The Horse Sacrifice

A king who has won an empire by a war like this one cannot simply sit on it; the epic knows this, and so the Ashvamedhika Parva sends Yudhishthira to do the one rite that is supposed to cleanse and confirm a sovereignty — the Ashvamedha, the horse sacrifice.

The form of it is strange and exact, and the strangeness carries the meaning. A consecrated horse is set free to wander wherever it will for a year, followed by an army; every land the horse enters must either submit to the king who sent it or fight the army that follows it; and at the year’s end, if the horse returns, the great sacrifice is performed and the king is acknowledged paramount and, the rite promises, absolved. It is a year of the country re-knit by a wandering animal — submission or battle, kingdom by kingdom — and Arjuna went as the army behind the horse, fighting the realms that would not yield, including hard old grief: he fought, among others, the people of Manipura and a king who was his own son, and the parva makes him bleed for the empire he is reconfirming, so that the reader cannot mistake the rite for a victory lap.

The treasury for the sacrifice came, the story is careful to say, not from plunder but from a hoard of gold left from an old ascetic king’s renounced wealth, recovered for the purpose — the epic insisting that the rite of cleansing not itself be funded by fresh robbery, a small precise scruple after eighteen books of large ones.

Inside the parva, before the horse is loosed, Krishna gives Yudhishthira one more teaching, the Anugita — a quieter echo of the Song he gave Arjuna in the field. Arjuna, the parva admits with disarming honesty, had forgotten much of the Gita; the clarity of the chariot did not survive the war, and he asks for it again. And Krishna tells him it cannot simply be repeated — that he had spoken it once in a heightened hour and could not summon that hour back to order, and gives instead a calmer, lesser, more livable version. It is one of the most human moments in the epic: even revelation fades and has to be relearned in plainer words, and the great teaching, recovered after a war, comes back smaller and more tired and still enough to live by.

So the horse went out into the year, and the army went after it, and the kingdom was being stitched back together hoof by hoof. But a horse loosed to wander the whole earth will, the parva knows, walk eventually into the one country where the king’s own blood is waiting, untold, for the army that follows it — and there the rite of reconciliation would have to pass through one more father and one more son who did not know each other.