The Pandavas gone, the dynasty in the hands of Parikshit's son Janamejaya, the sage Vyasa retires to the hermitage of Badarikashrama with his student Vaishampayana and composes - through dictation to Ganesha himself - the great epic of his own grandchildren. The epic is first told at the snake sacrifice of Janamejaya, in the pauses between its rites, the same sacrifice the young sage Astika brings to an end, and a small dog's curse at a much earlier sacrifice is finally understood as a warning.

Born of Arjuna's brief marriage to the Naga princess Ulupi and raised in the underwater kingdom of his mother, the serpent-prince Iravan comes to Kurukshetra, as his father once bade him, to fight for a father he barely knows. In southern tradition, which the epic does not record, he offers himself willingly to the goddess of the battlefield; in the epic he fights like a storm and dies on the eighth day at the hands of a shape-shifting rakshasa - the first of Arjuna's sons to fall for the Pandava cause.

In the forests of exile, the sage Markandeya consoles Yudhishthira with the most celebrated of all tales of devotion: the princess Savitri, who chose a husband fated to die within a year, followed the Lord of Death himself as he carried away her husband's soul, and - armed with nothing but wisdom and persistence - talked Yama into giving the dead man back.

To console Yudhishthira - a king ruined by dice and drowning in self-reproach - a sage tells the tale of Nala of Nishadha: chosen by Damayanti over the gods themselves, possessed by the spirit of the dice, stripped of kingdom and name, and restored at last through his wife's unbreakable cleverness and a trade of horse-lore for the secret of the dice.

Passing the Pandavas' forest hermitage while her husbands are away hunting, the Sindhu king Jayadratha - husband of the Kauravas' own sister - sees Draupadi alone at the door, and seizes her. The pursuit, the rout, and the strange mercy that follows leave Jayadratha alive, shorn, and burning with a humiliation that will one day cost the Pandavas the life of a sixteen-year-old boy.

Spared from the burning of Khandava by Arjuna's word, the asura architect Mayasura repays the debt with the most astonishing building ever raised: the Maya Sabha of Indraprastha, a hall where water looks like crystal floor and floor like water. In its glittering halls, Duryodhana stumbles, is laughed at, and carries home a humiliation that Shakuni will shape into the dice game.

Oldest of all the warriors at Kurukshetra, the eastern king Bhagadatta, friend of Indra and lord of Pragjyotisha, rides his colossal war elephant Supratika into the twelfth day of the war. Before he falls, he nearly kills Bhima, shatters whole divisions, and hurls at Arjuna the one weapon Krishna must break his own vow to stop.

Humiliated by the Pandavas in the cattle raid at Virata, where Bhima captured him, King Susharma of Trigarta and his brothers swear the terrible samsaptaka oath: they will kill Arjuna or die in the attempt, with no retreat permitted on pain of damnation. Day after day they call the world's greatest archer away to the far end of the field - and their doomed errand opens the gap through which Abhimanyu walks to his death.

Itching to gloat over the Pandavas in their forest rags, Duryodhana leads a glittering expedition to Dvaitavana under the pretext of inspecting the royal cattle. At the forest lake he picks a quarrel with the Gandharva king Chitrasena, loses his army, and is dragged away bound - until Yudhishthira sends his brothers to rescue the very cousin who came to laugh at them.

In a tale the epic barely touches and later tradition tells in full: only after the pyres are lit does Kunti tell her sons that Karna was their eldest brother - and that of all his sons, one boy still lives. Vrishaketu, last child of the fallen sun, is taken in by the very men who killed his father and brothers. Arjuna makes him his own student, the throne of Anga is set back on his head, and the eldest line of Kunti's blood rides on - beside the sacrificial horse of the Ashvamedha.