Victory City(45)

It was her first departure from the forest, her first shift from exile, vanvaas, into disguise, agyatvaas, and it was only when the three of them, two crows and a kite, were up in the sky and flying toward the sea that Pampa Kampana realized that she had forgotten something important. Ye-He and Zerelda were embarking on a life together, but they were not married. She considered this matter silently as she flew and discovered to her surprise that she didn’t care. “I have started living like a savage, according to the forest law,” she realized. “There nobody is married and nobody cares.” She asked herself if at some point Zerelda might want the formality of a wedding and she answered herself, “It’s too late for you to do anything about this.”

All the way to Goa she reflected, with a sense of shock, on her own shoulder-shrugging attitude. Was she a bad mother? Or might her attitude be another visitor from the distant future, when marriage would feel archaic and unnecessary, and nobody would give a damn about it? “That is a future beyond my imagining,” she thought. “So, yes, bad mother, probably, that’s it.”

Darkness rushed up as if invisible hands were drawing a curtain quickly over the day, and then with a twinkling of lights there was Goa, and beyond Goa, the sea, and in the harbor—they swooped down to look—was the largest wooden ship Pampa Kampana had ever seen. There were many decks, enough room on board for several hundred men, and there was a Chinese flag of some kind painted on the stern. General Cheng Ho had already arrived, and he traveled with a private army, apparently. Good. Zerelda would have defenders if she needed them.

Pampa Kampana stayed up in the sky, hovering, watching Li Ye-He and Zerelda fly down to the hostelry where Cheng Ho habitually went for his spicy fish curry. One crow touched down on the ground and then Grandmaster Li stood there, with the other crow perched on his shoulder. After a brief pause, the grandmaster went indoors. Then time stopped for Pampa Kampana. For a timeless hour she sat on the roof of the inn listening to noises of revelry. The general’s party came out, singing lustily, and headed back to the ship. Then after a further timelessness there was the shadow of a man faintly visible in the prow of the ship in the darkness, with an even less visible black shadow sitting on his shoulder, looking up toward the invisible cheel in the midnight sky and raising a hand in farewell.

As Pampa Kampana flew back to the forest of Aranyani, she kept her feelings under tight control, which was her way. “At least,” she thought, “I’ll never have to watch her grow old and die, never have to sit by that old lady’s side terrifying her by looking like the ghost of her younger self staring back at her in her final hours. At least we will both be spared that upside-down ending. And I won’t know when she dies, or how, so I can go on thinking of her as she is now, at the height of her beauty and power. Yes. That’s what I want.”



* * *



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Time drifted aimlessly, as if floating on tides of sadness, in the period after Zerelda’s departure. Years passed without anybody noticing. Nobody seemed to be getting older: neither the men nor the women. That phenomenon, too, eluded their attention, as if the enchanted forest had so ordained it.

The departed Zerelda’s sisters’ emotions did not fade. They had experienced her going as a kind of betrayal and reacted to it more in anger than with grief. The encampment in the forest blazed with activity as the princesses released their rage into construction projects. Their residence grew larger with the passage of time, with multiple rooms connected by a labyrinth of corridors, and now there was a thick soft carpet of fronds on the floors and there were tree stumps carved into comfortable seats by the skill of their blades, and whittled wooded blocks for pillows, curved into the shapes of their necks. But it did not feel like a peaceful home, because it had been built with wrath. After Pampa Kampana returned from the sky and was restored to human form, she withdrew into herself, spending days and even weeks alone, while Yuktasri disappeared into the forest with the forest women for long periods, and when she came back to their encampment she looked wilder, her hair standing out from her head, her garments torn, and mud on her face. Yotshna, the most sentimental of the sisters, sought to heal herself by plunging into love. She turned toward Haleya Kote and declared her affections. The old soldier, besotted with her as he was, did his best to discourage her.

Haleya Kote was maybe fifty years older than Yotshna Sangama. He had been born before her father. It was ridiculous for her even to think of him as a romantic prospect. He told her that from the beginning. “My knees creak when I stand up,” he said, “and I exhale whoof when I sit down, as if somebody let all the air out of me. I can’t walk as fast as you—damn it, I can’t run as fast as you walk—and I can’t think as fast as you either. I’m uneducated, my eyesight isn’t what it should be, I read slowly, I’ve lost most of the hair on my head, the hair on my chin is white, and my back hurts. I’ve killed men, and I was wounded so often in the old days that I’m more than half dead myself. I was a pretty bad soldier, not a very successful underground rebel, a more successful drunkard, and an adviser to your uncle whose main function was to tell him dirty jokes from the old military days. What kind of man is that for you? You only started thinking about it because there was no other man around except Grandmaster Li and he was destined for Zerelda and now he’s gone anyway. My most important achievement in life is that I didn’t get turned into a woman when we entered the forest. That’s more or less it. You’re young. Be patient. We’ll get out of here in a while and the right guy, young, handsome, charming, dashing, will be waiting for you in Bisnaga when we return.”