by Various
Arjuna asked Krishna once, before the fighting started, whether it was right to kill friends, brothers, teachers in battle. Their conversation lasted fifteen minutes. Arjuna has not yet told anyone what they said, but when they finished, Arjuna blew his conch and the war began.
Once, when they all were young together, Krishna split himself into a hundred Krishnas to sleep with one hundred cowgirls. In those days, Yudhisthira thought he knew his friend. Since the war began, Yudhisthira has begun to doubt himself.
Yudhisthira turns to Krishna. “What questions should we ask?” No titles between them. They have moved beyond titles.
“You ask what is this weapon. You ask how to guard against it. You should ask: how to kill the man who wields it.” Krishna raises his hand. The fingers are long, and slender, the palm paler than the rest of him. “An armored chariot, drawn by an armored steed: difficult to overcome. But kill the driver, and what does the chariot matter?”
Arjuna lets the rear two legs of his chair fall back; they collide heavily with the floor. In the silence that follows, he stands, stretches his arms behind his head. The joints of his shoulders pop like breaking trees. “The weapon matters, because the man holds it. And while he holds such a weapon, he is invincible. Even without that weapon, I doubt any of us could best him in battle. He was our trainer. He made us. He knows how to break us.”
“The man holds the weapon,” Krishna says, “but the man is not the weapon. Convince him to set that weapon down. Then kill him.”
“He is the finest warrior in the world,” Yudhisthira says. “He will not set his weapon down just because we ask him to do so.”
“He will,” Krishna replies. “If we ask him correctly.”
“If we have a chance,” Dhristadyumna says, “we must take it. Drona has not killed any of you yet, but he is not so forgiving with our men. We cannot fight a war without them.”
Krishna smiles, and somewhere bells ring.
• • •
At dawn Yudhisthira meets the elephant. Bhima guides him; Arjuna is elsewhere, darting among the enemy ranks, slaying from above, from below, descending every so often from his chariot to kill by blade, by missile, by bow, by hand. He knows a hundred thousand ways to kill. They all do. They were well taught.
The elephant stands huge and grey and armored in the dark. His long trunk trails in the dust, and his eyes are the size of Yudhisthira’s two fists together. One jewel-tipped tusk rubs against Bhima’s armor, and Bhima laughs, and pats the creature on the forehead.
“A good soldier,” Bhima says. Yudhisthira does not expect it to be more than a good elephant. It smells of musk and earth: new to the lines, it does not yet stink of war. In the distance, the first bombs explode, and the creature pulls away from Bhima. Yudhisthira knows that elephants feel fear. “I call him Ashwatthama.” The beast calms. Its trunk twines around Bhima’s shoulders like a stole, and he hugs the trunk against his neck. He smiles, wickedly.
Yudhisthira does not smile. Yudhisthira gets the joke, and does not find it funny.
• • •
Dawn turns to morning, morning to noon. Clouds obscure the battle: dust and smoke, poison gas, magic fog. The fog does not block Drona’s sight, or his arrows. He shines on the mountaintop, a man become a god.
Ashwatthama the soldier, Drona’s son, stands in the thick of the fighting. His advance on this Pandava position, near a stand of dead jungle, has met greater resistance than the place’s limited strategic import would suggest. He has stumbled onto some secret: a cache of supplies, a hidden weapon. Ashwatthama cannot see through the dead trees. The foliage and smoke are too thick. He will press on, and investigate for himself.
Ashwatthama flows through the Pandava soldiers like a flood. His own men follow him, finishing the fallen, guarding his sides and back, but he is the leader of the wedge, and the enemy fears his flashing sword.
Ashwatthama fears, too. He lacks royal blood. He is a great warrior but he is not his father’s equal. In this sixteen days’ war he has gained respect as a fighter who does not fear pain or death, but his exploits have not earned him fame. Men still call him Ashwatthama, Drona’s son.
Ashwatthama is the son of his father, but he is more, too, and he wishes it known.
With a slash he dispatches a giant, eight feet tall with a monkey’s tail, one of the many monsters in each side’s employ. The remaining Pandava soldiers here are men, and they fall back. Ashwatthama catches one beneath the helmet strap and blood unfurls from his throat down his shining armor carapace. Another, turning to flee, is pierced where his armor joins beneath the arm, and falls. The rest retreat toward the stand of trees, and Ashwatthama pursues.
They hold these trees, this forest, important. A prophecy perhaps, that if they hold this hill they will win the war? But there are many prophecies, of victory and defeat, on each side. A weapon, hidden within? Ashwatthama cannot feel the sacred light of any divine power here, but there are ways to conceal the greatest of weapons until it is used.
Movement at the forest’s edge. Ashwatthama recognizes the shape, a man made to a bigger mold than other men, terror of the wrestling field, strongest man alive: Bhima, receding into the bushes. Bhima bears his mace, and smiles. His face is streaked with blood.
Bhima is the strongest of the Pandavas, but he is not their greatest fighter or strategist. Bhima follows the plans of his brothers. When they were children together, Ashwatthama remembers, Bhima would be the last to join any game, watching instead from the sidelines and talking softly to himself as he determined the rules. Only once he understood would he wade into play, sweeping all before him. This attitude is a product of his strength, Ashwatthama thinks. The strongest men stand still, afraid they will break the world by moving.
Bhima would not have come on his own. The others have sent him to some purpose. Ashwatthama will find out what.
Bhima is strong, but Ashwatthama is fierce, and his father has taught him secret skills. If he bests Bhima on the field of battle, the army will sing his name until the end of the world, which may not be far distant.
Ashwatthama leaps, and in spite of his forty pounds of armor he clears ten feet over the Pandava line, and lands light as a cat, sprinting forward. The dead forest embraces him. Branches and leaves ripple when he passes, like the surface of a still pool when a stone’s cast in. Then he is gone.
• • •
Drona looses an arrow with God’s power wrapped up inside it, and breaks a cliff face to rubble. An avalanche tumbles down, boulders, dirt, and chips of stone. A column of Pandava cavalry disappears in the collapse, and the falling rocks close a narrow pass through which, he expects, Yudhisthira had hoped to send a pincer movement to strike the left flank of the King’s three-pronged advance. Yudhisthira may be the wisest of men, but Drona is the master of war.
Contentment blooms inside him, as dust blooms from rubble.
Then he hears the cry: “Ashwatthama is dead!”
The dust settles.
Beneath, the war rolls on, flattening the world. Swords meet, and spears. Chariots roar, fire burns, missiles explode, elephants trumpet and warriors blow melodies of advance and retreat on conch shell trumpets. This noise he knows. Over all this a silence hangs, and Drona hears the silence for the first time now, large as the sky, vaster than ever he thought, stretching out to the stars which are not tiny dots of light but great things far away. In this silence, the cry repeats. “Ashwatthama is dead!”
He recognizes the voice.
Bhima.
Drona sweeps the battlefield from right to left and back again, and on his second sweep finds Bhima: stumbling out of a dense copse of trees, spattered in blood, carrying a bloody tunic. Ashwatthama always wore the uniform of his men. The uniform is correct. The blood looks like blood, but Drona does not expect his son’s blood to appear any different from the blood of other men. “Ashwatthama is dead!” That same-colored blood covers Bhima’s hands and face. Tears seep from his eyes and leave clear tracks in gore. H
is shoulders shake, an earthquake. He sinks to his knees. One of the King’s men sees a chance, runs at Bhima, and Bhima, artless, strikes him in the stomach with a flailing arm and breaks his spine. He sobs, and Drona remembers how Ashwatthama and Bhima wrestled one another as children. “Ashwatthama is dead!”
No other sound can touch the silence, so the words echo there.
Bhima cries. He should have taken Ashwatthama captive. That was his right, and Ashwatthama should have accepted captivity. But they strove always against one another. And Bhima does not know his own strength. And Ashwatthama does not know when to quit, or how.
He wants to make his father proud.
Still the words resound.
Drona cannot see within the copse. The trees are too dense; they have not yet been destroyed. Drona could loose an arrow to burn them from this distance, or break them to splinters, but if his son remains within, or his body…
No.
Bhima grieves, Bhima weeps. But Bhima may lie. Arjuna fights on foot, pressed on all sides, glowing with battle: he moves so fast his armor shines white with the heat of it. He would tell Drona the truth, but would also kill Drona if he approached now. Since the first days of the war, Arjuna has shown little hesitation. He is a good soldier.
Yudhisthira will know. And Yudhisthira will not lie. Yudhisthira is the best of men.
Drona seeks the Pandava command tent. Those three are fake. That fourth is in fact a trap set too close to the lines, inviting an assault that would overextend a hungry commander. There. The fifth tent, neither so far back from the line nor so close as to seem foolhardy, its flags present but not ostentatious, bristling with prayer antennas.
Drona’s bow is in his hand, and righteous fire fills him. He steps forward and the world flexes, kneels. Distance is one, a shadow of the mind. He enters the battlefield like a chess player’s hand enters the board, and stands before the Pandava tent. Men and monsters rush to meet him, but he still holds his bow, and the wheels of God turn about him. He stands within a diamond palace. His assailants quail and fall back.
He steps into the tent, into the shadows.
He expected more within. Screens reflect the light his body sheds. Chairs stand empty. Thick rugs’ thread glints gold. Drona wonders if he has been tricked. But no. Yudthisthira is here, and that is all Drona needs.
Yudhisthira is the son of the Lord of Judgment and a mortal woman. He is wise, and good, and he was never Drona’s favorite student, because there is a limit to how wise and good a man can be in war. And because of his slight sad smile, everpresent, which Drona felt, even when he was a man and Yudhithira a boy, boasted of knowledge he, Drona, would never attain. Yudhisthira has never lied. Drona would believe this of no other man, but Yudhisthira is barely a man: less, and at once more. His feet do not even touch the ground.
Drona steps forward and the light that moves with him, the light of his weapon, casts changing shadows on communications equipment, on maps and charts, on the planes of Yudhisthira’s face. Yudhisthira is not smiling.
“Is my son dead?”
Yudhisthira opens his mouth, but no sound comes out.
Drona realizes he could kill the Pandava with a thought. End the war here. He could have done this at any time, saved lives and stopped slaughter. The thought seems unimportant to him now, distant. But he could have saved—
“Is Ashwatthama dead?” he repeats, and realizes he is sobbing.
Yudhisthira’s throat tightens. “Ashwatthama is dead,” he says, and says something more, but the bellow of a nearby conch trumpet fills Drona’s ears and he falls to his knees and closes his eyes and feels the tears flow.
Souls depart the battlefield, hundreds at a time. They rise to the sky, and rising their color fades, their forms fail and they merge back with light, with God, and emerge again. But some, rising, endure. Their wills gird them in form and heavenly flesh, and shining with the glow of liberated spirit they approach heaven, and walk with gods. Ashwatthama was brave. Ashwatthama knew the secrets of the world. He would walk in heaven wearing his own skin. Drona too knows the secrets of the world, and rises to seek his son. His hands slack, and his bow falls from them. His skin ceases to glow. His fingers float by reflex into a mudra. Drona’s soul flies upward, living, and the gates of heaven open for him.
• • •
Ashwatthama hears the cries of his own death, but he cannot tell from what direction they come. The trees here are thick. He strikes one with his sword and it topples, but still he cannot see the sky. The copse is not copse at all but forest, and chasing Bhima he has wandered into its depths. All paths lead in, a spiral with no outer edge. He sprints, he doubles back, he seeks his own tracks and finds none. The marshy ground holds no footprints.
He smells blood, though, and thinking blood must be the battlefield he bears toward the stench. Through the pressing bushes, the thorns that catch in his hair and tear his skin, through the branches every one of which resembles an upraised mace, to the clearing at the forest’s heart. An elephant in Pandava armor lies there, bathed in a spreading pool of its own blood. Flies have found it already, and dart above staring eyes. A mace has caved in the elephant’s skull. A bloody handprint rests on one jeweled tusk, a final pat from its murderer.
Ashwatthama has seen dead animals before, has killed many. But he staggers back, and stumbles into the wood, and does not know why he is afraid.
• • •
Yudhisthira looks down on his enemy, his teacher, his friend. Divine power set aside, soul wandering heaven, Drona seems smaller even than other men, and Yudhisthira realizes it has been ten years—more?—since last he saw Drona face to face. Yudhisthira feels an unfamiliar pain.
The tent flap opens, and two men enter: Dhristadyumna and Krishna. Both grin triumph. Krishna holds his conch shell, and Dhristadyumna’s hand rests on his sword. Yudhisthira realizes that Krishna’s was the trumpet that blew, that kept Drona from hearing the second half of his sentence: “Ashwatthama is dead, but I do not know whether it is the man or the elephant.”
Krishna sets his conch shell down on a map table. “I thought,” he says, apologetic, “that you might not be able to carry through your piece. I doubt we needed the trumpet, though, in the end. He had already fallen to his knees.”
“I told the truth,” Yudhisthira says.
“Of course you did.” Krishna places his hand on Yudhisthira’s shoulder. Yudhisthira steps back, and feels the strange new pain sharper than before, and embraces Krishna and so stands entangled with his friend, Arjuna’s charioteer, the smiling god, when Dhristadyumna draws his sword and cuts Drona’s head from his shoulders.
Yudhisthira surges forward, his friend thrown aside, and catches Dhristadyumna’s sword arm before the general can put his blade away. Drona’s head tumbles to the left and rolls, lying on its side, mouth open. Yudhisthira feels the new pain, and his old rage, and a strange warmth. “Why?” He shouts, and the walls of the tent tremble.
Dhristadyumna pulls back, or tries, but his sword arm will not move. Yudhisthira’s grip might as well be forged iron. Dhristadyumna is a brave man, but he feels fear staring into the Pandava lord’s eyes. “What did you plan to do with him, once he’d thrown down his weapons? Did you think this would end with you both alive, and friends?”
“We could have bound him. Tied him. Locked him away.” Yudhisthira’s grip tightens, and Dhristadyumna stumbles. Pain contorts his fingers. The blade falls to the bloodstained carpet.
“You’ve seen him. I’ve seen him. He would laugh at prison walls. What bonds could we tie to hold him?”
“He would not have tried to escape. He is a man of honor.”
Yudhisthira could close his hand and shatter Dhristadyumna’s wrist. The general spits his words through clenched teeth. “He was a butcher. He was a force of nature. And we will win this war because he is dead.”
“Coward.” Yudhisthira releases the other man’s arm, and stumbles back. “Coward.”
“You knew this would h
appen,” Dhristadyumna says. “You knew. And you went ahead with it, and now you blame me.”
Yudhisthira feels the new pain again, and the new warmth.
He looks down.
He stands on the gold-thread rug, in a pool of his teacher’s blood. He stands, and the rug scrapes his feet, which have not in his many years of life ever touched the ground.
He looks up.
Dhristadyumna’s eyes are wide and dark like those of a scared animal.
Yudhisthira turns, and walks past Krishna, out the rear flap of the tent, into the light and noise and death, trailing bloody footprints.
• • •
Heaven is wheels within wheels, and each turning of every wheel a garden, a palace, a tapestry of light and choice and change. Heaven is a flower, opening.
Heaven is empty.
Drona wanders, calling, crying. “Ashwatthama! Ashwatthama, my son!”
• • •
Ashwatthama stumbles from the forest onto the broken battlefield. Above him the sky is a maze of contrails and fire. On all sides the poisoned earth stretches. Soldiers of the King and Pandavas alike clash and war, advance and retreat. Men die, and animals, and their dying looks much the same. This is the war of the world. Ashwatthama’s sword is bare, and spotted with dried blood.
He searches the horizon for his father’s light, and sees nothing.
This is the war of the world, and its heart is gone.
Tina Gower became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of “Twelve Seconds” in Writers of the Future, Vol. XXIX (2013), edited by Dave Wolverton.
Visit her website at www.tinagower.com.
* * *
Novelette: “Twelve Seconds” ••••
Short Story: “Today I Am Nobody” ••••
TWELVE SECONDS
by Tina Gower
First published in Writers of the Future, Vol. XXIX (2013), edited by Dave Wolverton