The Armies Assemble

Peace having been refused to the width of a needle, both sides spent the last of the parva gathering the world to one field. Kings were canvassed across every country, and old debts and marriages and fears decided which banner each rode under, until two oceans of men were moving toward the plain of Kurukshetra — eighteen armies in all, eleven to the Kauravas, seven to the Pandavas, the larger host, as the epic is careful to note, on the side with the smaller right.

The commands were settled, and each settlement carried its private grief. The Kauravas made Bhishma their supreme commander — the grandsire leading the war against the grandsons he loved, accepting it because his vow bound him to the throne of Hastinapura whoever sat on it and whatever it did. He agreed on one stated condition that shaped the early war: he would not, in the same battle, fight alongside Karna, against whom he held an old contempt; and Karna, in turn, swore not to take the field at all while Bhishma lived, so that the Kaurava side went into its first ten days with its second great archer deliberately standing out of it. The Pandavas, by Krishna’s counsel and to honour an old fire-born destiny, made Dhrishtadyumna their commander — Drupada’s son, born for the killing of Drona, set now at the head of the army Drona would face.

The rules of the war were spoken aloud before it and agreed by both sides, and the parva records them precisely because the whole back half of the epic is the story of their breaking. Fighting would cease at sundown and resume at dawn. No man would strike one who had turned away, surrendered, lost his weapon, or fought another. Equals would meet equals; chariot would not fall on foot. The unarmed, the heralds, the drummers, the animals would be spared. They were good rules, agreed by honourable men, and not one of them would still be standing by the end.

And on the seam between the camps the war began taking the people it would take, before a single arrow flew. Yudhishthira, in the last hour, walked unarmed across the open ground to the enemy line and bowed at the feet of Bhishma, of Drona, of Kripa, of Shalya — asking the blessing of the elders he was about to try to kill, and asking each, in the old courtesy, for leave to fight him. Each gave it, and each, bound to the wrong side by vow or debt or blood, told him the truth in parting: that they fought for Hastinapura because they were owned by it, that their hearts were with him, and that he would win because dharma was where he stood. It is the parva’s last and hardest image — the just king receiving permission to destroy the men who love him, from the men who love him, because every one of them is held to his place by exactly the kind of vow this story has been weighing since the ferry. Then Yudhishthira walked back, and the conches sounded, and the two armies looked at each other across the field of Kurukshetra for the first time.