The Night the Armies Slept

By the time Ghatotkacha's huge body crashed down across a dozen chariots, killed at last by the one weapon Karna had been saving since his youth, the fourteenth day of the war had already burned past sunset and no one on the field seemed to know how to stop.

Duryodhana had sworn that Jayadratha would die before the sun set the next day or Arjuna would walk into fire, and to keep that oath from being fulfilled the Kaurava host meant to fight until dawn if it had to. Drona gave the order first: lamps lashed to the backs of elephants, torches wedged into chariot poles and standard staffs, so that the killing could go on by a light that was really no light at all, only a smear of orange swinging over a field already thick with smoke and the smell of blood.

Bhima fought in that swinging dark the way he fought in daylight, by weight and by roar, and men said afterward that the sound of him was easier to follow than the sight. Karna's chariot became a moving fire in itself, torches bound to both wheel rims, arrows going out from inside a ring of light into a dark that did not answer back so much as scream. Arjuna and Krishna pressed on beside them, the white horses catching torchlight like something out of a story rather than a war.

But light tied to a moving elephant is not light a man can trust his aim to, and by the second or third hour past dusk the field had stopped being two armies fighting each other and become something else: a great confused animal, twitching in the dark, its own limbs beginning, here and there, to strike each other by mistake.

By midnight no war on Kurukshetra was that clean division of two sides anymore. Men could not tell, in the smoke and swinging torchlight, whether the shape rising in front of them wore a Kaurava crest or a Pandava one, and swords fell on chests that would have flinched from them by daylight. Brother in arms cut brother in arms; a spear meant for an enemy chariot found a friend's driver instead, and no one on the field had time to call out an apology before the next blow needed answering.

The chariot horses suffered worst of all. Driven since morning without rest, whipped through hour after hour of a battle none of them had asked to be born into, they began simply to stop, heads down, legs trembling, deaf to the rein. Their drivers, no less exhausted, slumped forward in the traces and slept sitting upright, reins still wound around slack hands, while the horses stood over them like patient sentries guarding nothing.

Duryodhana rode past a place where two of his own cousins had gone at each other in the dark, thinking each other Pandava; Drona, from his own chariot, watched an elephant driver topple sideways off the beast's neck mid-stride and simply lie where he fell, and no one, not even Drona, called a halt. Karna's arm ached from a day and a night of the bow; even his famous composure had thinned to something worn and short-tempered. Bhima, still roaring, was roaring now mostly to keep himself awake.

It was a war being fought by men who were no longer entirely certain, from one swing to the next, who they were fighting.

It was Arjuna who finally said aloud what the whole field had already begun to feel. He lowered his bow, called Krishna to bring the chariot to a stop in the space between the two broken lines, and looked out at the torches guttering across the dark on both sides, Kaurava and Pandava alike, more of them going out now than being relit.

"Krishna," he said, "look at them. They cannot see. They cannot stand. This is not fighting anymore, it is only killing, and half of what is being killed belongs to no one's cause but exhaustion."

He raised his voice then, pitched to carry the way a warrior's voice is trained to carry over a battlefield, and called out across the dark to both armies at once: the moon had not yet risen, no man could see his enemy from his friend, and no more could rightly be asked of anyone that had not been given light to see by. Let the fighting stop, he said, until the moon itself gave permission to begin again.

It was, by every rule either side had sworn to keep and broken a hundred times since the ninth day, a strange thing to hear kept: not a rule inscribed in the old codes at all, only a plain observation shouted by one exhausted man, and yet across the field, first near the Pandava standards and then, more slowly, among Duryodhana's own captains, the fighting simply stopped. Duryodhana himself, hoarse from the day's shouting, made no argument. Drona lowered his bow without being ordered to. Even Karna, who owed the field one more day's killing before Jayadratha's hour came due, let his string go slack.

No herald carried the word. No conch confirmed it. The armies simply believed Arjuna, because what he had said was true.

What followed was unlike anything either army had done in fourteen days of war: they lay down. Not in camp, not behind the lines, but exactly where the order to stop had found them, in the churned mud and the smoking dark, kings and archers and elephant drivers together in a silence that had not existed on that field since the conches sounded on the first morning.

Duryodhana slept sitting upright against his chariot rail, still in his armor, his charioteer curled at his feet. Drona, an old man who had fought a young man's battle since dawn, lay back against his own war elephant's foreleg and did not stir again until the light changed. Karna did not unstring his bow; he simply set it across his knees and put his head back, and within moments the tension that had carried him through the day's grief and the day's fighting let go all at once.

Kings slept slumped along the necks of their elephants, who stood as still as temple carvings over them, unwilling, it seemed, to disturb men who had finally stopped asking anything of them. Horses stood riderless over sleeping charioteers, heads low, ribs heaving slow at last after a day of terror, keeping a kind of watch no one had trained them to keep. Here and there a torch, unfed and forgotten, guttered down to an ember and went out, and no one relit it, and the dark that followed was, for the first time in eighteen days of war, an ordinary dark, the kind that belongs to sleep rather than to slaughter.

Arjuna himself, beside Krishna, finally closed his eyes on a field that, for one stolen hour, had remembered it was made of men.

No one is recorded as having given the order to wake. When the moon finally cleared the smoke and dust hanging low over Kurukshetra and its light fell pale and full across the sleeping field, the armies simply woke, the way a body wakes when the sun touches it, without a herald's voice or a conch's blast to tell it the hour had come.

Drona was the first to rise from his place beneath the elephant's foreleg, and by the time he had called for his bow, Duryodhana was already awake beside his chariot, checking the edge of his mace as though the last hours had never happened. Karna rose more slowly, the ache in his shoulders no better for the rest, but he took up his bow again all the same, because the debt of Jayadratha's death was still owed by sunset that day and no sleep, however necessary, could excuse him from it. Bhima woke roaring, as he had fallen asleep roaring, and the sound of him moving again seemed to wake half the field around him on its own. Arjuna rose beside Krishna and looked out at the moonlit plain, at kings and drivers and elephants all stirring together as though from the same single sleep, and did not need to be told that the mercy was over.

Within moments the torches were relit, the conches sounded again on both sides, and the killing that had paused for a single moonless hour resumed exactly where it had left off, as though the field had never stopped at all.

But it had stopped, once, in eighteen days of a war that otherwise forgot to. For that one hour between the last torch going dark and the moon's first light, the greatest battle the world had gathered to fight admitted, without any vow or rule requiring it, that it was made of tired men who needed, more than victory, only to close their eyes.