The Corpse in the Shami Tree

They came down out of the forest at the end of the twelfth year with nothing left to spend but a single mistake. Twelve years in the wilderness had been served; one year of concealment remained, and if any of Duryodhana's watchers recognized any of them inside it, the whole thirteen began again from the first day.

Yudhishthira had already chosen Matsya. Virata was old, rich in cattle, friendly to their house and far enough from Hastinapura to be dull. They had chosen their names and their trades. What remained was the harder problem, and Yudhishthira put it to his brothers plainly as they sat within sight of the Matsya border.

'A man can change his name,' he said. 'A man can change his dress. Nobody on earth will mistake the Gandiva.'

It was true, and it was true of all of them. Arjuna's bow was known by sight from the Himalaya to the sea, and the sound of its string was known even to men who had never seen it. Bhima's bow, Yudhishthira's own, the swords, the quivers that never ran dry, the standards and the great conches: every piece of it was famous and described in the songs of a hundred courts. Five armed strangers walking into a small kingdom would be looked at. Five armed strangers carrying those particular arms would be named within a week.

So the weapons had to be left outside the city. Not sold, not sunk in a river, not buried anywhere a farmer's plough or a thief's patience might find them, because they would be wanted again in a year and wanted suddenly. They had to be put somewhere close to the road, somewhere they could be reached in an hour, and made untouchable in the open.

It was Arjuna who thought of the burning ground.

There was a cremation ground outside the city, near the ridge where the road bends toward the Matsya gate, and above it, on the bank of a small river, stood an old shami tree. The shami is a hard, thorny, unlovely tree. Its wood carries fire hidden inside it, which is why the priests take their kindling from it, and why country people otherwise leave it alone.

This one had grown huge. Its lower branches were high and thick, its crown was dense, and the ground beneath it was ash and bone and the black rings of old pyres. Nobody came there but the men who carried the dead, and they came only as far as the fires and left before dark.

'Here,' said Arjuna. 'It stands close to the road. We can reach it in an hour from any gate. Nothing grows near it that a woodcutter would want, and no herdsman will drive cattle across a burning ground.'

They waited until the sun was down and the last smoke had died. Then they unstrung the bows.

That took time, and a kind of grief. Arjuna set his foot against the Gandiva and let the great string go slack for the first time in years, and the bow, unbent, was only a length of shining wood in his hands. The quivers were stoppered. The swords were cleaned and put up in their sheaths. The conches were wrapped in cloth so that they could not sound if the wind moved them. The five of them worked in near silence with the smell of the pyres around them, five men setting down everything they were and had been.

'Wrap them together,' Yudhishthira said. 'Not one bundle for each of us. One bundle for all.'

They wound the arms in cloth and skins the way a body is wound, and as each piece went in it was named aloud, because a warrior does not put away his weapons the way a merchant puts away his stock.

The Gandiva went in first, the bow Agni had given Arjuna at the burning of Khandava, that had been Brahma's and Prajapati's and Indra's in turn before ever it came into a mortal hand, whose twang alone had scattered armies. Arjuna laid it down the length of the bundle like a spine and covered its face. Beside it went the two quivers that never ran out of arrows, and the arrows themselves, which had drunk more than the burning ground beneath them ever had.

Then Yudhishthira's bow, and his sword in its golden sheath. Then Bhima's bow, that no other man in the assembly at Hastinapura had ever managed to string, and the sword whose edge had been kept for Duhshasana since the day of the dice. Then Nakula's, then Sahadeva's, the twins handling their brothers' weapons as carefully as their own. Every blade was named. Every bowstring was named. Nothing went into the bundle without being spoken for.

When it was done, the bundle was as long as a tall man and roughly the shape of one, and they tied it about with rope at the neck and the waist and the ankles, exactly as the dead are tied.

Bhima carried it up the shami tree on one shoulder. He climbed into the dense crown where the branches were thickest, lashed the bundle high and firm where no wind would take it and no eye from the road would resolve it into anything but a dark mass among the leaves, and came down with his palms torn by the thorns.

The whole arsenal of the coming war hung above a field of ash, and would hang there for a year.

A hidden thing invites searching. A thing that is visible and repellent is never searched at all, and that was the second half of Arjuna's idea.

Before they went down to the city they found the cowherds who grazed near the ridge and told them a story. Their mother had died, they said. She was a hundred and eighty years old, and their family kept an old custom by which the aged dead are not burned but bound and hung in a tree, so that the body is given to the air. The bundle in the shami was her. They asked only that she be left in peace.

The herdsmen looked once at the dark shape high in the branches above the burning ground, and did not look again. Word went along the road within days and thickened as it went, the way such words do. There was a corpse in the shami tree. Strangers had hung it there. It stank, some said, though nobody had gone close enough to know. Cattle were driven the long way round. Children were told what would happen to them if they climbed it.

No sentry the Pandavas could have posted would have kept that tree half so well as a rumor did.

So the year passed. In Virata's city a brahmana played dice with the king, a cook worked the kitchens, a dance teacher taught the princess her steps, two men kept the horses and the cattle, and a hairdresser served the queen, and not one of them wore a weapon or spoke of one. An hour's walk away, above the ash, the Gandiva slept in its wrappings through the heat, through the rains that soaked the ropes and swelled them, through the cold, while Duryodhana's men searched the kingdoms of the world for five brothers and found nothing anywhere.

Only the tree knew where the war was.

In the last days of the year the Trigartas raided Matsya's cattle from the south, and Virata rode out with his army and his older sons to get them back. While he was gone the Kuru force came down from the north and swept the herds that were left, and there was nobody in the city to answer for it but the boy prince Uttara, who boasted magnificently in the women's quarters that he would drive the whole Kuru army off single-handed if only he had a charioteer worth the name.

Sairandhri suggested Brihannala, who had once, she said, been Arjuna's charioteer. The court laughed. The dance teacher was buckled into armor for a joke, and the chariot went out of the gate with a boasting boy at the reins and a eunuch standing behind him.

Then Uttara saw the Kuru army drawn up in the field with Bhishma's standard in it, and Drona's, and Karna's, and he dropped the reins and ran. Brihannala came down off the car, caught him by the hair, and carried him back, and there was a change in the voice that spoke to him then which the prince never afterward forgot.

'Not that way,' Brihannala said. 'Drive to the burning ground. There is a shami tree above it.'

'There is a corpse in that tree.'

'Climb it, and bring the corpse down.'

Uttara climbed, gagging on what he expected to smell, and found no body at all. He found a bundle tied like one. He cut the ropes, and the wrappings came away in the branches, and lying across his arms in the leaves was a bow of a kind no boy of Matsya had ever imagined existed, with four others beside it, and swords, and quivers, and conches.

'Whose are these?'

And under the branches of the shami tree the dance teacher named them, one by one, five brothers hidden a year in his father's house, and the last name spoken was his own.