Victory City(85)
She had built a new pavilion for him, the Conquest of the World Pavilion, where the great poets of the land assembled each day to sing his praises in several languages while the most beautiful women of the court fanned him with yak-tail fans. There were musicians and dancers in the streets to greet the returning heroes, and there were fireworks too, as fine as any that Domingo Nunes had created in the old days. It was a glorious return, all of it intended by Pampa Kampana to distract from the fact that Tirumala Devi, returning with two children, a daughter and a son, intended to make it plain to everyone that she—not only the senior queen but also the queen mother of the next king—that she, and not the outgoing queen regent, was the real power in the land alongside Krishna the Great.
Nagala Devi, now the grandmother to the future king, made sure Pampa Kampana understood her new situation. She came to stand beside the ex-regent, ostensibly to watch the carnival in the streets with her, but actually to gloat. “Whatever you are,” Nagala Devi said, “a very old woman disguised by magic as a much younger one, or just a brilliant fraud, it no longer matters. As queen regent you were a sort of servant promoted above your station for pragmatic reasons. Now you’re just a servant again, and any ambitions you may have had, have been nullified by the birth of the Crown Prince Tirumala Deva and the Princess Tirumalamba his sister. Once Krishnadevaraya dies you will be nobody. Actually, it feels like you’re nobody now.”
Then—soon after Krishnadevaraya’s return—the drought began. Without water even the most prosperous land begins to wither, and Bisnaga during the great dryness was no exception. Fields cracked open and swallowed cows. Farmers committed suicide. The river shrank and drinking water had to be rationed in the city. The army was thirsty and a thirsty army is no good in a fight, unless it’s a fight over access to water. Foreigners began to leave town in search of rain. The people, always hungry for allegory, began to wonder if the drought was a curse upon the king, if in spite of all his temple offerings he had displeased the gods and this unending barrenness was a judgment upon the slaughter of the one hundred thousand. This feeling intensified when it became known that one hundred miles to the northeast, at Raichur, situated in the “doáb,” the land between the two rivers Pampa and Krishna, it was raining hard, and the famous fresh-water spring in Raichur’s high citadel was flowing freely, so water was plentiful, and the harvest promised to be good.
The increasing frequency of the king’s bouts of bad temper was becoming alarming to Minister Timmarasu and to Pampa Kampana as well. At first they thought his irritability might have been caused by exhaustion, by the stress and fatigue of six years away from home, but even now, in the bosom of his capital, fanned by yak-tails and constantly entertained, his mood was often foul. Then the day came when he walked into the throne room clapping his hands and brimming with energy. “I have it,” he announced. “We have to conquer Raichur and then we will be masters of their rain.”
This was close to insanity, but neither Pampa Kampana nor Timmarasu could prevent Krishnadevaraya from putting his plan into action. “I had a vision,” he declared. “My father the old soldier came to me in a dream and said, ‘Without Raichur the empire will remain incomplete. Take that fortress and it will be the jewel in your crown.’?” He ordered the army to get ready to march.
“Raichur is in the hands of Adil Shah of Bijapur,” Timmarasu warned, “and to move against him after the long amicable peace with that sultanate ever since the battle of Diwani, after which, Your Majesty will recall, Bijapur acknowledged our preeminence…such a move may look like bad faith, and provoke the other sultanates to rise up and come to the defense of their co-religionist.”
“This isn’t about religion,” Krishnadevaraya roared. “This is about destiny.”
The battle for Raichur proved to be the most perilous conflict of his reign. Krishnadevaraya marched north with half a million men, thirty thousand horses and five hundred war elephants, and faced Adil Shah’s army waiting on the far side of the river Krishna with an equal force. Nobody could say who would prevail. But in the end it was Adil Shah’s army that fled the field.
Krishnadevaraya sent Adil Shah a contemptuous message. “If you want to live, come over here and kiss my feet.” When he read this the deeply insulted sultan ran away, swore to fight again another day, and was saved, for the moment, from choosing between humiliation and death; but the doors of the fort were smashed down, and the white flag of surrender raised. The soldiers of Bisnaga rushed to the spring and drank as deeply as they could, and no other sultan of the Deccan, having learned of the fall of Raichur, dared march against Krishnadevaraya, and the empire of Bisnaga had all the land below the river Krishna in its grasp. And the next day, back home in Bisnaga City and across all the lands of the empire, the drought ended and the rains came. The streets burst back into life.
* * *
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In the king’s absence, Pampa Kampana was Queen Regent again, which infuriated Tirumala Devi and Nagala Devi, in whose opinion the Crown Prince Tirumala Deva should have had that honor, even though he was just a boy, and his decisions should have been guided by his mother and grandmother. But Timmarasu had seen how well the city had flourished under Pampa Kampana’s guardianship and he had vetoed that idea. After that the senior queen and her mother were Timmarasu’s sworn enemies. For a time, however, they had other matters on their mind, because both the prince and princess were unwell.