Victory City(9)

* * *



—

It was a small room, unlike any other room in the palace, not in the least ornate, with plain whitewashed walls, and unfurnished except for a bare wooden plinth. A small high window allowed a single ray of sunlight to descend at a steep angle toward the young woman below, like a shaft of angelic grace. In this austere setting, struck by that thunderbolt of startling light, sitting cross-legged, with her eyes closed, her arms outstretched and resting on her knees, her hands with the thumbs and index fingers joined at their tips, her lips slightly parted, there she was: Pampa Kampana, lost in the ecstasy of the act of creation. She was silent, but it seemed to Domingo Nunes, as he was ushered into her presence by Bukka Sangama, that a great throng of whispered words was flowing from her, from her parted lips, down her chin and neck, along her arms and out across the floor, escaping from her as a river escapes from its source, and heading out into the world. The whispers were so soft that they were barely audible, and for a moment Domingo Nunes told himself he was imagining them, that he was telling himself some sort of occult tale to make sense of the impossible things he was seeing.

Then Bukka Sangama whispered in his ear. “You hear it, yes?”

Domingo Nunes nodded.

“This is how she is for twenty hours a day,” Bukka said. “Then she opens her eyes and eats a little and drinks something also. Then she closes her eyes and lies down for three hours to rest. Then she sits up and starts again.”

“But wha wha what is she ack ack actually doing?” Domingo Nunes asked.

“You can ask her,” said Bukka softly. “This is the hour when her eyes open.”

Pampa Kampana opened her eyes and saw the beautiful young man staring at her with the glow of adoration on his face and at that moment the question of her proposed marriage to Hukka Raya I, and perhaps to Crown Prince Bukka after his death (depending on who survived whom), developed new complications. He didn’t have to ask her anything. “Yes,” she said in reply to his unspoken question, “I’ll tell you everything.”

She had finally opened the door to the locked room that contained the memory of her mother and her early childhood, and it had all flooded out and filled her with strength. She told Domingo Nunes about Radha Kampana the potter, who taught her that women could be as good at pottery as men were, as good at everything as men were, and about her mother’s departure, which had left a void in her that she was now trying to fill. She described the fire and the goddess who spoke through her mouth. She told him about the seeds that built the city on the site of her personal calamity. Any new place where people decide to live takes time to feel real, she said, it can take a generation or more. The first people arrive with pictures of the world in their luggage, with things from elsewhere filling their heads, but the new place feels strange, it’s hard for them to believe in it, even though they have nowhere else to go, and nobody else to be. They make the best of it, and then they begin forgetting, they tell the next generation some of it, they forget the rest, and the children forget more and change things in their heads, but they were born here, that’s the difference, they are of the place, they are the place and the place is them, and their spreading roots give the place the nourishment it needs, it flowers, it blossoms, it lives, so that by the time the first people depart they can leave happy in the knowledge that they began something that will continue.

Little Bukka was astonished by her volubility. “She never talks like this,” he said, perplexed. “When she was younger, she didn’t talk at all for nine years. Pampa Kampana, why are you all of a sudden talking so much?”

“We have a guest,” she said, gazing into Domingo Nunes’s green eyes, “and we must make him feel at home.”

Everyone came from a seed, she told him. Men planted seeds in women and so forth. But this was different. A whole city, people of all kinds and ages, blooming from the earth on the same day, such flowers have no souls, they don’t know who they are, because the truth is they are nothing. But such truth is unacceptable. It was necessary, she said, to do something to cure the multitude of its unreality. Her solution was fiction. She was making up their lives, their castes, their faiths, how many brothers and sisters they had, and what childhood games they had played, and sending the stories whispering through the streets into the ears that needed to hear them, writing the grand narrative of the city, creating its story now that she had created its life. Some of her stories came from her memories of lost Kampili, the slaughtered fathers and the burned mothers, she was trying to bring that place back to life in this place, bringing back the old dead in the newly living; but memory wasn’t enough, there were too many lives to enliven, and so imagination had to take over from the point at which memory failed.

“My mother abandoned me,” she said, “but I will be the mother of them all.”

Domingo Nunes didn’t understand much of what he was being told. Then all of a sudden he heard a whisper, heard it not through his ears but somehow through his brain, a whisper winding itself around his throat, untying the knots inside him, clearing what was tangled, and setting his tongue free. It was simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying, and he found himself clutching at his throat and crying out. Stop. Go on. Stop.

“The whispers know what you need,” said Pampa Kampana. “The new people need stories to tell them what kind of people they are, honest, dishonest, or something in between. Soon the whole city will have stories, memories, friendships, rivalries. We can’t wait a generation for the city to become a real place. We have to do it now, so that there can be a new empire; so that the city of victory can rule the land, and make sure the slaughter never happens again, and, above all, that no more women ever have to walk into walls of flame, and that all women are treated better than orphans at men’s mercy in the dark. But you,” she added, making it sound like an afterthought although in fact it was what she really wanted to say, “you had other needs.”