Victory City(58)
“Ask me,” she said, as she had said once before.
“When I was nine years old the great goddess Pampa herself entered me,” Pampa Kampana said. “And if an aspect of her remains within me, maybe there is a greater strength in my body than I know, and if that strength is released it can combine with yours and together we can rid the jungle of this plague of short-tailed hairless foreigners.”
“Yes, the power is within you,” Aranyani told her, “and it is a far greater power than my own; and yes, I can release it. But when such a force bursts out of a mortal human body it is very probable that the human body will be destroyed. If you do this I cannot promise you that you will survive.”
“I have failed my daughters all their lives,” Pampa Kampana said. “At least this one time I can answer one of my children’s calls for help.”
“There’s something else,” Aranyani said. “The moment is near when the gods must retreat from the world and stop interfering in its history. Very soon human beings—and monkeys of all colors, for that matter—will have to learn to manage without us and make their stories on their own.”
“What will happen to the forest when it is no longer under your guardianship?” Pampa Kampana asked her.
“It will suffer the fate of many forests in the age of men,” Aranyani said. “Men will come, and either there will be open fields under cultivation here or else there will be houses and roads, and maybe a small ghost forest will remain, and women will say, look, there stands the memory of the forest of Aranyani, and men will not believe them, or care.”
“And this does not concern you?”
“Our hour is over,” Aranyani said, “and it’s your time now. So even if you—or the goddess coming out of you—and I together manage to win this battle, after that neither animals nor humans can count on us to protect or guide or help. The victory may be real, but also temporary. You should understand that.”
“Forever is a meaningless word,” Pampa Kampana said. “Now is my only concern.”
When Aranyani descended in majesty toward the forest floor all living things bowed down in fear and respect. None of them had seen a divine being before and the only proper response to it was gratitude and awe. That was the day of the expulsion of all pink monkeys from the jungle. They went quietly, or, at most, muttering under their breath about the injustice of their removal and the certainty that, one day, they would return. They were escorted out by the wild women, but everyone knew that the main force of the invaders was approaching, and this was just a preliminary move. Pampa Kampana and the goddess went together to face the enemy. As they neared the northern perimeter beyond which the battle would take place, Yuktasri Sangama approached her mother for the last time. “I’ll say goodbye,” she said, “and thank you.”
They went forward together
The two great ladies
Goddess and Woman
Stood glorious together
Against the thin pink line
Of our invaders
And wrought horrible destruction
On our foes.
(She tells us—Pampa Kampana tells us—that the wild women told her, long afterward, that Yuktasri had died peacefully and happily as she saw you win the war; and the jungle animals told her what they had seen, and she had translated their Master Language account into her own immaculate verse.)
The War was not really a Battle
It was a single Instant of Doing
They became two Golden Suns
Goddess and Woman
Flaming, blinding, burning
Utterly consuming the Enemy
In their fire.
After this extraordinary, cataclysmic event Pampa Kampana’s inert body was carried by the jungle women to her old home in the jungle and laid down to rest on a bed of soft mosses and leaves. Her eyes and mouth were open, and had to be closed, and the women thought her dead, and planned a funeral pyre, but then the voice of Aranyani filled the air as the goddess spoke for the last time to the creatures of the earth, saying, “She is not gone, but sleeping. I have placed her in this deep, healing sleep, and I will cause great thickets of thorns to grow around her, and you must leave her there, until she is awakened by an act of love.”
Time passed.—Can you feel it passing?—Like a ghost in a corridor floating past white curtains blowing at open windows, like a ship in the night, or a high migration of birds, time passed, shadows lengthened and shrank back, leaves grew and fell from branches, and there was life and death. And one day Pampa Kampana felt something like a soft breeze touching her cheek, and opened her eyes.
A young woman’s face was above hers, so like her own face that it seemed to her that she was floating above her body and looking down at herself. Then her thoughts cleared. The young woman was dressed like a warrior, with a great sword sheathed across her back.
“Who are you,” Pampa Kampana said.
“I am Zerelda Li,” the other replied, “the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of Zerelda Sangama and Grandmaster Li Ye-He. All my kin have departed this life in various ways, leaving me with only one living relative, about whom my mother spoke with her dying words, the same words her mother said to her, and her mother, and her mother, and hers. ‘The matriarch of our house is a woman named Pampa Kampana,’ she told me. ‘And she is still alive. Go to the forest of Aranyani, and make her give you what she owes you.’ I was holding her hand very tightly. ‘What does she owe me, Mother?’ I asked her, and she answered, ‘Everything.’ Then she died.”