Victory City(65)
“That’s all fine,” said the fifth gopi, “but I hope I will be allowed some romance as well.”
“Chitra,” the fourth-ranked gopi, was one of the few chosen ladies who came from an aristocratic household, and was therefore a nose-in-air type who was reluctant to be schooled by Pampa Kampana. “I know how it goes,” she told Pampa. “I intercede in the royal disagreements, and I garland the king and queen every day. I speak and read many languages, and can interpret any text to tell the king what the author really means, rather than what is apparent on the surface. I know how food will taste just by looking at it, and so I can also discern if it’s poisoned or not. I can fill pots with different quantities of water and play music on them with drumsticks. I will be in charge of the palace gardens, so that I can bring the king herbs that transport him into a transcendental state, and others that will heal him when he’s sick. The household animals will be in my care. And I will behave with extreme affection and high sensuality toward the king, but remain absolutely demure in the queen’s presence. None of this is very difficult.”
“We will see,” Pampa Kampana said.
Her last pupil was “Champaka,” or “Champaka-Mallika,” the Magnolia Queen, from a humble woodsman’s household. “I don’t have much to tell you,” Pampa Kampana said, “except everything I’ve told the others, combined. You are the most exalted of the ladies of the household, behind only the as-yet-unknown queen and her two as-yet-unnamed closest companions. You will have the ultimate responsibility for everything the ladies ranked below you must do, but you will be, or will become, skilled in the art of delegating. If you succeed in inhabiting your role, you will be fourth-ranked in Bliss Potency, and will be called upon to cause bliss to the king when the senior three are tired or disinclined. Your hands are skilled, or must become so, so that you can make sculptures from clay, and also sweetmeats to eat, so delicious that all will call you ‘Sweet Hands.’?”
“I can’t cook,” said the Magnolia Queen. “Everybody says so. What happens if I fail?”
“Don’t fail,” Pampa Kampana said, her patience at an end. “Learn. And do it soon.”
* * *
—
To Pampa Kampana’s surprise, her great-great-great-great-granddaughter Zerelda Li found the long-drawn-out process of the selection of the royal consorts entirely unobjectionable; in fact she was pleased that Pampa was participating in the enterprise, and helping the ladies to grasp the importance and variety of their new responsibilities.
“Who knows,” she said, and her air of starry-eyed innocence astonished Pampa Kampana, “maybe he’ll choose me as one of the two Chief Companions, or even—yes! Why not?—as his queen.”
“What are you saying?” Pampa Kampana said. The heat with which she spoke surprised them both, and may have been the product of her reluctant mentoring of the newly appointed royal consorts. “You’ve traveled the world, so you must have seen there are better ways to be a woman than that.”
“Yes, I’ve spent my life wandering, rootless, not knowing where I came from, where I belonged, or who, if I ever found that place, I might become,” Zerelda Li replied. “If there’s a chance now for me to become a real part of something, to join myself to an ancient tradition and become part of the ruling dynasty as well, then I will happily do it, and you should understand why. To stand by the side of the king will allow me to believe that my journeying is at an end, and that I can finally put down roots.”
“I have always believed that a woman can put down roots in herself,” Pampa Kampana said, “and not define herself by standing next to any man, not even a king. Didn’t you come across any women who thought like that in all your travels?”
They were in the old Green Destiny kwoon, sharpening their martial skills, and the argument—their first moment of dissension—added an edge to their training. “In the maps I have in my mind,” Zerelda Li said as they battled, “I see places where women are slaves, or servants, and where they are free they are still disrespected. In China their feet are bound and crippled when they are little girls. In the Stone Town of Zanzibar women are not allowed in public places. In the Mediterranean and in the South China Sea there were women pirates, that’s true, but one was overthrown by her son-in-law and the other married her adopted son and ended up running a brothel in Macau. Being a queen is a lot better than any of that.”
“I’ve been a queen,” said Pampa Kampana, setting down her sword. “It isn’t all that great.” At the end of their training they went to the baths. “In old Bisnaga,” Pampa Kampana told her grandchild, “women were lawyers, traders, architects, poets, gurus, everything.”
“When I am queen,” Zerelda Li said, “all that will be true again.”
“If you are queen,” Pampa Kampana corrected her, sighing.
“When,” Zerelda Li insisted. “Haven’t you seen the way he looks at me?”
At this point Pampa Kampana said something she hadn’t intended to say, something that came from a place within her whose existence she hadn’t suspected.
“He looks at me in the exact same way,” she said.
After that Zerelda Li did not speak to her for a week, but shut herself up in her Map Room in the Lotus Palace, had food brought to her while she worked, and slept in there on a bed she had brought in for her. When she finally opened the doors, everyone saw that she had made, over and over, maps of only two countries, both of which, Pampa Kampana suspected, were imaginary: the country of Zerelda, which Grandmaster Li had invented to entrance his beloved, and the land of Ye-He, by which invention Zerelda Li’s forebear, Pampa Kampana’s daughter Zerelda Sangama, had found a language in which she could tell Li Ye-He that she, too, loved him. The city of fleeting time and butterfly nets, and the city of flighted humans and flightless birds, were both depicted in dazzling colors and extraordinary detail. Here, in a corner of Zereldaville, was an old woman in a wheeled chair being pulled by her daughters, desperately grasping at the flitting hours she could no longer capture, while, watching her with expressions that mingled pity and contempt, were young boys munching on time sandwiches and fruits that looked like clocks, and believing themselves immortal; while here, in a neighboring panel, were ecstatic women flying above the clouds of Ye-He-Town, naked as the day they were born and dancing together in the air without a care in the world—and then the same women, shivering with cold, buying coats from the garment shops in the clouds, not because they had been overcome by shame at their nudity, but because they were freezing to death at that altitude. In the faces of the citizens of the two towns the stoicism of the Zereldans and the worldly wisdom of the Ye-He-ites shone out.