The King They Called a Coward

He won seventeen wars and then abandoned the city, overnight, without a fight. The world called him a coward, and he never once corrected it.

Seventeen

Jarasandha had come back to Mathura's gates more times than anyone in the city could easily count.

He had sworn it after Kamsa's death. Kamsa had been his son-in-law, and Jarasandha had given two daughters to that marriage.

And he kept the oath with the patience of a man who had all the armies of Magadha to spend. Seventeen campaigns. Each one raised, marched west, broken against Mathura's defence, and withdrawn to be raised again.

Mathura held every time. Krishna and Balarama met each assault personally, and each time the city was still standing when the dust settled.

And each time it paid in the currency wars always take. Men who did not come home. Fields unplanted, because the people who should have worked them had been on the walls. Granaries thinner each year. Widows accumulating in numbers no victory procession ever accounts for.

The ministers who assembled when Krishna finally called them expected to discuss defences for an eighteenth siege.