Victory City(73)

“Here’s some advice for you,” the king said. “The poisoner usually ends up drinking the poison himself. Just something for you to think about.”

“It’s that junior queen of yours who is the poisonous one,” Tirumala Devi cried, before sweeping away with her head held high. “That foreigner. She’s the one to worry about, if poison’s on your mind.”



* * *



—

The “foreigner” Zerelda Li was visiting Pampa Kampana in “the foreigner’s house.” She came in a silver carriage with attendants and guards, but she entered the house alone and became, during her visit, a simple child of the family, and not a junior queen. She found Pampa Kampana alone and huddled in a window seat watching the bustle of the city outside, with the melancholy air of one who feels her time has passed, and the lover in whose home she lives is nothing more than a way of helping the hours that remain to creep by as noiselessly as possible. “He is not special,” she admitted to herself. “His hair is like a beautiful fire and his eyes are jewels and his manners are of the old school, which is nice. But he is an imitation of an earlier man in another life. Actually, he is an imitation of the man who was himself an imitation of the real man. I am too old to fall in love with imitations of imitations, even one with the right hair, eyes, and manners, who makes love in the way I remember and still prefer, even though he is not Portuguese. I have seen the original, I have heard the music of that love, and I can’t be satisfied with an echo of an echo. Niccolò is pleasant, and has seen the wide world as he says Venetians do, but in the end, he’s beside the point.”

And then she thought, perhaps that’s what I have become as well, after all these years, as I approach my two hundredth birthday. Maybe I, too, am beside the point.

“Great-great-great-great-grandmother,” Zerelda Li said, “what is it you want?”

“I want two things,” Pampa Kampana replied. “And the first thing is, I want you to have what you want. If you want this king, and all that goes with him, if that makes you belong and shows you who you are, then I owe it to you to make sure you have that for as long as you want it, and don’t accidentally die of poison before you’re tired of life.”

She got up from the window seat and beckoned to Zerelda Li to follow her. “The woods near Bisnaga are not like the enchanted forest of Aranyani,” she said, “but neither were the groves around Vidyasagar’s cave where I grew up. Those ordinary woods gave him all the things he needed, and these woods have enough for my purposes too. I’ve been foraging there quite a lot while you’ve been busy with palace intrigues.”

“Foraging for what?” Zerelda Li asked and Pampa Kampana grinned widely with self-satisfied pleasure. “Vidyasagar was a man of many parts,” she said. “There was his wisdom, for which he was adored by many, and his statecraft, which was devious and made him a man who was feared by many as well. There were some parts, nocturnal ones, which I can never forgive, but I have locked those memories in a room so deep that on some days even I can’t find the way there, or the key, and there is no reason to go looking for that key today. And there are some parts which will be useful to us. Useful, I should say, to you.”

They were in Pampa Kampana’s room, and in a corner of the room there stood a small clay pot with a long neck that made it look a little like a strutting rooster. “Vieri tells me that this pot is a thousand years old and comes from a country whose people used it to hold the blood of defeated rivals. The dried remnants of that blood were still inside when he gave it to me, and I knew, because Vidyasagar taught me, that blood of this kind, when augmented with the right herbs, creates a drink that makes the drinker invulnerable to anything she eats or drinks.”

“An antidote,” Zerelda Li understood.

“I gathered the herbs,” Pampa Kampana said. “I crushed them and dropped them in through this long neck. I heated it all over a fire, and I said the words that Vidyasagar taught me, and now it’s ready.”

She put a wooden bowl down beside the clay rooster, picked the pot up by its neck, and smashed it down into the bowl. A thick dark liquid oozed out from the broken shards.

“A thousand years old, you said,” Zerelda Li marveled with a little shock in her voice.

“Yes,” said Pampa Kampana. “It has been waiting a long time to do what it was meant to do.” She saw that Zerelda Li was still looking disapproving. “Great age,” she added sourly, “doesn’t buy you any privileges these days. I used to make pots, so for me to smash one to bits is not an easy thing.”

She scooped the thick dark liquid into a glass vial and sealed it with a small cork. “Wear this around your neck,” she said. “Use food tasters and take every precaution, but if all else fails and you feel the poison in your body, take a sip. You don’t need to take much. A few drops will save your life.”

“How will I know if the food or drink is poisoned?” Zerelda Li asked. “Rich flavors can mask the taste of the venom, can’t they?”

“Your body will tell you,” Pampa Kampana said. “When the body is threatened, it sends out an alarm. You’ll know the signal when it comes. Which obviously I hope it never does.”

“And your other desire?” Zerelda Li demanded, hanging the vial around her neck, under her clothes. “Are you going to tell me what that is?”