Victory City(24)
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(Before Hukka could enter Madurai in triumph, Ibn Battuta made his escape, thinking it wiser for the foreign spouse of a member of the vanquished dynasty to absent himself from the scene; so there is no mention of the Bisnaga Empire in that great man’s celebrated travel journals, and we may allow him to leave these pages without further comment. Of his abandoned wife there is no more news. She has faded from history, and even her name is a matter of some conjecture. Poor lady! It is always unwise to marry a footloose, traveling man.)
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After Hukka entered Madurai he learned the tales of the gruesome dynasty whose rule he had just terminated, and he immediately thought of his own family, and regretted his recent estrangement from his brother the crown prince, and his longer alienation from his other siblings. He commanded the four cavalry riders with the fastest of all the horses in the army to gallop home to Bisnaga with a letter for Bukka, and to take similar letters to his three other brothers, Chukka in Nellore, Pukka in Mulbagal, and Dev in Chandragutti.
“These people in Madurai have been killing each other every few weeks for several years, it seems,” he wrote, “sons killing fathers, cousins killing cousins, and yes, there’s fratricide as well. The doings of this gory clan have made me love my family even more fiercely than I did before. So I am writing to tell you, my beloved kin, that I will not lift a finger to harm any of you merely to keep my hold on power. I trust you all not to move against me either, and I beg you to trust one another, and do no harm to your own blood. I’ll be home in Bisnaga soon and all will be well, as it has long been. I love you all.”
When Bukka received the letter he read it as a veiled threat. “The bloodbath in Madurai has given the king some bloody ideas,” he told Pampa Kampana. “We need to be certain that we have a protective armed phalanx around us at all times from now on. These letters will have agitated our brothers also, and who knows? One or all of them may decide it’s better to strike before they are struck.”
Pampa Kampana’s first thought was for her children, even though, being daughters—by this time they were beautiful teenage girls—they would be seen as less of a threat than sons. Maybe she needed to leave Bisnaga and seek shelter—but where?—the king’s brothers were not to be trusted, everywhere else in the empire was under Hukka’s control, and everywhere outside the empire was hostile. Bukka suggested that the princesses were safe while Hukka lived, but when the king died she should disguise her daughters as poor cowherdesses and send them to the Sangamas’ remote village of origin, Gooty, built in the shadow of a great wall of rock, where there were people who would look after the girls. “This will only be necessary for a short time, until I have established control over the kingdom,” he reassured her. “But in case I fail, whoever usurps my rightful claim, whether it’s Chukka or Pukka or Dev, will never imagine the girls might be there,” he said. “Since they became little kings in their little forts they have forgotten their roots and I doubt they even remember that Gooty exists. They weren’t there for long, anyway, preferring to embark on a life of crime.”
So began the first paranoid panic in the history of the Bisnaga Empire. In Nellore, Mulbagal, and Chandragutti the Sangama siblings began to eye their spouses, the Sisters of the Mountains, with increased suspicion, because maybe they had received secret messages from the king and were getting ready to kill their husbands. And Pampa Kampana secretly started preparing for her daughters’ flight to the cows of Gooty. Bukka sent back to Hukka the most loving message he could manage and then prepared for trouble.
Such moments can presage the fall of empires. But Bisnaga did not fall.
Hukka fell instead. On his way home from Madurai, riding at the head of his troops, he suddenly cried out and dropped off his horse. The army came to a grinding halt and a royal tent and field hospital were erected with great haste, but the king was comatose. After three days he briefly awoke from his coma and his attending physician asked him questions to try to determine the state of his mind.
“Who am I?” the physician asked.
“A ghost general,” Hukka replied.
The doctor pointed to his nursing assistant. “Who is he?” he inquired.
“He is a phantom spy,” answered the king.
An orderly came into the field hospital tent bearing clean linens. “Who is he?” the doctor asked Hukka.
“He’s just some spook,” Hukka said dismissively. “He doesn’t matter.” Then he sank back into what proved to be his final sleep. And just as the army reached Bisnaga it was announced that the king was dead. Afterward as the story of his last words was whispered among the troops there were many who were prepared to say that they had seen the phantom army of the Ghost Sultanate approaching, they had watched with terror as the ghost general charged toward the king on his three-eyed horse, and witnessed Hukka Raya I’s chest being pierced by the general’s translucent lance. But for every man who was willing to spin such yarns there were ten who said they had seen nothing of the sort, and the field doctors’ consensus was that the king had suffered a medical crisis in the brain and possibly in the heart as well, and no occult explanation was necessary.
The funeral rites of the first king of Bisnaga provided a solemn moment which, Pampa Kampana told Bukka, was the final act of the coming-into-being phase of the empire’s history. “The death of the first king is also the birth of a dynasty,” she said, “and another word for the evolution of a dynasty is history. On this day Bisnaga moves out of the realm of the fantastic into that of the historical, and the great river of its story flows into the ocean of stories which is the history of the world.”