The Guard Drona Had To Kill

"They had lit their fires the evening before," said Sanjaya, "and the smoke of them was still on the southern quarter of the field when the horns began."

Susharma, ruler of Prasthala, and his brothers Satyaratha and Satyavarman and Satyavrata and Satyeshu and Satyakarman had come before Duryodhana with ten thousand cars and taken an oath in the hearing of the whole host. They had bathed themselves in clarified butter, clothed themselves in robes of kusha grass over their mail, and used their own bowstrings for girdles. They had given gold and cattle and cloth to the brahmanas first, as men do who have settled their accounts with this world, and then they had spoken their vow aloud so that every creature might hear it.

"Let the earth today be without Arjuna," they said, "or let it be without the Trigartas. Those regions that belong to the man who drinks wine, to the man who robs a brahmana, to the man who abandons one asking for shelter, to the man who sets fire to houses and slaughters kine - let those regions be ours, if we come back off this field without having slain Dhananjaya, or if, ground down by him, we turn away in fear."

Then they marched to the southern part of the field and called for him by name.

Arjuna came to Yudhishthira at once. "Summoned, I never turn back," he said. "That is my fixed vow, and you know it. These men have sworn to conquer or to die, and it is me they are summoning. Susharma is there with all his brothers. Give me your leave to go and kill him and everyone who follows him. I am unable to endure the challenge. I tell you truly, know these enemies to be already dead."

The king did not answer at once. Behind him, to the north, the Kaurava host was already forming for the day, and in the mouth of it stood the old preceptor.

"You have heard in detail what Drona has resolved to accomplish," Yudhishthira said. "Act in such a way that his resolve comes to nothing. He is a hero, accomplished in arms, above fatigue, and he has vowed to take me. Not to kill me. To take me."

It was the difference that made the thing unbearable. Duryodhana wanted the eldest son of Pandu alive, in a tent, so that the dice could be brought out again and the whole ruin repeated with a better grip on it, and Drona had promised to hand him over.

Arjuna looked across the Pandava line and found the man he wanted.

"This Satyajit," he said. "He will be your protector in battle today. As long as Satyajit lives, the preceptor will never get what he wants. But hear the other half of it, and do not argue with me about it later. If this tiger among men is slain in the fighting, you are not to remain on the field. Not for an hour. Not if every warrior we have is standing around you. The moment he falls, you leave."

The prince of the Panchalas heard himself named and made no speech about it. He simply moved his car up beside the king's.

Yudhishthira gave his brother the leave he had asked for. He embraced him, and held him at arm's length and looked at him, and said over him all the benedictions a man says over someone he expects to see again and is not certain he will. Then Arjuna went out against the Trigartas the way a hungry lion goes into a herd of deer.

Across the field, your troops saw the ape banner turn south and go, and a sound went through them that was almost joy. Arjuna was off the board. Duryodhana's whole army turned its face toward one man, and became furious for the seizure of Yudhishthira.

Drona drew up the host that morning in the shape of a Garuda, and it was the most beautiful and the most frightening thing on the plain.

He put himself in the mouth of the bird. The head was Duryodhana with his uterine brothers packed around him. Kritavarman and Kripa were the two eyes. The neck carried Bhutasarman and Kshemasarman and Karakaksha with the Kalingas, the Singhalas, the Easterners, the Sudras, the Abhiras, the Daserakas, the Sakas, the Yavanas, the Kamvojas, the Hangsapadas, the Surasenas, the Daradas, the Madras and the Kalikeyas, and with them elephants and horses and cars and foot in their hundreds and their thousands. Bhurishravas and Shalya and Somadatta and Bahlika held the right wing with a full akshauhini. Vinda and Anuvinda of Avanti and Sudakshina of the Kamvojas held the left, at the head of Ashwatthama. In the back stood the Kalingas, the Amvashthas, the Magadhas, the Paundras, the Madrakas, the Gandharas, the Sakunas and the mountaineers. And in the tail, with his sons and his kinsmen and his friends about him, stood Karna.

In the heart of the array, keeping the region of Brahma before their eyes, were Jayadratha and Bhimaratha and Sampati and the Bhojas and Vrisha and Kratha and the mighty ruler of the Nishadhas. And in the middle of that host the king of Pragjyotisha sat his war elephant under a white umbrella, garlanded, the beast black as a mass of antimony and blind with its own must, so that he looked like the full moon standing in the constellation Krittika.

Yudhishthira saw that array come on, surging like a wind-driven sea, and disposed his own troops against it in a half circle. He had one instruction from his brother and one name, and he began to look for the name.

First the king went to the man whose business it was.

"My lord," Yudhishthira said to the son of Prishata, "you who own steeds white as pigeons - let such measures be adopted that I am not taken prisoner by the brahmana."

Dhrishtadyumna did not smile and did not soften it. He had been born out of a fire for one purpose and everyone on that field knew what the purpose was.

"O you of excellent vows," he said, "never shall you be placed under the power of Drona, however much he strives. I shall check him today with all his followers. As long as I am alive, son of Kuru's race, it does not become you to feel any anxiety. Under no circumstances will Drona be able to vanquish me in battle."

Then he scattered his shafts and drove straight at the preceptor.

Here is a thing worth telling, O king, and I saw it myself. When Drona looked up and found Dhrishtadyumna standing in front of him, the old man's face changed. Not with fear of the arrows. He had seen an evil omen in the shape of a man, and he became exceedingly cheerless, the way a man does who has just been reminded of the date of his own death.

Your son Durmukha saw it too, and did the kind thing. He shouldered his car between them to spare Drona the sight, and a fierce and bitter fight began at once between him and the prince of the Panchalas, arrows in clouds, neither giving ground.

And that was exactly the gap Drona had been waiting for. With the son of Prishata pinned and shouting a promise he could no longer keep, the preceptor put his head down and went into Yudhishthira's divisions and began to burn them like a wind scattering cloud.

For a short while only, O king, that fighting looked like ordinary fighting. Then it stopped looking like anything.

The dust came up and the standards went down and no man could tell his own people from the enemy any longer. They fought by inference and by watchword, calling out the agreed syllables and killing whoever answered wrong. Sunlight caught on the gems in their headgear and on their necklaces and on the plates of their mail and played there like something alive. Men killed men, horses killed horses, car-warriors killed car-warriors, elephants killed elephants.

The elephants were the worst of it. They came against each other tusk to tusk, and the friction of tusk on tusk struck fire, so that smoke went up from between them and they looked, shorn of the standards on their backs, like storm clouds with lightning inside. Some of them, wounded with lances, turned and went screaming through their own lines. Some, driven back by bigger beasts, were brought round again by the hooks and crushed whatever stood in front of them. Drivers were shot off their necks and fell with their goads still in their hands, and riderless elephants wandered in every direction like clouds torn loose from a larger mass, and then fell over each other and lay still.

The earth trembled and made a sound when those bodies came down on it. Men sank to their ankles in the mire of flesh and blood and stood there like trees whose lower parts have been swallowed by a forest fire. Robes, mail, umbrellas, standards, everything was dyed one colour. Cars rolled over the heaped dead and cut them again.

And there father killed son and son killed father, because nothing could be distinguished.

Through the middle of it, confounding the senses of everyone in his way, Drona came on toward the king.

Drona came up on Yudhishthira and received him fearlessly with a thick shower of arrows, and a noise went up out of the king's troops like the noise a herd makes when a lion has fastened on its leader.

Then Satyajit crossed in front of him.

He did not challenge, and he did not make a speech. He simply put his car between the preceptor and the king, and the two of them went at each other in the middle of both armies like Indra and Vali, and each of them shook the other's troops in the doing of it.

Satyajit invoked a mighty weapon and pierced Drona with keen-pointed arrows. Then he did a colder and more intelligent thing. He put five arrows into Drona's charioteer, fatal as snake poison, each one looking like Death himself, and the man went down senseless on the terrace of the car. Then ten shafts into the horses. Then, filled with rage, ten into each of the two Parshni drivers who guarded the wheels.

He was taking the chariot apart around the man, because a preceptor without a driver cannot chase a king.

Then he took his car in a wide circle at the head of his own troops, shooting as he went, and with one shaft cut down the standard with the golden altar on it that every soldier on that field used to find Drona in a crowd.

The old man looked at the wreck of his equipage and the fallen standard and the young Panchala coursing round him, and made a decision. Drona, that chastiser of foes, beholding these feats of his enemy, mentally resolved to despatch him to the other world.

What followed took a long time, and it is the reason a king of the Pandavas was still alive at sunset.

The preceptor cut Satyajit's bow through with the arrow still fixed on the string, and put ten shafts into him, chosen to go through into the vitals.

Satyajit took up another bow before the first had finished falling, and struck Drona with thirty arrows winged with the feathers of the kanka bird. The Pandavas along the whole line shouted and waved their garments over their heads, because the impossible old man had been checked and they had all seen it.

Then Vrika, excited with rage, put sixty arrows into the centre of Drona's chest. That feat seemed to everyone who saw it a highly wonderful thing.

Covered over with arrows from two sides at once, Drona opened his eyes wide and gathered up all the energy that was in him. He cut both their bows at a stroke. Then, with six shafts, he killed Vrika together with his charioteer and his horses, and there was one of them left.

Satyajit took up a third bow, a tougher one, and pierced Drona and his steeds and his charioteer and his standard again.

The preceptor could not brook it. He covered the Panchala's horses and standards, the very handle of his bow, and both his Parshni drivers, with an unbroken rain of arrows. And the bows kept being cut, and the prince, conversant with the highest weapons, kept finding another and going on with the fight against him of the red steeds.

That is what it took. Not one duel but four, each begun again from nothing with a fresh bow while the arrows were still coming.

At last, beholding Satyajit swell with energy instead of tiring, Drona chose a crescent-shaped arrow, and with it cut off that illustrious warrior's head.

The body stayed upright in the car for a moment. Then the Panchala horses carried it away into the press, and the road to the king was open.

Yudhishthira did not wait to see where the head fell. He had been given an instruction by a brother who was fighting in another quarter of the field for exactly this reason, and he obeyed it to the letter. Borne by fleet steeds, from fear of Drona, the king of the Pandavas turned and fled.

His allies did not understand it and did not follow. The Panchalas and the Kekayas and the Matsyas and the Chedis and the Karushas and the Kosalas all rushed at the preceptor instead, desirous of rescuing a man who no longer needed rescuing, and Drona, still wanting the prisoner, went through those divisions like fire through heaped cotton.

Then Satanika came out of the Matsya lines. He was the younger brother of Virata, and he had watched Satyajit hold the preceptor for the better part of a morning, and he seems to have concluded that the place could simply be filled again.

He put six shafts into Drona and his driver and his horses, arrows bright as sunlight and polished by the hand of their forger, and he shouted while he did it so that his own people would see who was standing there. He was engaged in a cruel act and attempting a thing very difficult of attainment, and he covered Bharadwaja's son with showers of arrows.

Drona took an arrow sharp as a razor and cut Satanika's head from his trunk while the man was still shouting at him. The head went into the dust with the earrings still in it.

The Matsyas broke and ran.

Then the son of Bharadwaja turned on the rest of them in order - the Chedis, the Karushas, the Kaikeyas, the Panchalas, the Srinjayas, the sons of Pandu - and defeated them all, and defeated them again, and the Srinjayas trembled at the sight of that golden car coming.

You have asked me many times, O king, what your teacher looked like on his best day, and I will tell you the way it looked to us.

He made a river. Coats of mail were its waves and standards its eddies, and it ran and it carried people away. Elephants and horses were its alligators and swords its fish. The bones of brave men were its pebbles, drums and cymbals its tortoises, shields and armour the boats on it, and the hair of warriors the moss floating on its surface. Arrows made its ripples and bows its current, and the arms of the fighting men lay in it like snakes. Heads were its stones. Maces were the rafts by which some tried to cross. It was miry with blood and flesh, standards stood along it like trees on a bank, and it ran toward the house of Yama, and jackals and dogs came down to drink at it.

They went at him together then, the whole of them. Shikhandi pierced him with five straight arrows and Kshatradharman with twenty. Uttamaujas with three, Kshatradeva with five, Yudhamanyu with eight. Satyaki put a hundred arrows into him. Yudhishthira, who had come back, put in a dozen; Dhrishtadyumna ten; Chekitana three.

Drona got over their car division like an elephant with rent temples going over a fence. He killed Dridhasena. He struck king Kshema nine times and Kshema fell out of his car dead. He put twelve arrows into Shikhandi and twenty into Uttamaujas, sent Vasudeva of the Panchalas to Yama's house with one broad-headed shaft, felled Kshatradeva out of his niche in the car, and came on toward Yudhishthira again.

And the king fled a second time, on his fleet horses, exactly as he had been told to.

That, O Dhritarashtra, is the whole account of the twelfth day, and this is what it comes to. Your teacher was not defeated. He was delayed. One Panchala prince with four broken bows bought an afternoon, and a boy of the Matsyas tried to buy another and was worth six arrows, and because of the two of them the man your son wanted alive was somewhere else when the preceptor arrived.