Krishna and the Flying City

When Krishna's discus took the head of Shishupala in the middle of Yudhishthira's Rajasuya, the hall fell silent and the sacrifice went on. But one man carried the corpse out in his heart. Shalva, king of Saubha, had been Shishupala's dearest friend and ally; theirs was a bond of years, of campaigns fought shoulder to shoulder. When word reached him of how his friend had died - unarmed, at a ceremony, before all the kings of the earth - Shalva did not weep. He swore. He would scour the earth of the Yadavas, he said, and kill Krishna as Krishna had killed: suddenly, and at home.

But Shalva was no fool; he knew what had broken every army sent against Dwaraka. And he had a vehicle of war that no walls could answer: Saubha, a city that was also a chariot, a fortress of iron that flew where its master's mind directed, vast as a drifting hill, crewed with engines and darkness, able to hover over any kingdom on earth and break it from above. From it Shalva ruled from the sky, and waited for Krishna to be away from home.

The day came. Krishna and Balarama had gone to Indraprastha for the Rajasuya, and word of it reached Shalva where his city hung above the western hills. He fell on Dwaraka out of the open sky.

The sea-city had been built against every enemy but this one. Saubha hung over the harbors and gardens, raining darts and stones and fire, smashing towers, tearing up the pleasure groves, while Shalva's ground army stormed the gates. The Yadava garrison fought back under Ugrasena's ministers; the citizens were herded inside; the bridges were broken and the boats forbidden to ply; drink was banned and the walls were manned. Dwaraka, the golden refuge that had never been touched, learned what it was to be besieged from above.

The best of the defenders was hardly more than a boy. Pradyumna, Krishna's son by Rukmini, beautiful as his father and not yet tested, came out of the gates with his chariot and his bow and threw himself at the sky-city's army. He fought like the fire he was named for, scattering Shalva's captains, and when Shalva himself came down to crush him, Pradyumna's arrow pierced the king's armour and struck him senseless in his chariot, and all Dwaraka roared.

But Shalva rose again, and his arrow found him; struck near the collarbone, Pradyumna sank down senseless, and his charioteer, obeying the old law that a stunned warrior must be carried from the field, drove him out of the battle. When Pradyumna woke he was ashamed to the bone at having been seen leaving a fight. His charioteer explained, gently, that a charioteer must protect a fallen warrior, but Pradyumna would not hear of flight and ordered him never to retreat again. The boy turned his chariot around and went back, and struck Shalva down once more, and had his deadliest arrow on the string when the gods sent Narada and the wind-god to stop him: for it had been ordained by the creator, they said, that Shalva would fall to no hand but Krishna's. Pradyumna withdrew the arrow, and the beaten Shalva fled Dwaraka on his flying city.

Krishna came home from the Rajasuya to find his city scarred: broken towers, burned groves, the harbor full of wreckage, and the people thin with siege. He heard it all standing very still. Shishupala's death had followed him home. He took up his conch and his discus, called for his chariot and his charioteer Daruka and a great army, and went out after Shalva, who had lifted his city away west when the defense stiffened, out over the ocean.

Krishna's chariot ran the shoreline west while lookouts scanned the sky, and at last, beyond Martikavata, in a bay of the ocean, they saw it: Saubha hanging over the sea like a second gray sky, its iron sides catching the sun. The battle that followed was unlike any fought on earth, a chariot on the shore against a city in the air. Shalva's engines poured down torrents of missiles; Krishna's arrows went up in answer like a river reversed. The demon-crewed city flickered and jumped through the air, now close, now a league away, now hidden in cloud, and Krishna stood off its every rush and slowly, patiently, began to take it apart.

Then Shalva stopped fighting with iron and began fighting with maya. Darkness swallowed the shore. And out of the darkness came a messenger crying that Dwaraka had fallen behind Krishna's back, and then, worse: Shalva's sorcery showed Krishna his own father. Vasudeva, old and dishevelled, came falling from the flying city in full view, arms and legs flung wide like a planet whose merit is spent, and as he fell, warriors struck at him with lances and spears.

For one moment the field held no god, only a son. Krishna's bow lowered; grief came over him like weather. Then, in an instant, he came back to himself, and the falling father was gone, and Saubha and Shalva with him. This was not news; it was a weapon. He named it illusion, and the moment he named it, it lost him, and the darkness thinned, and there was no corpse and no captive, only the hidden iron city and the liar inside it.

Krishna ended it then. His arrows drove the defenders from Saubha's rim; his divine weapons broke its defences one by one. Then he rose in his chariot, loosed Sudarshana, and the discus went up like a piece of the sun. It took the flying city at its heart and passed through iron as through cloth, and Saubha broke in half in the air. The fortress that walls could not answer came down burning into the sea, and the ocean closed over the flying city.

Shalva, roaring, raised a giant club to hurl at Krishna, and Sudarshana, returned to Krishna's hand and flung again, came around like a thought returning and cut him in two. So the friend followed the friend he had avenged, and the debt of Shishupala's blood was paid off at last - in the only coin vengeance ever accepts, which is more blood.

Krishna came home to a city that cheered him from broken walls. Far to the north, in those same days, another game had been played out in a hall at Hastinapura: the dice had fallen, Draupadi had been dragged by her hair before kings, and the Pandavas had gone into the forest. When Krishna at last reached them in their exile, Yudhishthira asked him gently where he had been, and Krishna told this story. "Had I been in Dwaraka when the summons to the game went out," he said, "I would have come to Hastinapura and stopped the dice, even uninvited. But I was on the shore at Martikavata, fighting a city in the sky." Evil had not needed to defeat him. It had only needed him busy. That is the quiet, cold lesson under the marvels: while the discus was saving Dwaraka, the dice were destroying the world, and even God cannot stand in two places where he is needed at once.