The First Envoy

The wedding of Abhimanyu and Uttara had barely ended, garlands still fresh in the hall at Upaplavya, when the guests who had come to celebrate it sat down again as something closer to a war council. Virata's capital was crowded now with the Pandavas' allies: Krishna and Balarama of the Vrishnis, the fierce Satyaki, old King Drupada of Panchala, and Yudhishthira himself, whose thirteen years of exile had just ended and whose claim to half the kingdom of the Kurus had not yet been answered by anyone in Hastinapura.

Krishna spoke first and spoke plainly, as he generally did when the matter was large enough to deserve plainness. 'Duryodhana will not give back what he holds simply because thirteen years have passed,' he said. 'Send to Hastinapura and ask for what is rightfully Yudhishthira's, half the kingdom, no more demanded and no less accepted. If it is refused, then we prepare for what refusal means. I do not think it will be granted for the asking. I think we should ask regardless, so that no one watching this war begin, on either side, can say it began before every gentler road had been tried and closed.'

The hall did not answer him with one voice. Some among the allies thought the demand too small for what the Pandavas had suffered; others thought any demand at all was already a step toward a war no one wanted to be the one who had refused to avoid. It was, Yudhishthira could see, going to be a longer council than the wedding feast that had preceded it.

Balarama rose next, and where Krishna had spoken of what was owed, Balarama spoke of what, in his view, had actually happened. 'Let us not pretend this quarrel began with Duryodhana alone,' he said. 'Yudhishthira sat at a dice board he need not have sat at, and staked a kingdom he need not have staked, and lost it fairly, by the game's own rule if not by its honesty. I do not say Duryodhana is blameless. I say that a demand sent to Hastinapura now should be gentle, not a challenge dressed as a request, since the man making it is not without fault of his own in how the kingdom came to be lost in the first place.'

Satyaki did not let the words settle before he answered them, and he answered with none of Balarama's mildness. 'A crooked game, played by a man Duryodhana's own uncle taught to cheat, against a king who trusted the hall he had been invited into as a guest trusts his host, is not fault in the sense you mean it,' he said. 'Shall we ask forgiveness of the men who dragged a woman into that hall by her hair because one of the players happened also to make a mistake at dice? I did not come to Upaplavya to hear the Pandavas' own allies soften the claim before the other side has even had the chance to refuse it.'

The exchange grew sharp enough that others in the hall began speaking over each other, Balarama's caution and Satyaki's contempt for it dividing the room roughly in two, neither faction willing to yield the argument to the other while Yudhishthira, whose kingdom the whole dispute concerned, said little and let his allies quarrel over how loudly to ask for it back.

It was Drupada who finally turned the argument somewhere useful, and he did it, characteristically, without much hope that any of it would work. He was the oldest king in the hall and the one with the longest memory of how little Hastinapura had ever given up without being made to, and he did not share Krishna's patience for asking twice.

'Send a priest first,' Drupada said. 'Not Krishna, not any of the great names in this hall who cannot appear in that court except as a declaration of war already begun. Send my own family priest, a brahmana whose only weapon is the claim itself, stated plainly, so that whatever Dhritarashtra decides, no one can say we did not ask through the gentlest possible messenger before we asked through any other kind. And while he travels there and back, let us not sit waiting on his answer. Let us raise every soldier we can raise, call in every alliance we can call in, so that if the answer is what I expect it to be, we are not caught unready by our own courtesy.'

No one in the hall mistook Drupada's proposal for optimism. He did not believe Dhritarashtra would grant the claim; he believed only that the asking had to happen, in the proper order, by the proper messenger, before the armies that were coming regardless were allowed to march. Yudhishthira agreed, and the choice fell easily into place beside the older king's plan: a priest to carry the claim, and, behind him, every preparation for the war that claim was unlikely to prevent.

The brahmana Drupada sent reached Hastinapura and was received in the Kuru hall with the formal honor due any priest arriving as an envoy, and he did not waste the honor on lesser words. He stated Yudhishthira's claim exactly as Drupada had instructed: half the kingdom, the portion the Pandavas held before the dice game and the exile that had followed it, returned now that the terms of that exile had been fulfilled to the letter, thirteen years counted and the final year passed unrecognized. He asked for nothing beyond what had already been agreed to years before by the Kurus' own word.

Bhishma spoke in the priest's favor as soon as he had finished, telling the hall plainly that the claim was just, that the Pandavas had kept their side of a hard bargain in full, and that Hastinapura's honor required an answer equal to that faithfulness. It was Karna who answered instead with contempt, calling the embassy itself an insolence, a brahmana sent to lecture the Kuru elders on a debt they owed no one, and reminding the hall that Duryodhana had won the game and would not be talked out of what the game had won him by a priest's borrowed authority.

Dhritarashtra, as he so often did when the hall divided sharply around him, let the argument run its course without settling it himself. When it was over he thanked the priest for the trouble of his journey, gave him gifts fit for the honor of his errand, and sent him home to Upaplavya without granting, or finally refusing, the claim he had carried.

The priest's return with gifts and no answer told the allies at Upaplavya everything Drupada had expected it to tell them. Both sides had spent the interval exactly as the old king had advised, not waiting on the embassy's outcome but gathering the armies each expected to need regardless of what any hall decided, so that by the time the priest reached home again the war both courts claimed not to want was very nearly ready to be fought.

This first embassy was not the last. Sanjaya would come from Hastinapura in his own turn, carrying Dhritarashtra's uneasy words to Upaplavya and Yudhishthira's answer back again, and after Sanjaya failed to settle anything, Krishna himself would go in person to the Kuru hall on the eve of the war, offering peace one final time before abandoning the offer for good; both of those later missions belong to their own telling. What Drupada's priest had done first, and plainly, was set the pattern the rest would follow: an embassy sent not truly expecting to prevent the war, but sent all the same, so that when the marching began, it began only after every gentler word had already been spoken and refused, and no king on either side could claim afterward that he had not been asked first to choose otherwise.

That, Bhishma might have said had he been asked to name the lesson of it, is what such embassies are frequently for: not to stop an army that both sides have already begun raising, but to buy, honestly or not, the days that army needs to finish gathering, while everyone at the table calls the waiting diplomacy.