Victory City(102)
The young Acharya, named Ramanuja after the legendary eleventh-century saint, greeted her at the door to the residences. “The war is lost,” she told him. “The victors are coming.” He did not ask her how she knew. “Come inside,” he said. “Maybe they will have the grace not to murder the monks or to desecrate this holy place.”
“Maybe,” Pampa Kampana replied. “But I do not think this will be a time of grace.”
* * *
—
A runner arrived in the city, at death’s door after running one hundred miles from the Talikota battlefield, and lived just long enough to give news of the defeat. After that the city was plunged into chaos. The army of the Four Sultanates was on its way and the army of Bisnaga had fled, hundreds of thousands of warriors dispersing pell-mell into the immensity of the countryside. Only the seven circles of walls remained to shield the city from the horde now descending upon them. But the soldiers on the walls had lost their nerve and they were fleeing too, and people understood for the first time that no wall would save them if there were not human beings upon it; that in the end the salvation of human beings came from other human beings and not from things, no matter how large and imposing—and even magical—those things might be.
As the news spread that the defenders on the walls had run away, the city surrendered entirely to panic. Crowds filled the streets, carrying possessions, loading carts, harnessing bullocks, stealing horses, seizing whatever was there to be seized, fleeing, fleeing. One million people, desperate to get away, anywhere, even though they knew that the empire was collapsing so there would be nowhere to hide. Men and women were weeping openly and children were screaming and even before the enemy had arrived the looting had begun, because greed exists, and can be an even more powerful driving force than fear.
One day after the calamity at Talikota, Aliya Rama Raya and Tirumalamba Devi’s surviving son, Tirumala Raya, came back to Bisnaga, wounded in the arm and leg and with a bandaged head, but staying on his horse, and accompanied by the small force of two dozen loyal soldiers who had helped him get away from the bloody rout, a ferocious band of old-timers who had fought their way out of the killing field, led by the most ferocious old-timers of all, Thimma the Huge’s almost-as-enormous descendant Thimma the Almost As Huge and Ulupi Junior’s blood kin, Ulupi the Even More Junior. “All seven gates to the city stand open!” Tirumala Raya cried out in the midst of the great bazaar. “We need good men, and women too, to close the gates and defend the city! Who will come? Who is with me?” Nobody paid any attention, even though, now that his father and brother were dead, he was technically the king. His was a ridiculous voice from another age of the world, an age of confidence, courage, and honor. In this new dark age, the age that had begun one day earlier, it was every man for himself, yes, and every woman for herself as well. The new king on his horse might as well have been a phantom, or a statue made of stone. The citizenry swarmed around him and ignored him. He was not a hero returning from the war. He was just a beaten fool.
Tirumala Raya changed his plan. “We must go at once to the treasury,” he said, “and we must collect all the gold we can. Then we must go south to Srirangapatna. That is my family’s kingdom and the sultans will not dare to follow us there, so far from their own lands. We will be welcome there, and safe, and with the gold we will not be dependent on anyone, and we can rebuild an army, and begin to save the empire from these foes.”
“Your Majesty,” Thimma replied, “excuse us for saying this, but no.”
“Our place is here,” Ulupi said. “We will stand at the city gates and face the enemy and strike terror into his black heart.”
“But the enemy is perhaps half a million strong,” Tirumala Raya cried, “and heavily armed, and made bold by victory. And you are only two dozen. They will kill you immediately and you will have achieved nothing except your own deaths.”
“Five hundred thousand of them against twenty-five or so of us,” Ulupi said thoughtfully. “That sounds reasonable. Thimma, what do you say?”
“Very fair,” Thimma replied. “I like those odds very well.”
The young king was silent for a moment. Then he said, “You’re absolutely right. The bastards have no chance. I will stay as well.”
“And the treasury?” Ulupi asked.
“To hell with the treasury,” Tirumala Raya replied. “Let’s go to the gates.”
* * *
—
On the third day after Talikota the army of the alliance reached the gates of Bisnaga. Pampa Kampana stood in Madhava Acharya’s cell hugging the Garuda Purana to her chest like a shield. The noise of the descending marauders was like the baying of a thousand wolves, and the sounds of the despairing people of the city like the death-shrieks of helpless sheep. She heard voices crying out in disbelief, because the seven walls had collapsed, had crumbled away like dust, as if their magic could not survive the city’s despair, as if their foundation had been its confidence and hope, and when those vanished, the illusion could not be maintained. After the dissolution of the walls the thunder of the assault filled the sky. Lost somewhere in the grand cacophony of death was the last stand of the two dozen, who fought their last fight, led by the last king, until the arrival of the angel of the end, Death himself, known in the ancient tales as the Destroyer of Delights and the Severer of Societies, the Desolator of Dwelling Places and the Garnerer of Graveyards. Death. The streets ran with blood and the air was full of vultures and the treasury was looted and everything that could be taken was taken, including human life. And there were flames, eating at the buildings of bricks and wood, until only their stone foundations remained. For what felt like forever, but might have been six months or six hours, or six days, there was the sound of smashing: the destruction of palaces and statues and all that had been beautiful. The giant statues of Lord Hanuman and of the goddess Pampa were broken into so many pieces that afterward it was impossible to believe that such statues had ever existed. The bazaar burned; the “foreigner’s house” burned; almost all that had been the capital city of the empire of Bisnaga was reduced to rubble, blood, and ash. Even the oldest temple, the so-called Underground Temple because it had emerged fully formed from beneath the earth on the day of the scattering of the seeds when Bisnaga was born, was burned and utterly destroyed. The monkeys who lived there ran for their lives from the flames.