Victory City(46)

“It’s so insulting that you think that’s all I want,” Yotshna told him. “Some young good-looking fool. I’ve had them swarming around me all my life at court and, to be frank, yecchh. The reason you didn’t turn into a woman is that you’re not a stupid boy. You’re a man, and you’ve lived long enough to know who you are. Very few men know who they are and that’s why they can’t get in here. A man who knows who he is, is gold.”

“My breath smells,” said Haleya Kote, “and I snore more loudly than Yuktasri in my sleep. I have half a century of memories of a time before you existed, when there was no Bisnaga, when the world was full of things that would be incomprehensible to you, because they happened so long ago. In my dreams I sometimes wish I was back there, young like you, and strong and full of determination and hope, knowing nothing about the harshness and cruelty of the world that beats optimism out of the young and makes them old. I don’t want to be the one who drives the optimism out of you.”

“I love it when you speak so romantically,” Yotshna told him. “That’s when I know you really love me.”

“Will you love me when I get sick and start to fail, to descend, as is inevitable, toward death?” he said. “Do you really want to nurse a dying man and have to grieve for all the love you wasted on him?”

“Love is never a waste,” she said. “You’ll look after yourself and the enchantment of the forest will look after you too, and so will I, and if we have ten or even fifteen happy years, I will be content. And yes: I will care for you until the last day, when the time comes for that end.”

“This can’t happen,” he said. “It mustn’t happen.”

“I know,” she replied, “but it will.”





11





The time came when Pampa Kampana was no longer resigned to exile. She needed to know exactly what was going on in Bisnaga City so that she could make decisions about her next moves. She informed Haleya Kote that she had work for him to do inside the city walls. “I can’t rely on crows and parrots forever,” she said. “I need experienced eyes and ears. And you have secret pathways in and out of the city.”

Yotshna was furious with her mother. “You’re doing this because of me,” she accused Pampa. “To get him away from me. You’re willing to put his life in great danger just to stop me having the man I want.”

“In the first place,” Pampa Kampana told her daughter, “that’s not true. I know you well enough to understand that you will not allow any action of mine to stop you if you’re determined enough. In the second place, don’t underestimate Haleya. He is well versed in underground work and in the arts of agyatvaas, and I’ll help him, too.”

“You’ll turn him into a crow?”

“No,” Pampa Kampana said. “I was not granted unlimited powers of transformation. I can only use them on two more occasions, and must wait until it’s absolutely essential to shape-shift. Haleya Kote will have to go in human form.”

“You won’t do for us what you were ready to do for Zerelda and Ye-He,” cried Yotshna. “That means you do want him dead, and if he dies, I will hold you responsible, I will never forgive you, and I will find a way to have my revenge.”

“You really do love him,” Pampa Kampana said. “That is good to know.”



* * *



—

The city of Bisnaga had grown up in the shadow of a rocky mountain range, those same mountains on which Hukka and Bukka Sangama sat on the first day, watching in disbelief as the future sprang up out of Pampa Kampana’s enchanted seeds. Both ends of the city wall touched the mountains, which themselves completed the ring of the city’s defenses, and gave Bisnaga the confident appearance of being impregnable. But Haleya Kote and the Remonstrance had long ago discovered deep cavities among the boulders, and after years of slow burrowing they had deepened those caves into tunnels and created hidden pathways to the outside world, intended to be escape routes in the event of their discovery and persecution. “I can get in and out,” the old soldier assured Pampa Kampana, “and in the city the members of the Remonstrance will hide me, if any of them still exist. In any case I can look after myself, don’t you worry. But without a horse to carry me it’s going to be a slow journey. Maybe I can steal a horse along the way, and another to get back.”

During Haleya Kote’s absence Yotshna Sangama refused to speak to her mother, and as the days wore on she became convinced that he must be dead. She imagined his capture, his torture, his terrible last moments, and wondered if he had died with her name on his lips. He was a hero whom her mother had wantonly sacrificed, and for what? What could he find out in Bisnaga that would affect their lives? Nothing, she thought. So he had died for nothing, which was not how a hero should die.

But he came back unharmed, riding a stolen horse, just as he had said. “Everything went according to plan,” he comforted the sobbing Yotshna, who rushed into his arms as soon as he had dismounted, sent the horse on its way, and reentered the forest—once again, without being transformed. “There was never a dangerous moment. Nobody’s on the lookout for an old nobody like me.”

“You look terrible,” Yotshna greeted him. “The risks, the danger, the journey have all aged you. You look like you’re a hundred years old.”