Victory City(11)
From this dream the arrival of the foreigner and the news of Pampa Kampana’s interest in him had rudely awakened the new king. Hukka began to imagine the foreigner’s head detached from his shoulders and stuffed with straw, and the only thing that deterred him from decapitating the newcomer at once was the probability that Pampa Kampana would strongly disapprove of such a course of action. However, he continued to look at Domingo Nunes’s elegant long neck with a kind of lethal desire.
“We are lucky then,” he said, with heavy sarcasm, “that it is a sophisticated and handsome Portuguese gentleman, a silver-tongued charmer, who comes to us today, and not a representative of the barbarian French or Dutch, or the primitive, rosy English.” And before Domingo Nunes could say another word, the king waved him away, and he was led by two armed women out of the monarch’s sight. As he left the throne room, Domingo Nunes guessed that his life might be in danger, understood that it probably had something to do with his encounter with the whispering woman, and immediately began to think about his escape. However, as things turned out, he would stay for twenty years.
* * *
—
When Pampa Kampana finally emerged from her nine long days and nights of magic she wasn’t sure if the red-haired, green-eyed young god she had seen truly existed, or if he had just been some sort of vision. When nobody in the palace would answer her questions her puzzlement grew. However, it was necessary to put aside her confusion for a moment to deliver the message for which Hukka and Bukka had been waiting since the moment they came down from the mountain into the city of empty-eyed people. She found the two princes trying to forget their boredom by playing chess, a game neither of them had fully mastered, so that they overestimated the importance of knights and castles and, being men, severely underestimated the queen.
“It’s done,” Pampa Kampana said, interrupting their amateurish moves without standing on ceremony. “Everyone has been told their story. The city is fully alive.”
Outside in the great market street it was easy to see the proof of her assertion. Women were greeting one another like old friends, lovers were buying one another their favorite sweetmeats, blacksmiths were shoeing horses for riders they believed they had served for years, grandmothers were telling grandchildren their family stories, stories which went back three generations at least, and men with old quarrels were coming to blows over long-remembered slights. The character of this new city was shaped, in important ways, by Pampa Kampana’s memories—no longer suppressed—of what her mother had taught her. All over the city women were doing what, elsewhere in the country, was thought of as work unsuitable for them. Here was a lawyer’s office staffed by women advocates and women clerks, there you could see strong women laborers unloading goods from barges tethered at the dock on the riverbank. There were women policing the streets, and working as scribes, and pulling teeth, and beating mridangam drums while men danced to the rhythm in a square. None of this struck anyone as odd. The city thrived in the richness of its fictions, the tales whispered in their ears by Pampa Kampana, stories whose fictionality was drowned out and forever lost beneath the clamorous rhythm of the new day, and the walls around the citizens had risen to their final, impregnable height, and above the arch of the great barbican gate, engraved in stone, was the city’s name, which all its inhabitants knew for certain, and would insist on the knowledge if you had asked them, to be a name from the remote past, handed down through the centuries from the time of legend, when the Monkey God Hanuman was alive and living in Kishkindha nearby:
Bisnaga.
News of a nine-day festival of celebration arrived and ran rapidly through the city. Gods would be worshipped in the temples and there would be dancing in the streets. Domingo Nunes, who had found lodgings in the hayloft of the family of the head groom to whom he had sold his horses, heard about the party, and had the idea that would keep him safe from the vengeance of a jealous monarch and his brother too. As he was preparing to go to the palace gates and request an audience, the head groom’s wife called up to him to tell him he had a visitor. He clambered down his wooden ladder and there was Pampa Kampana, who had given the whole city dreams to believe in and now wanted to see if she could believe in her own dream. When she saw Domingo Nunes she clapped her hands in delight.
“Good,” she said.
Once their eyes had met and what could not be spoken had been said without words, Domingo understood that he had better move quickly to get onto safer ground. “On my travels in the kingdom of Cathay,” he said, perspiring a little, “I learned the secret of what their alchemists originally called the devil’s distillate.”
“Your first words to me today are about the devil,” she said. “Those are not appropriate terms of endearment.”
“It’s not really anything to do with the devil,” he said. “The alchemists discovered it by accident and got scared. They were trying to make gold, unsuccessfully of course, but they ended up making something more powerful. It’s just saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, powdered and mixed up. You add a spark to it, and boom! It’s something to see.”
“In spite of all your travels,” she replied, “you haven’t learned how to talk to a woman.”
“What I’m trying to tell you,” he said, “is that, in the first place, this can make the city’s celebrations more exciting. We can make what are called ‘fireworks.’ Wheels that spin with fire, rockets that zoom into the sky.”