Victory City(19)
“For sure you will be king after your brother,” Pampa Kampana told him, “and to be perfectly frank, I can’t wait until I’m your queen.”
Bukka felt a shiver of fear run down his spine. He knew the king his brother was already finding it difficult to tolerate the continued attachment of Domingo Nunes’s handsome head to his long and elegant neck, but now another neck and head—his own—were in danger of being separated as well. If Hukka Raya received even a hint that his wife, the promiscuous beauty whom neither time nor motherhood could age or tame, was prepared to enter his brother’s bed once he himself was dead—was actually looking forward to entering it and was, by her own admission, eager for the day of Hukka’s death to arrive!—then the tide of blood would surely become a flood, and the empire would be lost in a dreadful civil war.
“You and I must never speak again,” he told Pampa Kampana, “until that day arrives.”
After that he began to drink. Haleya Kote arrived in the city with perfect timing, just when the crown prince needed a drinking buddy, and the two became inseparable. Hukka, knowing nothing of Bukka’s conversations with Pampa Kampana, deplored his younger brother’s slide into his cups, and first threatened him with removal from the royal council, which was the government of the city and oversight body of the empire, unless he cleaned up his way of life, and then, when Bukka showed no sign of changing his ways, actually did remove the crown prince from that august body, thus making a public fact of what had long been privately whispered: namely, that the two most senior figures in the empire, the founders of Bisnaga, had fallen out. Now there was factionalism at court. Those who admired Hukka’s reign, with its efficient administration and its many triumphs on the battlefield, stepped away from boozy Bukka, while those who noted that the king’s health was beginning to be poor, that he was prone to headaches, fevers, and chills, thought that their best interests demanded a greater loyalty to the heir to the throne than to the king. Meanwhile, the crown prince spent his days at the Cashew tavern, wrapped in the fogs that feni so readily induced.
Bukka was popular in the city for the good-humored buffoonery of these years, and his lack of royal grandeur. When compared to the increasingly severe and melancholy king, he came across as a figure to whom it was much easier for the citizens to relate. Afterward, when he had become an impressive monarch, people wondered if Bukka had just been playacting in those drunken days, or if he had really been a dissolute fool. Bukka himself only ever gave a cryptic answer to this question. “I made myself look foolish,” he said, “so that I might look better by contrast when I put aside my folly and put on the imperial crown.”
Nobody asked such questions about Haleya Kote, who was dismissed by everyone as an overweight and washed-up old soak. However, the truth was that Kote was a member, perhaps even the leader, of an extremist underground sect known as the Remonstrance, whose leaflets detailing the so-called Five Remonstrances accused the “structural elements” of their religion—which was to say, the priesthood—of rank corruption, and demanded radical reforms. In the First Remonstrance they asserted that the world of faith had grown altogether too close to the temporal power, following the bad example set by the sage Vidyasagar himself; and that persons in high positions in the empire’s temples should not take up posts in the city’s ruling body. In the Second Remonstrance they criticized the new ceremonies of mass collective worship surrounding the recent dedication of the new temple, which, they asserted, had no basis in theology or scripture. In the Third Remonstrance they proposed that asceticism in general, and the celibacy of holy men in particular, had promoted the practice of sodomy. In the Fourth Remonstrance they said that true believers should refrain from all acts of war. And in the Fifth Remonstrance they denounced the arts, stating that too much attention was being paid to beauty in architecture, poetry, and music, and that such attention should immediately and forever be diverted from frivolities toward the worship of the gods.
It was perhaps an indication of the rapidly increasing maturity of the city and the empire that was spreading outward from it, that it had already acquired dissidents. However, the Remonstrance had gained few followers in Bisnaga, whose citizens loved everything beautiful, took pride in the glorious architecture rising up all around them, and rejoiced in poetry and song; and who enthusiastically enjoyed the practice of sodomy as well as heterosexuality, many Bisnagans seeing no need to love only members of the opposite sex, and taking equal pleasure in enjoying the companionship of their own gender as well. In the evenings at the time of the sunset promenade it was possible to see couples of all sorts taking the air and holding hands without embarrassment: men and men, women and women, and yes, men and women too. These were not people who were likely to feel that the Remonstrance’s sexual condemnations were justified. Also, people were afraid of agreeing with the Remonstrance’s political assertions. The assault on the probity of the revered Vidyasagar—and the pacifist rejection of war, when the armies of Bisnaga had proved themselves near-invincible—and the broad accusations of public corruption—to proclaim such beliefs openly was to invite slaughter. So the Remonstrance had so far failed to grow larger than a tiny cult, and Haleya Kote drank his woes away.
All of this was known to the crown prince, but he gave no indication of knowing, either on that afternoon at the Cashew on which a temple was being consecrated elsewhere in the city, or indeed on any other afternoon. Had some spy come up to tell him that he was getting drunk with the empire’s most notorious underground rebel, its leading would-be revolutionary, he would have feigned shock and told the spy he could no longer down his feni in peace. And if Haleya Kote had suspected that a great and determined king was slowly hatching beneath the surface of the prince’s rollicking exterior, a king with detailed plans for how he would treat the Remonstrance cult, he might have worried about the safety of his own head. As it was, however, they passed their afternoons happily, without an apparent care in the world. The future was left to arrive in its own good time.