The Journey to the Mountain

That evening, Arjuna sat in his tent unable to close his eyes, though every part of him ached to. His son had died that day, cut down and surrounded by six great warriors in a battle formation he was too young to have been thrown into, and Arjuna had answered his own grief and his own fury with the worst oath a man on that field had sworn yet: Jayadratha, who had held the door of that formation shut and let Abhimanyu die trapped and alone, would be dead by sunset tomorrow, or Arjuna himself would walk into the fire he swore it by.

Word had already gone out through the Kaurava camp of the vow, and Jayadratha, understanding exactly what such words meant from such a man, had begun making his own preparations to be somewhere else, guarded by an army, when the sun went down.

Krishna found Arjuna still awake past midnight, staring at nothing, and did not pretend the oath had been wise. "You swore that in grief," Krishna said, "and grief does not measure what it promises. Jayadratha will be surrounded tomorrow by Drona's whole strength, hidden behind rank after rank of warriors who have sworn to keep him alive precisely because they know your oath. What you swore was rash. What is needed to keep it is not."

Arjuna did not deny it. He had sworn in the heat of a father's grief what even his own strength, on an ordinary day, could not guarantee.

"Then we will not wait for morning to find out if it is possible," Krishna said. "Sleep, if you can. Or do not sleep. Either way, we are going to go and ask for what the day will actually require."

Arjuna, who had asked Krishna for very little in this war that Krishna had not already known the answer to, closed his eyes only because Krishna told him to, not because he believed rest was still within his reach.

What happened next happened, as such things do in the old telling, in sleep, and yet was no ordinary dream. Arjuna felt himself lifted out of the noise and grief of the camp and carried northward, Krishna beside him the whole way, over the plains and the rivers and the long climbing country beyond, until the ground itself turned white and the air went thin and impossibly clean, and he understood, without being told in words, that he was looking at Kailasa.

He had heard of the mountain his whole life, the axis the sages spoke of when they wanted to describe a stillness beyond anything a Kshatriya's world contained, but he had never once, waking or sleeping, expected to stand at its foot. It rose ahead of them past any measure he had for mountains, its slopes catching a light that came from nowhere he could name, and the silence around it was so complete that Arjuna, who had spent fourteen days inside the loudest noise a human being can make, found the quiet almost harder to bear than the battlefield had been.

"We are not here to look," Krishna said, and led him on, over ground that seemed to require nothing of their feet, toward a place near the mountain's base where the air itself felt attended, as though something vast were simply, patiently, present. Arjuna went without arguing. He had followed Krishna into stranger places than this one, though never, until tonight, in search of anything so plainly larger than the war he had left sleeping behind him.

At the foot of the mountain Krishna stopped, and Arjuna, watching, understood that they had not traveled all this way for his own sake at all. Krishna set aside, for the moment, everything Arjuna had only ever seen him be, charioteer, cousin, counselor, the friend who spoke of dharma as though he had authored it himself, and knelt.

He worshipped Shiva there with a plainness that unsettled Arjuna far more than the journey north had. He had ridden beside Krishna for fourteen days believing, as most men on that field had come to believe, that Krishna stood at the very summit of what could be worshipped; to watch him now bow his own head before a presence greater still was to feel the ground of Arjuna's understanding shift under him more than the strange traveling itself had.

Shiva appeared as he chose to appear before them, the destroyer's stillness wrapped around something that felt, even to Arjuna, closer to mercy than to terror, and received Krishna's worship the way one old friend receives another's greeting after a long absence. Krishna spoke for them both, laying out plainly what tomorrow would require, and Arjuna stood by mostly in silence, a Kshatriya who had come expecting, if anything, to ask for a weapon, and found himself instead a witness to something he did not have the vocabulary for: proof, offered without a single word of explanation, that even the friend who drove his chariot bowed to someone.

He would carry that unease longer than he carried whatever they had come north to receive.

Shiva had given Arjuna this same weapon once before, disguised as a hunter testing a prince's temper over a slain boar in the high mountains, a gift earned then with an arrow drawn against a god who let himself be struck - but tonight was not a retelling of that story, only its reckoning.

"You believe you already hold this weapon," Shiva said to Arjuna, not unkindly, "because it was given to you once. But a weapon like the Pashupata is not a possession, the way a bow or a chariot is a possession. It is not yours to keep in a quiver and draw when convenience or grief demands it. It is lent, each time, for a single use, against a single necessity, and it must be asked for again exactly because a man who believes he owns such a thing has already begun to misunderstand it."

Krishna said nothing to soften this. He had brought Arjuna north precisely to hear it.

Arjuna, who until that hour had perhaps believed, somewhere beneath his grief and his oath, that he already carried inside him whatever it would take to reach Jayadratha through Drona's entire arrayed strength, understood now that he had been wrong to assume so. He asked, plainly, for what tomorrow would require, not as a man claiming what was owed him but as a man requesting, again, a mercy he had no right to consider permanent.

Shiva granted it. For one day, one use, one purpose, and no more, the Pashupata was given to Arjuna a second time, and something in the granting felt less like arming a warrior than like entrusting, briefly, a fire to hands that had asked properly to hold it.

They came back the way such journeys always end, without a seam Arjuna could find between the mountain's white silence and the canvas ceiling of his own tent. He opened his eyes in the dark before dawn, before the conches had sounded to call the armies to the fourteenth day's business, and for a moment could not have said with certainty whether Kailasa had been a place he visited or only a truth shown to him in the shape of a place.

Krishna was already awake, or had perhaps never, in any way that mattered, been asleep at all.

Arjuna rose and began, without needing to be told, the ordinary preparations of a man about to fight: the armor, the bow, the horses being yoked outside. But something in him had changed since the oath he had sworn the previous evening in grief. He no longer believed, as he had believed reaching for any of the great arms he carried, that the Pashupata was simply his, a thing stored inside him and available at need. He understood now that it had been lent to him twice, by the same patient hand, and that both times he had been required to ask properly before it would answer.

The conches sounded at last across the camp, and the armies began to stir toward the day that would decide whether his oath held or broke him. Arjuna climbed into the chariot beside Krishna carrying no more certainty about the outcome than he had carried the night before, only a clearer understanding of what he had actually been given, and by whom, and on what terms, a mercy asked for twice by a man who had thought, the first time, that he already owned it.