Satyaki of the Vrishnis

Satyaki was born Yuyudhana, grandson of the Vrishni elder Shini, and from boyhood he trained under Arjuna's own hand, until the bow he carried and the fire in his temper were both unmistakably his teacher's making. Of all the great Yadava captains gathered under Krishna's banner at Dwaraka, he was the one who never wavered on which side of the coming war he would stand.

When the embassies of Hastinapura and Indraprastha came to Dwaraka seeking Krishna's strength, Krishna offered a choice: himself alone, unarmed, as counselor, or his Narayani army, a hundred million cowherds trained to war. Duryodhana, delighted, took the army. Arjuna, asked first and offered the same choice, wanted only Krishna. The command of that surrendered army fell to Kritavarma, who marched the Vrishni soldiery to Kurukshetra under the Kaurava standard, kinsman set against kinsman before a blow had been struck.

Satyaki took no army and needed none. He came to the Pandavas as himself, sworn to Krishna's counsel and to the pupil-bond with Arjuna, and no one questioned where his mace would fall. When Krishna rode once more to Hastinapura, this time not for tribute but for peace, offering Duryodhana five villages in place of a war, it was Satyaki who stood armed at the chariot's side through the assembly, the visible edge of Krishna's patience. He said little in that hall. He did not need to. Every eye that studied him understood that the offer of peace had come flanked by a man who would not survive being ignored twice.

The peace failed, as everyone but Dhritarashtra had expected it would. When the armies mustered on the plain of Kurukshetra, Satyaki took his place among the Pandava chariots, and across the field, unmistakable among the Kaurava ranks, rode Kritavarma, the man leading Krishna's own soldiers against Krishna's own choice.

The fourteenth day of the war asked more of Satyaki than any before it. Arjuna had sworn, before the assembled armies, that he would kill Jayadratha before sunset or walk into fire himself, and Drona had answered by throwing the entire weight of the Kaurava host between Arjuna and his goal. As the sun climbed and Arjuna's chariot pressed deeper into that wall of enemies, the Pandava army began to buckle behind him, cut off, unable to follow.

Krishna turned to Satyaki. Yudhishthira's own safety, and the army's, depended on someone reaching Arjuna's side or dying in the attempt, and there was no one else Krishna trusted to try. Satyaki did not hesitate. He drove into the Kaurava ranks alone, a single chariot against battalions, and fought his way through division after division, past warriors who had been posted there for the sole purpose of stopping him. Drona's own forces, Kritavarma's Narayani soldiers among them, threw themselves at his chariot and were driven back or cut down.

Among the warriors who barred his path that day was Bhurishravas, whose grim duel with Satyaki and its unhappy end belongs to its own telling. It is enough here to say that Satyaki did not fall, and that when the fighting at last opened a corridor through the host, he broke free of it bleeding and unbowed and reached Arjuna's chariot in time.

Arjuna saw him come through what should not have been survivable, and for a moment even his concentration on Jayadratha faltered in something like wonder. Krishna said only that the debt of a teacher to a worthy pupil, and a pupil's to his teacher, had been paid twice over that afternoon, first by Arjuna's vow and now by Satyaki's ride. There was no time to say more. The sun was falling, Jayadratha was still ahead, and the day was not yet finished with either of them.

What Satyaki did to Bhurishravas in the last exhausted minutes of their duel did not stay a private matter. Bhurishravas had beaten Satyaki to the ground and stood over him with a lifted sword when Arjuna, unwilling to watch his pupil die, loosed an arrow that sheared away the arm holding it. Robbed of his weapon and his war, Bhurishravas sat down on the field in the posture of a man preparing to die by fasting, a warrior's last dignity. It was in that stillness, sword-arm gone and death already chosen, that Satyaki rose, took up his own blade, and struck off his rival's head.

The field went quiet around them in a different way than battle-quiet. Even soldiers hardened to slaughter understood that a man sitting in prayerful surrender was not a man still fighting. Arjuna's face, when Satyaki turned to him, was not the face of someone congratulating a rescue.

Words passed between them that neither had used with the other before. Arjuna spoke of what a warrior owed an enemy who had already laid down his claim to combat. Satyaki, still shaking with the effort of the ride and the duel both, spoke of what Bhurishravas himself had done in another hall, to another undefended person, and refused to be told his anger was wrong. For a moment it seemed the quarrel might become its own duel, teacher's fury meeting pupil's, two of the war's fiercest tempers with weapons still in hand.

Krishna stepped between them before it could. He did not fully absolve Satyaki, and he did not fully silence Arjuna's objection either. He only said that the day's dying was not finished, and that the army waiting behind them could not afford to watch its own protectors turn on each other. The two men lowered their weapons, the anger banked but not extinguished, and returned to the war that would not wait for either of them to be right.

By the eighteenth day the war Satyaki had ridden through for a fortnight was ending in a way no one had wanted to imagine at its start. The Kaurava host was all but gone. Duryodhana himself lay dying, and the Pandava camp, victorious and gutted in equal measure, was combing the ruined field and its edges for whatever remained of the enemy.

It was in that combing that Satyaki's men found Sanjaya, Dhritarashtra's charioteer and counselor, the man who had narrated the entire war to a blind king from a palace far away. He had wandered from Hastinapura toward the battlefield, lost, and Satyaki, still carrying the raw temper the war had never let him set down, took him prisoner and made ready to kill him where he stood. A charioteer who was no soldier meant little to Satyaki's fury; what mattered was that he belonged, root and branch, to the house that had cost so many lives.

Yudhishthira intervened, and it was Vyasa, present as he so often was at the turning points of this story, who settled the matter with a word Satyaki could not easily refuse. Sanjaya, the sage said, was under a vow of protection and a divine sight granted for the telling of the war, and no blame for the war's cause could fairly rest on the man who had only reported it. To kill him would be to punish a messenger for a message he never chose to carry.

Satyaki listened, and let his sword arm fall for the second time that war, this time before any blood was spilled rather than after. Sanjaya was released and sent on toward Hastinapura, to carry to Dhritarashtra the last and hardest news of all: that his sons, every one of them, were dead.

Thirty-six years later, the grudge that had waited since the Narayani army split in two finally came due. The Vrishnis and their kin had gathered on the shore near Dwaraka for a festival, wine flowing freely among men who had once been the most disciplined fighters in the world, and old wounds that battle had never let them settle began working themselves loose in the drinking.

Satyaki had never forgiven Kritavarma for the night at Kurukshetra's edge when Ashwatthama, Kripa, and Kritavarma fell upon the sleeping Pandava camp and cut down unarmed men in their beds, boys among them, in vengeance for a day's defeat. That the army Kritavarma once commanded had stood on the wrong side of the whole war was old news by then; that its commander had lent his hand to killing sleepers was not a thing Satyaki's temper had ever set down. At Prabhasa, with wine loosening what restraint the years had built, he said so aloud, in front of Kritavarma and everyone gathered.

The taunt struck exactly as it was meant to. Kritavarma answered with his own accusation, Satyaki's killing of the disarmed, praying Bhurishravas, and in moments the old quarrel was a new one, and the new one was a blade drawn in anger among kinsmen who had survived a war meant to kill them precisely so they would not die like this. What followed at Prabhasa belongs to its own dark telling, the mace-fight that consumed the Yadava race in a single afternoon.

Satyaki's story, in the end, is not a story about failure of courage. No warrior of the Mahabharata rode farther into danger for another man's sake, or paid a truer debt to a teacher who had shaped him. But loyalty un-tempered by a wiser head than its own runs where it is pointed, in devotion and in fury both, and the same fire that carried him through the Kaurava host at Kurukshetra was the fire that, unwatched by Krishna at last, burned down everything he loved.