Victory City(98)

Achyuta did nothing, as if he was afraid to act. He was unpopular at court, in the streets, and among the armed forces, and his inaction proved to be fatal. Aliya Rama Raya seized the moment, dethroned him, and packed him off to Chandragiri to rot. He died there a short time later. And so the last ruler of Bisnaga came to the throne.





21





Now here is Aliya Rama Raya ascending to become a Lion on the Diamond Throne. Or a Diamond on the Lion Throne. Simultaneously with that event, Pampa Kampana in her telling of the history of Bisnaga, and Tirumalamba Devi in the writing down of it, have caught up with the present moment. The verses telling of the fall of Raichur, and the rise of the aggressive Portuguese viceroy to the west and the prince to the south have been firmly set down, and the coronation of the new king described at a moment contemporaneous with the event itself. (We can safely assume, and it looks to be so in the manuscript as we have it, that the verses revealing the death in exiled captivity of the unloved Achyuta, in the distant Raj Mahal of the Chandragiri fort, are inserted later, when that unmourned event occurs.)

With Aliya on the throne, there were inevitably substantial changes at court. Tirumalamba Devi was now queen of Bisnaga, so the five hundred wives of Achyuta were released from their duties and dismissed from their cloisters, and Aliya, by nature an austere man as well as a duplicitous one, chose not to take any wives but his queen, a departure from long-established practice, but a popular one, and if his duplicity caused him to find secret lovers, we are not told of them. Tirumalamba Devi, freed from the shadow of her mother and grandmother, the two notorious poison queens, was also well liked. Her work as Pampa Kampana’s scribe had endeared her to many, and she set out to make her reign one in which both the literary and architectural arts might flourish. So it seemed as if Bisnaga might be entering a new age of glory.

(It is said, however, that terminally ill people suddenly rally in their penultimate hour, and give their loved ones joyful reason to believe that a miraculous recovery might be occurring; but then they fall back against their pillow, breathlessly dead and cold as the winter desert.)

Pampa Kampana moved back into the palace; Queen Tirumalamba Devi insisted on it, and insisted, too, that old Pampa take the suite of rooms reserved for the queen of Bisnaga. “We must show the whole of Bisnaga that love has triumphed over hate,” she said, “that irrational anger cannot have the last word and rationality must answer it, and, yes, that reconciliation follows remonstrance. Additionally, I personally want to show that to you, because I am and will always be your scribe, sitting at your feet, and you are and will always be the true queen.”

“I’ll do it if you want,” Pampa Kampana told her. “But I don’t care about comfort, and I don’t feel like the queen of anything anymore.”

They didn’t have much work to do. The book was up to date, and Aliya’s reign was just beginning, so there wasn’t a great deal to record. “I have dreamed the future,” Pampa Kampana said to Tirumalamba. “But it would be improper to write it down before it happens.” The queen begged her, “At least tell me, so that I am prepared for whatever comes.” Pampa Kampana was reluctant for a long while. Then finally she said:

“Your husband, my dear, will make a fatal mistake. This mistake will take a long time to make. Sometimes it will look like it is not a mistake, but in the end it will destroy us. You can’t stop it and neither can I, because the truth of the world is that people act according to their natures, and that is what will happen. Your husband will act according to his nature, which you yourself have called sly, sneaky, calculating, and underhand, and that will destroy us. We inhabit at present the moments before the calamity. Enjoy them while it lasts because maybe they will last for twenty years, and for those twenty years you will be queen of the greatest empire our world has ever seen. But underneath that surface the mistake will be happening, slowly. You will be an old lady when the world ends, and I am finally allowed to die.”

Tirumalamba buried her face in her hands. “What a cruel thing you have told me,” she sobbed. Pampa Kampana remained dry-eyed and stern. “You shouldn’t have asked to hear it,” she replied.



* * *



—

Aliya Rama Raya, observing the divisions between the Five Sultans at the unpleasant dinner with Achyuta Deva Raya, had calculated that the best way to safeguard the northern frontier of Bisnaga was to make sure those rifts were never healed. As long as those five were quarreling among themselves he could easily deal with any threats from Mysore to the south and the Portuguese viceroy on the west coast. He wrote to all five, holding out the hand of false friendship. “Now that the unfortunate Achyuta is out of the way,” he said, “there is no reason for us to fight. We each have our kingdoms, and we all have more wealth than we need. It’s time to be friends. Stability brings prosperity.”

When he told Tirumalamba what he had done, her memory of Pampa Kampana’s prophecy was still fresh, and she grew agitated. “Do you really mean what you’re saying?” she asked. “I know you too well to believe that it is. So it must be the start of some terrible scheme.”

“Scheme, yes,” her husband answered. “Terrible, no. Please accept that, as your senior by thirty years, I am also the wiser half of this marriage. Kindly attend to poetry, dance, music, and build a temple if it pleases you, but leave matters of state to me.”