Uluka's Embassy

The talking was over. Krishna's embassy had failed, the armies had marched, and now they lay camped across Kurukshetra from one another, eleven akshauhinis against seven, close enough that each side's cooking fires were the other side's horizon. In these last hours Duryodhana called for a messenger to carry one final word to the Pandavas. He did not choose a minister or a herald of rank. He chose Uluka, son of Shakuni, child of the dice, and the choice was itself the message: the gambler's son, sent to the men the dice had ruined.

"Go to the Pandavas in their camp," Duryodhana told him, with Karna and Shakuni listening and approving, "and say to each of them exactly what I tell you, in my words, before all their kings." And he loaded the young man with taunts as a ship is loaded, one for each brother, one for Krishna, sparing no one, savoring each. Uluka heard him out, and understood clearly what he was being made into: an arrow shot to sting men who could not, by the law of embassies, harm the messenger. He went, because his king commanded, into the enemy camp at evening, and was received - such was Yudhishthira's court even now - with courtesy.

"To Yudhishthira, Duryodhana says this," Uluka began. "You wear dharma like a beggar's shawl over a sword. There was once a cat who took up vows on the riverbank, arms raised, claiming to have renounced all violence, until the mice, marveling at so holy a beast, came to live around him in devotion - and he ate them one by one, fat with piety. Such is your righteousness, cousin: gentleness in speech, an empire in the heart. If you are men, fight. Do not hide a kshatriya's greed behind a sannyasi's face.

"And to Bhima: cook! Slave of your belly, you tied on an apron in Virata's kitchens and were happy there. You have sworn to drink Dushasana's blood and break my thigh. Wolf-belly, the thigh is here. Come and try.

"And to Arjuna: you have Krishna, you have Gandiva, and you have ten years of boasts. Tomorrow there will be no more postponements and no more disguises, dancing master. Show us the archery the world talks about, or admit that a eunuch taught dancing in a king's harem because it suited him."

Uluka turned last to Krishna, and delivered the deepest of Duryodhana's spite. "Cowherd! Trickster of Mathura! You came to my court and showed us conjuring, forms and fires, and thought to frighten kings with a magic-lantern show. We were not frightened. Bring your illusions to Kurukshetra and see what they weigh against eleven armies. You who broke embassies and now drive a chariot: tomorrow you are only a charioteer, and we will see the herdsman hold reins while men fight."

The camp had gone very quiet. Uluka stood in the middle of that quiet, a young man emptied of his poison, waiting to see if the law of messengers would hold.

It held. Yudhishthira spoke first, without heat. "You have said what you were given to say, Uluka. Take back this answer: we accept. Duryodhana was offered peace at the price of five villages and refused it; what he has bought instead will be delivered to him in the morning." Arjuna said only that the answer to the words would come from Gandiva, and that Duryodhana should listen for it. Krishna smiled at the taunt about charioteers. "Tell your king the herdsman will hold the reins," he said, "and let him watch what the chariot does."

Only Bhima burned. He rose with his whole body shaking and gave his answer not as rhetoric but as an itinerary. "Cook, am I. Yes, and tomorrow I begin to cook this war. Tell Duryodhana his message is heard and mine is unchanged: I will tear open Dushasana's breast on the field and drink his blood as I swore in the hall; I will break the hundred sons of Dhritarashtra like reeds; and for your master himself I am keeping the mace and the thigh he bared to Draupadi. Nothing he said tonight will add a day to his life, and nothing he can say will take one from mine. Go."

Sahadeva added one quiet sentence for the man who had sent the messenger rather than the message: that Shakuni's son would find, on the field, that the dice were done and the debts of the game came due in person.

Uluka bowed and rode back across the dark plain between a hundred thousand fires, and delivered the answers faithfully in Duryodhana's pavilion. And Duryodhana laughed with Karna and Shakuni, well pleased with his night's work, and gave the order to array the armies at dawn. He had spent the last quiet hours of the old world purchasing exactly nothing: the insults had bought no fear, the answers had promised no mercy, and every vow on both sides stood one night nearer its keeping. The next sound the two camps exchanged, after Uluka's hoofbeats faded, was the conch of the herdsman-charioteer at first light.