Victory City(22)

There was one thing she did understand: that the force of her sexual desires grew stronger with every passing year, as if her body’s ability to cheat time went hand in glove with an increase in the force of its physical needs. It occurred to her that she was more like a man than a gentlewoman in the matter of desire; when she saw someone she wanted, she set her sights upon him, she had to have him, and cared little for the consequences. She had wanted Domingo Nunes and she had had him, but she had lost him now, and the king with his growing puritanism was less and less to her taste. There were many preening, fawning options at court with whom a queen might indulge herself if she so chose, but for the moment she did not so choose. It was hard to be attracted to these former half-finished beings whose stories she herself had whispered into their ears. Whatever their ages, they felt to her like her children, and to seduce them would feel incestuous. And there was another question to think about: was she sucking the life and beauty out of the men she chose? Was that why they looked older than their years and died before their time? Should she abstain from all romances to spare the lives of the men she desired, and would she then begin to age like everyone else?

Such were Pampa Kampana’s preoccupations. But the imperatives of her growing sexual hunger overrode her doubts. She began looking for a man; and the person upon whom her predatory and possibly lethal gaze alighted was her husband’s brother: little buzzing Bukka, as sharp as the sting of a bee.

He was the only one who could cheer her up. He regaled her with risqué accounts of the bawdy late-night goings-on at the Cashew and invited her to spend an evening there with him and his drinking buddy Haleya, an idea so deliciously scandalous that the queen was tempted to accept his offer. But she restrained herself, contenting herself with his tall tales, by which, she noticed, she was not only amused but very frequently aroused.

Her attraction to the crown prince rapidly became obvious to everyone at court, and seemed impossible to comprehend. Bukka was no beauty of the Domingo Nunes type. By this time his body had bulged and sagged in several places, and he had the helpless look of a bulbous human root vegetable, a rutabaga or a beetroot. This sack of a man was oddly endearing to the lustful queen. And she had motives beyond mere desire. He was good with her girls, a naughty uncle whose antics delighted the princesses. It had come to Pampa Kampana in a dream that this year would be the last of her husband’s life as well as the year of Domingo Nunes’s death, and so she had to think about the future. In the absence of a clearly established line of succession the death of a king endangered all his closest relatives. Therefore it was important that she safeguard Bukka’s long-established claim to the throne, because if he was wearing the crown then her children would be safe. And if she stood by his side no man in Bisnaga would dare to stand against them.

She asked him to walk with her through the foliage tunnels, and kissed him for the first time in those secret passageways constructed by her husband. “Bukka, Bukka,” she murmured, “life is a ball that we hold in our hands. It is for us to decide what game to play with it.”



* * *



—

Of course the news of Pampa Kampana’s entanglement with the crown prince reached Hukka’s ears almost immediately, foliage or no foliage, and the cuckold king, unwilling to move against his brother, was forced for one last time to leave home on a military expedition, to conceal his shame and also, by military triumph, to erase it. It was time to kill the sultan of Madurai, who had grown too big for his boots ever since he dethroned the Hoysala king, even though he had afterward failed to conquer the old Hoysala lands, which now belonged to the Bisnaga Empire. The sultan was a nagging thorn in the empire’s side, and he needed to be dealt with. So Hukka Raya I set out on his last campaign, from which he would never return. His last words to the crown prince and the queen were very simple. “I place the world in your hands.” There was no doubt in Pampa Kampana’s mind that he feared he was going to his death. There was no need for her to confirm that he was. He hugged his brother and for a moment they were two poor cowherds again, just starting out on life’s road. Then he left, knowing in his heart that his own road would run out soon, and thinking a good deal about the world of ghosts.

Ever since the funeral of Domingo Nunes, at which he had heard for the first time the liturgical terminology of Roman Catholicism, Hukka had been perplexed by the idea that one of the Christian gods was a phantom. He was familiar with gods of all types, metamorphic gods, gods who died and were reborn, liquid and even gaseous gods, but this concept of a ghost deity disturbed him. Did Christians worship the dead? Was the ghost somebody who had once lived, who had been elevated to the pantheon by the other gods on account of his godlike qualities? Or was this a god designated for the task of overseeing the dead while the Father-and Son-gods took responsibility for the living? Or a god who had died but failed to be resurrected? Or one who had never lived, a disembodied wraith present from the beginning of time, invisibly circulating among the living, sliding in and out of bedrooms and chariots like some sort of spy watching over the good and bad deeds of the world? And if the other Christian gods could be described as Creator and Savior, was the ghost the Judge? Or simply a god with no special area of concern, a god without portfolio? It was…a puzzlement.

His mind was running on specters because in those days rumors had begun to circulate about the emergence of a so-called Ghost Sultanate, an army of the dead—or perhaps the undead—made up of the spirits of all the soldiers, generals, and princes destroyed by the rising power of the Bisnaga Empire, all of whom were now hell-bent on revenge. Tales of their leader, the Ghost Sultan, had begun to spread. He carried a long lance and rode on a three-eyed horse. Hukka didn’t believe in ghosts, or at least that was his public position, but privately he wondered if the sultan of Madurai’s forces would be supported by these invincible ghost battalions, and if he would have to face the Ghost Sultan as well as the living one on the battlefield. That would make victory almost impossible to achieve. He secretly feared, too, that his growing religious intolerance, which in his almost wholly secular (and therefore debauched) brother Bukka’s opinion ran counter to the founding idea of Bisnaga, might add to the fervor with which the ghost soldiers would oppose his forces, because, of course, they had all belonged in life to the religion which he no longer found tolerable.