Victory City(74)
“What are you talking about?” the older woman asked.
“You said there were two things you wanted,” Zerelda Li reminded her. “What’s the second thing?”
Pampa Kampana was silent for a long moment, then made her decision, and spoke.
“I am the mother of Bisnaga,” she said. “Everything that has happened here, happened because of me. My seeds gave birth to the people, my art caused the walls to rise. I have sat upon the throne beside both the founding kings. What do I want? I want my true nature to be recognized. I don’t want to be invisible. I want to be seen.”
Zerelda Li listened with great seriousness and attention. Then she said, “I’ll talk to him. I’ll explain. I’m sure he will be thunderstruck when he starts believing. I’m sure he will welcome you into the palace and give you the highest rank, higher even than the senior queen. I will try. But you know what would convince him better than I can?”
“No,” Pampa Kampana said.
“More walls,” said Zerelda Li.
Under the influence of the mystical power of the number seven, Krishnadevaraya had decided that the expanding city should be defended by not one, but seven circles of surrounding walls. The population had grown spectacularly, and burst out of the original enclosure. Whole new neighborhoods were being built outside the fortifications, and the citizenry who lived there were unprotected against attack. New walls were urgently required.
“It’s a long time since I made the first wall rise,” Pampa Kampana said. “I was much younger then, and stronger. And that was before the war against the pink monkeys almost killed me and I slept until you woke me up. We changed into birds to get here, that’s true, but even that gift is all but used up, and I don’t know what else remains. I don’t know if I can still build even one new wall, let alone six more.”
“Try,” said Zerelda Li.
* * *
—
The next day Pampa Kampana visited Sri Narayan and bought a large sackful of assorted seeds. “No fruits today, madam?” Sri Narayan’s fruit-vendor brother Sri Laxman called across. “Mango season soon be over, madam. Mango also has seed. Better you buy some quick, before they go.”
To please him, she bought some mangoes and put them in her sack. Sri Narayan snorted in irritation. “He can sweet-talk better than I,” he said. “But what mango-shango can grow in this stony ground?”
“Not only mangoes will grow from mango seeds,” she said. “Or from your seeds either.”
After she left the brothers scratched their heads.
“That meant what?” Sri Narayan wondered.
“Some nonsense,” Sri Laxman replied. “The lady is an excellent lady but sometimes I am afraid she is a little bit crack.” And he tapped himself on the forehead to make his point.
* * *
—
Pampa Kampana slept early, and Niccolò de’ Vieri crept into bed later, without disturbing her. Then when it was still dark she awoke and stole out of the room without waking him. At dawn, she passed through the city gates, barefoot, and wearing only two lengths of homespun cloth, with marks on her forehead which indicated her seriousness of purpose, and a large gunny sack filled with seeds (and some mangoes too) slung over a shoulder. She went out alone into the rocky brown plain and looked up at the surrounding hills, as if she was letting them know that they were about to experience a great change. Then she walked forward into the emptiness and nobody saw her for many weeks. Afterward in the Jayaparajaya she described her long wanderings across the plain, up the hills, down into the valleys, and told how she chanted and sang as she walked.
Yes, the land is barren, (she wrote)
But song can make fruits grow
Even in a desert
And the fruits of songs become
The wonders of the world.
At length she came down again into the wide Bisnaga plain, her skin dusty and her lips parched. It was dawn again, and the shadows of the hills retreated and sunlight flowed over her, a river of heat. Pampa Kampana stood very still for the next seven hours, ignoring the sweat that began to run down from her head, the perspiration flowing out from all her body’s pores, the dust on her skin turning to mud, the shimmer of the heat in the air, the drumbeat of the heat in her ears. After seven hours she closed her eyes and raised her arms and her miracle began.
The stone walls rose up everywhere that she had planted their seeds, along the riverbank, through the plains, and up and down the hills of that harsh terrain. The river washed the stones, the plains were dominated by their eminence, and the ranges of hills surrounding Bisnaga City raised the new defenses up toward the sky. There were watchtowers awaiting sentries, crenellated ramparts lacking only archers, and cannons, and cauldrons of hot oil. There were gates strong enough to resist the heaviest of battering rams. From that day until the last day no enemy would ever set foot in the heart of the empire, and on that last day the enemy only entered because the people had lost hope. Only despair could make the walls crumble and fall, and the coming of that despair was still long years away.
Six new circles of high stone walls, born of enchanted seeds, and seven circles in all: the wonders of the world.
The raising of the walls did not end until after sunset, it went on deep into the night, but well before the miracle was complete there were crowds rushing out of Bisnaga, on foot, on horseback, in carriages, to stand open-mouthed and stare at the city’s rising defenses. The king himself rode out and could not believe his eyes. Pampa Kampana, a solitary figure in the heart of the great Bisnaga plain, stood with her eyes closed and her arms raised and nobody, at first, connected this solitary ascetic woman with the surging stone all around. The crowds grew larger and people jostled Pampa Kampana in their ignorance. Still she stood there, silent, unseeing, commanding the massive fortifications to rise up, stone on stone, perfectly dressed, the walls even and smooth, as if an army of invisible, spectral master masons was at work, an army capable of summoning stone out of the air and working at impossible speed. As the sun set behind the seven stone circles the people of Bisnaga were filled with a mixture of fear and joy, as men and women are when the miraculous crosses the frontier from the world of gods and enters the everyday, revealing to women and men that that frontier is not impenetrable, that the miraculous and the everyday are two halves of a single whole, and that we ourselves are the gods we seek to worship, and capable of mighty deeds.