Victory City(31)

“I suspect most of these doubters belong to the first, Created Generation and not to the Newborn,” she said. “I was always concerned that Whispering was an imperfect tool, and that some, at least, of the Created would later suffer from unpredictable forms of existential difficulty, psychological problems caused by their uncertainty about their own natures and worthiness, and that these problems would lead them to be prejudiced against others who, in their misguided opinion, were being treated as worthier than themselves. Get me a list of these doubters,” she told Bukka imperiously, “and I’ll go whisper to them some more.”

During the second half of Bukka’s reign, Pampa Kampana took on this task of whispered reeducation. As we will see, it did not succeed. In this way Pampa learned the lesson every creator must learn, even God himself. Once you had created your characters, you had to be bound by their choices. You were no longer free to remake them according to your own desires. They were what they were and they would do what they would do.

This was “free will.” She could not change them if they did not want to be changed.



* * *



—

Bukka Raya I had played second fiddle to his brother for two decades, but once he became king he took to it as to the manner born. If we look ahead in Pampa Kampana’s great book, we find that in the years to come he would be considered the best and most successful king of the Sangama dynasty, the first of the three ruling houses of Bisnaga. Nobody now remembers the Shambhuvaraya kingdom of Arcot, and the power of the Reddis of Kondavidu dwindled into nothing long ago. Yet these were among the substantial kingdoms and consequential rulers who fell under Bukka’s aegis. Goa was his, and even a part of Odisha or Orya. The Zamorin of Calicut was his vassal, and the Jaffna kingdom of Sarandib or Ceylon paid him tribute. And it was to Jaffna that Bukka sent the exiled no-longer-princes, Erapalli, Bhagwat, and Gundappa Sangama, to live out their days under house arrest, closely guarded by soldiers of the Jaffna king, as a favor to the emperor of Bisnaga.

This was both Bukka’s most painful decision and also his greatest miscalculation. No king likes paying tribute to a more powerful monarch, or acknowledging the other as his suzerain. So as the boys from Bisnaga grew toward manhood, the king of Jaffna covertly joined forces with them and helped them to set up a system of communication—by boat across the strait separating Ceylon from the mainland and then on horseback—with their three uncles, Chukka, Pukka, and Dev, all of whom had poorly disguised royal ambitions too. The nightriders, dressed all in black, galloped regularly to Nellore, Mulbagal, Chandragutti, and back again, and so the six Sangamas, the three angry teenage nephews and their three ex-bandit uncles, all of them filled with flaming, murderous ambitions, were able to make their plans.

The failure of Bukka’s intelligence service to notice the brewing conspiracy could be ascribed to one single distraction: Zafarabad. The rise of the Zafarabad sultanate to the north of Bisnaga, on the far side of the river Krishna, was a genuine threat to the empire. The shadowy figure of Zafar the first sultan was so rarely seen in public that people began to speak of him as the Ghost Sultan, and to fear that in Zafarabad the phantom army of the dead had been reborn and therefore could not be killed again. There were rumors that the three-eyed mount of the Ghost Sultan, the phantom stallion Ashqar, had been seen strutting in the streets of Zafarabad like a prince. It was plain to Bukka that Sultan Zafar was modeling his new kingdom on Bisnaga. Just as the Sangamas claimed to be the children of the Moon God Soma, so Zafar and his clan announced they were descended from the legendary Persian figure Vohu Manah, the incarnation of the Good Mind, and they went so far as to identify Bisnaga with Aka Manah, the Evil Mind that was the enemy of the Good. This sounded like nothing less than a declaration of war, and so did the choice of the name of “Zafarabad,” which meant “City of Victory,” just as “Bisnaga” did, in its uncorrupted form. To give the new sultanate the same name as the empire was a clear announcement of intent. The Ghost Sultan meant to erase Bisnaga and take its place. Even the three-eyed magic horse was a part of the challenge. If indeed it did exist, it was a rival to the celestial white horse upon which the Moon God rode, and whose descendants Hukka and Bukka had always claimed—without providing any proof—were their own sacred battle steeds.

Bukka was a well-loved king, so when he chose to march upon Zafarabad the decision was popular. Cheering crowds lined the streets as the king rode through the great gate to where his army was waiting, its one million men, its one hundred thousand elephants, its two hundred thousand Arab horses, its air of utter invincibility against which not even ghosts would stand a chance. Only Pampa Kampana was filled with foreboding, and Bukka’s last words to her felt like a warning, or an omen. “This is where you get your wish,” he told her. “In my absence, you will be the queen regent. You alone will rule.”

After he left at the head of his army, Pampa Kampana, alone in her private rooms in the zenana, the women’s wing, asked to see Nachana, the court poet. “Sing me a happy song,” she told him, which should have been an easy request to fulfill since almost all of Nachana’s work was a celebration of the empire and its rulers—their wisdom, their prowess in battle, their cultured elegance, their popularity, their looks. But when Nachana opened his mouth only mournful verses poured out of it. He closed his mouth, shook his head in puzzlement, opened his mouth again to apologize for his mistake, then tried again. Even sadder stanzas fell from his lips. Again he shook his head, frowning. It was as if some dark spirit were controlling his tongue. It was a second omen, Pampa realized. “Never mind,” she told the discomfited poet. “Even genius sometimes takes the day off. Maybe you’ll do better tomorrow.”