The Race for Allies

When the last embassy failed, both houses stopped talking and started riding.

This was the part of the war that nobody sings. For months no arrow was loosed anywhere in Bharatavarsha, and the whole struggle was conducted by men on horses carrying letters. Look at the ground and you can see how it had to go. Hastinapura sits on the Ganga where the northern roads cross, with the Kuru country spread around it and the great kingdoms of the west and the north-west inside easy reach. Upaplavya, where the Pandavas had come out of hiding, is a town in Matsya, off to the south-west, on good roads but on fewer of them. Duryodhana had the crossroads and the treasury of a settled empire. Yudhishthira had thirteen years of absence to explain and a claim that had to be argued at every gate.

A courier with remounts and royal warrants could hold to about twenty kos in a day on the trunk roads, more if the halts were arranged for him and less in the rains. Word to Dwaraka on the western sea was a matter of days. Word to Pragjyotisha, beyond the eastern rivers, was the better part of a month, and the army it summoned would need three more to walk back. So the courting had to begin early and be aimed like an arrow, and both houses aimed on the same evening.

Kings woke to find two sets of envoys in the same courtyard, the Kuru banner and the Pandava banner sitting on opposite benches, each pretending not to have noticed the other. Some heard both and chose by the hour of arrival. Some sent word to both and waited for a second offer. In more than one hall a man who had eaten Hastinapura's salt at a wedding twenty years earlier found that the debt had come to collect itself at breakfast.

The richest single prize was on the western sea, and both men went for it in person, which tells you what they thought it was worth.

Duryodhana reached the island city first by about an hour and found Krishna asleep. He took the seat at the head of the couch, because that is where a king sits. Arjuna came in behind him and stood at the foot, and waited. When Krishna opened his eyes he saw Arjuna first, and heard the claim of the man behind him, and settled it in a sentence: on one side the whole Vrishni army, on the other himself alone, unarmed, and holding no weapon in the fighting. Arjuna asked for the man. Duryodhana went out delighted with the army and could not believe his luck.

What he had won was not small. The Narayanas were a full akshauhini of cowherd soldiers, and Kritavarma of the Bhoja line took them east with a second Vrishni contingent behind him, and that host had to be marched off the coast, across the dry country and the Sarasvati lands, and delivered to the Kuru muster before the season turned. Balarama, who had taught the mace to Bhima and to Duryodhana both and loved his two pupils equally and hopelessly, refused the whole business, said that he would not watch it, and went away up the Sarasvati on pilgrimage with his ploughshare over his shoulder.

So the Yadava strength went one way and one chariot went the other, and the ledger of the war, read in the plain arithmetic of men and elephants, closed at Dwaraka in Duryodhana's favour. Every map of that season shows the same thing. The bookkeeping was correct. It was also, in the event, not what the account turned on.

The north-west was the far end of the board. Madra lay up between the rivers, a long march from the Kuru country, and Shalya's akshauhini was the largest single body of men either side could hope to add. Because he was distant, he had to start early. Because he started early, he was on the road for weeks. And a king on a road for weeks can be worked on.

He was marching for his sister's sons. Duryodhana's agents went ahead of him instead of meeting him, and the march turned into a progress: rest houses standing new at every halt, tanks dug and filled, gardens, garlands, singers, food laid out for an army as though for a festival. Shalya assumed his nephews had done it. He called for the host to show himself and take a gift for the trouble, and out of the tent came the wrong man, and the boon was already spoken. He went on to Upaplavya to confess it in person, and one akshauhini walked into the wrong army on a road of hospitality.

Beside Madra lay Kekaya, and Kekaya did what border kingdoms do when the map forces a choice on cousins: it split. Five of the brothers took their divisions south to Yudhishthira; the rest went to Hastinapura, so that the same banner appeared in both musters and Kekaya archers would spend the war shooting at their own colours.

The rest of the north-west fell as geography and blood dictated. Gandhara was Shakuni's, and Shakuni had lived in Hastinapura for a generation. Bahlika and Somadatta were Kuru by descent. Sudakshina brought the Kambojas and the mountain cavalry down the long road from the passes. Trigarta, whose princes had been humiliated in Matsya's cattle fields the year before, needed no envoy at all.

The farthest ally either side won came from Pragjyotisha, out past the eastern rivers where the hills begin, a country of elephants and of the coastal peoples the Kurus called yavanas and mlechchhas. Its king was Bhagadatta, who had been a friend of Indra himself, and who was old enough to have hunted with Pandu and to have loved him.

The envoys reached him after a month of riding. He heard the Pandava case out to the end and did not pretend that it was weak.

"Your father was dear to me," he told them, "and his son is dear to me for his sake, and I would rather have this cup with Arjuna than with anyone living. But I have taken from Hastinapura for forty years. I hold what I hold because that house stood behind me. I am too old to learn a new loyalty and too honest to pretend I never had the first one. Tell him I will be on the other side, and tell him I will not fight him carelessly."

Then he put his elephants on the road, and they walked west for three months.

South and east the pattern repeated. Kalinga on the eastern sea sent its host north along the coast road. Avanti sent its twin kings. Magadha, Chedi, Kashi and the Panchalas came to Yudhishthira, and every one of them can be traced to a marriage, a rescue or a slight: Panchala because Draupadi was its daughter, Matsya because the Pandavas had swept its floors for a year, Magadha because Jarasandha's son sat on that throne only because Bhima had put him there, Chedi because Dhrishtaketu's father had died in Krishna's hall.

By the time the roads emptied, the count was in. Duryodhana had eleven akshauhinis. Yudhishthira had seven. An akshauhini is a fixed thing, chariots and elephants and horse and foot in the old proportion, so the two numbers can be laid side by side honestly, and eighteen armies is what the war would spend.

Read the eleven and you are reading a debt book. Gandhara by marriage, Bahlika and Somadatta by descent, Sindhu by Dushasana's sister, the Kambojas and the mountain peoples by tribute, Pragjyotisha and Kalinga and Avanti by forty years of a rich court paying its friends on time, the Vrishni host by a sleeping man's arithmetic, Madra by a road of rest houses, Trigarta by a grudge. Not one of those kings had studied the case and found Duryodhana in the right. They had studied their own accounts.

Read the seven and you are reading a wedding and an exile. Panchala came because a bride had been won there, Matsya because a household had hidden them, Magadha and Chedi because of what Krishna and Bhima had done for those thrones, Kekaya because five brothers chose their kin over their kingdom, the Yadava followers of Satyaki because Satyaki would not be parted from Arjuna, and Krishna because Arjuna had walked to the foot of the bed instead of the head.

The seven chose their commander, and it was not one of the kings. Dhrishtadyumna of Panchala took the field command, born for one purpose and known to be born for it, and against him the eleven put the oldest man alive.

Nobody had fought yet. Everything that could be decided by counting had already been decided, and the whole of the rest of the story is what happens when the counting stops.