The dialogue had ended. The armies were moving now, the war was truly beginning, and Sanjaya had many grim things he would soon have to report to the blind king. But for one more moment, he could not pull his mind away from what he had heard.

It was strange, he thought. He had witnessed so much already — chariots like thunder, banners snapping in the wind, the terrifying blast of a thousand conches. Those sights were huge. Yet it was not those that kept returning to him. It was the quiet talk. Two men in a single chariot, speaking softly while the whole world held its breath.

Every time the conversation came back into his mind, something happened inside him. A warmth spread through his chest. A lightness lifted his shoulders. He felt the way a person feels when they remember being loved.

"O King," he said, almost to himself, "I keep remembering it. I remember Arjuna lowering his bow in sorrow. I remember Krishna's patient voice. I remember how, word by word, the darkness in Arjuna's heart was answered with light. And each time the memory returns — and it returns again and again — I find myself rejoicing all over again, as if hearing it for the very first time."

He had heard plenty of clever speeches in the king's court. They impressed you once, and then you forgot them. But this was different. This holy conversation was like a deep well: every time he lowered the bucket of his memory into it, the bucket came up full and cool and fresh.

Sanjaya understood then that some treasures are not used up by remembering. They grow. The more he turned the dialogue over in his heart, the brighter it shone. He knew he would carry it for the rest of his life, and that on his hardest days he would reach for it, remember it once more, and feel that same quiet, returning joy.

"Again and again," he murmured, smiling in spite of the war about to begin. "Again and again, I rejoice."