Victory City(61)
He summoned Thimma the Huge (so called both because it was a fair description and also to avoid confusion with Saluva Timmarasu, Krishna Raya’s prime minister). It was said of this immense, silent hulk that he was more elephant than man, his arms like two long trunks that could swing an enemy into the air and hurl him great distances, his gigantic feet able to crush opponents beneath their unimaginable weight. He needed so much to eat that, like a working elephant, he had to carry his food in a sack around his neck, and if he was not fighting or sleeping then he was eating. On the battlefield his mere arrival was enough to make entire platoons of adversaries turn and flee. His weapon of choice was the club, but on entering the kwoon he picked up a spear as well. The balconies of the kwoon were full. Nobody gave the two women much of a chance, even if they had arrived from the skies, and the watchers began to bet against them. Thimma and Ulupi Junior were heavy favorites. Only the king, as an act of friendship to the new arrivals who had blessed his claim to the throne, placed a large bet on the supernatural ladies, on whom he received very long odds.
Then the combat started, and all those who had backed the two local heroes quickly understood that their money was lost. The spectacle of the two apsaras whirling up into the air to attack their opponents from above, running up walls and along the rooftops of the kwoon to dive down, attack, and retreat again, was dizzying not only to the spectators but to their opponents, who were soon reduced to standing back-to-back in the center of the kwoon’s fighting arena, swinging and lunging at empty air. The aerial ballet of the two women, punctuated with bouts of swordplay that were almost ecstatic in their beauty, left Thimma the Huge and Ulupi Junior exhausted, with only a smashed club, a bisected javelin, and a broken sword to fight with. When Thimma finally sank to his knees panting, the king threw a scarlet cloth into the arena to indicate that the battle was at an end. After that day there was no argument about the most fearsome fighters in Bisnaga, and Krishna Raya declared, “All four of these warriors will come with me to the wars, and no force on earth will be able to withstand us.”
The oldest spectators, who were familiar with the old stories, said to one another, “The only women who could ever fight like that were Pampa Kampana and her three daughters, especially Zerelda Sangama.” That memory ran swiftly around the galleries of the kwoon and dropped down into the arena and reached the ears of the combatants and the king.
“Then call me Pampa Kampana,” said Pampa Kampana, “and I will be her second coming. Or, to be precise, her third.”
“And call me Zerelda,” said Zerelda Li, “and I will be that great lady reborn.”
The gold coins Krishna Raya had won by betting on the two women were used to buy food to distribute to the poor. In this way both the king and the victorious ladies began to be seen as virtuous benefactors of the people, and were much loved. “It’s a new age in Bisnaga,” people began to say, and so it proved to be.
* * *
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When the army paused at night, on the road north to Diwani to face the armies of Bijapur and Bidar, Pampa Kampana and Zerelda Li shared a tent, and this, after the nonstop activity that had followed their first meeting, was where they finally had time to begin to know each other.
“Tell me your story,” Pampa Kampana said, and the young woman, who by nature was a reticent and inward person, made so by the strangeness of her life, opened up to this apparition of a youthful ancestor who was the very incarnation and point of origin of that strangeness. “I was born on a ship,” she said, “and nobody can put down roots in the sea. This is how it has been for us ever since Zerelda Sangama and Grandmaster Li joined General Cheng Ho. We have been women on ships, making our way here, there, everywhere, finding men, not marrying them—following the lead of Zerelda Sangama and Grandmaster Li, who never married, but remained true to one another all their lives—and having daughters, and carrying on, bearing Zerelda Sangama’s given name—Zerelda after Zerelda after Zerelda, ending with me, the sixth of that line!—and we kept the grandmaster’s family name as well, down all our generations. So we have all been Zerelda Li, the first, the second, the third, and so on. As for me, I had my mother and that was all. My father was mislaid in a port somewhere. There were no other children on board; so from the beginning I was treated as an adult and expected to behave as such. I grew up silent and watchful and I think the men on board—tattooed, gold-toothed, peg-legged, eye-patched, piratical types of whom a normal girl would be terrified—were actually a little scared of me, and very scared of my mother, and so they kept their distance.
“The ship itself was my only neighborhood, it was the street where I lived, but there was a new world waiting every time we came into port and that new world became a part of my world too, for a while. Java, Brunei, Siam, the far lands of Asia, and in the opposite direction the lands of Araby, the Horn of Africa, the Swahili Coast. When we brought the giraffe of Malindi back to China the emperor said it was proof of the Mandate of Heaven that blessed and authorized his rule. We brought ostriches too but they were not held to be divine, being too foolish-looking. This was my life, everywhere and nowhere, and I discovered I possessed the gift of holding the shape of things in my mind. I became a map of the world.
“I learned that the world is infinite in its beauty but also unrelenting, unforgiving, greedy, careless, and cruel. I learned that love is for the most part absent and, when it appears, is usually fitful, fleeting, and finally unsatisfactory. I learned that the communities men build are based on the oppression of the many by the few, and I did not understand, I still do not understand, why the many accept this oppression. Maybe it is because when they do not accept it and rise up, what follows is a greater oppression than the one they overthrew. I began to think that I did not like human beings very much, but I loved mountains, music, forests, dancing, wide rivers, singing, and of course the sea. The sea was my home. And finally I learned that the world takes your home away without any remorse. Somewhere on the eastern coast of Africa a yellow fever came aboard. I was spared, but many died, including my mother. All I had left was what she had taught me, the high arts of battle, and her dying words, the dying words of all the Zereldas. ‘Find Pampa Kampana.’ And so here I am, and now you know everything.”