The Fall of Vikarna

Of the hundred sons of Dhritarashtra, only one had stood in the gambling hall and spoken against what his brothers were doing. When Dushasana dragged Draupadi before the assembly and she asked whether she had been lawfully staked, it was Vikarna, youngest among the elders' voices and least powerful of them, who rose and said the game was crooked, that Yudhishthira had staked her after staking himself and so had no right left to stake her, that the whole wager was void and the queen free. No one heeded him. Bhishma equivocated, Drona stayed silent, Karna mocked him for a child lecturing his betters, and Vikarna sat down again, overruled but not ashamed.

That hour is remembered elsewhere in full, and it needs no retelling here except to say that Bhima, then boiling with a fury he could not yet act on, swore before witnesses to kill every son of Dhritarashtra in whatever war was to come; yet he never forgot which of them had spoken truth in that hall.

Thirteen years is a long habit for memory, but a war does not ask what a man once felt. Now, on the fourteenth day of Kurukshetra, the sun climbing hot and merciless over a field already ankle deep in blood, Vikarna stood armored among his brothers, bow in hand, sworn as every kshatriya is sworn, to fight for the king who fed him. He had chosen the losing side and the unjust cause with his eyes open, and he had chosen it again every dawn since, because it was the side of his own blood.

The fourteenth day was a day without evening. Arjuna had sworn to kill Jayadratha before sunset or walk into fire himself, and the whole Kaurava host had thrown itself between him and that oath, a wall of chariots and elephants and men that did not care whether it broke as long as it held until dusk. Drona arrayed his troops formation behind formation to buy Jayadratha his life, and the fighting had the pitch of men who knew the sun itself was their enemy now.

In that crush Bhima drove through the Kaurava ranks like a flood finding the lowest ground, his bow never still, his chariot wheels grinding over what his arrows had left behind. He was hunting a path to his brother's side, cutting down whoever the day set in front of him. Karna met him there, and the two of them fought as if the whole war had narrowed to the space between their chariots.

Karna had turned aside for a moment and seen what Bhima's arrows had already done that day, sons of Dhritarashtra thrown down from their chariots and lying still. He came back sighing like a great serpent, his eyes red as copper, and poured arrows on Bhima until they seemed to fly not only from his bow but from his standard, his umbrella and the very floor of his chariot. Bhima, reckless of his life, answered with nine arrows and then twenty more, shrouding Karna as Karna had shrouded him. Along both lines men who had seen a great many duels stopped to cheer this one.

When the cheering rose, Duryodhana understood what it meant. Bhima's arrows were striking Karna, and Karna was the one man he could not afford to lose. He turned to the kings and princes around him, and above all to his own brothers. "Go to Karna," he said. "Save him from Vrikodara. The arrows Bhima is loosing will kill Radha's son if no one stands between them. You are all great archers. Protect him."

Seven of his brothers answered at once: Shatrunjaya, Shatrusaha, Chitra, Chitrayudha, Dridha, Chitrasena and Vikarna.

Of the seven, only Vikarna had once stood up in the dice hall and told the assembly that Draupadi had not been lawfully won. No one heard what he thought as he wheeled his chariot toward Bhima. Bhima himself would say, a little later, that Vikarna had come to that field bearing in mind a kshatriya's duty, and that he had always wished the Pandavas well. Perhaps both were true of him in that moment, and perhaps he did not try to make them agree. The king had given an order, a comrade was in danger, and he was a son of Dhritarashtra on the field of Kurukshetra. He went.

The seven came at Bhima in anger and closed around him from every side, pouring their arrows on him the way the rain clouds of the monsoon pour on a mountain. For a while he was hemmed in and hard pressed, like the moon beset by seven planets at the end of an age.

Then Bhima took his great bow firmly in his left hand and drew it with all his strength. He knew that the seven were only men. He set seven arrows to the string, bright as the rays of the sun, and as he aimed them he remembered the old wrongs, the dice hall, the thirteen years, the insults he had swallowed and carried all that time.

He let them fly. Each gold-winged shaft, whetted on stone, went through a heart and out into the sky again, red now where it had been gold, like a bird of bright plumage rising. The seven brothers fell from their chariots to the earth, like tall trees on a mountain ledge broken by an elephant. Vikarna fell with them. There was no last duel between the two men, no words across the gap between their chariots. One volley, and it was done.

Bhima had already killed many sons of Dhritarashtra that day, and he had not paused over any of them. But he paused over this one. Among all the brothers who had fallen to him, it was for Vikarna that he grieved bitterly, because Vikarna had been dear to him.

"This was my vow," he said, "that every one of you would be slain by me in battle. That is why you have fallen, Vikarna. My vow is kept. You came to this battle bearing in mind the duties of a kshatriya. You were always working for our good, and above all for the king's. It is hardly right for me to grieve for one as noble as you." And he grieved all the same.

It could not last. Karna had watched all seven die before his eyes, and the fight was not over. Bhima lifted his head and let out a roar like a lion's, so loud it carried across the field to Yudhishthira, the sign they had agreed on, telling him that the day was going their way. Drums and conches answered it from the Pandava lines. Then Bhima turned back into the press of the war, carrying with him the one death among all the Kauravas that he had stopped to mourn.