Victory City(34)
When one has been in the shadows for an eternity, the sunlight feels too bright to bear.
Bukka had told Pampa Kampana about Haleya Kote’s secret life, of course. She did not argue with his decision to keep the Remonstrance underground. “Ask your friends to work on escape routes,” she told him. “If things go badly in the future—the near future, I fear—then an underground network may be something we all need.”
* * *
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Messengers arrived from the front. The expedition against Zafarabad was not going well. Haleya Kote came to give the queen regent the news. After the first skirmishes Bukka had to retreat south of the river Bhima and concede the northern shore to the sultan. Next, the sultan annexed Warangal, which had been a part of the Bisnaga Empire, and killed its ruler. Pampa Kampana was surprised and even distressed to learn that Bukka had sent envoys to the court of the Delhi sultan asking for that prince to help Bisnaga against his own co-religionists, which looked like a desperate move, and was unsurprisingly rejected. Then things had improved. Bukka had surged back toward the north and captured Mudgal. The messengers’ report described Bukka’s savage massacre of the people of Mudgal, which horrified Pampa Kampana. “That isn’t the man I know,” she said to Haleya Kote. “If that’s how he’s behaving now, it means his project is in danger, and so are we.”
She was correct. The next messengers described an assault by the army of the Zafarabad sultan upon Bukka Raya I’s forces at Mudgal. The weight of this assault panicked many members of the Bisnaga army, and whispers of the Ghost Sultanate, rumors that its phantom warriors were at the head of the Zafarabad vanguard, spread rapidly through the ranks, instilling terror and panic. When an army is afraid, it can’t fight, even if it outnumbers its opponents. Bukka had fled his camp, the messengers said. His army had retreated in haste, and the advancing sultan had murdered ninety thousand people who had been left behind. Another even worse military defeat followed. “The king is coming home, but the enemy is in pursuit,” the messengers said. “We must prepare for an attack, or at the very least a siege.”
The Bukka who came home from the wars was, indeed, unlike the one who had departed. The way a man dealt with victory revealed one kind of truth about him: was he a magnanimous victor or a vindictive one? Would he remain humble, or develop an inflated opinion of himself? Would he become a victory addict, greedy for repetitions of his triumph, or would he be content with what he had achieved? Defeat asked even more profound questions. How deep were his inner resources? Would the moment be the unmaking of him, or reveal a previously unseen resilience and resourcefulness—qualities unknown even to himself? The king entering his palace in the bloodied leather and metal garments of the battlefield was a man surrounded by question marks, as if by a cloud of mosquitoes. Even Pampa Kampana did not know how he would answer.
He didn’t speak to her, but only shook his head, and the cloud of interrogatory mosquitoes shook with him. He went into his private rooms and gave orders that nobody should enter. He remained there for week after week and it was left to Pampa Kampana to arrange the city’s siege defenses with the help of Haleya Kote and her three daughters. Vidyasagar came to see her on the ramparts, where she was busy from dawn until dark, and told her that Bisnaga’s defeat was a consequence of the king’s abandonment of “intimacy with the gods in general and Shiva in particular.” If that intimacy could be renewed then the advance of Zafarabad would fail; and military success would follow. “Many people in Bisnaga—most of our people, may I suggest—are in agreement with this analysis,” he told her. “There are moments when a king should be instructed and guided by the people, and not the other way around.”
“Thank you,” she told him. “I will make sure the king knows this wise advice.” Then she got on with her work and didn’t give Vidyasagar’s wise words another thought, because she was making sure the battlements were well stocked with cauldrons of oil to be heated and poured over anyone who tried to assault the walls, and that the soldiers manning the ramparts were well armed and also well rested, sleeping in shifts and taking up their posts in strict rotation. The army of Zafarabad was very close. Within days the attack—if it was to be an attack—or at least the siege would begin.
Pampa Kampana had begun to despair, but then one Friday morning when the earth was trembling because of the weight of marching feet, both human and animal, and when the dust cloud enveloping the army of Zafarabad was visible in the near distance, Bukka pulled himself together, marched out of his private quarters in full, clean battle array, and cried out, “Let’s give that Ghost Sultanate a welcome that will make them scurry back to Ghost World.” Though he had never been a large man, he rode through the streets of the city like an angry colossus and then at the head of his troops he led the charge into the sultan’s army screaming a scream so terrifying that even that regiment of ghost soldiers, if that was what they were, could think of nothing except to flee as fast as possible and in complete disarray.
In the conflict with Zafarabad, Bukka had been the aggressor, seeing the danger of his northern neighbor’s growing strength, and opting for a preemptive strike, which did not succeed. The river Krishna remained the boundary between the two realms. Not one guntha of land was gained or lost—not one cent—not so much as a single ankanam. Both sides held their territory, and an uneasy truce was made.