The Grandson of Shini Crosses the Ocean

"Command me," Satyaki said, "and I will go. But hear first what I was told, and by whom."

The king had asked him gently, which made it worse. Yudhishthira could not settle. Somewhere out beyond the dust Arjuna had gone in after the ruler of the Sindhus with the whole Kaurava army closing behind him, and the king wanted a man sent after him, and the man he wanted was standing in front of him.

"I am ready to throw away my life for Dhananjaya," Satyaki said. "Commanded by you I would fight the three worlds, gods and Asuras and men together, and I would not count this weak host of Suyodhana's worth the naming. But this is what Arjuna said to me this morning, in front of all our warriors and in Vasudeva's hearing."

He repeated it exactly, the way a man repeats an order he intends to hold somebody to.

"'Today, O Madhava, protect the king carefully until I have slain Jayadratha. Making the monarch over to you, or to that great car-warrior Pradyumna, I can go with an easy heart. You know Drona. You know the vow he made in front of everybody. The son of Bharadwaja is always eager to seize the king, and he is competent to do it. If Yudhishthira is taken while I am gone, I shall not succeed in killing Jayadratha, and great will be my grief, and we shall go back into the woods, and my victory over the Sindhu king will be worth nothing at all.'"

Satyaki let that stand a moment.

"You have been made over to me as a trust, O king. I am not free to hand you back. The preceptor is cased in mail and light of hand, and if he gets you in battle he will sport with you the way a child sports with a small bird. Who protects you when I am gone? Tell me that, and I will go, and I will not ask you twice."

"It is even as you say," Yudhishthira said. "And for all that my heart will not be easy on Arjuna's account. I shall take the greatest precaution in protecting myself. Weighing my own safety against your going, the going seems to me the better. Bhima will protect me. Prishata's son will protect me. The five Kekaya brothers, and Ghatotkacha, and Virata and Drupada, and Sikhandin, and the twins, and the sons of Draupadi, and the Panchalas and the Srinjayas. Dhrishtadyumna sprang out of the fire for Drona's destruction. Go, grandson of Sini, with an easy heart."

Satyaki stood there and did the arithmetic. If he refused, Arjuna would censure him. If he stayed, people would say he was afraid to follow Arjuna.

"Let them not say I feared to go," he said, half to himself, and then aloud: "If you think these arrangements sufficient, then I will do your bidding. There is nobody in the three worlds dearer to me than Phalguna. The commands of my preceptor weigh with me always. Your commands weigh more. Three yojanas lie between this place and the spot where he is standing, and I shall cross them."

Then he told them how to load the car.

"Five times what the professors of military science direct," he said. "Quivers, and every kind of weapon, in their proper places. I have the Kambojas to get past, who are a full akshauhini and firmly united, and the Kiratas the king of the Kiratas once gave to Arjuna as a present and who are now waiting on the other side, and the Sakas, and a thousand elephants of the Anjana breed that do not retreat if the men on their backs urge them forward. Yoke horses of the best breed, marked auspiciously, after their thirst has been slaked and they have been groomed."

So the four Sindhu horses were walked and bathed and fed and given drink and put back under the yoke in chains of gold. A tall standard with a golden lion was set up on the car. Daruka's younger brother, who was his charioteer and his friend, came and told him the vehicle was ready, the way Matali once reported to Vasava.

Satyaki bathed, and gave gold nishkas to a thousand Snataka brahmanas, and drank the honey-wine, and touched a brazen mirror for luck, and let the girls throw fried paddy and perfumes over him. Then he bent and worshipped the feet of Yudhishthira, and Yudhishthira smelt his head, and he got up on the car.

Bhima came out with him, armoured, saluting the king as he passed, meaning to go the whole way.

Satyaki turned in the car and looked at him with every limb full of joy, and would not have it.

"Protect the king, Bhima. That is your duty above all things. I will pierce through this host whose hour has come. Now or later, the protection of the king is your highest business. You know what I can do and you wish me well. Go back."

"Go then, and succeed," Bhima said. "I will protect the king."

"Go back, son of Pritha. My success is certain, since you of all men are today obedient to my wishes." He was smiling when he said it. "When the sinful ruler of the Sindhus has been slain by the son of Pandu, I shall come and embrace Yudhishthira of virtuous soul."

He embraced him and let him go, and then turned and looked at the Kaurava army the way a tiger looks at a herd of deer, and the men on the other side of the field saw him do it and began to tremble where they stood.

The Pandava line went forward with him for the first part of it. Dhrishtadyumna and king Vasudana were shouting, "Come, smite quickly, rush, so that Satyaki may pass easily. Many mighty car-warriors will struggle to stop him," and the whole host answered, "We will beat whoever tries to beat Satyaki," and threw themselves at the Kaurava front.

Then the noise around one chariot became the loudest noise on that part of the field, and the host in front of it broke into a hundred struggling pieces, and Satyaki went into the gap.

He killed seven great bowmen in the front rank before anybody had properly understood what was happening. Sanjaya, telling it afterwards, said that he sometimes pierced a hundred men with one shaft and sometimes one man with a hundred, and that although he was alone the warriors facing him saw him multiplied, and were stupefied by it, and left the field rather than test whether their eyes were lying.

Drona came across to stop him, because Drona stopped everything that day.

They exchanged the first shafts almost politely, five from the preceptor into Satyaki's vitals, seven of Satyaki's back with gold on the wings and kanka and peacock feathers on the shanks. Then ten, then six, then eight, then the standard. Then Drona covered the car and the horses and the driver and the flag with arrows like a flight of locusts, and Satyaki covered him back, and neither of them moved a hand's breadth.

And Drona, who could see where this was going, tried words.

"Your preceptor has gone away like a coward," he said, "leaving the battle, avoiding me who was fighting him, going by my flank. If you do not avoid me too, O son of Madhu's race, in the manner of your teacher, you will not get away from me alive today."

It was a well-made trap. Fight, and lose the afternoon; run, and admit the charge against Arjuna.

Satyaki answered it without stopping to think about it.

"At the command of king Yudhishthira the just, I shall follow in the track of Dhananjaya. Blessed be you, brahmana. I would lose time. A disciple should always tread in the way trodden by his preceptor. I shall therefore follow in the track that my preceptor has trod."

And he went round him.

"Drona will try everything to check us," he told his driver as they came out of it. "Go carefully and listen. Yonder is the host of the Avantis. Next to them the Southerners. Next to them the Valhikas. By the side of the Valhikas stands the division Karna commands. They are all different from one another and they all lean on one another. There is an open space between them. Take me into it."

Drona came after him from behind, shooting, and could not close the distance, and Satyaki went through the seam between two armies and out the other side into Karna's host, and cut his way across the front of it without slowing down.

Kritavarma came out of the Bhoja division to meet him, which was the encounter Satyaki had least appetite for, since they were kinsmen and both of them Vrishnis and both of them had learned their bows in the same city.

He did it anyway. Six shafts into Kritavarma, four into the horses, four more into his chest, sixteen after those. Kritavarma, unable to bear it, drew his bow-string back to his ear and put a calf-toothed shaft through Satyaki's armour and his body and into the ground behind him, and then cut Satyaki's bow with the arrow still on the string.

Satyaki threw a dart at his right arm, took up a tougher bow, and buried him and his car under arrows by the hundred and the thousand. Then he cut the head off Kritavarma's charioteer with a broad-headed arrow, and the horses, feeling nobody on the reins, bolted with the car behind them.

And Kritavarma, in the middle of a running chariot with a headless man at his feet, got the reins in his own hands and brought the team round and stopped them, and stood up with his bow, ready to go on. His own troops cheered him for it.

By the time he had the horses quiet, Satyaki was gone past him.

He did not follow. He turned instead and went at Bhimasena, and Drona, having put his array back in order and given the keeping of it to the ruler of the Bhojas, came on after Satyaki himself.

So the grandson of Sini came out of the Bhoja division alone, over ground made impassable with the blood of foremost Kshatriyas by the hundred, and looked ahead of him at the Kamboja host, and could not for some time get forward a single step.

"That dark mass on the left of Drona's host," Satyaki said to his driver. "That is not cloud. Those are elephants. Rukmaratha leads them. They are princes of the Trigarta country, every one of them a car-warrior with gold on his standard, and Duryodhana has told them to wait there for me and throw their lives away. Urge the horses. I shall fight the Trigartas in the sight of Bharadwaja's son."

The driver took him in slowly, and the elephants closed on all sides, and Satyaki shot into them the way a cloud at the end of summer pours rain on the side of a mountain. They came out of it with their tusks broken and their frontal globes split and their trunks cut off and their riders gone, and ran back through their own ranks trumpeting, and the division was finished.

Then the ruler of the Magadhas brought his elephant out in front of the white horses and stopped, coolly, and waited to be looked at.

Jalasandha wore golden Angadas and ear-rings and a diadem. He was smeared with red sandal-paste and there was a chain of gold burning round his head and a cuirass on his breast, and he stood on the elephant's shoulders shaking a bow decked with gold, and he looked, Sanjaya said, like a cloud with lightning in it.

He was also a good archer. He put shafts into Satyaki's broad chest, cut his bow while it was being drawn, and then, smiling, pierced the bowless man with five more. Satyaki did not tremble. He picked up another bow, said, "Wait. Wait," and put sixty arrows into Jalasandha's chest, smiling himself now, and cut his bow at the handle.

Jalasandha threw the bow away with the arrow still fixed on it and hurled a lance that went through Satyaki's left arm and into the earth behind him like a hissing snake. Then his scimitar, off a shield of bull's hide decked with a hundred moons, which cut Satyaki's bow again and lay burning on the ground like a circle of fire.

Satyaki took up a third bow, large as a sala shoot, whose twang was like Indra's thunder. Two razor-faced arrows took off Jalasandha's two arms, which fell from the elephant's back like a pair of five-headed snakes falling off a mountain. A third took his head with its beautiful teeth and its ear-rings.

The trunk stood a moment and then dyed the elephant red, and the animal ran wild through its own side with the costly seat swinging under its belly, crying out, and the Kaurava troops turned their faces and went.

Then Drona caught him.

That was the longest of the fights and the only one in which nobody who watched it could say who was better. Three iron arrows like snakes of virulent poison went into Satyaki's forehead and stood there, so that he looked like a mountain with three summits. He cut the next flight in half with two winged shafts. Drona smiled at the speed of his hands and put thirty more into him, then fifty, then a hundred.

Sanjaya, who was watching for a blind king and had no reason to flatter a Vrishni, said afterwards that they could mark no difference between the lightness of hand of that foremost of the regenerate and the lightness of hand of him of the Satwata race, and that in this respect the two bulls among men were equal.

Drona cut the bow. Satyaki hurled an iron mace twined round with cord, and Drona broke it out of the air. Drona threw a dart with a golden staff that missed the man, went clean through the car, and stuck in the ground howling. Satyaki struck him on the right arm and hurt him badly.

Then Drona threw a second dart and hit Satyaki's charioteer, and the man went down senseless on the floor of the car and lay there.

And Satyaki, three yojanas from where he was going, with the preceptor of the Kurus in front of him, took the reins in his own hands and went on fighting, driving and shooting at once, and struck that brahmana with a hundred arrows and laughed out loud at what he had just done.

Drona put five shafts through his armour that drank his blood. Satyaki answered by killing Drona's driver with one arrow, and the loose horses ran away with the golden car behind them, and the bright chariot of the preceptor began to trace circle after circle over that field like a sun in motion.

Every king and prince on the Kaurava side started shouting at once: "Run. Rush. Seize the steeds of Drona."

They abandoned Satyaki where he stood and went after their commander's horses. Drona, carried out of the fight by his own team, saw from a distance that his array had been broken behind him while he was away, and made no attempt to follow the Vrishni. He went back to the gate and stood in it.

"Our foes were already burnt up by Kesava and Phalguna," Satyaki said to his driver, laughing, as they came clear. "In beating them again we have only been the instrument. They were slain already by the son of the chief of the gods. We have but slain the dead."

Sudarsana heard that or something like it, and came across in a golden coat of mail to shut his mouth. He was a good enough archer to cut Satyaki's shafts into two and three pieces in the air before they arrived, and he put three arrows through Satyaki's armour and into his body and killed his four silver horses. Then Satyaki killed his, and cut off his charioteer's head, and then with a razor-faced arrow like the fire at the end of the yuga took Sudarsana's own head, ear-ringed and full-mooned and radiant, off his trunk.

After that they were in among the shaved heads.

"By what road shall I take you to Dhananjaya?" the driver asked. "With whom have you been angry, Vrishni? Who will stand and look at you, and who is it that Vaivaswata is thinking of today?"

"These," Satyaki said. "By killing these Kambojas I will fulfil my vow. Today I will show my preceptor the Pandava of white steeds the skill in weapons that I got from him. Today Suyodhana will count two Arjunas on this field. Bear me in."

So they went into the Yavanas and the Sakas and the Daradas and the Barbaras and the Tamraliptakas and the countless Mlecchas with their diverse weapons. His arrows went through coats of iron and brass and out and into the ground. He was killing five and six and seven and eight of them at a shot. Their head-gears lay everywhere, and their shaved heads with the long beards on them looked, said Sanjaya, like featherless birds lying on the earth, and the field under its headless trunks was beautiful in the way a sky covered with coppery clouds is beautiful.

What was left of that mailed host put whip and goad to their horses and got out in every direction. The Charanas in the sky applauded, and so, quietly, did some of Dhritarashtra's own men.

By now Dhritarashtra had stopped Sanjaya twice to ask how this could be happening.

"Were there no car-warriors in that army of mine? Alone he has crushed numberless men. Was the track he took empty? Phalguna himself did not fight as this grandson of Sini has fought. Let the Pandavas hang up their weapons; this one will do it all."

"Three thousand bowmen were sent at him at once," Sanjaya said, "headed by your son, with Sakas and Kambojas and Valhikas and Yavanas and Paradas and Kalingas and Tanganas and Amvashtas and Pisachas and Barbaras and mountaineers. Then five hundred more. Then a thousand cars, a hundred great car-warriors, a thousand elephants, two thousand men and foot-soldiers past counting. Duhsasana was urging them on, saying, 'Slay him.' He killed all of it."

When the stones came it was Duhsasana's idea.

"You are accomplished in fighting with stones," he told the hillmen, "and Satyaki is ignorant of that mode of warfare. So are all the Kauravas. Stay him. Rush at him. Do not fear. He will not be able to come near you."

They came at him like ministers coming at a king, with rocks the size of elephants' heads held up over their shoulders, and stood in front of the car and threw.

Satyaki shot the stones out of the air. The fragments went off burning like a swarm of fire-flies and fell among the men who had thrown them and killed a great many of them, and there was a noise of oh and alas from that quarter. Five hundred fell with their arms cut off and the stones still gripped in the dead hands. Then a thousand. Then, said Sanjaya, more than anyone counted. The bursting rock made the elephants and horses unfit to stand, as though wasps were biting them.

And Drona, hearing that particular uproar from the far end of his own array, said to his driver, "Take me there. That Satwata is tearing us into pieces and careering about like the Destroyer. Yuyudhana is among the mountaineers."

"You are blessed with length of days," the driver said, "but the Kaurava troops are running, and the Panchalas and the Pandavas are coming at you from every side to kill you, and Satyaki is now far ahead of us. Decide which."

Duhsasana's car came in beside Drona's with the wreck of a division behind it, and Drona looked at him and did not spare him anything.

"Why are all these cars flying away? Is the king well? Is the ruler of the Sindhus still alive? You are a prince and a brother of the king and a mighty car-warrior. Why do you fly from battle?

"You said to Draupadi once, 'You are our slave, won by us at dice. Do not confine yourself to your husbands. Cast aside your chastity. Be a bearer of robes to my eldest brother. Your husbands are dead. They are as worthless as grains of sesamum without kernel.' Having said that, why do you run now?

"When you took up the dice at the gambling match, could you not divine that those dice would soon turn into shafts like snakes of virulent poison? The woes of Draupadi have you for their root. Where is that pride now, and that insolence, and that brag? You are afraid of one warrior of the Satwata race. What will you do when you see the wielder of Gandiva, or Bhimasena, or the twins? If your heart is set on flight, then let the earth be given to Yudhishthira the just and let there be peace. Otherwise go back to where Satyaki is, and fight."

Duhsasana said nothing at all. He behaved as though he had not heard a word of it, and turned his car and went back to where Satyaki was.

He fought better than he had. He put four arrows into the horses, three into the driver and a hundred into Satyaki, and roared. Satyaki made him and his car and his standard invisible with straight arrows, wrapping him the way a spider wraps a gnat, and then killed the horses and the driver, cut the bow, cut the leather fence off his hand, cut the standard and the shafts of the car, and killed both of his side-drivers. The leader of the Trigartas took the bare and weaponless prince up onto his own car and drove him off.

Satyaki went after them for a moment, and then reined in and let them go.

He had remembered, Sanjaya said, the vow Bhimasena made in the middle of the assembly hall, that every one of Dhritarashtra's sons would be killed by him and by nobody else. That kill belonged to another man, so he did not take it.

Then he turned the white horses onto the track Dhananjaya had gone by, which was easy to find, being the only road on that field made of broken cars and dead elephants, and went on toward the far end of the array to stand at his friend's wheel.