Kungas spent a pleasant day rubbing salt into the wound. He rotated all the various troops under his command across the northern battlements facing Venandakatra’s pavilion and the bulk of his forces. Allowing Malwa’s soldiery, if not the pavilion-enclosed Vile One himself, to see the full panoply of forces which were now arrayed against them.
By popular acclaim, the four hundred spearmen of the Dakuen sarwe were rotated through no less than three times. Partly, that was due to the exotic and splendid appearance of the Ethiopians. Black men from a far-off and fabled land—blacker than any Dravidian—sporting savage-looking spears and jaunty ostrich-feather headdresses. Mostly, however, it was due to the crowd’s glee at the sight of four hundred bare asses, at Ezana’s lead and command, hanging over the battlements in Malwa’s face.
Better was still to come. By mid-afternoon, the wedding ceremony itself was finished and the bride and groom began to dance.
Shakuntala danced first. By custom, the husband should have done so. But the empress had decreed otherwise. Shakuntala was a wonderful dancer, in her own right, but she was not Rao’s equal. No one was. So, she went first. Not because she was ashamed of her own skill, but simply because she wanted the people watching—and the world which would learn from their telling, in the years to come—to remember Rao in all his glory.
Her dance, in truth, was glorious itself. Shakuntala did not dance in the center square of the city, where the wedding had taken place. She did so on the top battlements of the northern wall, on a platform erected the day before, after hurriedly changing her costume.
When she appeared on the platform, the crowd gasped. Shakuntala had shed her elaborate imperial costume in favor of a dancer’s garb. Her pantaloons, for all that they were tastefully dyed, bordered on scandal.
Yet, the crowd was pleased. At first, as she began her steps, they assumed that Shakuntala was simply taunting her enemy. Prancing, in all her youth and beauty, before the creature who had once dreamed of possessing her.
Which, of course, she was. Dancing, by its nature, is a sensuous act. That is as true for an elderly man or a portly matron, creaking and waddling their way through sober paces, as it is for anyone. But there is nothing quite as sensuous, dancing, as a young woman as agile as she is beautiful.
Shakuntala was both, and she took full advantage. It was well for Venandakatra that he never saw that dance. The Vile One would have ground his teeth to powder.
But, as Shakuntala’s dance went on, and transmuted, the crowd realized the truth. Taunting her enemy was a trivial thing. Amusing, but soon discarded.
The Empress Shakuntala was not dancing for the Vile One. She was not, even, dancing for Andhra. She was dancing for her husband, now. The sensuousness of that dance, the sheer sexuality of it, was not a taunt. It was a promise, and a pledge, and, most of all, nothing but her own desire.
They had wondered, the great crowd. Now, they knew the truth. Watching the bare quicksilver feet of their empress, flashing in the wine of her beloved’s heart, they knew. Statecraft, political calculation—even duty and obligation—were gone, as if they had never existed.
Andhra had married the Great Country, not because its own past required the doing, but because that was the future it had chosen freely. The future that it desired. When she finished—in defiance of all custom and tradition—the crowd burst into riotous applause. The applause went on for half an hour.
It was Rao’s turn, now, and the crowd fell silent. His reputation as a dancer was known to all Marathas. But most of them had never seen it with their own eyes.
They saw him now, and never forgot. The tale would be passed on for generations.
He began, as a husband. And if his dance was not as purely sensual as Shakuntala’s had been, no one who saw it doubted his own heart.
The dance went on, and on. And, as it went, slowly transformed a man’s desire for a woman—the life she would give him, the children she would give him—into a people’s desire for a future.