Victory City(76)
During those months the two ladies at the heart of the matter treated each other with an icy courtesy that fooled nobody, least of all the ladies themselves. When she heard that Zerelda Li was suffering from morning sickness, Tirumala Devi sent her a nameless drink which she said would settle the junior queen’s stomach immediately. Zerelda Li poured the contents of the bottle into a plant pot in her quarters and let it be known that the flower in that pot immediately shriveled up and died. Soon afterward Zerelda Li heard that Tirumala Devi had developed a craving for sweet things and was unable to resist sugary confections, even though she was dismayed at the amount of weight she was putting on. At once the junior queen sent the senior monarch a sequence of baskets containing quantities of the most irresistible sweetmeats in the land, the local delicacies Mysore pak and kozhukkattai, as well as Goan bebinca and Tamilian adhirasam, and even some more exotic delicacies from far away, sandesh from Bangla and gujjiya from the territory of the Delhi sultanate; one basket a day, every day for weeks, and Tirumala Devi’s hatred for her rival increased even as her own waistline expanded.
Krishnadevaraya’s trusted minister Saluva Timmarasu privately advised the king that nothing should be done that prejudiced the senior queen’s status. Even if Zerelda Li’s child was male and Tirumala Devi’s turned out to be female, the junior queen’s son should not be named heir to the throne. Instead, Tirumala Devi should be given further opportunities to produce a boy child, and that boy should be first in line of succession, whenever he arrived.
Krishnadevaraya shook his head. “That doesn’t sound right,” he said.
Timmarasu dared to contradict him. “You mean to say, my king, that it doesn’t sound just, and I daresay it would be unjust. But there are occasions when an injustice is also the right course of action for a king to pursue.”
“Let us ask the mother of the empire if she agrees,” said the king.
* * *
—
Pampa Kampana was not well. Ever since the miracle of the walls she had felt dizzy, perpetually tired, with aches in her bones and an irritation in her gums. “You need to rest,” Zerelda Li told her. “You’re not yourself.” But Pampa knew that in a deeper way she was precisely feeling like herself, feeling the way a person of her antiquity should feel. For the first time in her life, she felt old.
She had not returned to the house of Niccolò de’ Vieri, and her instincts told her that whatever happened now, whether she recovered her strength and clarity of purpose, or slowly faded into nothingness, the time of Signor Rimbalzo, Mister Bounce, was over. She sent a message to the fruit vendor Sri Laxman asking him to send Alphonsos to the “foreigner’s house,” and to include the wax-sealed paper her messenger carried, containing words for the Venetian’s eyes only. “These are the last Alphonsos,” this message read. “Mango season is over.” When Vieri received the gift and read the message he understood that it was her way of saying goodbye. He packed his bags immediately and left Bisnaga forever less than twenty-four hours later, bouncing away to the next place on his never-ending journey, carrying her words and the memory of his love, two burdens he would not put down until his dying day. He was the last foreigner to enter her life. That aspect of her story, too, was ending.
She remained in the suite for visiting monarchs but was deeply withdrawn into herself, noticing none of the grandeur of her accommodation, the stone and silver bidri-ware water-pipes from conquered Bidar, the bronze Chola period Nataraja portraying Shiva as the lord of the dance, and the paintings of the unique Bisnagan school, whose artists characteristically chose to portray neither the gods nor the kings but the common people at work and, just occasionally, taking a hard-earned rest. To all of this Pampa Kampana was, for the moment, blind. She might as well have been living in an unfurnished cave such as the one she had lived in for nine years with Vidyasagar, or a jungle hut like the one she and her daughters had built in Aranyani’s forest. She said very little, remaining lost in thought, and spent much of her time obsessively examining her face, hands, and body to see if old age, which she had begun to feel in her bones, might finally be catching up with her appearance.
She should not, she told herself, be worrying about the arrival of gray hair and wrinkles like some vain flibbertigibbet. Her power rested in herself, not in her looks. —Yes, but, she answered herself, if she started looking like a crone, the king would look at her differently. —Maybe, she argued back, he would treat her with the gravity, the respect, that old age commanded and deserved. Maybe her authority would actually increase.
But in fact she could not see the evidence of the years in her skin. The goddess’s gift of youth was apparently not yet lost, not on the outside, at least. Inside, she had begun to feel the weight of every accumulated year of her two centuries of life. Inside, she began to feel that she had lived too long.
Zerelda Li came to see her, heavily pregnant, and looking outraged. Pregnancy was being unkind to her, she was suffering its myriad ills, but that was not the reason for her foul mood. “The king wants to see you,” she told Pampa Kampana, sounding simultaneously out of breath and furious. “You have to come right away.”
“What’s the matter?” Pampa Kampana asked.
“That matter is, he wants you to decide if my child will be a person of importance, a person of some consequence in this damned empire, or if my baby should be shoved to one side like a little piece of shit,” Zerelda Li told her. “And, just so I can be prepared, can you tell me how you intend to answer the question?”