novelraw Arc 3 – Yudha Arambha Parva - Chapter 3 - The Fall of Uttara and Śveta
Arc 3 – Yudha Arambha Parva - Chapter 3 - The Fall of Uttara and Śveta
Sañjaya said:
Hear now, O King, of the clash of foot against foot—hundreds and thousands—where all kinship was forgotten.
Sons knew not sires, nor sires their sons; brothers remembered not brothers; the sister’s son saw not his mother’s brother; friends failed to know their friends.
The Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas fought as if seized by demons, and men fell together in tangled heaps, car splinters and shattered wheels about them.
Axles struck axles, yoke-spikes cracked against yoke-spikes, and companies crashed upon companies, each hungry for the other’s life.
Chariots blocked chariots till none could move.
Huge elephants, temples rent and streaming ichor, hurled themselves upon their like, tearing flesh in many places with tusks.
Others, towering and bannered, trained to charge at pike and hook, dashed straight at those in rut and shrieked in pain like cranes in a storm.
Well-tutored beasts, with juice pouring from temple and mouth, were hewn with swords and lances, riddled with arrows in their vital parts—
They screamed, toppled, and lay still; others turned and broke in fear.
Red rain fell where iron sang,
Swords flashed bright in blood’s cold sheen;
Blades like comets whirled and rang—
Death walked plainly, calm, unseen.
The elephant-guards, broad-chested, wrath enflamed, ran hither and thither with pikes and bows, bright axes and clubs, lances and short shafts, bludgeons tipped with iron, and sabres polished like mirrors.
The hiss and whirr of descending steel—aimed at eyes, throat, and flank—grew loud as storm; the cries of men crushed by maces and clubs, hewn by tempered blades, gored by tusks, ground under feet, rose like the wails of the hell-doomed.
Horsemen on swift chargers, tails streaming like swans’ plumes, met headlong; their gold-adorned, barbed darts flew like bright, swift serpents.
Some riders leapt high and lopped the heads of charioteers; others rained straight shafts upon close-ranked cavalry.
Elephants, cloud-bright in golden trappings, flung steeds and crushed them down; pierced on frontal globes and flanks, the beasts trumpeted in agony.
Javelins fell like meteors torn
From wrathful skies in iron light;
Mail split, tender flesh was shorn—
Day was chiseled into Night.
Some, drawing sabres from leopard and tiger sheaths, cut their foes down at close quarters; others, though their sides were cleft and their flanks laid open, rushed still with shield, axe, and sword.
Elephants with trunks upraised dragged down cars, overturned steeds and riders, and rolled across the field, guided by the cries of the drivers behind.
Here a man speared; there another axed; elsewhere men were crushed by elephants, trampled by horses, hewn under wheels.
They cried for kin—“My son!”, “My father!”, “Brother!”—“O mother’s brother!”, “O sister’s son!”—and fell upon names that could not save them.
Many, with weapons lost or thighs snapped, shrieked for water; others, awash in their own blood and sick with thirst, cursed themselves and thy sons for assembling this war.
Yet there were kṣatriyas—brave and grim—who, having hurt one another sorely, neither flung their arms aside nor uttered wails;
They lay where they fell, biting their lips in wrath, brows knotted, glaring upon their foemen with the joy of men who die unbent.
Some bore wounds like kiṃśuka bloom,
Crimson flowers on mail and skin;
Silent, steadfast in their doom,
Iron held the will within.
Others, strong of limb and stubborn of soul, endured their pain and spoke not.
Chariot-warriors, flung down and gored by elephants, begged a place upon another’s car to rejoin the fight.
Across every division rose uncounted, terrible cries.
And so, O Bhārata, in that slaughter-ground where kindness fled and rage reigned,
Fathers slew sons, sons slew sires; the sister’s son struck down his mother’s brother, and the maternal uncle repaid in kind; friend slew friend, and kindred hewed at kindred.
Thus was the harvest cut in the encounter of the Kurus and the sons of Pāṇḍu.
Dharma hid his face in dust,
Love forgot its ancient claim;
Ties of blood ran red with rust—
Only duty, grim, remained.
Then, amid that frightful press, where none spared any, the divisions of the Pāṇḍavas, drawing near to Bhīṣma, began to waver.
For the mighty-armed son of Śāntanu, O King—his silver standard bearing the palmyra with five stars—stood upon his lofty car and shone like the cool lunar orb beneath the peak of Meru.
The Wounding of the Morning — Bhīṣma’s Storm
Sañjaya said:
When the greater part of the forenoon had passed, O King, and the field was already drenched with blood, the battle flamed anew.
Durmukha, Kṛtavarman, Kripa, Śalya, and Vinda’s brother Vivingsati—urged on by thy son—gathered round Bhīṣma, son of Śāntanu, like stars guarding the rising moon.
Shielded by those five mighty car-warriors, the grandsire, blazing with fury, drove his chariot deep into the host of the sons of Pāṇḍu.
The silver palmyra on his banner glided like lightning across the standards of the Cedis, Kāśis, Kāruṣas, and Pañcālas.
His arrows—broad-headed, straight, and swift—clove heads and severed chariot-yokes; cars fell splintered, banners fell blazing; Bhīṣma seemed to dance upon his coursing car, a fire fed by the ghee of men.
Elephants pierced in their vitals shrieked aloud; tusks shattered, they crashed upon one another in crimson ruin.
Abhimanyu Challenges the Grandsire
Then Abhimanyu, son of Arjuna, seeing the slaughter and filled with wrath, spurred forward on his chariot drawn by tawny steeds.
His standard, gold-gleaming like a karnikāra tree, flashed against the palmyra of Bhīṣma.
Striking that silver banner with a keen shaft, he proclaimed his challenge before the grandsire and the five who guarded him.
His bow sang like the bow of Indra,
His eyes were flame beneath the helm;
Youth and fury in one splendour shone—
Like dawn breaking over a storm-dark realm.
He pierced Kṛtavarman with one arrow, Śalya with five, and his grandsire with nine that bit deep through armour.
With one full-drawn shaft he sheared away Bhīṣma’s golden standard; with another he struck down the charioteer of Durmukha, cleaving his neck cleanly;
and with one razor-edged arrow he cut in twain the bow of Kripa.
He smote them all again with shafts sharp as serpents’ fangs, his form aglow, as though he danced amid a rain of fire.
The gods themselves, watching, were gladdened by his skill; the elders whispered that the youth fought with the might of Dhanañjaya himself.
His bow twanged like Gāṇḍīva; drawn and loosed without pause, it whirled in the air like a wheel of flame.
Bhīṣma’s Counterstroke
Bhīṣma, the lion among men, rushed upon him and pierced him with nine arrows, cutting down Abhimanyu’s banner and wounding his charioteer.
But though Kripa, Kṛtavarman, and Śalya struck him from either side, the son of Arjuna swayed not, firm as the mountain Maināka against the wind.
Surrounded by those five warriors, he poured upon them arrowy torrents, turning aside their missiles, and his shout rose high above the din.
The force in his young arms was great indeed, and his shafts, showering upon Bhīṣma, sparkled like sunlight on steel rain.
Bhīṣma answered with divine weapons; they flashed about him like the rays of the sun upon the sea.
But Abhimanyu cut each one in mid-air, and with nine swift arrows clove down the palmyra-banner of Śāntanu’s son.
The banner, decked with jewels and edged in silver, fell earthward like the moon dropping from heaven.
A roar of joy rose from the Pāṇḍava ranks, Bhīma himself shouting aloud in pride for Kuntī’s grandson.
Youth against age, flame against sea,
Valor against vow, wrath against fate—
The boy drew blood from the sire of kings,
And the heavens trembled to see such weight.
Bhīṣma’s Rain of Arrows
Then Bhīṣma, enraged, released celestial weapons—arrows in thousands, bright as lightning and fatal as Time.
Subhadrā’s son vanished within that downpour.
Ten great car-warriors of the Pāṇḍavas sped to his aid—Virāṭa and his son, Dhr̥ṣṭadyumna of Pṛṣata’s line, Bhīma, the five Kekaya brothers, and Sātyaki, slayer of foes.
They came rushing like a river breaking its banks.
The grandsire met them.
Three arrows he planted in Dhr̥ṣṭadyumna, ten in Sātyaki, and with one keen-edged shaft he clove Bhīmasena’s golden lion-banner, so that it fell blazing to the dust.
Bhīma answered with three arrows to Bhīṣma, one to Kripa, and eight to Kṛtavarman.
The Fall of Uttara
Meanwhile, Uttara, son of Virāṭa, mounted upon a tusker with trunk upraised, charged the ruler of Madra.
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Śalya checked his onset and slew his four steeds with a single iron dart.
Uttara’s elephant placed its foot upon Śalya’s yoke, crushing the car’s front; but the Madra king, descending, hurled another dart that cleft the prince’s mail and struck him senseless.
Falling from his beast, hook and lance loosened from his hands, he lay like a broken standard.
Śalya, leaping to the ground, hewed off the elephant’s trunk; the wounded beast bellowed, sank to its knees, and died.
Then the Madra king remounted the car of Kṛtavarman and stood gleaming among the foe.
The Wrath of Śveta
Beholding his brother slain and seeing Śalya stand proud beside Kṛtavarman, Virāṭa’s son Śveta blazed in wrath like fire fed with ghee.
He bent his mighty bow—vast as Indra’s own—and rushed, showering arrows thick as rain on the Madra lord.
But seven of thy princes came to shield Śalya: Vṛhadbala of Kośala, Jayatsena of Magadha, Rukmaratha his son, Vinda and Anuvinda of Avanti, Sudakṣiṇa of Kāmboja, and Jayadratha of Sindhu.
Their bows, bright with gold and color, flickered like lightning in cloud.
They poured their arrows upon Śveta as monsoon clouds pour rain upon the mountain at summer’s end.
The commander of the Pāṇḍava host, enraged, answered with seven swift shafts that struck and broke their bows asunder.
They snatched new bows in the time it takes an eye to blink and loosed again seven arrows—
but once more Śveta, unshaken, cleft their weapons in flight.
In fury they seized seven blazing darts, crying aloud, and hurled them all together at the prince’s car.
Each missile, bright as a meteor and roaring like thunder, he cut apart with seven keen shafts.
Then, drawing one arrow mighty as the bolt of heaven, he shot Rukmaratha in the chest.
The Madra prince fell fainting, blood pouring from his wound, and his charioteer bore him away senseless from the field.
The sun was red, the dust was gold,
The sky was filled with shrieks and flame;
Each moment birthed a death untold—
And glory and ruin wore one name.
Śveta then loosed six arrows tipped with gold, shearing the standards of his six remaining foes;
He smote their steeds and drivers, drenching them in blood, and drove straight toward Śalya’s car.
A cry of “Alas!” rose through thy host, for Death seemed near the Madra king.
But then thy son Duryodhana, with Bhīṣma at the head and all his princes in support, surged forward with their divisions and rescued Śalya from the jaws of fate.
A vast mêlée followed—cars and elephants crashing together in confusion,
while Bhīṣma, the grandsire, poured down a storm of arrows upon Abhimanyu, upon Bhīma, upon Sātyaki, upon the Kekayas, upon Virāṭa and Dhr̥ṣṭadyumna, and upon the troops of the Cedis.
His bow was a serpent of lightning,
His arrows the tongues of flame;
He loosed them swift as thought itself—
And the world spoke only his name.
Thus, O Dhṛtarāṣṭra, beneath the burning sun and the cloud of dust,
the aged Bhīṣma shone—terrible and splendid—
as the moon amid the smoke of sacrifice,
and the first great day of Kurukṣetra drew on toward its blood-red noon.
Bhīṣma’s Irresistible Arrow
Dhṛtarāṣṭra said:
“When that great bowman Śveta drove toward Śalya’s car, what did my Kurus and the sons of Pāṇḍu do then, O Sañjaya? And what did Bhīṣma, son of Śāntanu, accomplish? Tell me all.”
Sañjaya said:
O King, hundreds and thousands of kṣatriya bulls—brave, bannered, and eager—closed ranks with Śveta at their van.
With Śikhaṇḍin also high in the fore, they pressed toward thy royal son, desiring to rescue the generalissimo and pierce the heart of Bhīṣma’s guard.
They stormed upon the gold-decked car of the grandsire, fain to cut down that foremost of warriors.
What followed was terrible to behold.
Śāntanu’s son emptied chariot-terraces with the speed of light; heads leapt from necks, standards toppled, yokes splintered.
Radiant with a sunlike fury, he shrouded the very sun with arrows, driving back the darkness of foes as dawn disperses night.
His shafts in hundreds and thousands, hard-fletched and fleet, harvested the lives of countless kṣatriyas; elephant-crests, iron-mailed, fell like peaks sundered by heaven’s bolt.
Cars climbed cars and steeds o’er steeds,
The living dangled, dead yet rode;
Blood wrote runes on rattling wheels—
Dharma groaned beneath the load.
Young riders in their prime, slain, hung from saddles, bows still locked in death’s grip.
Warriors with loosened mail, swords and quivers clattering, lay in hero-beds upon the earth.
They rose, they fell, they grappled hand to hand; dust climbed thick; men found their foes by bowstring’s twang and the press of bodies.
Drums split the ear; names vanished in the uproar; the sire knew not his son.
He who was slain had been half-severed ere he fell; he who lived was struck at the very vitals; none went unmarked when Bhīṣma drove upon the host.
Yet in that tumult Śveta wrought a mighty slaughter among the Kurus, lopping arms bright with aṅgadas, hewing heads and bows by the hundred.
Chariots, wheels, small and costly banners, vast bodies of horse and crowds of men—Śveta shattered all around.
Alone, like Meru in the gale,
The grandsire held an army’s weight;
Our ranks drew back beyond the hail—
And fear sat by the Kuru gate.
We, O Bhārata, fell beyond arrow-range, abandoning—even then!—Bhīṣma in the storm; only he stood cheerful, immovable, Meru amid the blast.
His golden-car rays burned like the winter sun, and his cloud of shafts struck down asuras.
Men, breaking ranks beneath his slayer’s hand, fled from him like fuel from a sudden blaze.
Even so, confronting Śveta alone, the grandsire still was whole and glad of heart; loyal to Duryodhana’s welfare, he consumed the Pāṇḍava ranks reckless of his own life.
Beholding Śveta, the general, smite thy divisions, the grandsire Devavrata rushed impetuous.
Śveta wrapped him in a net of arrows; Bhīṣma answered with a flight as vast; like bellowing bulls, like maddened tuskers, like twin tigers, they closed.
Shaft foiled shaft and flame met flame,
Each would drink the other’s breath;
Day could end a world in name,
Save Śveta stood and stayed that death.
In a single day—so burned his wrath—Bhīṣma could have consumed the Pāṇḍava host, had Śveta not withstood him.
Seeing the grandsire turned back, the sons of Pāṇḍu rejoiced; thy son grew pale.
Duryodhana, wrath enkindled, rallied kings about him and drove straight upon the Pāṇḍava lines.
Then Śveta, leaving Gaṅgā’s son, stormed thy host like tempest through a wood; having routed them, he returned again, O King, to where Bhīṣma stood.
They blazed against each other as Vṛtra and Vāsava of old.
Śveta, drawing to the ear, planted seven shafts in Bhīṣma; the grandsire checked his impetus like an elephant mastering an elephant.
Śveta smote him again; Bhīṣma pierced him with ten; the youth stood like a mountain under rain.
Śveta then with ten keen arrows broke Bhīṣma’s bow to splinters, and with an iron-plumed shaft crushed the palmyra on his standard’s crest.
Thy sons, beholding the fallen emblem, cried out, “The grandsire is slain!” and the Pāṇḍavas blew their conches in delight.
Duryodhana, stung to fury, urged all to ring the grandsire round.
Valhika, Kṛtavarman, Kripa, Śalya, Jarāsandha’s son, Vikarna, Chitrasena, Vivingsati—all sped with the fourfold host to shield Gaṅgā’s son and poured ceaseless arrows on Śveta.
The lion-hearted commander checked them all with sharp, swift shafts, then shivered Bhīṣma’s bow again with a thick, bright rain.
Seven princes roared like storming seas,
He cut their crests with strokes of light;
A single helm against the breeze—
One will against a nation’s might.
Bhīṣma seized another bow and feathered shafts with kanka-wings; Śveta, wrath aflame, riddled him yet again before all eyes.
Thy king was troubled; thy whole array grew faint to see the foremost of earth’s heroes checked beneath the youth’s fast hand.
Then Devavrata, angered, loosed a storm; Śveta broke his shafts and once more clove his bow.
Casting that bow aside, the son of Gaṅgā, senseless with rage, took up a greater, stronger limb.
Aiming seven whetted, broad-headed shafts, he slew Śveta’s four steeds with four, shore down his banner with two, and with the seventh cleft the charioteer’s head.
Śveta leapt from his car, bereft of steeds and driver, and Bhīṣma’s arrows rained upon him from all sides.
Leaving his bow upon the shattered platform, Śveta grasped a gold-decked dart—terrible as Death’s own rod—and cried:
“Wait, O best of men, and behold!”
He hurled it—bright as a serpent new-sloughed, blazing like a meteor’s fall.
Thy sire, unafraid, cut that flaming spear to nine with eight keen arrows while it sped, and thy troops shouted for joy.
Śveta, beholding his severed doom, reeled senseless with anger; his hour had come and clouded counsel.
Smiling through blood, he seized a mace like Yama’s own and rushed on Bhīṣma as a swollen torrent on the rocks.
Knowing the blow could not be lightly borne, the grandsire, mighty and measured, sprang to earth to ward it off.
Śveta’s whirling mace crashed upon Bhīṣma’s car and burned it to ash—standard, steeds, driver, and shaft.
Śalya and others hastened to the grandsire; he mounted a fresh car and, cheerless, drew his bow and moved again upon Śveta.
Then a voice from heaven, auspicious and clear, rang in the sky:
“O Bhīṣma, mighty-armed, delay not.
The Creator has fixed this hour for thy success over this one.”
Hearing the celestial mandate, Bhīṣma rejoiced in heart and set his will upon Śveta’s destruction.
Many Pāṇḍava heroes—Sātyaki, Bhīmasena, Dhr̥ṣṭadyumna, the five Kekayas, Dhr̥ṣṭaketu, and Abhimanyu—rushed united to rescue him;
but Bhīṣma, with Droṇa, Śalya, and Kripa beside, checked them like a mountain holding back the gale.
Śveta, sword in hand, cut Bhīṣma’s bow; but Devavrata, remembering the heavenly word, took up another, bright as Indra’s.
Though Śveta stood ringed by tigers among men, the son of Gaṅgā drove through, caring for Śveta alone.
Bhīmasena pierced him with sixty shafts; yet thy sire repelled Bhīma, Abhimanyu, and the rest with a tempest of iron.
Sātyaki he marked with a hundred, Dhr̥ṣṭadyumna with twenty, the Kekayas with five apiece, and advanced unbroken toward Śveta.
Then Bhīṣma chose a single death—
A shaft like Time’s own whetted breath;
Gods and gandharvas saw it flame—
A brahma-blazing tongue of death.
He set upon the string an arrow great of strain, irresistible, winged and sanctified with brahma-power.
It flashed like fire; passing through Śveta’s mail and body, it smote the earth beyond with the thunder of a falling sky.
As the sun drops to his western house drawing the light behind, so fled that shaft from Śveta’s heart, bearing away his life.
Thus was Śveta slain by Bhīṣma.
He fell like a loosened mountain-crest, and all the Pāṇḍava kṣatriyas lifted lamentation; thy sons and all the Kurus shouted for joy.
Duḥśāsana danced upon the field to conches and drums, exulting in the fall of the ornament of battle.
At the death of their commander, the Pāṇḍava bowmen trembled—Śikhaṇḍin at their head.
Then Dhanañjaya and the scion of the Vṛṣṇis slowly drew the army back to camp for nightly rest.
So, O Bhārata, both thine and theirs withdrew at last, oft rending the dusk with lion-shouts;
and the mighty car-warriors of the sons of Pāṇḍu went to their quarters, cheerless, thinking on that dreadful single combat and the fall of their general.