FOURTEEN
Arjuna’s armor radiates lances of fear across Kurukshetra. The Gandiva glitters, already piercing Jayadratha’s heart. To that king, hidden behind the teeming Kaurava army, Arjuna seems like the God of death. The Pandava raises the Devadatta and blows a long, echoing blast. The Kaurava frontlines cower at the sound and when Krishna joins a deep note to it on the Panchajanya, Jayadratha whimpers in his chariot.
Conches resound on both sides for the fighting to begin. Arjuna raises his arm high and cries to his sarathy, “Let us burn this shoddy cart. Ride at them, Krishna, the sun waits for no man!”
Krishna flicks his whip over his horses’ sleek necks. Durmarshana roars like five tigers and charges out of his vyuha to meet Arjuna. Their bows streaming, the cousins fly at each other. Durmarshana fights as never before and for a while it seems he will hold Arjuna up. Arrow cuts down arrow in flight, or glances off warriors’ stubborn mail. But the equal contention lasts only a few moments. Suddenly, Arjuna lifts his archery and heads roll off necks in a macabre pageant. When Arjuna fights like this, no one can see where he bends his bow, or draws another arrow from his magic quivers; or where he aims it, true as death. They see just a blur in his chariot. At times, it seems he hardly moves at all; but enemy soldiers fall in waves before him, blood spilling on to the dark earth from their carved limbs and wounds through which their spirits fly out to the invisible hosts waiting above Kurukshetra to take them to other realms. Arjuna dissevers their heads so casually: as if he snipped mallika flowers from their stems, to offer Siva for worship.
The air is a murky opacity of ghosts and screams. Not a sound from the Pandava: save that of his bowstring and the hum of his arrows. When five thousand Kaurava soldiers have died, in moments and Duryodhana’s brother realizes that today Arjuna also fights as never before, Durmarshana bolts and his men go after him. In the time it takes to tell, Arjuna has smashed the first of Drona’s vyuhas: the shakata collapses at his onslaught. And far away, at the eye of the needle he means to thread with a mighty astra today, Jayadratha is near collapse.
As Arjuna’s gandharva horses flash forward, Dusasana appears on his path with a legion of elephants, roaring an arrogant challenge. But to the Pandava, it makes no difference whether it is Dur-marshana or Dusasana, horses or elephants. All that matters is that they come between him and his quarry and he will not let them stand. Grey beasts fall as facilely as men did before them: some shot with a score of wooden shafts all over their hulking bodies, others with just one silver arrow through their hearts. The Gandiva sings, calling the enemy to the ceremony of death.
Mowing through his legion, Arjuna comes face to face with Dusasana himself.
He covers his cousin’s elephant in a mantle of fire. He shreds the weapons in his hands, makes red flowers sprout all over the Kaurava’s body and Dusasana cannot stand Arjuna any longer than his brother Durmarshana did. He, also, turns his beast around and lumbers away quickly. On plunges Arjuna, seeing just Jayadratha before him and all the others merely obstacles to his reaching that king, his target. It was so when he was a boy and Drona’s sishya and so it remains. Drona watches him fly at the padma vyuha and is reminded of the day when he gathered his students under a tree in which he had set a wooden bird and asked each one what he saw. Arjuna saw only the bird’s eye and brought it down. Today, Jayadratha is the wooden bird and the soldiers guarding him just the leaves in the tree. Like an arrow, Arjuna makes for his prey, brushing the leaves aside.
The white chariot storms the rim of the second vyuha and Drona rides up to stop his favorite sishya. Arjuna folds his hands to his master and says, “I have come to avenge my child. Once you said you made no difference between Aswatthama and me and I pray you still feel the same way. Bless me, Acharya and let me into your vyuha.”
Drona raises his bow in reply. With a smile, he cries, “You cannot enter my vyuha without defeating me!”
Though Drona was the main conniver in yesterday’s treachery, Arjuna cannot find it in himself to hate his master. Without rancor, he looses his first volley at his guru and those shafts are deadlier for the detachment with which they are shot. Drona answers with a scorching salvo of his own and a tremendous duel begins.
How well each one knows the other’s mind; how perfectly they anticipate every shaft. But they are not master and pupil any more: Arjuna is more than his Acharya’s equal. The Pandava breaks Drona’s bow; before the pieces fall to the chariot-floor, the master has another one out.
For an hour, they duel; and at first, one has a slender advantage, then the other. They fight at the farthest reaches of their genius, until abruptly Krishna cries, “It isn’t Drona you have sworn to kill before the sun sets. Time flits by and every moment is precious. Leave the brahmana here, we must break into the vyuha!”
Krishna swerves his horses away; he drives them round Drona’s chariot in a pradakshina. Smiling, Arjuna cries to the Acharya, “My lord, I must leave you!”
Drona roars, “What is this, Arjuna? You ride away from an enemy without beating him? You have never done this before.”
Flashing away to storm the padma vyuha, Arjuna calls back, “You are not my enemy, but my guru! Bless me, that I succeed.”
The words are borne to Drona on the wind. For the time he has lost fighting his master, arrows flare thicker than ever from the Pandava’s bow and Kaurava soldiers fall before him in lurid waves and a swell of mortal screams. At Arjuna’s wheels, guarding his rear and flanks, ride the Panchala brothers, Yuddhamanyu and Uttamaujas, as they have since the war began. Kritavarman comes to challenge Arjuna and with him Sudakshina, lord of the Kambhojas and Srutayus. Their arrows darken the sky. But those shafts themselves are livid and illumine dim Kurukshetra like strange lamps, flying.
Drona swirls round at the mouth of the lotus and rides after Arjuna. His careful plans foiled by the Pandava breezing past him, the master dashes after his disciple in anger. The gifted Kritavarman holds Arjuna up and it seems that Arjuna hesitates to unleash his fiercer missiles at the Yadava. Krishna cries, “He is one of the six that murdered your child! Don’t stay your hand because he is my cousin. He is a traitor and deserves to die.”
No sooner has he spoken, than Kritavarman is struck down with ten sizzling shafts that break his bow and smash through his armor, so he falls screaming. His sarathy flies from the field with his bleeding kshatriya. After Kritavarman departs, Sudakshina cannot resist Arjuna for more than a few moments. The Pandava sweeps him aside and plunges on deeper into the vyuha. A better warrior than Sudakshina looms in his path: Srutayudha who wields Varuna’s mace. The mace is a magical weapon and no one can kill Srutayudha as long as he carries it. When he casts it at an enemy, it divides itself into a hundred maces and strikes like a flock of thunderbolts; and then, it flies back to his hand. But Varuna had said to Srutayudha he must never cast the mace at anyone who bore no arms, for then it would turn on the one who cast it.
Srutayudha harries Arjuna with the Sea God’s mace, but finds he can never strike the Pandava because of Krishna’s lightning maneuvers in the gandharva chariot. Forgetting that the sarathy carries no weapon, Srutayudha flings the mace at Krishna. The occult gada takes Krishna in his chest, but softly as flowers. With a roar of its own, in anger that it has been cast at an unarmed man, the ocean mace flashes back at Srutayudha and smashes his head like a peach. As soon as he falls, Varuna’s weapon vanishes from Kurukshetra; it returns to the Lord of tides.
Seeing Srutayudha die, Sudakshina turns back into battle against Arjuna. But the duel lasts just moments and the Pandava kills the lord of the Kambhojas with an arrow through his heart. Panic takes the Kaurava army. Drona roars above the pandemonium to his legions, to surround Arjuna, they must not let him move ahead. But who can stand before the Pandava today? Drona rushes forward himself, covering Arjuna in a fever of arrows. Arjuna burns them all up with a brahmastra and they fall away as ashes. Fifty thousand footsoldiers run at Arjuna’s chariot. But he is dauntless; he is implacable, as he cuts a way of fire before him with unearthly missiles, parting the dark tide of men in streams of blood.
On through the incarnadine mire the golden chariot ploughs, as if no army stood in its way. Until, two heroic brothers challenge the Pandava: Srutayus and Achutayus, dead Sudakshina’s friends, who have rashly sworn to avenge him. They fly unexpectedly at Arjuna from two sides and Srutayus strikes Krishna unconscious. When the Pandava’s chariot lurches to a stop, Achutayus casts a javelin at Arjuna, a lance like a green star and strikes him deep in his side. A roar goes up from the Kaurava army as Arjuna reels and the Gandiva slips from his hand. The Pandava totters against his flagstaff.
“Arjuna is slain!” cry the Kaurava soldiers.
But in their excitement, they don’t press home their brief advantage quickly enough. With a cry, Krishna recovers, seizes the reins again and veers away from Srutayus’ ominous fire. By Krishna’s grace, Arjuna’s wound is stanched and the jade lance falls out. Quicker than thinking, the Pandava invokes the aindrastra to quell the thousand arrows that flare at him from every side. With another shaft of power, he cuts down the two brothers on either side of him. A single arrow, which severs Sru-tayus’ head, flies on in uncanny trajectory and crashes into Achutayus’ heart.
Seeing four of their kshatriyas die in moments, the common Kaurava soldiers run in panic from Arjuna. The padma vyuha is breached and every instant the golden chariot flies nearer its quarry, hidden fearfully in the needle’s eye.