The Thirteenth Day (15 page)

Again, ‘protect’?

Both Satyajit and Vrika were Panchala noblemen. Vishaka had told me this morning that since yesterday, the positions on my chariot flanks were being sought after by the Panchalas as it seemed the most likely place to find Guruji. There were murmurs of money being exchanged for the post, but nothing had been substantiated with evidence. The Panchalas knew how much Drupada wanted Guruji and the rewards that would follow his death at their hands.

Still, I was glad that the Panchalas would bear the brunt of Guruji’s thrust.

‘From, uh, my analysis, Drona prefers punching through the centre rather than hacking at the flanks. The Krauncha arrangement he put up yesterday was typical of him. I believe he will go with one of three arrangements: a needle, an eagle or the thunderbolt. Which is why, Yudhishthira, your position will be right at the back. As bait…to wear him down before he reaches you and, uh, hopefully to kill him.’

He smiled, pleased with his own logic.

Bhima’s impatience ruined Dhristadyumna’s appreciation of the fine arts of battle strategy.

‘Sounds good. Let’s go.’

We walked towards the chariot park. The elephant arsenal lay desolate next to it. Bhagadatta had made short work of them in the first six days. Our handful of mammoths were now used to cover chariot retreats rather than push ahead themselves. Without them, the Kaurava elephants had cowed down our forces and none of the allies wanted to be anywhere near Bhagadatta’s beasts.

Taking down an elephant had become a long and tedious task. Long-speared infantry with their fifteen-foot-long wooden pikes poked at the elephants’ eyes from a distance to stop them from charging. Behind them archers fired away at the mahout or the warrior on the back. The elephants would be bewildered at first, then furious, using their trunks to flick away soldiers like nutshells. They would thrust forward with their tusks, which were normally cased in iron, and gore any unfortunates who came in the way. One had to hope that a spear caught an elephant in the eye or under the jaw before it did too much damage.

Supritika was particularly terrifying in this regard. Nature had endowed her with oversized tusks that stuck unevenly out of her jaw like gnarled tree stumps. She was also larger than all the other elephants on the field. And white.

In times of lesser significance, Bhagadatta had told me that she was an albino calf abandoned by her herd. As a young king, he had been asked to hunt a ghost elephant laying waste to the jungle tribes of the east. In his wine-cut slur, he told me that he had wrestled her for three days and three nights, without weapon or armour. Finally, when exhaustion became a more difficult adversary, she pushed him aside and ran back into the jungle. He lay in the grass without moving until his retainers found him and took him back to camp. He slept for a week. And the day he awoke, he found the beast outside his camp, slaughtering his guards. When he approached her, she calmed and bent to her knees in submission. He took her into his stable and named her ‘Supritika’.

Whether or not Bhagadatta, even in the prime of his youth, was strong enough to wrestle an elephant is a question I’ve never bothered asking. I’ve always preferred his version of the events.

What happened next is true. From early on it became evident that she was strongly attached to him.

A night after she arrived at the stables, she killed its other inhabitants. The mahouts had come that morning to find her up to her knees in elephant gore flicking blood with her trunk, like a child playing with water. Supritika’s brutality had surprised the mahouts, but what really made them uneasy about the beast was the silence with which she conducted her carnage. Supritika never made a sound. Not that night in the stables, and not after. They began to call her Supritika the Silent. If she wanted something, she would nod and gesture to the mahout. She never roared or whimpered or trumpeted earnestly like the other elephants. And if the mahout did not understand, she gored him with her tusks until he did, or died, whichever came first. Bhagadatta himself was not spared her tantrums. If she didn’t see him for a day, she would kill a mahout or tusk an elephant, prompting Bhagadatta’s ministers to schedule an appointment with Supritika every day. She would accompany him on official visits, attracting crowds with her unusual colour, stampeding into them if they got too close or too loud, to the dismay of her mahouts, who were changed faster in Pragjyotisha than sacred threads. If the cost of keeping Supritika happy was more than the standards human decency should ever live up to, Bhagadatta didn’t seem to notice. She was the toughest war elephant in Bharatvarsha.

I walked the path made familiar over the past eleven days. Vishaka was waiting for me at the chariot park with an enquiry from a nobleman regarding the whereabouts of his son (a chariot warrior charged with my protection) who hadn’t come back to their tent yesterday. It was a cruel question with only one possible answer, which he didn’t want to hear and I shouldn’t have been asked to say. Still, I told Vishaka to tell him that a lot of warriors spent nights in quarters other than their own. They would surely meet at the battlefield today.

On the side, I also told him to have a word with the scavengers and the men who handled the carcasses. Death lived longer than a few seconds on the battlefield. After the day’s carnage was complete, entire platoons of men would haul the carcasses off a few yojanas from camp, and prepare huge funeral pyres to expedite their ascension to afterlife. Unfortunately, the sheer numbers of the dead often resulted in many remaining unburned for a day or even two. I had witnessed the sight of these men, lying in a pile, limbs protruding at odd angles like grotesque human furniture. A separate heap had been kept for severed limbs or heads, to see if they could be joined with their owner on their final journey. These piles were protected from carrion birds and other scavenging animals by a platoon of masked archers. The afterlife was a thriving trade. Kusa grass and tinder wood were being sold at outrageous prices—a trend that showed no signs of stopping.

We had gotten used to death. We spent the whole day dealing with it, and the night lying close beside it. Soldiers reported visitations from spirits, mostly of warriors they had slayed. Arjuna had mentioned this in a talk he gave the younger officers before the battle. He had told them to try finishing duels as quickly as possible without observing the features of the person they killed. It will haunt you, he added quietly. It was easy for Arjuna to say this, he with the mighty bow and prodigious talent for war. But everyone who had survived thus far into the battle was stalked by someone’s shade.

For me, it was a nameless boy from the second day. He was wearing a saffron dhoti and bronze armour. We had fought on the ground. He came at me swinging a sword several times too heavy for him. What made it tragic was the ridiculous simplicity of it. Even for a bumbling slasher like me. I stepped aside and tripped him. He fell down awkwardly and lay still, breathing heavily. His sword clattered away and was immediately appropriated by a foot soldier. The men around me began laughing at his clumsiness. I stood over him with my sword poised for a final cut, thanking my stars for an easy kill.

Then he took off his helmet.

A sixteen-year-old’s stubble on his cheek, and a child’s fear of death in his eyes. He was younger than Abhimanyu and probably as talented in combat as I had been at his age. The laughing around me stopped. The soldiers looked at me curiously, wondering what I would do next.

War. Any kind of physical conflict is mechanical by nature. An artificial momentum needs to be created and maintained to distract our mind away from the horrors we commit. Once this momentum is broken, and we become aware of ourselves, we cannot fight.

The momentum changed for both me and the boy when I saw his face. I stood over him taking in his face and his youth. The realization that I was about to kill a child stayed my hand. I stood there staring at him for what seemed like a very a long time, though it must have been only for a few moments. The silence changed tenor from curiosity to embarrassment. Strangely, the child did not move. We just looked at each other awkwardly.

I remember thinking of letting him go. I could not kill him now. Not with such coldness. I looked at the faces of my men around me stupidly, expecting one of them to resolve my moral conflict. They refused to meet my eyes and looked away.

I took a deep breath and slammed my shield into his face, hoping to disfigure it enough not to remember it later on. He fell back and found his motion, crawling back slowly, God only knows where. I lifted my sword and brought it down on his head with all my strength. His head split open like a watermelon. I pulled out my sword, trailing little grey worms that were his brain, and thick, black blood. His eyes flickered dumbly and tongue lolled and he died. I walked away. The slaughter resumed as usual.

That night, he visited me.

His head was full, but the tongue lolled, and the eyes blinked with only the whites visible. I woke in a cold sweat and couldn’t sleep again that night. He didn’t come after that, but I saw his face sometimes during battle. And it took all the mental discipline I possessed to run him out of my thoughts.

Perhaps death on a battlefield is better than living with yourself and a head full of ghosts.

An indistinguishable medley of voices shook my thoughts. The chariot park spread out in front of me. My brothers had reached earlier and were getting their arms in order. It was ironic, all my brothers were in front where all the carnage was, and all of Dhristadyumna’s brothers were at the back with me. And yet, the day still looked more dangerous for his brothers. Sahadeva looked at me and smiled in conciliation. I had inadvertently solved the crisis of our dwindling Indraprastha Corps.

All I had to do was stand at the back and wait for Guruji.

D
rona had arranged us like a Garuda, an eagle with long wings and a small beak, to pierce the Pandava lines. Dhristadyumna sought the safety of a half-moon. Yudhishthira, I guessed, would be at the back.

The eagle’s beak had Drona, who was looking a lot better since yesterday, and the Leopard Guard at its tip reinforced by Suyodhana, commanding a platoon of elephants, Kritavarma and myself, supported by an elite group of Yadava and Anga chariots. The beak would detach from the main force once we got close enough to Yudhishthira.

The rest of our bird stretched out behind us across the field,

Directly behind us were Bhagadatta’s Pragjyotisha elephants and hidden from view were the Trigartas behind them.

The right wing was led by Shalya, looking almost normal now. The left wing was in the hands of Drona’s son, Ashwatthama, an easily dislikeable character prone to fits of violent rage. The reserve would be in Jayadratha’s charge today.

The bird bristled as the battle conches began their first blare. Kurus, Kambojas, Yavanas, Daradas, Kalikeyas, Sakas, Abhiras, Kalingas, Surasenas, Madras, Amvashthas, Magadhas, Paundras, Madrakas, Gandharas, Sakunas, Vasatis—we had members from almost every civilized kingdom. The stone-like mountain men from the north—grey-complexioned; uncomplaining and ever silent slit-eyed head hunters from the far east; green- and blue-eyed foreigners from across the seas with strange symbols tattooed on their arms and unpronounceable names.

It was not impossible that the entire world was represented here on these plains. Men from the pits of the earth to its very lofts stood here on this ground in Bharatvarsha. Men of all kinds talking in every possible tongue we could imagine, telling stories of their ways, their women, home, and their desire to return and never leave.

The Pandava conches responded, louder it seemed, making contest of this too. I could make out Arjuna with Bhima and Abhimanyu. That was good news. Bhagadatta and the Trigartas wouldn’t have to wander around the battlefield locating their targets.

A second round of conches blasted from our lines, outdoing the Pandava effort. A few seconds later the Pandavas returned their call with the same ferocity. The battle would begin on the third blast. I gripped my bow tightly.

It didn’t sound.

Puzzled, I looked at Suyodhana and Kritavarma, who shrugged and asked the soldier next to him to find out about the delay. Drona didn’t turn around and looked on calmly at the battlefield. There was a rustle of motion from behind us, and Susharma walked out of the lines.

I called out to him, but he paid no attention. Kritavarma shouted out too, but Susharma kept walking. Drona continued looking impassively towards the battlefield.

He was unarmed and wore a white dhoti and cuirass. Curiously enough, he appeared to have and had shaved off his eyebrows and moustache. He walked at an easy pace towards the centre of the battlefield, where the two armies would meet. A hundred bows rose up on either side. A few paces away from the Pandava centre, he stopped and began to speak.

We couldn’t hear him, but everyone was already forming their own theories. Was Susharma backing out? Was he defecting to the Pandavas? Our entire army went silent trying to make out his words when Drona turned around and said loudly to the army in general: