The Birth of the Sword

The war was finished, and Kurukshetra had gone quiet in the way that only a battlefield can go quiet, with the dust settled and the birds come back and nothing moving on the whole plain but the small procession that walked out each morning to where the old man lay. Bhishma rested on his bed of arrows with his head propped on the three shafts Arjuna had driven into the ground for him, and the sons of Pandu sat in a half circle at his side while he spent the last of his allotted days pouring out everything a lifetime had taught him.

Yudhishthira asked most of the questions. That was understood among them. He asked about kingship and about famine, about when a ruler may conceal a truth and when he may not, about the duties of the four orders and the passage of the soul, and the old man answered him hour upon hour without complaint. But on this morning Bhishma turned his head a little on its bed of iron and looked past the eldest brother to where the fourth sat, silent as he almost always was.

'Nakula,' he said. 'In all these days you have asked me nothing.'

'Ask him,' said Yudhishthira, 'while there is time to ask.'

Nakula, who had been trained to the sword as no one else in that family had been trained to it, and who had walked the length of the war with a blade in his hand while his brothers made their names with bow and mace, sat forward at last.

'Grandsire, of the weapons a kshatriya carries, bow and dart and mace and sword, the bow seems to me the foremost, for with it Arjuna emptied this field. Yet my teacher told me otherwise. He said that when the bowstring is cut and the mace has slipped from the hand and the chariot is a wreck beneath you, the sword remains, and that the sword stands above them all. I have carried that teaching thirty years without knowing why it is true. Tell me why.'

Bhishma's mouth moved toward something like a smile. 'You have asked the oldest question of the four of you,' he said. 'The sword is older than the bow. It is older than kings.'

'Hear the origin of the blade,' Bhishma said, 'and you will have heard the origin of punishment itself, for they are one story told twice.

'In the first age, when the Grandsire had brought forth the worlds and set his creatures in them, dharma stood upon all four of its feet and nothing needed guarding. There were no thieves, because there was nothing a man wanted that he did not already possess in sufficiency. There was no lying, because a lie had no use. Men lived out their full spans and went where they were meant to go, and Brahma looked at what he had made and was satisfied with it.

'But the same creation that brought forth the gentle brought forth the danavas, and they were made of a different appetite. They grew in strength and in number and in insolence, and they began to trouble the world. They broke into the sacrificial grounds and scattered the fires. They dragged the sages out of their groves by the hair and set the groves alight. They carried off women and cattle and children. Boundaries went unrespected, oaths went unhonored, and the strong began to eat the weak openly, because nothing anywhere was arranged to stop them. Dharma lost one foot, and then another. The earth herself cried out under the weight of what was being done on her.

'So the gods and the sages together went up to the Grandsire and laid the whole ruin before him. And Brahma, who had made the world and did not intend to watch it consumed, said only this: I will do what must be done.

'He spread a sacrificial ground on the high summit at the roof of the worlds, in that place where the roads of the sky begin, and the great rishis came and sat at the ceremony, and Brahma himself poured the oblations. For a long while nothing rose from the altar but smoke. Then the fire darkened, and stood up, and something came out of it that was not fire.'

'He was terrible to look at,' Bhishma said. 'Blue in the throat, dark in the body, red in the eye, blazing at every edge of himself like a fire that has been given a shape and a will. Where he stood, the day went out of the sky. Comets fell in the east. Thunder walked without clouds behind it. The seas heaved up out of their beds and the mountains shook themselves like animals, and every creature that saw him understood, without needing to be told, what he had been made for.

'The Grandsire said to the assembly: this is the one I have brought forth for the protection of the world and for the destruction of the enemies of the gods. And then that being folded himself down out of his own vastness and became a blade, a sword keen on both its edges, long and bright and cold, with a hilt shaped for a hand to close on.

'Brahma took it up and gave it to Rudra. Take this, he said, and with it restrain the wicked and guard the dharma.

'And Rudra put on the form he wears when the worlds are in danger. He grew until the sky was not large enough to be a garment for him. Three eyes, and matted hair, and hide of a tiger about his waist, and in his fist the new blade throwing its light out across the whole of creation. He went among the danavas. What happened there took a long time and is not pleasant to describe: the blade went through them as a scythe goes through standing grass, and their hosts broke, and those who could run ran into caves and into the sea and under the earth, and the ones who could not run stayed where they fell. When it was over the rivers had changed color and the sky was clean, and the sages came out of their hiding places and lit their fires again.

'That is how order was put back into the world the first time. Not by persuasion. By the sword.'

'And then,' said Bhishma, 'the blade began the journey that ended on this field.

'Rudra, when the work was done, did not keep it. He gave it to Vishnu, who is the preserver of what has been made, and Vishnu gave it to Marichi, and Marichi to the great rishis, and the rishis to Vasava, who is Indra and the king of the gods. Indra gave it to the guardians of the four quarters, and they gave it to Manu, the son of the sun, and with Manu it came down at last into the hands of men.

'Manu did not hand it over in silence. He gave it to his sons with a charge attached, and the charge is the reason the weapon still means anything. This is for the protection of the four orders, he told them. It is to be laid upon the guilty and upon no one else. Whoever uses it otherwise will find that it was never really his.

'From Manu it passed to Kshupa, and from Kshupa to Ikshvaku, and so to Pururavas and Ayus and Nahusha and Yayati; and from Yayati to Puru, and down through the line of Bharata whose name we all carry, king to king, hand to hand, until it reached the kshatriyas who fought here last month. Every sword drawn on this plain, Nakula, including the one at your hip, is a portion of the one that stood up out of the Grandsire's fire. That is why your teacher told you it is foremost. Not because it kills more surely than an arrow. Because it is the first thing that was ever made for the single purpose of stopping a wrong.

'The learned give it many names, and each name is a warning about a different thing. Asi, the thrower. Vishasana, the render. Khadga, and Tikshnadhara for its keen edge, and Durasada, hard to approach. Srigarbha, that carries prosperity inside it. Vijaya, victory. And last, Dharmamula, the root of the law. Say those eight over a blade before you draw it and you will not draw it lightly.'

'There is an etiquette to keeping such a thing,' Bhishma went on, 'and the old kings observed it exactly. The blade is kept clean and kept sharp, because a dull sword is an insult to what it is. It is honored before a campaign with flowers and with sandal paste and with the same offerings a man would make to a guest of high rank. It is never drawn in play, never drawn to frighten a servant or amuse a court, never bared merely to be admired. It is not sold. It is not lent to an unworthy man. It is not turned on one who has thrown down his weapons, or one who has turned his back, or one who is asleep, or one who begs.

'And there is a warning fastened to it, which is older than all the rules. The being who became that blade was brought out of the fire to end a lawlessness, not to enjoy it. Whoever carries the sword and comes to love the drawing of it has already been cut by it, though the wound will take years to show.'

Nakula sat very still. 'Then it is not really a weapon at all,' he said.

'It is the rod of chastisement,' Bhishma said. 'Danda. It came into the world before there were kings to hold it, which should tell you something about kings. We did not invent punishment. We were handed it, and told what it is for, and every generation since has had to prove it was fit to be trusted with the thing. Most were not. Look around you at this field and count how many were not.'

He let that sit. Then he said, more quietly, 'Yudhishthira. You have been sitting there hearing your brother's lesson and thinking it is not addressed to you.'

'It is addressed to me,' Yudhishthira said.

'It is. You are about to be given the rod, and you do not want it. That is the only qualification the story asks for. The blade is safest in the hand of a man who takes no pleasure in it, and it is deadliest to the man who does.'