Sutasoma and the Broken Scimitar

Sanjaya went on with the sixteenth day, and the blind king in the hall let him go on.

The Suta's son had the command that day. Karna had already met Nakula and beaten him and let him live, and had gone off toward the Pancala car-throngs with the sun standing at the meridian, and while he was scorching them there the rest of the field went on without him, in pockets, man against man.

In one of those pockets a son of Dhritarashtra was destroying his father's army.

"Against Yuyutsu," Sanjaya said, "who was employed in routing the vast army of thy son, Uluka proceeded with speed."

The king knew the name. Yuyutsu was his own son by a vaisya woman, the one who had stood up on the first morning of the war when Yudhishthira asked across the space between the armies whether anybody wished to change sides, and had walked out of the Kaurava line in front of everyone and never gone back. Sixteen days later he was still there, and he was cutting his brothers' troops apart, and it was for Dhritarashtra's army that he was doing it.

The man who came for him was Uluka, son of Subala's son Shakuni, the young man who had ridden into the Pandava camp on the eve of the war carrying Duryodhana's message and delivered every insult in it word for word to the faces of five brothers who had wanted to let him leave alive.

He came at speed, calling out as he came.

"Wait. Wait."

Then Yuyutsu, with a winged arrow of keen edge, struck him with great force, the way Indra strikes a mountain with the thunderbolt.

That was how it opened. The Kaurava who had chosen the other side, and the boy who had carried the words that made the choosing final, in the dust of the sixteenth day, with the commander of the army a mile off and no one watching either of them.

Uluka was filled with rage at the blow, and he answered it in the way that ends most of these encounters before they have properly begun. A razor-headed arrow took Yuyutsu's bow in two. A barbed shaft went into Yuyutsu himself.

He cast the broken bow off the car. His eyes were red with wrath, and he took up another bow, more formidable than the first and of greater impetus, and he did not shoot once.

He pierced Uluka with sixty arrows.

Then he pierced Uluka's driver, and then he came back and struck Uluka once more, and for a moment on that part of the field the son of the vaisya woman had the better of the son of the gambler.

Uluka steadied himself and shot twenty shafts adorned with gold into him, and then he raised his aim and cut off the standard.

It was made of gold, that standard, lofty and gorgeous, and Sanjaya troubled to say where it landed. It fell down in front of Yuyutsu's car, so that the horses had it lying across the ground before them and the man on the terrace had to look at it.

A standard is how the army finds a prince in the smoke. It is also, for a man in Yuyutsu's position, the only public statement he has. He had carried that gold pole from the Kaurava side of the field to the Pandava side in front of both armies, and now it was down in the dirt under his own wheels.

Beholding his standard cut off, Yuyutsu was deprived of his senses by wrath.

He put five shafts into the centre of Uluka's chest.

They were well aimed and they were not enough, and Uluka, who had been shooting all this while like a man doing arithmetic, took a broad-headed arrow steeped in oil and cut off the head of Yuyutsu's charioteer.

The driver went down out of the niche, and the four steeds went next, killed where they stood in the traces, and Uluka put five arrows into Yuyutsu himself while the man was still standing on a chariot that had become furniture.

Deeply struck by the strong Uluka, Yuyutsu proceeded to another car.

That is all Sanjaya says about it, and it is worth noticing how the epic keeps its accounts here. Nothing is made of the defeat. Nobody boasts over him, nobody spares him with a speech, no god remarks on it from the sky. A prince loses his horses and his driver and his flag in the space of a few breaths, climbs down, walks to whatever chariot is nearest with a living man on it, and gets back up. On the sixteenth day this was ordinary.

Having vanquished him in battle, Uluka proceeded quickly towards the Pancalas and the Srinjayas, and began to slaughter them with sharp shafts, and the pocket where the two half-brothers by marriage had fought closed over and was gone.

A little way off, two more young men found each other.

Srutakarman was a son of Dhritarashtra. Satanika was a son of Nakula and Draupadi, one of the five boys the brothers had between them by their common wife, and he had been on the field since the first day.

Within half the time taken up by a wink of the eye, and fearlessly, Srutakarman made Satanika steedless and driverless and carless.

It was a beautiful piece of shooting and it settled nothing at all. The mighty car-warrior Satanika stayed standing on the wreck, and filled with rage he took up a mace and hurled it at the Kaurava.

The mace reduced Srutakarman's car with its steeds and its driver into fragments, and then went on and struck the earth with great speed and pierced it through.

So the two of them, both enhancers of the glory of the Kurus, stood in the dirt with nothing left to fight from, glaring at each other across the ruins of two chariots.

Then Dhritarashtra's son, overcome with fear, mounted the car of Vivingsu, and Satanika got up quickly on the car of Prativindhya, who was Yudhishthira's son by Draupadi and his own eldest brother, and the field carried them both away.

Shakuni, filled with rage, pierced Sutasoma with many keen shafts.

Sutasoma was Bhima's son by Draupadi, and Shakuni was Subala's son, the king of Gandhara, Duryodhana's uncle, the man who had thrown the dice in the assembly hall thirteen years earlier and won a kingdom and a queen with them without ever touching a bow in anger. He had come to this war as the architect of it. He was also, as the Pandavas kept discovering, a warrior of sure aim and conversant with all the methods of warfare.

The shafts went in and Sutasoma did not move. He failed to make the latter tremble, Sanjaya said, like a torrent of water failing to produce any impression upon a mountain.

Then Sutasoma looked at who it was.

Beholding that great enemy of his father, he covered Shakuni with many thousands of arrows.

The phrase is the whole of Sutasoma's motive and the epic spends no more words on it than that. Every wrong of the thirteen years belonged in some degree to the man in the chariot opposite, and Bhima's son had grown up on those years, and here at last was Subala's son inside bowshot with nothing between them.

Thousands of arrows is not an exaggeration meant kindly. It is a description of a young man emptying himself at an enemy.

Shakuni, actuated by desire of battle, quickly cut off all those shafts with his own winged arrows.

Every one of them. He stood on his car and picked the storm out of the air piece by piece, and when he had checked them all he was still filled with rage, and he struck Sutasoma with three arrows, three being enough.

Then the brother-in-law of your house, Sanjaya said to the king, cut the steeds and the standard and the driver of his adversary into minute fragments, all of it at once, and the spectators on both sides uttered a loud shout at the sight.

Deprived of his steeds and his car, with his standard cut off, the great bowman jumped down from the wreck and stood on the earth.

He had taken up a good bow on the way down.

That is the detail the story turns on. A car-warrior whose chariot is destroyed is supposed to do what Yuyutsu had just done a few hundred paces away and what Srutakarman and Satanika had both done: find another car, or get behind somebody who has one. Sutasoma did not look for a car. He set his feet in the dust in front of a moving chariot and went on shooting.

And he shot a large number of arrows equipped with golden wings and whetted on stone, and shrouded therewith the car of Subala's son.

Shakuni saw them coming, a flight of locusts making for him, and did not tremble. That illustrious warrior crushed all those arrows with arrows of his own.

But something had changed on that part of the field. The warriors who were present there were highly pleased, and so were the Siddhas in the firmament, who are the perfected ones and who are described in this poem as watching the war the way men watch a contest in an arena. They were pleased at the sight of a wonderful and incredible feat, and Sanjaya names exactly what the feat was.

Inasmuch as he contended on foot with Shakuni staying in his car.

Not that he was winning. He was not winning. He was standing on the ground where a horse could ride him down and shooting up at a man who had every advantage the field allows one warrior to have over another, and he was still there, and that was the whole of the wonder.

Shakuni ended it with a handful of broad-headed shafts of great impetuosity, keen and perfectly straight. They cut off Sutasoma's bow, and then they cut off all his quivers.

Bowless now, and carless, standing on his feet in the open with a chariot in front of him.

He lifted a scimitar of the hue of the blue lotus, equipped with an ivory handle, and shouted.

It was a loud shout, and it was addressed to nobody, and Sanjaya reports the effect it had on the man it was aimed at. That scimitar of the intelligent Sutasoma, of the hue of the clear sky as it was whirled by that hero, was regarded by Shakuni to be as fatal as the rod of Death.

Then Sutasoma began to career in circles over the arena, and displayed the fourteen different kinds of manoeuvres.

The poem lists them, because they were a discipline with names, taught the way weapons are taught, and a warrior who could show all fourteen under fire was showing the sum of a boyhood spent at it. He wheeled about. He whirled the blade on high. He made side-thrusts. He jumped forward, and leaped on high, and ran above, and rushed forward, and rushed upwards, and the dust went round him in circles as he moved.

The valiant son of Subala sped a number of arrows at him.

Sutasoma cut them out of the air with the scimitar as they came.

Filled with rage at that, Subala's son once more sped at him a number of shafts that resembled snakes of virulent poison, and aided by his skill and his might, Sutasoma cut off even these with the blade, displaying his great activity, possessed as he was of prowess equal to that of Garuda himself.

Understand what the comparison is doing. Garuda is the bird that eats serpents. The arrows have just been called snakes. A man on foot in the middle of a battle was taking arrows out of the air with a sword, one after another, and doing it well enough that the poet reached for the king of birds to say how it looked.

Shakuni watched the circles for a while, and then he stopped watching and started measuring, and he waited for the blade to come round again.

With a razor-headed arrow of great sharpness, Shakuni cut off that bright scimitar as its owner careered in circles before him.

Half of it fell down on the earth. The other half stayed in Sutasoma's grasp.

That is the image the whole episode has been building toward, and it lasts about as long as a breath. A young man in the open, no horses, no car, no standard, no bow, no quivers, holding the stump of a sword with the good half of it lying in the dust several feet away, and the man who had ruined his family sitting above him on a chariot with a full quiver.

Seeing his sword cut off, the mighty car-warrior Sutasoma retreated six steps.

Then he threw what he had left.

The fragment was decked with gold and gems, and it went up and across and cut off the bow of the illustrious Shakuni, string and all, and fell down on the earth.

It is the only thing that happened to Shakuni on the sixteenth day that he had not arranged himself, and it was done with the broken half of a sword by a man standing on his feet who by every measure of that field had already lost.

Then Sutasoma went to the great car of Srutakirti, who was Arjuna's son by Draupadi, and climbed up beside his brother, and that was the end of it.

Subala's son took up another bow, formidable and invincible, and proceeded toward the Pandava army, slaying large numbers of foes on the way. Beholding him careering fearlessly in battle, a loud uproar arose among the Pandavas in that part of the army. People witnessed those large and proud divisions, bristling with arms, routed by the illustrious son of Subala.

Even as the chief of the celestials crushed the Daitya army, Sanjaya said, the son of Subala destroyed that army of the Pandavas.

So the gambler went on and the day went on, and what was left behind him on that patch of ground was a gold standard lying in front of a dead team, two boys who had wrecked each other's chariots and borrowed their cousins', and half a blue scimitar in the dirt with nobody coming back for it.