Victory City(17)
“I fail to see the humor,” Hukka huffily said, but Pampa Kampana was weeping as she pointed a hilarious finger in his direction. “Your face,” she said, “it’s covered in spots. Suppurating zits, good gracious. Every time you used one of those unkind words, another one burst out of your skin. I think you had better clean up your tongue or your whole face might just become one big boil.”
Hukka brought his hands up to his face in alarm and felt his forehead, cheeks, nose, and chin, and there they were, the pustules. It was clear that Pampa Kampana’s magic extended far beyond the enchantment of seeds. He realized that he was scared of her, and a moment later understood, additionally, that his fear of her magic was sexually arousing.
“Let’s get married right away,” he said.
“As long as you’re clear about my terms,” she insisted.
“Whatever you want,” he cried. “Yes, I accept. You are so unbelievably dangerous. I must have you.”
After the wedding, and for the first twenty years of the Bisnaga Empire, Queen Pampa Kampana openly maintained two lovers, the king and the foreigner, and even though both men were unhappy about the setup, and often said as much, Pampa moved between the two of them with a serenity that suggested she had no difficulty with the arrangement, which only increased their displeasure. Consequently, they both found ways of being absent for long periods from the source of their discontents. Domingo Nunes, having provided the empire with a large storehouse full of powerful explosives, flung himself back into horse-trading, finding in the love of horses some consolation for having only half the love of the woman of his dreams. As for Hukka Raya I, he embarked on the great business of empire-building, establishing formidable fortresses at Barkuru, Badami, and Udayagiri, conquering all the lands around the Pampa river, and earning the right to be named the monarch of the whole country between the eastern and western seas. None of it made him happy. “It doesn’t matter how much land you have,” he complained to Pampa Kampana, “or how many seas you can wash your feet in, if your wife has beds in two different houses, and you’re only in one of them.”
In Hukka’s absence Bukka tried to intercede on his brother’s behalf. He took Pampa Kampana for a walk along the bank of the river whose name she bore to encourage her to give up her liaison with the foreigner. “Think of the empire,” he implored her. “We all bow down before you as the enchantress who brought all this into being, but we expect you to remain in a high place and avoid slipping into the gutter.”
The harshness of that squalid noun, gutter, stirred Pampa to reply. “I’ll tell you a secret,” she said. “I’m going to have a child, and I’m not sure which one of them is the father.”
Bukka stopped walking. “The child is Hukka’s,” he said. “Be in no doubt about that, or the city you have built will crack and break and the walls will tumble down around our ears.”
In the next three years Pampa Kampana gave birth to three daughters and after that the foreigner’s name could never be spoken within the palace walls or anywhere that her husband was present, and nobody, on pain of death, was allowed to notice the young princesses’ Iberian good looks, their fair skin, their reddish hair, their green eyes, and so on. In the future these attributes would create dissension in the kingdom, but for the moment their right to be members of the royal lineage was beyond dispute. But Hukka himself noticed what there was to notice, and his demeanor grew dark and withdrawn, also because Pampa Kampana had proved incapable of bearing him a son. As the years passed, his sadness grew, and in spite of all his military triumphs he became known as a monarch of gloomy disposition. When he was out fighting and conquering he felt better, because killing his adversaries on the battlefield was preferable to not being able to kill his romantic adversary back home. Every man he killed had the face of Domingo Nunes; but the satisfaction didn’t last long, because the real Domingo was back in Bisnaga fucking the queen. Hukka came back to his palace soaked in blood and dissatisfaction, and his feeling of unrequited love turned him toward God.
On a hot dry day in the last year of his reign he summoned all his brothers to a meeting at the Mandana mutt, to dedicate the new temple being built there. By this time Chukka Sangama was established as the regent of Nellore, Pukka was the unquestioned strongman of Mulbagal, and Dev was firmly seated on the kursi of Chandragutti. They arrived at Mandana surrounded by the splendor of their mounted knights and many flags, and they had made wives and princesses of their guardian warriors, the Sisters of the Mountains, Shakti, Adi, and Gauri. Hukka watched his married brothers arrive with some envy—their women were not sleeping with bastard foreigners, were they?—but then he remembered that the Sisters were under orders to slit the throats of their husbands if they ever so much as thought of rising up against the king in Bisnaga, which was to say, himself. And he was the one who had given those orders, and the loyalty of the Sisters was beyond question.
“I guess it’s better to have an unfaithful spouse,” he told himself, “than one who is more loyal to your brother than to you, and whose knife, therefore, is always very close to your treacherous throat.”
Chukka, the loudmouth brother, professed himself amazed by what he saw at Mandana. “What happened here?” he cried. “Did some god show up and decide to turn the monk’s cave into a palace?” For Mandana was in the process of becoming a majestic religious destination, thronging with pilgrims and priests, boasting architecture-in-progress that promised to become as ornate as the old, ascetic refuge of the sage Vidyasagar, the Ocean of Knowledge, had been plain.