Victory City(50)

“I will make it my business to get this young king out of the old brothers’ clutches,” said Pampa Kampana, “and that will be the beginning of the renewal, and the return of the Bisnaga we loved.”

“It may take longer than you think,” Madhuri Devi said.

“Why do you say that?” Pampa Kampana asked.

“According to the stars,” said Madhuri Devi, “you will be married to a king of Bisnaga one more time, but it won’t be this one, and it won’t be soon.”

“Madhuri, you’re so kind to give me shelter, but I don’t really put much store in the stars,” Pampa Kampana said, and then added, after a few moments, “How long will it be?”

“I don’t know how this is even possible,” Madhuri Devi said, frowning, “but then I don’t know how you’re possible at all. You’re somebody my grandparents used to talk about when I was a little girl, and yet here you are looking younger than me. Anyway, the stars are very certain, and they say, in approximately eighty-five years from now.”

“Too long,” said Pampa Kampana. “We’ll have to see about that.”



* * *



—

In his own time, people called young Deva Raya a great monarch, but Pampa Kampana in the Jayaparajaya refers to him as the “Puppet King,” because he allowed not one but two unseen masters to pull his strings, falling under the spell of the two rivals whose struggle was at the heart of the secret history of Bisnaga: first, Vidyasagar the priest, and then the priest’s “protégée” whom he had abused, who rejected him and became his greatest adversary—Pampa Kampana herself, the empire’s once and future queen.

In the early days of his rule Deva Raya was the obedient creature of Sayana and the DAS, which was to say, of Vidyasagar, the absent puppet-master. He ordered the beautiful Hazara Rama temple to be built in the heart of the Royal Enclosure and it became the private place of worship of the kings of Bisnaga from then on, until the very end. And the puritanism of the DAS and its intolerance of other faiths continued. Also under the expansionist influence of the DAS he was very often away at the wars. For almost twenty years he fought everyone in the neighborhood, defeating them all, including Mahmood of Zafarabad. All of this added to his glory, but it meant that Bisnaga City was left for long periods in the hands of Sayana, who was beginning to be very old and sick, and behind Sayana there was Vidyasagar who had become old and sick many years earlier. The DAS-controlled royal council, too, had atrophied. Its long spell in power, and the immense age of its senior members, had encouraged laziness and incompetence, which, in turn, bred—in the less antique members—a good deal of fiscal corruption, and a liking for deviant sexual practices which the official policy of the organization strongly condemned. The citizens of Bisnaga began to want a change.

This was the opening Pampa Kampana needed. She began to whisper through all the concealed hours of the day and most of the night as well. “You don’t eat,” Madhuri Devi told her worriedly. “If you are human, then you must eat at some point.” Pampa Kampana agreed politely to set aside thirty minutes a day during which they could share a meal and converse. The rest of the time she sat with her eyes closed, visiting the minds of the people. “You don’t sleep,” marveled Madhuri Devi. “At least, not when I’m looking. What kind of a being are you? Is this a goddess who has come into my house?”

“I was inhabited by a goddess when I was very young,” Pampa Kampana replied. “It changed me in many ways, some of which even I don’t yet understand.”

“I knew it,” said Madhuri Devi, and fell to her knees.

“What are you doing?” Pampa Kampana cried.

“I’m worshipping you,” Madhuri Devi said. “Isn’t that the right thing to do?”

“Please don’t,” Pampa Kampana said. “I have lost one daughter to a foreigner and the sea, and left two behind in a forest. I see now that the task ahead of me will take many years and maybe before it’s done my daughters will all be dead, and Haleya Kote will be gone for sure, and maybe you will have come to the end of the road as well, and yet there’s a thing in me that doesn’t care about any of that, a thing that only cares about the task I have been set. I have turned away from my daughters as my mother turned away from me. That’s not the kind of person you should revere. Get up off your knees at once.”



* * *



—

The whispering wasn’t as straightforward as it had been in the beginning. That had been the time of the Created Generation, born from seeds, and they were blank slates, empty heads, and when she wrote their stories on those slates they accepted the narratives she was planting in their heads without making any fuss. She was making them up, and they were becoming the people she invented. There was little or no resistance. But the people she had to whisper to now were not her inventions. They had been born and raised in Bisnaga, they had actual family histories going back two or even three generations, and so they were not pliable fictions. Also they had been encouraged by the authorities of the present day, the DAS people, to believe that the true story of the birth of Bisnaga was a lie, and that a lie was the truth: that Bisnaga was not seed-born, but an ancient kingdom with a history that did not originate in the imaginings of a whispering witch.