The Cattle Raid and the Hidden Archer

When Duryodhana’s spies reported that Kichaka was dead — killed, it was said, by invisible husbands, over a servingwoman of unusual bearing — the Kauravas read between the lines what the story wanted them to read, and guessed that the Pandavas had surfaced in Matsya. Susharma, king of Trigarta and an old victim of Kichaka’s strength, proposed the obvious move: with Matsya’s commander dead, raid Virata’s cattle, the wealth of the kingdom, and the Kauravas would strike from another side at the same time, both to plunder Virata and to flush out whoever was hiding in his court.

It worked at first. Susharma’s force drove off the southern herds and took Virata himself prisoner in the field. The Pandavas, still in disguise, could not stay disguised and let their host be carried off — the year’s whole discipline kept colliding with the things honour would not permit, which is the parva’s argument about how thin the line is between prudence and cowardice. Yudhishthira, Bhima, Nakula, and Sahadeva went out with the Matsya army under cover of their false names, fought as cooks and grooms have no business fighting, broke Susharma, freed Virata, and recovered the herds, and the king did not understand why his kitchen and stables had won him a battle.

He understood less an hour later. While the main army was away in the south, the Kauravas struck from the north in force — Bhishma, Drona, Karna, Kripa, Ashwatthama, Duryodhana himself — and drove off the northern cattle. There was no one left in the palace to answer it but Virata’s young son, Prince Uttara, brave in talk and untried in war, and a court that knew of no charioteer for him. Brihannala — Arjuna, in the dancing-master’s anklets — offered to drive. The boy was humiliated to ride to war behind a eunuch and went only because there was no one else.

Out on the plain, seeing the whole grand army of the Kurus arrayed against him, Uttara’s courage failed completely; he leapt from the chariot and ran, and Brihannala ran after him, caught him, calmed him, and turned the chariot toward a particular tree in a burial ground where a bundle hung wrapped to look like a corpse, so that no one would touch it. Inside were the weapons. Arjuna took down Gandiva, strung it, and the year ended in the sound of that string — a sound the old men in the opposing army knew at once, the way you know a voice you have not heard in thirteen years.

He fought them all, alone, from one chariot, with a frightened boy holding the reins he had handed back: Bhishma, Drona, Karna, Kripa, Duryodhana, turned away one after another, not killed — the year was not yet a war — but beaten back and shamed, and at the last he loosed a sleep-bringing weapon that laid the whole Kuru force down in the field, and had the trembling Uttara strip the cloaks off the sleeping princes as trophies. The cattle came home. The thirteenth year had expired in the very hour of the battle, so the discovery, if it was one, came too late to cost them anything.

The disguises came off in Virata’s hall. The cook was the strongest man alive; the dancing-master was the first archer in the world; the dice-player was a king; the servingwoman was an empress. Virata, ashamed of how he had let Sairandhri be struck in his own court, gave his daughter Uttaraa not to Arjuna — who had been her teacher and would not blur that — but to Arjuna’s son Abhimanyu, the boy the war had been waiting for since the forest. The exile was over. There was a marriage, and an alliance, and a gathering of friends; and into that gathering the Pandavas now had to bring the only question left: they had kept every term of a brutal contract to its last day — would the men who set it give back the kingdom, or would it have to be taken on a field?