Ashvatthāmā

As the sun set on the last day, the dying Duryodhana lay stretched on the bloody earth, and there came to him the three survivors of his host: Ashvatthāmā, Kripa, and Kritavarmā. And Ashvatthāmā, Droṇa's son, consumed with rage at the unchivalrous killing of his father and the foul blow that had felled Duryodhana, swore a terrible oath before the dying king: that this very night he would wipe the Pāṇḍavas and all their line from the earth.

And Duryodhana, with his last breath, anointed him supreme commander, and found a cold solace in the vow, and died.

That night, as the three rested beneath a great banyan tree, Ashvatthāmā watched an owl steal silently among the branches and fall upon the sleeping crows, slaughtering them defenceless in their nests; and he took from the owl a black inspiration, that when one's army is destroyed, any means is justified, even the killing of sleeping men. Kripa pleaded with him desperately to desist, warning that the slaughter of sleeping, defenceless men was an unspeakable crime that would blacken his name forever.

But Ashvatthāmā was deaf to it, declaring that the Pāṇḍavas had already broken the embankment of dharma when they killed his father and Karṇa, and that no law bound him now.

And under cover of the dark the three crept into the sleeping Pāṇḍava camp, where the five brothers and Krishna, by fortune, were absent that night. And Ashvatthāmā went through the camp like a butcher: he kicked Dhrishtadyumna to a suffocating death, denying him even a weapon in his hand; he slaughtered the sleeping Pānchāla warriors; and he cut the throats, one by one, of the five young sons of Draupadī as they slept. And Kripa and Kritavarmā fired the camp and cut down any who fled the flames.

And Ashvatthāmā returned to Duryodhana's corpse, triumphant and spiritually ruined, and announced that the Pāṇḍava line was erased.

But it was a hollow and a horrible victory, for he had killed only the sleeping children and not the brothers themselves; and when Yudhishthira returned in the morning to find his camp in ashes and his children murdered in their beds, he wept that their hard-won victory had turned to an absolute defeat of the soul, that they had won the war and lost everything that made the winning sweet.

The Pāṇḍavas pursued Ashvatthāmā to the hermitage of Vyāsa; and there, cornered, he loosed the ultimate weapon, the Brahmashira, and Arjuna loosed his own to meet it; and the sages, seeing that the meeting of the two would destroy the world, commanded both to withdraw them. Arjuna could withdraw his; Ashvatthāmā did not have the skill, and could only redirect his, and in his malice he aimed it at the womb of Abhimanyu's widow, to kill the last unborn heir of the Pāṇḍavas.

And for this final crime Krishna cursed him: to wander the earth for three thousand years, alone, diseased, an outcast, bearing forever the rotting weight of his deeds, while the child in the womb, though struck, would be revived by Krishna's grace to carry on the line.

So ended the eighteen days of Kurukshetra, in victory and in ashes, the evil of Duryodhana destroyed at last, but at a cost so terrible, so many dead, so much honour broken on both sides, so many children murdered, that the victors could scarcely tell their triumph from their ruin. And the world passed, in that ending, out of one age and into a darker one, and the survivors stood among the corpses of nearly all they had loved, and had to learn how to live in the grey aftermath of a victory that had cost them everything.