Victory City(28)

She found and trained a new generation of women woodcarvers as well as women stonemasons, because most secular buildings in Bisnaga, even large sections of the palace complex, were made of wood, and because women had more complex and interesting ideas about the erotic than men did. In those years when her sons were being born and she and Bukka were enjoying each other—she had never enjoyed being with Hukka in the same way—she set out to transform Bisnaga from the puritanical world envisaged by Vidyasagar, who had managed to persuade Hukka of its desirability, into a place of laughter, happiness, and frequent and variegated sexual delight. The project was a way of extending her own newfound happiness—which had permitted her to consign Domingo Nunes to the realm of memory rather than that of pain—and offering it to the general populace as a gift. It is likely, too, that the project was also, less innocently, a kind of revenge, undertaken precisely because the great priest wouldn’t like it—the now-revered priest who had once been a monk who had not behaved, in the cave at Mandana, as monastically as he had encouraged everyone to believe.

It was Haleya Kote who came to Bukka to warn him that the plan might be backfiring.

“The thing about creating a life of delight,” the old soldier told the king as they walked through the private leaf-tunnels of the palace gardens, “is that it doesn’t really work from the top down. People don’t want to have fun because the queen tells them to, or when, or where, or in the manner she prefers.”

“But she isn’t really telling them what to do,” Bukka protested. “She’s just creating an encouraging environment. She wants to be an inspiration.”

“There are grannies,” Haleya mentioned, “who don’t like having wooden threesomes set into the walls above their beds. There are wives who are finding it difficult that their husbands look so long and carefully at the new sculptures, and husbands who wonder if their wives are being turned on by the wooden men, or, alternatively, the wooden women in these reliefs and friezes. There are parents who are finding it difficult to explain to their children exactly what’s going on in the carvings. There are sad sacks and lonelyhearts made sadder-sackier and lonelyheartier by all the portraits of other people’s joy. Even Chandrashekhar”—this was the barman at the Cashew—“says that looking at all that perfection of beauty and performance all the time, every day, is making him personally feel inadequate, because what ordinary guy could rise to such gymnastic heights. So you see. It’s complicated.”

“Chandra says that?”

“He does.”

“How ungrateful people are,” Bukka mused, “to find complication in a simple offering of public beauty, art, and joy.”

“One person’s art is another’s dirty picture,” Haleya Kote said. “There are still a lot of people in Bisnaga who follow Vidyasagar, and you know what he says about the carvings that are now crawling around the temples and infesting the public streets.”

“?‘Crawling’! ‘Infesting’! Are we talking about cockroaches?”

“Yes,” said Haleya Kote. “That’s exactly the word he uses. He’s encouraging people to stamp out the invasion of filthy roaches fucking in wood and stone. Several of the new sculptures have already been defaced.”

“I see,” Bukka said. “And so? What is your advice?”

“This isn’t my portfolio,” Haleya Kote said, backing away from a possible confrontation with Pampa Kampana. “It is something you should discuss with Her Majesty the queen. But…” And here he stopped.

“But?” Bukka insisted.

“But, possibly it would be a good idea for the empire to follow policies that do not divide us, but unite.”

“I’ll think about it,” said the king.

“I understand,” he said to Pampa Kampana in the royal bedchamber that night, “that for you the act of physical love is the expression of spiritual perfection. But apparently not everybody sees it that way.”

“This is disgraceful,” she replied. “Are you taking the side of that old bald fat fraud against me? Because he’s the one poisoning people’s minds, not I.”

“It may just be,” the king gently said, “that your ideas are too progressive for the fourteenth century. You’re just a little ahead of your time.”

“A mighty empire such as ours,” she replied, “is precisely the entity that should set out to lead the people toward the future. Let it be the fourteenth century everywhere else. It’s going to be the fifteenth century here.”





8





The three daughters of Pampa Kampana and Domingo Nunes, who were officially considered to be the offspring of Hukka Raya I, were Yotshna, “the light of the moon,” a name chosen by Pampa to refer back to the Sangama brothers’ claim of being descended from the Moon God; Zerelda, “the brave warrior woman”; and Yuktasri, “the brilliant, naughty girl.” By the middle of Bukka’s reign, when they were grown women in their late twenties, it was evident that Pampa’s prophetic gifts had allowed her to foretell their characters perfectly. Yotshna had been a serene child and had grown into a calm beauty, as radiant as the full moon over the river, as alluring and romantic as the newborn crescent rising in the East. She was born with a stammer but before anyone could notice it Pampa Kampana whispered the cure into her ear to make sure that no wicked gossip could even think of uttering the words “just like Domingo Nunes.” The middle girl, Zerelda, had been a tomboyish child, and occasionally perhaps a little too violent when playing with the daughters of courtiers, who dared not punch her back because of her superior rank and so were obliged to take their beatings without protest; and now, as an adult, she shocked the court by cutting her hair short and wearing men’s clothes. Yuktasri, the youngest, had been the brightest girl in the royal schoolhouse, and her teachers told Pampa Kampana that if she hadn’t been a princess she might have found a future in mathematics or philosophy, but her habit of playing practical jokes on classmates and teachers alike ought, perhaps, to be curbed. At sixteen, she was still the intellectual of the family, and shared one striking characteristic with her sisters: which was, that none of the three had shown any interest in finding a spouse.