Victory City(39)

“I don’t care how long we have to stay here if we can all be together like this,” said Zerelda Sangama, leaning her head toward Grandmaster Li until it almost—but not quite—rested on his shoulder.

“Agreed,” her sister Yotshna said. (She was sitting a little too close to Haleya Kote.)

Young Yuktasri said, “Good fish.”

“Time to sleep,” Pampa Kampana said, getting up. “Tomorrow it will be time to find out exactly what’s going on in Bisnaga, and what we can do about it.”

During the night the forest bats flew over them, around and around, like a protective army of the air.



* * *



—

It was a part of the enchanted quality of the forest that Pampa Kampana and the others were immediately able to understand and converse with all the living things within it. Of course this made the newcomers feel less alien in their new surroundings, but it was also, very often, oppressive, because the forest was full of conversation, the endless gossip of the birds, the sinuous whispers of the snakes, the high distant calls of the wolves, the loud bullying voices of the tigers. After a time the six of them would find a way of adjusting their minds and shutting out the nonstop cacophony, but in the beginning the princesses constantly had to put their hands over their ears and even thought about filling those shapely organs with mud to silence the din.

Pampa Kampana had no such difficulty, and immediately began to join in many of the conversations with evident pleasure, and even issued commands and offered instructions. She might no longer be a queen in Bisnaga but here in the forest her aura of magical power, conferred upon her by divine authority long ago, was impossible to argue with. Aranyani the goddess of the forest had accepted her as a sister and so that was how all the forest creatures thought of her. On their second night, a female panther dropped down from a tree and addressed them in a language they did not know but found that they could understand. “Don’t worry about us,” she said. “You have a mighty protector in this place.” The next morning, even before the dawn chorus began its chit-chat, Pampa Kampana awoke and went out of their new home to talk to the birds. She dismissed some of the woodland species as being insufficiently serious for her needs, and concentrated on the parrots and the crows. “You,” she told the parrots, “will fly to the city and hear what people say and come back and repeat it all to me, word for word. And you crafty creatures,” she told the crows, “will go with them to understand what it means, the words beneath the words, and then you can be my wise advisers.”

Seven parrots and seven crows obediently flew away in the direction of the great city. They were on relatively friendly terms, the crows and parrots, because both species were disapproved of by many of the other birds. In the forest world the crows were rank outsiders, considered to be treacherous and self-serving, and were distrusted. Even their voices were ugly when compared to the bulbuls and the larks; they did not sing, but cawed, hoarsely. If the forest birds were an orchestra, then the crows were always out of tune. Also, nobody had forgotten the war, two hundred years earlier, between the owlets and the crows, a war in which the crows were widely believed to have behaved dishonorably. Pampa Kampana knew about this anti-crow sentiment, and found it despicable. For hundreds of years before the war the crows had been obliged to act as servants—as serfs—to the more aristocratic birds, the owlets above all, and in her opinion the war had been a battle for liberation. By the end of the war many of the owlets were dead and the crows no longer answered to anyone, and, frankly, in Pampa Kampana’s opinion, the more beautiful birds with more mellifluous voices needed to reassess their prejudices. Yes, there had been many casualties, but this had been a war of independence and should be understood as such. “It’s too bad,” she lectured the gallery of dawn birds, “that you beautiful winged creatures can be as bigoted as flightless human beings.”

As for the parrots, they weren’t songbirds either, which made them, so to speak, lower-caste; and there were so many of them that the other birds resented them for taking up too much space. Pampa Kampana had deliberately chosen the two outsider species to be her eyes and ears. After all, now she and her companions were banished outsiders also.

The delegation of parrots and crows returned three weeks later. They brought much news. When the six claimants to the throne arrived in Bisnaga (they told Pampa Kampana), it was Vidyasagar who ordered all of them to leave their troops outside the city gates, and to enter with no more than a personal security entourage. “There will be no bloodshed in our streets,” he decreed. “Everything will be resolved without resorting to murder.” By this time (the birds reported) Vidyasagar was well over seventy years old, and if the gods had indeed granted him a longevity equal to that granted to Pampa Kampana by the goddess whose name she bore, they had unfortunately not given the sage the gift of immunity from aging. So he was alive, but, it must be said, more than somewhat decrepit. His hands were bony claws; he had lost a good deal of weight and now looked, to be frank, scrawny. For courtesy’s sake the birds did not dwell on the condition of his teeth.

“I don’t care how he looks,” Pampa Kampana told them. “Tell me what was said and done.”

“Appearances had a lot to do with it,” said the head parrot, whose name, approximately, was To-oh-ah-ta. “Vidyasagar took one look at the white-haired Sangama uncles, Chukka, Bukka, and Dev, and told them they were too old for the job—which was rich, coming from him!—and said that the empire needed young blood, a ruler who would stabilize matters by ruling for a long time.”