Ten Days Under the Grandsire

The war began, and the storyteller’s frame holds: everything reaches us through Sanjaya, narrating to the blind king the destruction of his house, so that even the battle is a thing reported to a man who would not look.

For ten days the Kaurava army fought under Bhishma, and under Bhishma it could not be broken, because Bhishma could not be broken. The grandsire went through the Pandava ranks like weather, killing thousands a day, and the agreed rules began to bend almost at once under the pressure of a war nobody could win cleanly. Bhima found and began methodically killing Dhritarashtra’s sons one by one, keeping the first half of his oath in the hall. Abhimanyu, Arjuna’s boy, fought like his father and drew the old warriors’ astonished respect. Iravan, Arjuna’s son by a serpent princess, fell. The numbers the epic gives are deliberately past comprehension, because the point is that they had already stopped being people and become a count.

The trouble was structural and the parva states it as such: Bhishma would not fight to win. He led the Kaurava army with total skill and no appetite, killing because his vow chained him to Hastinapura’s throne, sparing the Pandavas wherever the field let him, fighting a war he wished the other side to win. It made him unconquerable and useless at once, and Duryodhana saw it and could not bear it. He went to the grandsire and as good as accused him of treason of the heart — you protect the men you are meant to destroy. Bhishma did not deny it. He told Duryodhana the truth he had told everyone since the ferry: he would fight, and fight without equal, but the Pandavas could not be defeated, because dharma stood where they stood, and no vow of his could move that.

By the tenth day the Pandava side understood that the war would not end while Bhishma lived, and that Bhishma, being who he was, would not be killed by ordinary means or by men he did not consent to fall to. So they did the thing the parva builds toward and does not flinch from naming: they went, at night, across to the enemy’s grandsire and asked him how he could be killed. And Bhishma, who wanted the just side to win and was tired in a way no battle could rest, told them. He would not raise his weapon, he said, against one who was a woman, or had been a woman, or laid down arms. In the Pandava ranks rode Shikhandi — who had been born Amba, the woman Bhishma’s arrow had unmade a lifetime ago, reborn for exactly this, the keeper of a promise made in the Adi Parva and never forgotten by the story. Put Shikhandi in the front, the grandsire said, and Arjuna behind him, and I will not lift my bow, and then you may do what you have come to do.

He told his own death to the men he was fighting because the alternative — a war without end, fought for a side he knew was wrong — was worse to him than dying. The eleventh dawn came up over a field that now knew how the unkillable man could be made to fall, and the only thing left was for the people who loved him to do it.