4
Hukka and Bukka’s three disreputable brothers had arrived some time earlier, riding into town together, side by side down the main street, bandits trying to look like aristocrats. With their thick, unkempt hair and their wild beards and handlebar mustachios they looked, and smelled, more like hoodlums than princes, however many airs they tried to put on, and people reacted to them with fear, not respect. They had cast-iron shields strapped to their backs. Pukka Sangama’s shield featured a portrait of a snarling tiger, Chukka Sangama’s shield was decorated with butterflies and moths, and Dev’s boasted a floral design. Swords and daggers hung from their waistbands and in dirty leather sheaths worn beneath the shields, the hilts of the swords protruding for easy access. In short, Pukka, Chukka, and Dev were as terrifying a sight as could be imagined as they rode up to the palace gates, and the citizenry scattered before them as they advanced.
The news of Hukka and Bukka establishing their rule over a miraculously newborn city had spread fast, along with rumors of a treasury overflowing with golden coins called pagodas, and also, people said, golden varahas of different weights. Pukka, Chukka, and Dev were determined not to be cut out of history if there was easy wealth to be had. At the palace gates they remained mounted and demanded admission.
“Where are those rascally brothers of ours?” bellowed Chukka Sangama. “Did they think they could keep all these riches to themselves?”
But he and his brothers were faced with a sight so unfamiliar in their experience that it punctured the balloon of their belligerence and made them scratch their heads. What stood before them was a phalanx of spear-carrying palace guards wearing golden breastplates, shin guards, and forearm cuffs, with swords in golden scabbards at their waists and long hair braided beautifully on top of their heads. They wore golden shields and grim expressions. And they were women. All of them. Tall, muscular women soldiers who meant business. Chukka, Pukka, and Dev had never seen such a thing.
“Is this what those fools are doing now?” Chukka demanded. “Sending ladies out to do unladylike business?”
“This is nothing new,” said the captain of the guard, a giant with a ferocious face and large, heavy-lidded eyes. Her name was Ulupi, and she was named after the daughter of the Serpent King. “In this city, women have guarded the Imperial Palace for generations.”
“That’s interesting,” said Pukka Sangama, “because I’m sure this city wasn’t here the last time we passed through the neighborhood.”
“You must be blind,” Captain Ulupi answered him. “For the power of the empire and the grandeur of its capital city have been known to all for longer than it is necessary to say.”
“And so Hukka and Bukka are in there, taking part in this phantom delirium?” Dev demanded. “Whatever this delusion is, they are happy to go along with it? And with you?”
“The king and the crown prince are fully supportive of the highly trained and fully professional officers of the palace guard,” said the captain. “And you’ll find, if you defy us, that we are not so ladylike at all.”
Now the truth was that the three younger Sangama brothers had been earning a dishonest living for some time as highway robbers and cattle thieves, and had recently added horse-thievery to their repertoire on account of the establishment of an international horse-trading enterprise at the port of Goa. Portuguese entrepreneurs had begun importing Arab stallions by sea to sell to several regional princes. Ambushing the horse convoys and reselling the beautiful animals on the black market was proving to be lucrative business, but it was also becoming dangerous, because the ruthless Tamil gangs of Maravar and Kallar thieves had moved into the area and brought along their murderous reputations, and the Sangama brothers, fearing for their lives, and being less than heroic, were looking for something less life-threatening to do. Their brothers’ new golden city glistened with exactly the kind of opportunities they sought.
“Take us to our brothers at once,” Chukka Sangama said in his most commanding tones. “We need to explain to them why there is no difference between thieves and kings.”
In the throne room, Hukka Raya I and Crown Prince Bukka were getting used to their large seats, their gaddis, so jewel-encrusted that they would have been uncomfortable if there hadn’t been thick cushions covered in brocaded silk to sit upon. Hukka soon found that if he sat upright on the gaddi then his feet didn’t touch the ground, and he looked like a child. Therefore, it was better to lounge, and if sitting up was absolutely necessary, then footstools would be required. All these things were being worked out, to ensure the princeliness of the crown prince and the kingliness of the king. Chukka, Pukka, and Dev entered the royal presence to see the royal personage, their brother, experimenting with footstools of different heights. Bukka’s gaddi was a little lower. He, too, was learning how to lounge regally, and if he sat up his feet touched the floor, so he did not have to deal with the problem of dangling.
“So this is what it means to be a king,” Chukka Sangama taunted his brother. “It’s a matter of getting the furniture right.”
“We are disappointed in our siblings,” said Hukka Raya I, using, for the first time, the royal plural, and speaking to the throne room in general, as if it were a person. “Our siblings are unable to live up to the role for which history has chosen us. They are dark princes, shadow lords, phantoms of the blood. They are stale bread. They are rotting fruit. They are moons in eclipse.”
“As they are our brothers,” Bukka said, also addressing the empty air, “our choices are straightforward, but limited. Either we have them executed immediately, as potential traitors, would-be usurpers, or else we give them a job.”
“It’s too early in the morning to spill family blood,” said Hukka Raya I. “Let’s think of something for them to do.”
“Let’s give them a job far away,” Bukka suggested.
“Very far away,” Hukka Raya I agreed.
“Nellore,” Bukka proposed. That was on the eastern seacoast, approximately three hundred miles distant. “It needs conquering,” Bukka added, “and these three won’t be much trouble to us there.”
Hukka had a grander vision. “First Nellore to the east,” he said, “then Mulbagal to the south, and then Chandragutti to the west. Once you capture Nellore, Brother Chukka, you can stay back there and take charge. And Brother Pukka, you can have Mulbagal when it falls, and Brother Dev, you’ll go alone to handle the conquest of Chandragutti, and then stay put there. So each of you ends up with a kursi, a throne, and I hope you’ll be very happy. And in the meanwhile Bukka and I will conquer everything in between.”
The three disreputable brothers shifted their feet and frowned. Was this a good deal or a poisoned cup? They weren’t certain. “You get the treasury overflowing with pagodas,” Chukka objected. “That doesn’t seem right.”
“Let me be clear,” said Hukka Raya I. “I will provide each of you with a formidable army. An undefeatable force. On one condition: my generals will be in charge of the soldiering. You can sit back on your horses under the imperial flag, and after the battles my generals will put you on the throne, but in combat you’ll do exactly what they tell you to do. And after it’s done you’ll each have a province to rule, which is a much better option than stealing horses and worrying about being killed by the Kallar and Maravar gangs. Brother Chukka, you’ll have the privilege of worshipping in the Jagannath Temple at Puri. Pukka my brother, the great hero Arjuna’s temple will be yours. And Dev, your temple’s in a cave, that’s true, but to compensate for that, you’ll get the best of the three forts, an awesome hilltop fortress, with pleasing views on all sides. In addition I will provide each of you with a personal guard detachment, drawn from the women of the Imperial Defense Force. You’ll be safe with them, but if you attempt any kind of treasonous insurrection against the empire—against us—they have orders to kill you on the spot.”
“That sounds like a bad offer,” Pukka said. “We’ll just be your puppets. This is what you’re really saying. Maybe we should just refuse your proposal and take our chances.”
“You’re free to refuse, by all means,” said Hukka Raya I, not unkindly, “but then you won’t leave this room alive. You understand why. It’s nothing personal. Just family business.”
“Take it or leave it,” Bukka told his brothers.
“I’ll take it,” said Dev Sangama immediately, and the other two slowly, thoughtfully, nodded their heads.
“Be off with you then,” said Hukka Raya I. “There’s an empire to be conquered, and history to be made.”
The captain of the guard, Ulupi, as serpentine as her name, hissed at Chukka, Pukka, and Dev that the audience was at an end. Her tongue flickered between her teeth before and after she spoke.
“One more thing,” Hukka Raya I called after them. “I don’t know when we will see each other again, if ever, so there’s something you should know.”
“What’s that?” growled Chukka, the most discontented of the exiting three.
“We love you,” Hukka said. “You are our brothers, and we will love you until you die.”
It wasn’t possible for the three departing Sangama brothers to leave immediately. An army took time to move. There were the traveling palanquins of the military grandees to plump and burnish so that those gentlemen could journey to their destination in comfort, and canopied howdahs had to be mounted on the backs of battle elephants so that these same high-ranking officers could ride to war while reclining on cushions and pillows, and there were thousands of elephants to feed, pack elephants and battle elephants, because elephants ate constantly, and had to be loaded with their own fodder as well as all the goods needed by the regiments, for example the massive moving parts that would later be assembled as siege engines that hurled boulders at the walls of the fortresses of the enemy. And tents had to be collapsed and loaded onto bullock-carts, along with benches, stools, straw for camp mattresses, and latrines; there was an entire armaments division to transport, so that the army’s weapons could be kept in good order, swords could be sharpened, arrows balanced and bowstrings kept taut, javelin-points checked daily to ensure that they were as sharp as daggers, and shields repaired after hard days on the battlefield; and there was a whole kitchen-city to mobilize, ovens as well as cooks, and great cartloads of vegetables, rice and beans, and caged chickens and tethered goats, too, because there were many chicken- and goat-eaters among the ranks, in spite of what their religion formally decreed; and there had to be wood for fires, and cauldrons to be filled with soups and stews; and there were other camp followers to marshal, including courtesans who would attend nightly to the needs of the most desperate soldiers. The medical equipment, the surgeons and nurses, the fearsome saws used for cutting off limbs, the canisters of salve for blinded eyes, the leeches, the healing herbs, would all be placed at the rear of the column. No soldier going to war wanted to see such things. It was necessary for them to feel immortal, or, at least, to persuade themselves that crippling injury, agonizing wounds, and death were things that happened to other people. It was important that each individual foot soldier and cavalryman was allowed to believe that they personally would emerge from combat unscathed.
And this was no ordinary army. It was a fighting force that was gradually being born. Like everyone else in the new city the soldiers woke up each day with whispers in their ears, each soldier hearing—for the first time, but as if the information had always been there—the story of his life. (Or her life. The women soldiers were fewer, but they were there. They had whispered memories too.) In that mysterious moment between sleeping and waking they each heard the imaginary narrative of their family’s fictional generations, and discovered how long ago they had decided to join the new empire’s forces, and how far they had traveled, what rivers they had crossed, what friends they had made along the way, what obstacles and foes they had had to overcome. They learned their own names, and the names of their parents and villages and tribes, and the names of love given to them by their wives—their wives, who were waiting for them in their villages, nursing their children!—and their personalities, too, dripped into their ears, they found out if they were funny or bad-tempered, and how they spoke; some were voluble, others were people of few words, and some used foul language, as soldiers often did, while others disliked it; some of them were open about their feelings while others concealed them. In this they, like the civilian population of the city, became human beings, even if the stories in their heads were fictions. Fictions could be as powerful as histories, revealing the new people to themselves, allowing them to understand their own natures and the natures of those around them, and making them real. This was the paradox of the whispered stories: they were no more than make-believe but they created the truth, and brought into being a city and an army with all the rich diversity of nonfictional people with deep roots in the actually existing world.
The one thing the soldiers all had in common, the whispers told them, was their courage and skill on the battlefield. They were a brotherhood (and sisterhood) of overpowering warriors, and they could never be defeated. Each day as they awoke this knowledge of their invincibility deepened. Soon they would be ready to follow orders unquestioningly and obliterate their enemies and march relentlessly to victory.
In the shadow of the city’s golden walls, which grew higher and more imposing every day, stood the carpeted tent assigned to the three ostensible leaders of the coming expedition. Inside these palatial quarters scattered with brocaded cushions and illuminated by filigreed brass lanterns, Chukka, Pukka, and Dev Sangama—the titular though not the actual commanders of the grand venture—could be found trying to make sense of their new world. It was plain to all three brothers that some powerful sorcery was at hand, and fear battled with ambition in their breasts.
“I have the feeling,” Chukka Sangama said, “that even though our Hukka and Bukka have put on royal airs, they are in the grip of some wizard who can make the unliving live.” He was the most confident and aggressive of the three, but at that moment he sounded shaken and uncertain.
His brother Pukka, always less brutal and more calculating, weighed up the odds. “So we can be kings,” he said, “if we’re okay with leading an army of ghosts.”
Dev, the youngest, was the least heroic and most romantic one. “Ghosts or no ghosts,” he said, “our guardian angels are ladies of the highest quality. If we can win them over to be our consorts, I don’t give a damn if they are human beings or specters of the night. Before death comes to claim me, I want to know what it’s like to be in love.”
“And before death comes for me,” Chukka said, “I want to rule the kingdom of Nellore. Or at least to take command of that, as a beginning.”
“If death comes for us,” Pukka Sangama reasoned, “it will be sent in our direction by our brothers Bukka and Hukka. I’d like to send the exterminating angel in their direction before they send him in ours. After that we can worry about ghosts.”
Commander Shakti, Commander Adi, and Commander Gauri, the three intrepid palace officers assigned to guard but also to spy on the three departing Sangamas, were known as the Sisters of the Mountains (although they were not really sisters), because their names were also those of three of the many forms of the goddess Parvati, daughter of Himalaya, the King of the Mountains—and their air of authority was so irresistible that it was inevitable that the recently reformed bandits should fall in love with them.
In their dreams each brother saw his personal Sister beckoning to him, issuing erotic challenges and making sweet promises of rewards. Chukka Sangama, the most extroverted, even aggressive, of the three brothers, met his match in Commander Shakti, in whose name the dynamic energy of the cosmos was contained. “Chukka, Chukka,” Shakti whispered to him in his dreams, “I am lightning. Catch me if you can. I am the thunder and the avalanche, the transformation and the flow, the destruction and the renewal. I may be too much for you. Chukka, Chukka, come to me.” He was possessed by the thrill of her, but when he woke up she was standing spear in hand, stone-faced and impassive, at the door of the tent, not looking as if she had had the same dream.
Meanwhile Pukka Sangama, the cautious and rational one, dreamed of Commander Adi, who revealed herself to him as the eternal truth of the universe. “Pukka, Pukka,” she sighed, “I see that you are a seeker, and want always to know the meaning of things. I am the answer to all your questions. I am the how and why, the what and the when and the where. I am the only explanation that you need. Pukka, Pukka. Find me and you will know.” He awoke bright-eyed and eager, but there she was, beside her fellow Sister, spear in hand, impassive, at the door of the tent with a face that could have been carved in the hardest granite.
And Dev Sangama, the most beautiful brother and the least courageous, was visited by Commander Gauri, the most beautiful of all beings, and her dream-incarnation was four-armed, holding a tambourine and a trident, and her dream-skin was as white as snow, an analogy which came to Dev Sangama in his dream even though he had never once seen snow in his whole hot life. “Dev, Dev,” murmured Gauri, dripping her words like sweet poison into his sleeping ear, and shaking her tambourine, “your beauty makes you a worthy companion for me, but no mortal man can survive the devastating force of making love to a goddess. Dev, Dev, will you give up your life for a single night of celestial bliss?” And he awoke with the words of assent on his lips, yes, yes I will, yes, but there she was standing granite-faced beside her stony co-Sisters, as impassive as they were, with only two arms, no tambourine, and a spear, not a trident, in her hand.
When the Sisters of the Mountains were discussing matters they leaned in toward one another so that their heads touched, and they spoke in a private language. Some of the words were the everyday words the Sangama brothers could understand, like food and sword and river and kill. But there were many other words that were a complete mystery. Dev Sangama, the fearful one, became convinced that this was some sort of demon-language. In that army cantonment in which soldiers were listening to secret whispers whose source was unknown, acquiring individuality, memory, and history, and gradually turning into fully realized human beings, it was easy to believe that a kingdom of demons was being born, and that their elder siblings Hukka and Bukka had fallen under their spell. In the bright light of day he tried to convince Chukka and Pukka that they were in danger of losing their eternal souls and that the risks of a life on the highway stealing horses were smaller than the dangers of being the figurehead commanders of this occult military force. But at night when Sister Gauri visited him his fears were quelled and he longed only for her love. So he was torn, and as a result incapable of making any sort of radical decision, but did not abandon the plan.
Finally he asked Gauri about the unknown words and was told that this was the hidden language of security, the coded tongue which defeated the best efforts of any spying ears. In the language of security there were ordinary words for extraordinary things, a running stream might indicate a certain kind of cavalry advance, and a feast might be a slaughter; so even the words Dev could understand might have meanings he could not know. And at a higher level of safety there were new words, words that looked at individuals in battlefield terms, for example, so that the word for a man on the front line was not the same as the word for a man on the flanks, and there were chronology words too, describing people as beings moving in time, words that could make the difference, in war, between life and death. “Don’t worry about words,” Gauri told Dev. “Words are for word people. You are not a person of that type. Concern yourself only with deeds.” Dev was not sure whether or not this advice was a kind of insult. He suspected that it was, but he took no offense, being in the grip of love.
In the evenings the three Sangamas took their meals in the royal tent with the three Sisters. The brothers, coarsened by their outlaw lives, devoured heaped platters of roasted goat meat without any concern for religious niceties, goats slathered in chilies that made the men’s eyes water and their heads sweat and their copious hair stand on end. The women, by contrast, with grace and care ate delicately flavored vegetables, with the air of people who barely needed to eat. And yet it was plain to all six of them that these well-mannered angels were by far the more dangerous, and the men gazed upon them with an unfamiliar mixture of fear and desire, unable to express the desire because of the fear; and, so unmanned, tore into their goat legs with ever more barbaric ferocity, hoping that this would give them at least the appearance of masculinity. It was not clear to them if this gastronomic performance made any kind of favorable impression on the ladies, whose expressions remained enigmatic, even obscure.
Pukka Sangama, the one who wanted answers, asked questions. “When the three of you lean your heads together like that,” he wanted to know, “is that an even more secret form of communication, a wordless form? Are you talking to one another brain-to-brain? Or is that a comfortable way for you to rest while standing up?”
“Pukka, Pukka,” Commander Adi reproved him, “do not ask questions whose answers you do not have the capacity to understand.”
Chukka Sangama lost his temper. “What is going on around here?” he demanded. “We’ve been sitting in this tent for so long that the days have become blurry and I can’t remember what time it is. Somebody needs to tell us what we are supposed to do and when we are supposed to do it. We are not men accustomed to sitting on our behinds like pet dogs waiting for a treat.”
“Thank you for your patience,” Sister Gauri replied. “In fact we were planning to tell you this evening that the army is ready to march. We will set out at dawn.” It was the exact moment at which Pampa Kampana was informing Hukka Raya I and Crown Prince Bukka that the city too had been told its stories and its creation was finally complete. Soldiers as well as civilians were ready for whatever history had in store.
Chukka jumped to his feet. “Thank god,” he cried. “Finally something that makes sense. Let’s go to war and bring peace to the land.”
“Do as you’re told,” Gauri said, “and everything should go well.”
Music burst out from the city, and the three Sangama brothers in their cantonment tent could hear the celebrations clearly even through the thick city walls. They heard, too, the shrieks and cries that greeted the sight of the first fireworks in the history of the land soaring up above the gathered masses. But they were unable to join the party. “Sleep,” Sister Gauri commanded them. “Dancing doesn’t matter. It’s tomorrow that the empire will begin to be born.”