The horses had grown still. On the charioteer's seat, Krishna held the reins lightly, and the morning light caught the blue of his skin like sunlight on deep water.

"You asked how I could have taught this yoga long ago," he said, "when I stand beside you now, young and living. Let me tell you a secret about myself, Arjuna. I do not come only once."

Arjuna lifted his head from his hands.

"Picture a lamp in a great hall," Krishna went on. "Through the long night, the wind keeps slipping under the doors. Again and again it gutters the flame down to a thread of orange. And again and again, a quiet hand cups the lamp and feeds it oil, and the light steadies and grows tall once more. The hall is never left in darkness for long."

He turned, and his eyes were ancient and kind at the same time.

"I am that hand. When the good and gentle are crowded into corners, frightened, when the cruel grow loud and trample what is sacred, when the right way of living lies fallen in the dust — then I gather myself and step into the world. Sometimes as a prince. Sometimes as a child. Once, they say, as a fish; once as a great tortoise carrying a mountain on its back. The shape changes. The purpose never does."

A breeze moved across the plain, and the banners of both armies stirred.

"I come to lift up the good," said Krishna, "to halt the hand that wounds the weak, and to plant the right way firmly back into the earth like a young tree pressed into soil and watered until it stands. Not once. Age after age. In every era, whenever the lamp burns low, the hand returns."

Arjuna was very quiet. The whole field seemed quiet with him — the horses, the wind, the waiting soldiers, all leaning in toward the charioteer's small, certain voice.

"Then you have done this before," Arjuna said slowly.

Krishna smiled. "Many times. And the night is not over yet."

Far off, the first sun broke fully over the hills, and the dew on a thousand spears began, one by one, to shine.