Victory City(25)
Things calmed down quickly after that. Pampa Kampana had not sent her girls into exile in Gooty to pretend to be cowherds. She had gambled her family’s safety on her presumption that if she stood beside the crown prince, nobody would dare to raise a hand against him. And so it proved. Courtiers, nobles, and military leaders quickly acknowledged Bukka Raya I as the new ruler of Bisnaga and so did the Sisters of the Mountains. Bukka’s three surviving brothers, immensely relieved that their wives had not killed them when they learned of Hukka’s demise, journeyed to Bisnaga City to kneel before their new monarch, and that was that. Bukka Raya I would reign for twenty-one years, a year longer than his deceased brother, and these years comprised the first golden age of Bisnaga. Hukka’s puritanical religious sensibilities were replaced by Bukka’s happy-go-lucky lack of religious rigor, and the mood of so-what tolerance in which the city and empire had been born returned. Everyone was happy except for the priest-turned-politician Vidyasagar, who expressed to Pampa Kampana his displeasure at the return of an air of loose-moraled levity, at the indulgence shown toward members of other faiths, and at the new regime’s theological laxity.
But she was no longer the traumatized little girl he had once taken into his cave and—in her unspoken words—abused. So she chose, quite simply, to ignore him.
7
On the first day of his reign Bukka sent for his old drinking buddy. Haleya Kote, whose life had been spent in army camps and cheap hostelries, was thrown off balance by the grandeur of the royal palace. He was escorted by expressionless women warriors past ornamental pools and splendid baths, past stone reliefs of marching soldiers and saddled elephants, past stone girls with flared skirts dancing in stone unison beside musicians drumming on stone drums and playing sweet melodies on flutes of stone. Above these friezes the walls were lined with silken cloths onto which pearls and rubies had been sewn, and there were golden lions standing in the corners. Haleya Kote felt overawed in spite of all his secret radicalism, and also afraid. What did the new king want with him? Maybe he wanted to erase the memory of his boozy past, in which case Haleya Kote feared for his neck. He was brought by the women warriors into the Hall of Private Audience and told to wait.
After an hour alone in the presence of shimmering silk and stone magnificence Haleya Kote’s nervousness was much increased, and when at last the king entered, accompanied by a full retinue of guards, butlers, and handmaidens, Haleya became convinced that his last hour was at hand. Bukka Raya I was no longer little round Bukka of the Cashew. He was splendid—dressed in gold brocade, with a cap on his head to match. He seemed to have grown. Haleya Kote knew he could not actually have increased in size, that that was just an illusion created by majesty, but even that illusion was enough to heighten the grizzled old soldier’s discomfiture. Then Bukka spoke, and Haleya Kote thought, I’m a dead man.
“I know everything,” Bukka said.
So this wasn’t about the drinking. Now Haleya Kote was even more convinced that his last day had come.
“You are not who you seem to be,” Bukka said. “Or so my spies inform me.” This was the new king’s first admission that throughout his brother’s reign he had maintained his own personal security and intelligence unit, whose officers would now replace the Hukka team, whose members would be encouraged to retire to small countryside villages and never return to Bisnaga City.
“My spies,” Bukka added, “are very reliable.”
“Who do they say I am?” Haleya Kote asked, although he already knew the answer. He was a condemned man asking to hear the sentence of death pronounced.
“You remonstrate, is that the word?” Bukka said very gently. “And indeed it is my information that you may be someone my late brother deemed a person of great interest, the actual author of the Five Remonstrances, and not simply a disciple of the cult. What’s more, to conceal your authorship, you do not behave like the religious conservative the author would appear to be. Either that, or your declarations do not align with your true character, and are made to acquire for you a following you don’t deserve.”
“I will not insult your intelligence team by denying what you know,” Haleya Kote said, standing very upright, as a soldier should at a court-martial.
“Now, regarding the Five Remonstrances,” Bukka said. “I’m in complete agreement with the first. The world of faith should be separated from the temporal power, and from this day forward, that will be the case. As for the Second Remonstrance, I agree that these ceremonies of mass worship are alien to us, and they too will be discontinued. After that things get a little stickier. The link between asceticism and sodomy is not proven, nor is the link between celibacy and that practice. Furthermore, it is a form of pleasure enjoyed by many in Bisnaga, and it is not for me to prescribe what kinds of pleasure are acceptable and which illegal. Then you require that we refrain from all military adventures. I understand that like many seasoned soldiers you have a hatred of war, but you in your turn must acknowledge that when the interests of the empire require it, then into battle we will go. And finally, your Fifth Remonstrance against art is the work of a true philistine. In my court there will be poetry and music and I will build great buildings too. The arts are not frivolities, as the gods well know. They are essential to a society’s health and well-being. In the Natya-Shastra Indra himself declared the theater a sacred space.”