The Rise of Hastinapur

by Sharath Komarraju

  Spread before them on the table was a map of North Country. The path from Gandhar to Hastinapur had been marked with two red lines that slithered around River Iravati and first went eastward, toward the mountains. Then it slid down from between Trigarta and Pulinda – two of Hastinapur’s vassal states, and came to a stop near the point where the Yamuna broke off from her sister Ganga.

  ‘On the southward bank of Iravati shall we build our camp. The people of Trigarta – or of any other kingdom – shall not see us, for we will hide under a curtain of mist. There is enough mist that settles on Iravati, so we shall have enough to use our Mystery and create a film that will hide us well.’

  ‘Mist in the summer?’ said Gandhari.

  ‘Aye,’ said Kubera, ‘the same mist that hides our trade route, my lady. We shall create more of it and build a few barracks and stables on the riverbank, for we shall need reinforcements during the battle.’ He turned toward the map. ‘We will draw them out to the clearing here.’ He carved a circle at a point next to the eastern tip of the Kuru kingdom. ‘The land there is soft and muddy, much like the wetlands of Kamyaka, so their archers will not find solid footing.’

  ‘And it is flat too,’ said Shakuni, ‘so they will have to shoot their arrows into the air and hope that some of them pierce our armour shields. They cannot aim at us directly like they could at Kamyaka.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kubera, ‘that is so.’ He said to Gandhari, ‘I do not expect Hastinapur to fight us on open fields and win, my lady, but if at any point they take our gold mine, our reinforcements will suffer. We must prevent that at all costs.’

  ‘I have already stationed my best guards at the gold mine, and the towers there will not allow any intruders to pass.’

  ‘That is good for now,’ said Kubera, ‘but once the battle begins, we must see to it that the mine is well guarded.’ He thought for a moment, looking away. ‘Perhaps I can persuade Indra to part with a few dozen footmen. They’re the best fighters on the Meru. With them guarding your mines, you will have nothing to fret about …’

  ‘But you say they belong to Indra,’ said Gandhari.‘Will he allow them to guard our mines?’

  ‘I shall do my best,’ said Kubera, smiling and patting her hand. ‘You must not give much of your mind to this, Your Highness. You must think of what you plan to do once you recover all of your gold.’

  In spite of the shadows in her mind, she smiled back. The evening heat made her vision wavy, or perhaps it was the oil that she had become used to applying under her eyelids before she went to sleep every night. She reminded herself that she must ask Kubera how it worked; even after a month of constant use, she had not seen any improvement in her sight. Her dreams had become more vivid and clear, but the figures she often looked at on the ceiling in her room still appeared as smudges. What had Kubera said when he had given her the oil box? Something about the sight of the mind – tonight, perhaps, after the lamps had been put out, he would steal into her chamber like he had done a number of times recently.

  She was beginning to get addicted to his smell; no, not the smell of musk that he carried, but the light green must that tingled her nose when he held her close to his bosom. On the nights when he had slept in her bed, she had slept without dreaming, and she had woken up feeling like a lotus in full bloom.

  She did not know if Shakuni guessed it, especially at times like these when Kubera did not hesitate to take her hand in his. Her wrist strained a bit when the thought struck her, and she pulled it back. But then in a flash of indignation, she thought: So what? How many women had he not lain with over the years? If she liked a man enough to invite him into her bed, why should she look for Shakuni’s approval? As long as the matter did not cross the palace walls – and she would ensure that it did not – nothing mattered, at least for as long as she was queen and he a mere prince.

  ‘I do not wish to think of a victory that may or may not come, my lord,’ she said to Kubera, not telling him that she did not dare think of the war coming to an end because that would mean it would be time for him to return to Meru. ‘All of Gandhar shall have you to thank if we, indeed, manage to win.’

  ‘There is no question of us not winning!’ said Shakuni, getting up and limping out to the window overlooking the mines. ‘I shall kick Bhishma’s face into the dust, and I shall bring back with me his crown. Hastinapur shall belong to Gandhar!’

  Gandhari held her hands together and frowned as she looked at her brother’s face. She found herself worrying, curiously, for the welfare of Bhishma and Hastinapur.

  Gandhari sees a moving mass of black cloud in front of her, and every few seconds a flash of light falls upon it, illuminating it for just long enough for her to make out what is going on, and then it goes away, leaving her staring at blackness again. First she sees the swarm of soldiers, elephants and horses moving on the rugged terrain, crossing River Iravati and moving northward, just as Kubera had said they would. At the head of this group is Kubera himself, leading his cavalrymen by subtle shapes on the fingers of his raised arm.

  Then the footmen crouch and the horses neigh. They stop at the edge of the Kamyaka forest, and her warriors trade glances with one another from behind their armours. Kubera turns and says that they would wade through the jungle and light fires in the thickest part of it so that the enemy could not see them, and he warns his troops that this part of the jungle is teeming with hyenas. When one of the front men chuckles, Kubera silences him with a gaze of steel, and says that hyenas could tear open a man with less effort than a tiger.

  Now they are passing through the forest, and Gandhari hears the breeze rustle in her ears. The smell of corpses and vultures hits her. Wolves howl. Bats fly in bunches, screeching. The men move ahead, not turning their heads once, swishing their torches from this side to that, leaving orange arcs in the night air. The wooden sandals clack against the rocks, the dead leaves stick to their soles. Kubera jumps up on a ledge by a brook and says, ‘We shall camp here for dinner!’

  Nibbles, licks and sighs of pleasure. Smoke from the fires, the taint of burnt flesh. Here a man sucks out the marrow from a yellow bone. There a horseman feeds his steed a bag of oats and gram. To the far side, with his legs immersed in the brook, an archer holds a bamboo tube to his lips and begins to breathe into it. Legs tap, hips begin to sway. They all gather round him, and over their heads a swarm of bees wade into the sky against the half moon.

  The marsh is frozen, but then she recalls that it is not possible for it is midsummer night, so the icicles drop away, and sludge replaces them. The army walks through it with care, examining their feet after each step. The mendicants warn the soldiers to look out for leeches, and every few moments someone would cry out in pain, and the man with the bandages hops over with a knife to scrape the animal off, along with a layer of dried skin. The elephants skirt along the edge of the mire, keeping to hard ground. The mahouts whisper sweet nothings to their animals and sing songs of old travellers.

  Now they are passing through a narrow lane, flanked by stone on one side and thick shrubs on the other. In the firelight she sees fear flicker in the eyes of the footmen, and when they hesitate, Kubera chides them and goads them on, telling them that the camp is just on the other side of the passage, with the great clearing just beyond. The footmen enter first, then the horses, then the elephants at the end.

  ‘We are trapped!’ someone yells.

  ‘Stay quiet!’ says Kubera.

  ‘The entrance, it is blocked with trees!’

  ‘A trap! We have been ambushed!’

  Darkness engulfs her, and she sees nothing but hears arrows whizzing, men wailing, the feet of elephants thundering against the rocky earth. She feels herself pushed back against the cold flatness of a rock, and she looks up straight into the open aiming eye of an archer, with his shaft pointed straight at her. Before she can open her mouth the man has released his arrow, and she sees it slice into her heart, and yet she feels no pain.

  Then she sees an elephant buck
le, first trembling on her hind legs, then heaving to the front as arrow after arrow pierces her sides, causing the trunk to rise and point to the sky. She waits for a moment on her front knees, and tries twice to haul herself back to her feet, but fails, each time sinking deeper toward the ground. Then a maceman leaps into view, and turns around himself twice to gather enough momentum to land a blow on the animal’s forehead. This time it does not make a sound, but it drops down. Her eyes close, and her trunk falls away, limp and lifeless. The maceman gets out a machete and jumps at the tusks, and with two quick swishes, they are in his hands. He launches his mace onto his shoulder and looks about himself, eyes alert, his nose sniffing for new prey.

  The archer who played the bamboo flute at the brook lies dead among the fallen leaves, his chest broken in, his mouth red with blood, his eyes peaceful, fixed upon the moon in the sky. In his one hand he holds the feather-tip of the arrow he meant to shoot at his attacker, but his bow is cut in two, though the string has survived, waving in the night breeze. He has the face of a miner who whistled on the way back from work, with his mine turban hanging lopsided on his head. Gandhari thinks that he would have been in the habit of waving at young women on the way back from the lake, who would giggle at him with their hands clapped over their mouths.

  Then she sees the moment in the clearing, where rows and rows of kneeling archers rain arrows on footmen emerging from the pass. Some horses charge straight at them in useless valour, only to be dragged down by spearmen. The elephants are all frightened to a corner by a group of soldiers wielding torches, where the macemen pounce on them and pound them to the ground. The mahouts have their skulls broken.

  A stream of armoured horsemen then rides into the pass with lances in their hands, and they break into the archers who were frantically forming a circle of their own to combat the enemy. Some of them get pinned back against the rock, some of them have their limbs broken, most have their lives snuffed out before they can set their first arrows to their bows.

  And in the midst of all, she sees Kubera at the head of the clearing, along the edge of the jungle of Kamyaka, atop a white horse, silently watching. She sees his eyes, and finds no anger or lust. Behind him stand his cohort of horsemen, and none of them breaks out to attack the enemy archers. Gandhari runs to them and screams at the top of her voice, but they do not hear her. They do not see her.

  The carnage is ending. The last few men are being chased and slaughtered. Dismembered limbs and bleeding pieces of flesh hang off every bush. A horse’s head looks up at her from the ground, as though the rest of its body has been buried. Yell after yell – both of the victors and of the killed – rend the air. She slaps her hands over her ears and runs. Just as she is about to exit the clearing and enter the pass, she sees, through the corner of her vision, a lone chariot bearing a red flag. A yellow rising sun is painted on it, and though the breeze is strong, the flag seems to extend out to its full length and stand steadily.

  She does not see the man standing in the chariot, for he is hidden by shadows, but she knows who it is. She turns and resumes running, through the pass of death, toward home, toward the warmth and quiet of Gandhar.

  Gandhari woke up with a shriek, covered in cold sweat. Gathering her nightclothes she tumbled to the window to look at the fires at the mine. They were glowing as usual. She could see movement there, of white and red spots meeting and colliding, but even when she narrowed her eyes, the vision did not improve. Perhaps everything was okay, she thought, perhaps it had all been a dream.

  The doors flung open, and Chyavatana came running in. She turned to him, her gown fell away. ‘I beg your pardon, Princess!’ said he, falling on one knee. He was bleeding from the arm, from the tip of his ear. ‘We have been led into a trap! Our army … it is no longer …’

  Her eyes opened wide, but she said calmly, ‘I know.’

  ‘And the mines, my lady! The mines have been attacked. All your guards lie dead at the gate, and the enemy has taken over.’

  FOURTEEN

  Gandhari went into Shakuni’s room. He stood with his back turning away from the window, and she knew at once that he had been staring at the mines. The torches had been extinguished now, and the guards that stood by the gates wore a different uniform and carried maces and bows instead of spears and swords. He looked at her with disgust in his eyes, and he clutched his arm and dragged it across the front of his body as he limped over to his bed. She went to his side and laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘You shall be all right, brother,’ she said. ‘Bhishma will let you rule independently if you let Hastinapur take all the gold they need from our mine.’

  ‘Well,’ he spat out, ‘is that not rather kind of him?’

  ‘It is, rather. We ought to be glad that he has not killed us.’

  ‘Even death would be pleasanter than living like this, as a slave.’

  Gandhari sat on the bed and looked at her brother. She held his cheeks in both her hands and turned his head so that he looked into her eyes. ‘Brother, do you not see, that I burn just as much as you do? Do you not see that all that has happened here this last one year has just been one big plan to get hold of our mines?’

  His roving eyes focused.

  She nodded at him. ‘Why should some unknown man from the mountain come and offer us help at the very moment that we needed it? Why should Hastinapur fail to locate this one trade route, even though they had been so efficient at sniffing out all the others? Why should Bhishma, our mortal enemy, be so peace-loving and generous towards us? Why should the man from the mountain goad us into war though we were uncertain of winning it? Why should he offer soldiers of Indra to guard our mines? And why should they fail to fight against a band of archers that have come from Hastinapur, and why did they surrender our mines? So many questions arise tonight within our minds, do they not? And yet, there is but one answer to them all.’

  She released his face and looked away into the corner, where Shakuni’s assortment of swords and scabbards were kept. ‘From the beginning, Shakuni, from the very beginning, the man from the north and Bhishma have worked together.’ A sharp intake of breath came from Shakuni. ‘Accept that for a moment and look at all the questions that I have asked you. Do they not all disappear? The man called Kubera appeared when he did because he was sent here by Bhishma. He offered us all the help that he did so that he could gain our trust, which he did.’

  He gained my trust too, she thought. Was that just part of the plan too? Or had there been genuine fondness in his gaze? Her face hardened as she remembered the way his lips touched her body. She shivered in sheer revulsion, striving to push the memory out of her mind. ‘Everything he did, every strategy he implemented for us, he did with the aim of bettering Hastinapur’s chances of winning. He was fighting for them, Shakuni, from our side.’

  ‘My sister,’ said Shakuni, taking her by the arms. ‘What is it that you say? The same Kubera who gave Gandhar all the goods that she needed? The same Kubera who gave us forces to fight with!’

  ‘Whose idea was it that we should fight Hastinapur, Shakuni?’ she asked. ‘You remember the night when I asked him if war was necessary, and how he argued that it was – he was more passionate about fighting than you and I were, brother. Ah! If only we had seen through his coat of wool. I wish that I had him here in this room; I would slit his throat with that sword of yours!’

  Tears came to her eyes. ‘We did not doubt anything even when Bhishma allowed trade with the Meru people to flourish. We thought that he was helpless because the mountain men were stronger than Hastinapur. Bhishma did not stop us because that was what he wanted us to do all along. How foolish of us, Shakuni!’

  ‘And the constant refrains in his letters to you, saying that war was bad for everyone?’

  ‘He knew. He knew that the more he restrained me from fighting, the more I would be bent on doing so. It must have been their ploy all along, that Bhishma would speak against war, giving the impression that he was afraid of our might, and that Kubera would enc
ourage us to fight and take back what was ours by right. How well they played it, and we are such knaves, brother, to be fooled by the same man twice.’

  ‘I cannot believe this,’ said Shakuni, shaking his head. ‘I cannot believe this.’ She felt a faint wave of pity toward him. His eyes had a dazed look about them, and his hands trembled. Gandhari thought again that there was no king in him; never had been, never would be.

  ‘Think to yourself, Shakuni,’ she said sadly. ‘How else did we lead our army straight into a trap on the bank of the River Iravati? How did all of Hastinapur’s army attack our west gate and fell our towers? How did the supposed guards of our mines lose so easily, and where have they gone now? Where is Kubera now? He is not dead, oh no, he is perhaps sitting with Bhishma now, and they must be sharing a pitcher of wine, laughing at us. The mines … the mines are gone …’

  Her eyes welled up. She craned her neck so that she could see the extinguished torches lining the path to the mine’s gate. Brighter fires had been lit at the gate, and she saw two rows of armed men guarding it. They did not need to be there. Gandhar’s army had been decimated, and they had no resources to raise a new one. Gandhar was now utterly routed, nothing more than a slave city to Hastinapur.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘They are gone.’

  ‘We shall never reclaim them again!’

  ‘No, we shall not.’

  ‘Then all is lost, sister. You say I shall be king, but there is nothing to rule but rubble, and there is nothing to do but beg from Hastinapur, from Bhishma, the man who killed us all.’