Victory City(56)
“Well, not exactly,” the crow said in the Master Language. “But, family of, yes. You can call me that if you wish.”
“You bring me a message,” she said. “My daughters, how are they?”
“There is one daughter,” the crow said, “and the message comes from her.”
“What about my other daughter?” Pampa Kampana asked, although she knew what the answer must be.
“Died long ago,” the crow said tersely. “They say, of a broken heart, but I don’t know. I’m just a messenger. Don’t kill me. I’m just a crow.”
Pampa Kampana took a deep breath and controlled her tears.
“What’s the message?” she asked.
Yuktasri’s message was this: “War.”
13
The pink monkeys came at first in small groups and behaved courteously. They were able to communicate in a garbled, ugly attempt at the Master Language. It was comprehensible, although their pronunciation was laughable. They said they were, in essence, simple traders, employees of a trading company from far away, but news had reached even that remote location of the riches of the forest of Aranyani, where it was possible to find produce that grew nowhere else in the world, berries whose unknown flavors brought tears of joy to the eyes of those who ate them, and gourds of a rich sweetness no other gourds could rival, and there were fruits with no names because they had never entered the outside world where things had to be named in order to exist; and there were also nameless fish that swam in the jungle’s rivers, so succulent that men, and monkeys, might cross the world to taste them.
We ask your permission to receive some of the bounty of the forest, the pink monkeys said, and we will repay you in any currency that would be meaningful to you. Maybe it’s time you learned the value of silver and gold, the pink monkeys suggested to the brown and green monkeys and, through them, to the forest in general and even to Aranyani herself. The sound they made to describe these coins was like a word from the language of the east coast, kacu, which, because they couldn’t pronounce things properly, they called cash. “Kacu, cash, is the future,” they said. “With kacu you can have a place in that future. Without it, unfortunately, you will become irrelevant, and in the end the future will arrive like a forest fire and burn your jungle to the ground.”
The green and brown monkeys were both seduced by the pink monkeys’ courtesies and scared into cooperation by their threats. The other jungle creatures ignored the embassies of these bizarre aliens with the terrible accents. Only the wild women of the forest, and, it is said, the goddess Aranyani herself, understood the danger to their way of life. “The future” was a menace they had no desire to confront. But for a long time they didn’t know how to act.
* * *
—
(We may perhaps best understand the pink monkey narrative as an aspect of the Jayaparajaya’s fascination with Time—Time divided into yesterdays, todays, and tomorrows. The monkeys we first encountered in these verses, the gray Hanuman langurs of Bisnaga, are, we may say, the poet’s gesture toward the mythical past of the great legends, while these pink newcomers represent an as-yet-unknown tomorrow, a tomorrow that will fully arrive long after the poet’s work is done. This, at least, is the proposition which, with all due modesty, is here advanced.)
* * *
—
When Pampa Kampana told Fern?o Paes she had to leave, and would appreciate the gift of a horse, the foreigner made no argument. “At the very beginning you told me that you were just passing through my life,” he said, “so I can’t complain that you misled me in any way. And if as you say you are a miraculous ancient being who was once the lover of Domingo Nunes then I must also accept, even if I can’t believe it, that you see me as little more than an echo of, or a substitute for, your earlier beloved. At any rate I’m grateful for the gift of your time, and a horse is the least I can offer in return.”
She had one last meeting with Madhuri Devi in the old house with the alcove. “I will never see you again,” she told the former astrologer, “but I know I am leaving my city and the empire in safe hands. Make sure you find safe hands to hand them to when it’s your time.”
“I have never thought of you as a supernatural being, although you are,” Madhuri Devi replied. “But now I see your solitude and the sadness that it brings. We are just fleeting shadows on a screen for you. How lonely that must be.”
“I whispered in the king’s ear last night,” Pampa Kampana said. “So don’t be surprised if he announces his decision to ban the burning of widows in the whole of the empire, and to restore the status of women in Bisnaga to the way it used to be.”
“The New Remonstrance would not have allowed the burning anyway,” Madhuri Devi said. “But thank you, it’s easier if the king already agrees.”
“No more burning widows,” Pampa Kampana said, instead of saying “goodbye.”
“No more burning widows,” Madhuri Devi replied. Then they parted, knowing it would be forever.
* * *
—
After Pampa Kampana left Bisnaga for the second time, the so-called “second golden age” came to an abrupt end, as if by her departure she had brought down the curtain on those years. Deva Raya died, and happily no women were burned on his pyre. The twelve thousand wives were released into the world to make their way in it as best they could. Incompetence and corruption followed. We may pass over the sequence of incompetent kings, each murdered by the next ruler. There were decapitations and straw-stuffed heads. And finally the last, pathetic Sangama king was decapitated by a general named Saluva, and the founding dynasty of Bisnaga came to an end.