Victory City(62)
“Your map of the world,” Pampa Kampana said, “do you have an actual map in your head? Can you see how the world joins up? How here connects with there, and is affected by it and changed by it? Can you see the shape of things?”
“Yes,” said Zerelda Li. “I see it very clearly.”
“Then I will tell you who I am,” Pampa Kampana said. “I am a map of time. I carry almost two centuries within me and will absorb half a century more before I’m done. And just as you can see how here connects to there, so I perceive how then is joined to now.”
“Then let’s both make our maps,” Zerelda Li proposed, clapping her hands. “I’ll set mine down on paper if you will agree to do the same with yours. I will ask the king for a Map Room and cover every inch of the walls and even the ceiling with pictures of the great world beyond the sea, and you must ask for an empty book that you will fill with history and dreams and maybe tell the future as well, while you’re at it.”
There, in that spartan military encampment, on the road to war, Pampa Kampana’s masterwork was born. She began in earnest to write the Jayaparajaya, even though to do so meant revisiting the horror of the fire that consumed her mother; and Zerelda Li began to draw the maps that would be thought, for fifty-five years, to be the most perfect works of the cartographer’s art. But the Map Room did not survive the destruction of Bisnaga, and no shred of Zerelda Li’s genius remains for us to marvel at today.
The battle of Diwani didn’t last long, and would be better described as a rout. As the armies of Bijapur and Bidar fled the field the vanquished sultans prostrated themselves at Krishna Raya’s feet, expecting to be trampled by the battle elephant, Masti Madahasti, on which he sat in his golden howdah, looking down at them with the wide yellow-toothed grin of victory. But Krishna held his elephant back. “He has sensitive feet,” he informed the prone sultans, “and I don’t want to injure them if I can help it. So, I suggest that you can live, and go back to your petty thrones, but from now on both your sultanates will be subservient to the Bisnaga Empire, and you will accept my supremacy, and pay me tribute. I hope you will accept this generous offer, because if not then Masti Madahasti here may have to risk his tender feet after all.”
“There’s just one thing,” said the horizontal sultan of Bijapur. “We are not prepared to convert to your religion with its thousand and one gods, and if you insist on that, then let the elephant do its worst. Is that not so, my friend Bidar?”
The sultan of Bidar considered for a moment. Then, “Yes,” he said, “I suppose so.”
Krishna Raya let out a loud laugh, a laugh containing little mirth. “Why would I insist on such a thing?” he asked. “In the first place, such conversions are dishonest. We know from our history that the founders of Bisnaga, Hukka and Bukka Sangama, were forcibly converted by the Delhi sultan, and obliged for a time to pretend to accept your tediously unitary God; but they escaped the first chance they got and gave up all that nonsense at once. In the second place, were you to convert, you would lose the support of your own people and therefore be unable to convince them of the value of loyalty to the Bisnaga Empire, and after that you would be of little use to me. And in the third place, if by some miracle your people followed you and converted en masse, who then would occupy all those beautiful mosques you have built in your sultanates? So, keep your faith, my elephant doesn’t mind if you do. But if you show disloyalty to the empire in even the slightest degree, then Masti Madahasti may have to risk his tender feet after all and pound you both to death.”
In that age of decapitations, straw-stuffed heads, assassinations, and elephant crushings, news of Krishna Raya’s merciful act spread rapidly, and was thought to be greatly to his credit. Thus began the legend of the new God-King, as godlike as the god after whom he was named, a legend which, very soon, Krishna Raya unfortunately began to believe himself. On that day, however, Pampa Kampana noticed a more immediate motive for his act of forgiveness. As Krishna Raya was pardoning the defeated sultans, his eyes moved away from their humbled bodies and darted between Zerelda Li and Pampa Kampana herself. They were mounted on horseback and positioned to his elephant’s right. Ulupi Junior and Thimma the Huge were to his left, on foot, but the king’s gaze never once strayed in their direction. Zerelda Li kept looking straight ahead and gave no indication that she was aware of the king’s scrutiny, but Pampa Kampana looked right back at him until his grin widened, becoming even more yellow, and he actually blushed.
Pampa Kampana put her hands together and applauded him for his wisdom. He bowed his head to recognize her gesture, because the approval of his two apsaras was something he found that he greatly desired. It was plain that something had begun.
* * *
—
It was Mahamantri or Great Minister Saluva Timmarasu who had taught the young Krishna Raya about the importance of the number seven. There were, he said, seven ways to handle an adversary: you could try to reason with him, or bribe him, or stir up trouble in his territories; you could lie to him in peacetime and trick him on the battlefield; you could attack him, obviously, and this was the recommended method; or finally—not to be recommended—you could forgive him. When Krishna Raya forgave the two sultans at Diwani, almost everyone approved and praised his humane act. Timmarasu, however, greeted him on his return to the palace with the words: “I hope that wasn’t really forgiveness, because that would be a sign of weakness, but if it’s a trick, it’s a good one.”