The Fall of Bhishma

On the tenth day they did it the way he had told them to. Shikhandi rode to the front of Arjuna’s chariot, and Bhishma, seeing in that rider the woman Amba had been and the vow he would not break, lowered his bow as he had promised he would. And Arjuna, behind Shikhandi, wept and shot — into the grandsire who had raised him, with arrows enough to make a forest of him, until there was no part of Bhishma the shafts had not entered and he fell from his chariot at last.

He did not touch the ground. He fell onto the arrows themselves, so thick in him and around him that they held his body off the earth — the bed of arrows the epic will not let the reader forget. And he did not die. He had been granted, long before, the power to choose the hour of his own death, and he chose not then. The sun was in the wrong quarter of the year; he would wait, he said, on his bed of arrows, until it turned north, the auspicious season, and then he would go. So the most honoured man in the story lay pinned and conscious on the points of his own war, in the open between the two armies, and the fighting drew back from him.

Both sides came to him where he lay, and the war paused around him as it had paused for the Song, because Bhishma on his arrows was a kind of teaching too. He asked for a pillow and the kings brought silks; he refused them and asked Arjuna instead, who drove three arrows into the ground beneath his head — the only pillow, the dying man said, fit for a warrior. He asked for water and the kings brought it in vessels; he refused that too, and Arjuna shot a shaft into the earth and a spring of cool water rose to Bhishma’s lips. Even his dying he made into instruction: comfort offered the easy way refused, and accepted only from the hand that had felled him, in the soldier’s hard idiom.

Then Bhishma did the thing his whole life had been bent away from. He called Duryodhana to him and told him, plainly, with nothing left to lose and nothing left to guard: stop this. The Pandavas cannot be beaten; make peace even now; let the kingdom be shared and the house live. It was the counsel he had given from the ferry onward, given now from a bed of arrows by a man who had killed thousands enforcing the opposite — and Duryodhana, true to the shape the story cut for him, would not hear it from the dying any more than from the living.

Bhishma stayed on his bed of arrows, waiting for the sun to turn, and the war went on without him. His falling changed everything and resolved nothing: the side that loved him had killed him by a stratagem he had handed them; the side he led had lost the one man holding it together and would not take the peace he spent his death advising. The story leaves him there deliberately, alive at the edge of the field, so that he can watch, with the patience of a man already as good as dead, the rest of his family do to each other what he had warned them of since before any of them were born. The Kauravas turned, the next morning, to the only commander left who could hold the army — and put Drona, the teacher, at its head.