Victory City(30)

All hell broke loose. The first circle of hell was right there in the council chamber, where Bukka Raya I was plunged into the inferno of impossible choices—to support his wife and outlaw his children, or to protect the little princes and alienate Pampa Kampana, maybe permanently—while all around him were the members of the council, looking in his direction, trying to decide which way they would jump after he had made his own unhappy leap. If he exiled the boys it could destabilize the empire and perhaps even lead to civil war; if he refused Pampa Kampana’s demand then who knew what occult devastation she might rain down upon Bisnaga? As she had created it, might she not also be its destroyer?

“We need time,” he said. “This requires much consideration. Until we deliver our opinion, the princes will remain here under the protection of the palace guard.”

No decision was the worst decision. The next day, as the news spread, fights broke out in the city streets, and there were many violent assaults on women by those who opposed the queen’s position, and these crimes dragged Bisnaga into the second circle of hell. On the third day the stores in the bazaar were looted by criminal gangs seeking to profit from public disorder, and on the fourth there was even a brazen attempt to rob the city’s treasury with its huge vaults of gold. By the fifth day the whole city was full of rage, this faction against that one, and on the sixth day each faction was accusing the other of heretical thinking, and on the seventh day the violence was out of control. For this entire week Bukka Raya I sat alone in his private chambers, almost immobile, barely eating or sleeping, pondering, seeing nobody, not even the queen. At last Pampa Kampana forced her way into his presence and slapped him across the face to snap him out of his reverie. “If you don’t act now,” she told him, “then everything will collapse.”

To quote Pampa Kampana’s own words at this important moment in the narrative (because my own might not be trusted when such discord must be described): “When Bukka Raya awoke from his confused slumber, he was as powerfully decisive as he had been indecisive before.” In quick succession he accepted and agreed with Pampa’s requests, insisted on and received the royal council’s assent, sent his three little boys into exile, and dispatched the women warriors of the palace guard, as well as a substantial body of soldiers from the military cantonment, into the city streets to restore order.



* * *



—

(It is very striking that Pampa Kampana, describing these crucial and painful events in her book, writes about them without a trace of emotion, giving no hint of what must surely have been the case, that she must have felt anguished and conflicted at her sudden and absolute rejection of her sons; that Bukka too was deeply torn between his love of his wife and his paternal feelings for his children; and that to choose his wife over his sons was—to say the very least—an unusual and unexpected move for a man of his position, and his time. She simply records the facts. Off into exile went the arrogant little boys, and the princesses ruled the court. We begin to see that Pampa Kampana possessed a startling—an almost frightening—streak of ruthlessness.)



* * *



—

It didn’t take long for the city to calm down. Bisnaga was no primitive civilization. In her early creative whispers Pampa Kampana had imbued its newborn citizens with a strong belief in the rule of law, and taught them to value the freedoms they would enjoy under the law’s umbrella. The umbrella became the most important fashion accessory in the city, a sign of status, and a symbol of patriotic reverence for justice and order. In the streets of the city every day the umbrellas paraded in all the colors of the rainbow, with golden tassels dangling from the spokes, some brilliantly patterned in paisley swirls or abstract zigzags, some with tiger motifs or with birds flying all over them. The umbrellas of the wealthy were set with semi-precious stones and made of silk, but even the poor had simple umbrellas over their heads, and the variety of the designs spoke of the diversity of cultures, faiths, and races to be found in those streets, not only Hindu, Muslim, and Jain but also the Portuguese and Arab horse-traders, and Romans who came with great jugs of wine to sell and spices to buy; and the Chinese were there too. Bukka Raya I had sent an ambassador to Zhu Yuanzhang, known as the Hongwu Emperor, in the first Ming dynasty capital of Nanjing; and some years later, after a family coup led to the shifting of the capital to Beijing, meaning “Northern Capital,” the new emperor’s great general (and eunuch) Cheng Ho, who liked to travel, came to visit Bisnaga in return. He, too, had an umbrella, and the design of his golden Chinese parasol spawned many local imitations. The umbrellas revealed the cosmopolitan open-mindedness of the city, and it was that open-mindedness that led, after some days of discontent, to the people accepting Bukka’s decree, so that Bisnaga became the first and only region in all the land where people could contemplate the idea of a woman sitting alone upon the throne.

But the trouble rumbled on. Bukka sent his spies into the city to find out what was bubbling down below the apparently peaceful surface. The news they brought back was troubling. The reality that had emerged during the troubles—the factions, the criminals, the rage simmering down there and the threat of further violence fed by that rage—was not an illusion. The people might be more divided than had been believed, and support for the exiled little princes might be greater than expected. The equality judgment might, in the future, be seen as destabilizing, the decision of an out-of-touch elite. When Bukka told Pampa Kampana about the spies’ report, however, she was unimpressed.