Victory City(37)

At the edge of the forest Pampa Kampana had a warning for Haleya Kote and Grandmaster Li. “In this forest, which exists under the protection of the forest goddess Aranyani,” she said, “men can have a serious problem. It is said that any man who enters here will be transformed into a woman at once. Only men who have achieved complete self-knowledge and mastery over their senses can survive here in male form. So we must thank you and warn you, it would be safer to say goodbye.”

The men considered this unexpected obstacle for some time.

Then Grandmaster Li said, “I swore an oath to protect you with my life. That promise does not expire until the day I die. I will go with you into the Forest of Aranyani, come what may.” He dismounted from his horse and took up his sword and his other possessions. “Go well, horse,” he said, and patted it on the rump. Off it went. Zerelda, his star pupil, looked at him admiringly and, Pampa Kampana noted, even a little fondly. “If anyone has self-knowledge and mastery over his senses,” Zerelda told him, “you do. The forest will not harm you in any way.”



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(At this point in her narrative Pampa Kampana introduces a digression about the loyalty of horses, how they did not betray people who truly cared for them, and how she had spoken to them to ask them to cover their tracks on their return journey, walking through streams and across stony ground to make sure the runaways’ destination could not be learned. We have chosen not to include this perhaps overlong passage.)



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Haleya Kote shifted in his saddle uncomfortably. “I’m not a guy like our pal Ye-He here,” he said. “I don’t meditate, or attend to the purification of the self. I’m not a wise man like Vidyasagar, studying the Sixteen Systems of Philosophy. I’m just somebody who accidentally became a friend of our dear departed king, a fellow who likes a drink from time to time, and who used to be okay in a fight. I’ve never been a woman. I don’t know if I’d take to it very well.”

Pampa Kampana rode up beside him and said softly, “But you are also a man who does not deceive himself. You are not a fake. You know exactly who and what you are.”

“Yeah, probably,” Haleya Kote replied. “I’m nobody special, but I’m me.”

“In that case I believe you may be fine.”

Haleya Kote thought for a moment.

“Okay,” he said at last. “Fuck it. I’ll stay.”

They set the rest of the horses free and stood for a moment gazing at their verdant destiny. Then into the trees they went, and the rules of the outside world fell away.



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The wood closed around them, and was full of noises. There was much birdsong, as if a chorus had flown up to greet them: the yellow-throated bulbul, the jungle babbler, and the rufous tree pie could be heard; and tailorbirds, wood swallows, and larks; the barbet, the coucal, the forest owlet, the parrot, and the jungle crow were here; and many more to which they could not give names, birds of dreams, they thought, not of the real world. For here it was the real world that was unreal, its laws had been blown away like dust, and if there were other laws here, they did not know what those laws might be. They had arrived in arajakta, the place without kings. A crown, here, was no more than an unnecessary hat. Here justice was not handed down from above, and only nature ruled.

Haleya Kote was the first to speak. “Ladies, if you’ll excuse the vulgarity, I have checked myself, and it feels like I am not changed.”

“Oh, wonderful,” Yotshna, the eldest princess, cried, and for a second time Pampa Kampana noted just a little too much emotion in one of her daughters’ voices. “That’s such good news for us all.”

“Grandmaster?” Zerelda asked. “And you?”

“I am happy to say,” replied Li Ye-He, “that I too appear to be intact.”

“Our first victories,” Zerelda declared. “These are good omens. They show that we will overcome whatever challenges the forest may send in our direction.”

“Are there wild beasts here?” Yuktasri, the youngest, asked, trying not to let her fears show in her voice. Her mother nodded. “Yes. There are tigers as big as a house, and predator birds larger than the rukh of Sinbad, and giant snakes capable of swallowing a goat, and maybe dragons too. But I have magic that will keep us safe.”



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(We must ask ourselves how great her powers could actually have been, and if the forest truly did contain wild beasts that never bothered them because of her witchcraft—as her story suggests—or if it was mercifully free of such dangers, and she was just making a sort of joke. Was it true that the goddess who gave her the gift of long life, and the power to give seeds the power to grow a city, and the power that enabled her to whisper men’s lives into their ears, also endowed her with the ability to enchant the enchanted forest? Or was this poetry, a fable like so many others? We must reply: either it’s all true, or none of it is, and we prefer to believe in the truth of the well-told tale.)



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Now they heard music. There were tabla drums playing rapidly somewhere up above them, speaking in their private language. And someone was dancing, invisible feet mirroring the speech of the drums. They could hear the dancer’s anklet bells jingling. Someone was dancing in the trees, up on the high branches, or perhaps in the air between the trees.