arjuna in his grief may never have spoken the name, belonged to a fire kindled at the southern end of the field by a king out of the hills, and to the oath sworn into its smoke, the oath that had purchased this exact evening at this exact price, though no Trigarta on the field had ever known what the day they bought would cost the house of Arjuna.

After Abhimanyu, the war of the sworn men stopped being an errand and became a furnace, and Arjuna stopped fighting it like a soldier and began fighting it like a man hewing his way through grief itself.

Day after day the southern horn still called, because the oath permitted nothing else, and day after day Arjuna answered, and Krishna drove, and the Trigarta nation died by divisions and re-formed from its own survivors and called again. There were hours, the poets say, when Arjuna fought the sworn men with something close to horror, for they would not stop, and there is a particular dread in killing men who have stopped wanting to live. The Gandiva never cooled. The arrows went out in their sheets and lines. The hill men fell and the hill men rose and the hill men came on, and the field at the southern edge of Kurukshetra was sown, harvest after harvest, with the truth-named brothers of Trigarta and the men who had followed them into the fire.

Susharma himself met Arjuna in single combat again and again across those days, and again and again was spared by the breadth of a hand. Disarmed, unhorsed, his chariot smashed beneath him, struck senseless and dragged living from the field by his own men, the king of Trigarta seemed a thing the war was keeping back, as a man keeps the last cup of wine for an anniversary he means to honour properly. Each time he was carried off, he returned. Each time he returned, he called the name again. The oath had taken from him every choice except the choice to keep it, and he kept it, morning after morning, with a constancy that even his enemies could not name cowardice.

It came at last on the eighteenth and final day of the war. By then the samsaptakas were a remnant of a remnant. Trigarta's whole fighting generation lay in long rows at the southern end of the field, where they had chosen to lie. Drona himself was dead, and Karna, and almost every great captain of the Kuru host. The war was ending, and the sworn men had outlived their use to the strategy that had spent them, but the oath had never cared about use.

Susharma gathered what was left of his people and made the last charge of the sworn men. He came at Arjuna one final time, his surviving brothers about him and his sons beside them, the whole truth-named house of the hills riding into the white horses for the last cast of the only die their oath had left them. And at last the king achieved the single victory the vow had ever truly held in reach. He died exactly as he had promised the fire.

Arjuna's arrows broke the charge. They killed the brothers, Satyavarman and the rest, and the sons gathered around their father, and then a final shaft found Susharma and gave him his release. No samsaptaka fled. Not on the first day, not on the last, not one man in all the long furnace between. The oath was kept by every soul who swore it, kept whole and kept perfectly, and it purchased, in the end, nothing at all. Duryodhana lost the war. Trigarta lost its generation. The day they had bought for Drona had killed a boy and changed nothing of the outcome.

When the wise made the long accounting of the war, they gave the sworn men a strange double place. They are damned for the cause they served and honoured for the constancy with which they served it. They flung themselves at the one impossible task on the whole of that vast field, knowing to a man that it was impossible, because they would not go on living small inside their shame. The epic does not love the samsaptakas. It does not call them right. But neither does it laugh at them, and that restraint, in a poem so free with its judgements, is itself a kind of grave honour for the army of the already dead.