Victory City(78)

Krishnadevaraya understood this better than anyone, and gave the order, via Mahamantri Timmarasu, to prepare his armed forces for war.



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Pampa Kampana awoke from her collapse into a new reality. Zerelda Li was gone and with her all Pampa’s hopes of a new line of magical girls. Her fabulist dynasty had ended. The future belonged to Tirumala Devi, who, once she emerged from her own sorrowful retreat, would no doubt be given many more opportunities to produce an heir, and no doubt at least one of them would be a boy, and would live. The old order would not change. Krishnadevaraya might be glorious, he might win many battles, but he would not become what the women of Pampa Kampana’s line might have made him.

All Bisnaga was shaken by the deaths of one queen and two potential kings. Krishnadevaraya himself, who should have been readying himself for his military campaign, had instead taken off his habitual attire of a “sultan”—the clothing of which Tirumala Devi and her mother so strongly disapproved—and had put on the two pieces of homespun cloth preferred by mendicant alms-gatherers and holy ascetics. He had sequestered himself in the Monkey Temple, kneeling, with his head bowed and lost in prayer, asking Lord Hanuman for guidance. The whole city held its breath and waited for him to emerge.

Some days passed in this fashion.

Then before dawn one morning Pampa Kampana was woken by a nervous serving girl and informed that the king was waiting outside, still half-naked in his pauper’s rags. “Bring him in,” she commanded, and gathering her own garments about her got out of bed to greet him.

When he entered he would not let her kneel or make any other gesture of obeisance. “There’s no time for that,” he said. “I have a lot to tell you. In the temple, when I closed my eyes and waited for an answer from Lord Hanuman, all I could see was your face. At last I understood. In you and you alone there lies the guidance that I seek, and so I must at once offer you a new and deeper kind of love, not the common love men show to women, but the higher love shown by the devotee to the manifestation of the Divine.” And after saying those words he was the one to kneel down and touch her feet.

The speed at which these new developments were arriving bewildered Pampa Kampana. “This is much too soon,” she said. “All our thoughts should be fixed upon mourning the dead. Declarations of love, higher or lower, should be set aside for another time. What you say is inappropriate, my lord.”

“You mean, I think, that it would be considered unseemly out there, in the corridors of the palace, and in the city street,” Krishnadevaraya replied. “But sometimes what a king must do to perfect his majesty goes against that grain. I have no time to waste. The great matter of my life is upon me. I see years stretching ahead when my days will be filled with blood and my nights of peace here at home will be few. It is my wish that you act as queen regent in my absence, which is the meaning of my visions in the temple, and for that to be possible we must be married at once. Yes, you will be the junior queen, that’s the vacancy to be filled, but in every other way you will be at the apex. Tirumala Devi says she is a fine administrator and perhaps she is but I exalt you above her, and Timmarasu agrees with what I say. You see that reasons of state must triumph over social convention. A king must act when it is time to act. He must love when it is time to love, and not when it is too late or when people think it seemly. You are my glory made flesh, and so you must rule in my place. Tirumala has many qualities, but she is not glorious.”

“It is a strange use of that word, love,” Pampa Kampana said. “It’s all mixed up with other words that aren’t loving at all. Also, you were Zerelda Li’s lover, and therefore you can’t be mine. That would be too great an indecency. So, yes, I will marry you, and rule Bisnaga in your absence, but it stops there. We will sleep in separate beds.”

There was a great turbulence within her. She had owed Zerelda Li everything, and had set her own dreams aside so that the younger woman could achieve hers. But now the child was no more, and everything was being offered to Pampa herself, for the second time, and with even greater force than the first. The reverence she had been shown ever since she made the walls rise up—the miracle that made Bisnaga’s capital city a fortress which could not be breached—was, finally, little more than a courtesy, a gesture of astonishment and gratitude. But now she was being invited into the heart of the empire, which also meant into the heart of the king. She was being offered the reality instead of the polite appearance, and it was no longer necessary for her to deny her own dreams in order to fulfill Zerelda Li’s hopes. It was the strangest declaration of love she had ever received, a love that felt, at one and the same time, like an abstraction, an impropriety, and even a kind of blasphemy. She had been touched by a goddess but she was not one, yet now she was being offered the place, if not of the goddess herself then of her representative on earth, or something close to that. She had been loved in many ways by many men, had been called promiscuous as a result, and might even at times have admitted to the justice of the charge, but this was a love she had never been offered, not a thing of the body, but, instead, a higher exaltation, in which the love and care of Bisnaga itself was mingled with the obsession—the “vision”—of the king. She, who had so often been so eagerly desirous of physical love, began to see, through her turmoil, that carnal love had been a mere substitute for what she truly wanted; that she wanted what she was being asked to accept.