The Dice King's Son

The plain between the two camps was five miles of flat, cold ground, and Uluka crossed it alone in the dark with the reins loose in one hand.

He had done what he was sent to do. He had stood in the Pandava assembly with Krishna and the five brothers and their allies ranged around him, and he had delivered his king's message word for word, taunt for taunt, sparing nothing and softening nothing, and he had carried their answer back out through the tent flap into the night. That errand is told in full elsewhere. What is not usually told is the ride home.

He was not a coward and he had not been afraid in there. What he had felt, standing in that lamplight repeating another man's contempt in another man's cadence, was something colder and more exact: he knew, as each sentence left his mouth, precisely what he was buying with it. He watched Bhima's hands. He watched the change come over Arjuna's face and settle there like weather. He understood that no words spoken in the next month could unsay these, and that the men in front of him would remember the mouth that had said them long after they had stopped caring who had composed them.

He had said them anyway. That was the errand.

Behind him now the Pandava fires were shrinking. Ahead the Kaurava lines came up out of the dark, a mile of them, and somewhere in the middle of it his father's tent with a lamp still burning.

Duryodhana was awake and had been waiting, and rose when he came in, delighted, wanting every phrase back and every face described. Shakuni sat where he always sat, off to one side, saying nothing, watching his son with the flat pleasure of a man whose piece has been moved correctly across the board.

'Good,' he said, when the report was done. 'Now sleep. It begins in the morning.'

To understand the son you have to go back a long way west, to the hill country of Gandhara, where the horses were the best in the world and the grievances were kept as carefully as the horses.

Shakuni had come east as a young man, escorting his sister Gandhari to the marriage that the elders of Hastinapura had arranged for her: a princess of Gandhara given to a king who was blind, the fact of his blindness disclosed in the way such facts are disclosed, which is to say late. Gandhari bound her eyes and never took the cloth off again. Her brother did take his eyes off nothing. He stayed. He stayed for forty years, in a court where he was always a guest and never a subject, and he did not stay out of affection for the Kurus.

He stayed as a creditor stays.

Uluka was raised inside that arithmetic. Other boys of the Kuru court grew up on the bow and the mace and the recitation of ancestors. Uluka grew up on his father's other education: how a board is read, how a man's greed is measured before the first cast, how you find the hour at which a proud man will stake something he cannot afford. He learned Gandhara's horsemanship too, because he was a kshatriya and a nephew of kings. But the first thing he ever learned by heart was that the world is a table, that everyone at it wants something, and that the man who knows what they want has already won.

He learned it from a father who never once said that he was doing it, and who loved him, in his fashion, with a completeness he showed nothing else alive except Duryodhana's cause.

So when the day came that the Kaurava camp needed a mouth to carry an insult that could not be recalled, there was never any question whose son would carry it.

In the field he was not a mouthpiece. He was Gandhara's cavalry, and Gandhara's cavalry was worth having.

Shakuni and his son commanded the western horse together, light riders on quick mounts who did not stand and trade with elephants but came around the flanks of the Pandava divisions, spent their arrows, and were gone before the answering volley found them. Day after day they were where the line was thinnest. When the Kaurava array bent, it was often Gandhara's horse that bought the time to straighten it.

Uluka fought better than the Pandavas expected of a man they had decided to despise. He held his ground against Bhima's chariot on one of the middle days and came away alive, which was not nothing. He crossed with Yuyutsu, who was fighting his own brothers, and neither could break the other. He met Sahadeva more than once, and each time the two of them recognized each other at a distance across the churn of the field, and each time the fighting swept between them and carried them apart.

That recognition was mutual and old. The youngest of the Pandavas had been a boy in the dice hall in Hastinapura. He had watched Shakuni's hands. He had heard Draupadi dragged into that assembly by her hair while the elders studied the floor, and he had made a vow there that was quieter than Bhima's and every bit as fixed: whatever else happened, the man with the dice would not walk out of the world unpunished, and Sahadeva would be the one to see to it.

Uluka knew about the vow. Everyone in both camps knew about the vow. It was one of the things a man in his position simply lived with, the way a man lives near a river that has flooded before, and he rode out each morning under it without comment.

By the eighteenth day the war had stopped being a war and become a settling of particular accounts. Bhishma was on his bed of arrows, Drona was dead, Karna was dead, Shalya had fallen that morning and the Kaurava host had come apart into fragments, each fighting its own last engagement. What remained of Duryodhana's strength was a few thousand men and the Gandhara horse.

Sahadeva came for them across the broken ground with the deliberateness of a man keeping an appointment. He did not go for Shakuni first, though Shakuni was there, thirty paces off, wheeling his riders to hold the flank. He went for the son.

Uluka saw him coming and did not turn away, which is the only thing anyone can say for certain about how he chose to end. He met the charge. He shot well; he shot as a man shoots when he has understood something and has decided not to say it aloud. Arrows crossed and crossed again, and the Pandava's chariot came on through them, and the space between the two men closed to nothing.

'Do you know why it is you,' Sahadeva said, 'and not him?'

Uluka did not answer.

'Because he taught you the game,' said Sahadeva, 'and a man who understands stakes should be shown what he wagered.'

The arrow that killed him was clean and quick, a broad head through the chest, and he went down off the chariot floor with his bow still strung. Sahadeva did not stop to look at the body. The whole exchange had taken less time than it takes to describe it, which is generally the case.

Thirty paces away, Shakuni had turned his horse. He had seen the last of it. He had watched the arrow released, and he had watched where it went, and there was no move left on the board for that.

Men who were near enough afterward said the strangest thing about that morning was Shakuni's face.

He did not cry out. He did not charge. He sat his horse for a moment with an expression that nobody in that army had ever seen on him, which was the expression of a man reading a column of figures and finding, for the first time in forty years, that the total is not what he had calculated.

He had spent his life arranging for other people to lose things. He had put a kingdom on a board and taken it, and a queen's honor with it, and had watched it all happen from behind a face like a closed door. What he had never done was stand on the other side of a wager. The one possession he had not thought to hedge was lying face up on the field in front of him with an arrow through it.

He fought on for a while out of habit, and within the hour Sahadeva finished the account, in the manner told in its own place.

By midday the Gandhara horse had ceased to exist as a formation. Duryodhana, who had lost his hundred brothers, his generals, his friend and now his uncle, went off alone toward the lake with nobody left to tell him what to do next, which was perhaps the truest measure of what Shakuni had been to him.

Of Uluka little else is recorded. He killed no one whose name outlived him. He is remembered for an errand he did not compose and a father he did not choose, and for the fact that when the collector came he stood still and let the debt be taken.

That is the whole shape of it. The stakes a man plays for are not always the ones he puts on the table, and the debts a father games away are collected, in the end, from his children.