Victory City(35)

But after his last triumphant charge, Bukka became unwell. His condition worsened slowly but steadily and he fell into a deep sleep. As the news of his failing health spread beyond the palace walls people began to speculate on the cause. The idea that the king had been poisoned by a ghost dart took hold. “He is fighting the poison, but it is winning,” the taxidermist said. “A ghost kills you slowly, because the move from our world into that world requires time,” wailed the vendor of sweets. “He stands on the bank of the Sarayu river like Lord Ram,” cried the painter of signs, “and soon, like Lord Ram, he will step into its waters and be lost.”

Pampa Kampana spent every day and night at Bukka’s bedside, applying cold compresses to his brow, and trying to squeeze water drop by drop into his mouth. He was asleep and did not awake. She understood that he was dying, that he would be the next person she had loved to leave her alive and mourning. On the third day of Bukka’s illness Haleya Kote asked to be admitted to the king and queen’s presence. Pampa Kampana knew at once, from the expression on his face, that things were going badly outside the king’s bedchamber as well as inside it.

“We have been blind,” Haleya Kote said. “Or rather we were only looking at the danger from the north, so we did not see the growing problems in the east, west, and south.”

Chukka, Pukka, and Dev Sangama, accompanied by Shakti, Adi, and Gauri, the Sisters of the Mountains, and their personal armies, were converging on Bisnaga from their strongholds in Nellore, Mulbagal, and Chandragutti, Haleya told Pampa Kampana. “They have evidently persuaded those ferocious Sisters, their wives, that their oath to safeguard Bukka’s position on the throne expires when he passes away, and that, after that, their loyalties must lie with their husbands.” Additionally, he went on, the three deposed princes, now arrogant, entitled young men instead of arrogant, entitled little boys, and even angrier than they had been as children, had been allowed to leave Jaffna, accompanied by a sizable Ceylonese force of men, and they, too, were headed for Bisnaga to stake their claims to the throne. “I am sorry to tell you,” he concluded, “that even though Bukka Raya decreed it and the council approved his decree, support for your eldest daughter’s right to rule is not extensive, neither in the army cantonment nor on the city streets. ‘Queen Yotshna’ is still a step too far for most people.”

“Six claimants to a throne that has not yet been vacated,” Pampa Kampana said. “And who will choose between them?” Haleya inclined his head. It was a question to which they both already knew the answer. The answer was sitting under a banyan tree at Mandana with his eyes closed, apparently removed from these events, not a co-conspirator at all, not even remotely to be thought of as an individual who had corresponded and conspired with all six claimants, but merely a saint under a tree.

“Whoever it is, and whoever takes the prize,” Haleya Kote told Pampa Kampana, “the danger to you and your daughters is very real. Especially as the question of their true parentage is still present in many wicked minds.”

“We will not run,” Pampa Kampana said. “I will sit by my husband’s bedside, and if he leaves us I will make sure he does so with all the honors of the state. This is my city, which I built from seeds and whispers. Its people, whose stories are my stories, whose being-in-the-world comes from me, will not chase me out.”

“It’s not the common people I’m worried about,” Haleya Kote said. “But let it be as you wish. I will remain by your side, with all the defenders I can find.”



* * *



—

With the death of Bukka Raya I, two of the three founders of Bisnaga were gone and only Pampa Kampana remained. The day after Bukka died peacefully without waking up from his last sleep, the last rites, antyeshti, were performed at the burning ghat which would afterward become the site of his memorial. In the absence of a male child—the male children being still in transit, at the head of an army—the role of chief mourner was undertaken by Haleya Kote, who bathed himself thoroughly, then in fresh clothes circumambulated the body on the pyre, sang a brief hymn, put some sesame seeds in the dead king’s mouth to serve as a symbol of the magic seeds with which he had created the city, sprinkled the pyre with clarified butter, made the correct linear gestures toward the gods of death and time, performed the act of breaking the water pot, and lit the fire. After that he, Pampa Kampana, and her three daughters walked around the flames several times, and finally Haleya Kote picked up a bamboo stave and pierced Bukka’s skull to release his spirit.

All this was done with the proper solemnity, but after the mourners left the burning ghat a detachment of soldiers separated Haleya Kote from the four royal women, who were taken back to the palace and sequestered in the zenana, the women’s wing, under twenty-four-hour armed guard. It was not clear who had given the order for this to happen, and the guards refused to answer Pampa Kampana when she asked them. The priest Vidyasagar was some distance away under his banyan tree, lost in meditation, and had not spoken a word. Yet somehow everyone knew who was in charge.

That night Pampa Kampana, enraged by her sequestration and filled with disbelief that Bisnaga would treat her in this way, was unable to think clearly. She commanded the woman warrior guarding the entrance to her rooms, “Go and get me Ulupi, right now.” Ulupi, you will recall, was the gigantic, hissing captain of the guard, the one with the hooded eyes and flickering tongue. But the warrior at the door merely shrugged. “Not available,” she said, making it clear that she who had been queen until a day earlier was considered to be nobody now; that Bisnaga had turned away from its matriarch in contempt.