Starbook

by Ben Okri

  'What are slaves?' the young prince asked.

  'The lowest of the low,' the warrior replied.

  'What does that mean?'

  'Mean, sir? It means we are nothing. We have no freedom. We do whatever you tell us to do. You can kill us whenever you want. Our people don't know where we are. We are here by force. We don't want to be here. We want to be in our villages, with our own families, and our people.'

  'So why don't you just go?' the prince asked, amazed.

  'Because they will kill us if we try. We are slaves, sir. Captured people.'

  'What are you doing?'

  'We are digging latrines.'

  'How long have you been here?'

  'Not long for a free man, but too long for a slave.'

  The prince was about to ask another question when the elders descended on him and led him away. He protested.

  'Your highness, you can't talk to those people.'

  'Why not?'

  'They are animals.'

  'Animals? They are not animals. They are human beings,' the prince said, astonished.

  'They are slaves, your highness, and a prince cannot talk with slaves.'

  'Why not?'

  'Because it is forbidden.'

  'By who?'

  'The laws of the kingdom.'

  'The laws? Who made the laws?'

  'The Wise Ones.'

  'Which Wise Ones?'

  'From long ago.'

  'Then they must have been fools, or monsters.'

  'Your highness, they were your ancestors.'

  'I am ashamed to have such ancestors.'

  The elders were silent and took his remarks as further proof that he was either deranged or bewitched, as the wise king had said.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  He left the elders and went straight to his father and made an unusual request. His father, the king, heard him out without blinking. When he had finished, the king stared at his son for a long time. Then he laughed. It was not the same laughter as the last time. It was a troubled laughter.

  He summoned the elders. When they were gathered the king asked his son to repeat his request. The prince, calm, innocent and sad with love, said:

  'If I am to be future king I want to know what good and what evils we have done as a people.'

  There was a deep silence among the elders. Then they began to murmur in great perplexity. Their murmurings turned into discussions and then into arguments. They argued among themselves about what were evils and what were good. They argued furiously. The prince watched them in amazement. He heard mention of tortures, floggings, murders, wars, rapes, burning of villages, outcasts, banishments. Then he thought he hadn't heard them right. Some elders said they were not evils but necessities, matters of justified war, acts of defence needed to protect the kingdom. The king became impatient.

  'Are you going to answer my son, or what?' he bellowed.

  There was another silence. The elders stared at the prince. The prince stared at them. Then, quite suddenly, the king began laughing again; and the elders, taking their cue, relieved, laughed as well.

  What a fearful laughter it was, this peculiar laughter of the custodians and the elders. It was a laughter the prince had never heard or seen before. It was a laughter threaded with dark energies. It almost made him ill. The king, noticing that his son had turned pale, stopped laughing. Then gradually silence descended upon the elders.

  'You have not replied to my request,' the young prince said, eventually.

  The senior among the elders stepped forward, prostrated himself majestically, and said:

  'We as a people have only done good. We have done no evil. The bad things it appears we have done were for good reasons. We are a good people, with a clean conscience. You should be assured, your highness, that as a future king your hands and the hands of your ancestors are clean.'

  'What about the slaves?'

  'Dear prince,' said the senior custodian, 'there are no slaves in the kingdom.'

  'What?'

  'It is best for a prince not to know the good or the necessary evil done in the realm. That is our job. Yours, in time, is to rule with good hands.'

  'How can my hands be clean if there is wickedness done in my name?'

  'Done in the name of the kingdom, dear prince. Your hands will always be clean.'

  The custodian smiled benignly.

  'So there are no slaves in the kingdom?'

  'Yes.'

  'Yes there are or yes there are none?'

  'No.'

  The prince was exasperated. He turned to the king, his father. The king was grim and mute. He offered no support. He merely listened. He watched his son.

  Suddenly the prince bolted from the chamber and was gone before the custodians and elders could react. Not long afterwards a commotion was heard in the palace corridors. Guards and soldiers made loud noises. There was much shouting, and a clashing of weapons. Then voices bellowing. The prince reappeared in the hall of custodians, leading seven of the slaves he had spoken to earlier.

  'You can't bring slaves in here!' the elders shouted, almost as one.

  'What slaves?' the prince replied. 'These are men captured in war.'

  'And some are criminals, sold by their own people,' said the senior of the custodians. 'Some are murderers, running away from justice. And some are dogs in disguise, animals and beasts to their own kind. We make them work. We do them no harm. They feed, they can marry, and they can earn their freedom. They are not slaves.'

  'I want them freed!' cried the prince.

  'Don't get involved in these matters, your highness. Keep your hands clean. Don't enquire too much into affairs of the kingdom. Things are more complicated than they seem. There are no chains on these people. They are almost free. We have an ancient understanding between villages and kingdoms. These threads are too entangled to unravel in a day.'

  The prince was silent. The custodian gave a sign for the slaves to be removed. Soldiers came in and led them away.

  'What else is there that I must not know?'

  'Many things.'

  'Like what?'

  The head custodian paused. He turned helplessly to the king. The king nodded.

  'Outcasts. The burial of kings with their servants and wives. Low castes who work in the dark, never seen, never allowed to marry above ...'

  On and on the custodian went, pouring out the practices of the land from time immemorial, the good and the bad. But first the bad, for that was the theme of the day. It was a worrying list. It included peculiar things like days when no animal, insect, bird or living thing is killed. Days of laughter. Nights of story-telling. The special day of the spirits. The day of the long-haired babies. The festivities for the lower caste, when all the villages stage dances and rituals for them and bring gifts and food, and perform for all outcasts, beggars and rejects. Then there were the leprous left out in the hills. The night of the dead, when ancestors are honoured. The flogging of thieves. The exile of adulterers. The banishment of cowards, traitors, murderers. The rigorously reasoned laws. The list went on, for hours, till the young prince began to hallucinate. Then he fell down in exhaustion and overwrought emotion.

  That night the king went to the prince's bedroom and watched him sleeping. The king sat and stared at his son for hours as he slept. At dawn the king left. He was silent most of the next day. Silent and thoughtful.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Not long after the king left, the prince awoke. And he remembered the maiden. And, without eating, taking only the swiftest bath and some water to drink and a few fruits, he hurried off into the forest to his hiding place beside the river.

  The world had changed. The air was cooler. The shimmer on the water was more muted. The prince waited in a state bordering on illness. He waited in a mildly hallucinated condition and he drifted off and thought he saw the king above him, staring at him. He thought he saw the king by the river, gazing into the water at scenes of the future unfolding before him.

  The
n seven maidens appeared from out of the river, attired in splendid white robes. Three of them had musical instruments he had never seen before, of shining metal, gleaming like polished silver in the sun. The maidens, with hands linked, danced on the surface of the river, laughing and singing. Then as they danced they rose in the air, like a ring of diamonds, a circle of angels, and then they came back down again, and landed on the shore.

  There was one among them who was the most beautiful, who was the princess of them all. She had eyes that shone like moonlight. She had a face that was clear in its beauty and happy sadness, skin that was smooth, and she walked elegantly. The other maidens clustered about her and made a seat for her of flowers they picked from the shores of the river. She lay languidly on the bed of flowers. Then one of the maidens struck up an instrument and they all began playing the most haunting music. The princess among them began to sing:

  'Who knows why we wait,

  For love comes to us like gentle fate.

  It hides along the river of time

  And gives off the fragrance of thyme.

  To love is to suffer is what they say;

  But to suffer sweetly is better than to decay.

  This life is not a river under the sky.

  Many things must happen, who knows why.'

  And so she sang and when she came to the end she began to hum and the others hummed and giggled and soon silence fell over them as the light made their beauty shine so brightly by the river. They were silent as they stared into the air. Then the princess among them said:

  'Oh, but we are so happy today, and all is well in the kingdom, and so let us prophesy a little under this gentle breeze.'

  'O yes,' cried one, 'let us prophesy a little.'

  'Who shall begin?'

  'You will?' the maidens said in chorus to the princess.

  'All right,' she replied.

  She picked up a white flower, spun its stalk between her palms, and sent it whirling into the air, and it turned, spinning, and sailed away in the breeze, down the river. Then she began, saying:

  'I speak backwards and forwards and sideways and inside out, and always speak the truth. There will be a marriage between a prince and an outcast, a prince and a slave, and a magic line will be conceived. The prince will become a slave before his son is born. There will be sweetness made out of the blood and suffering of men and women. Music will come from their bones, which the whole world will dance to, and fall in love through. Suffering like a curse will fall on the land. The sea will swallow up thousands of the men of the soil. There will be darkness over its sky for two hundred years. Then light will return. The world will be upside down. White will be black, and black white. Good will be evil, and evil good. And stones will give off more love than the hearts of men. And freedom will be in chains for a thousand thousand moons. And women will curse the day they were born and men will long for death to come. And the ways of God will work through all this, making all things better. Out of fire comes the purest gold. Only the flesh dies, but nothing grows old. Songs of fishes that taste the flesh of men, songs of chains that bind the flesh of men, songs of the whip and the cane, sweetness from such pain, beauty from such horror, immortality from the terror. Such are the ways of gods in stone, of spirit in bone, of love in the dust, of magic in rust. Love by the river, lightning in the heart, time will quiver, man and magic will never part.'

  Then silence in the breeze. Then music in the empty air. Then a circle of maidens dancing in an opposite direction in the bright spaces, the world aglow with the vaporous brilliance of their white robes. A voice singing from the other shore. The king measuring out the good and evil in the land with his strides in the dark. Someone weeping in the forest, weeping and weeping as if the sorrows in the world were too much even for the trees and the earth to bear. And a single flower spinning in the breeze, and falling on the face of the prince as he waited, drifting in an enchanted illness.

  He was not so much awoken by the flower as that he became aware that the day had darkened. It seemed as if he had been waiting by the river all his life. The maiden he sought did not appear. He stole back home, without hearing the great weeping in the forest, without noticing the eyes that followed him in the darkness of the woods.

  CHAPTER TEN

  When he re-entered the village the light was different; a rich blue colour seemed to touch the world everywhere. He wandered to the farms, and saw the women at their work, their children straddling their backs, held securely with broad strips of cloth. He watched the women harvesting the crops. He watched them in the cornfields, the yam fields and the cassava fields. He watched them separate pineapple fruits from their thick green stalks. He saw all the women as his mother. He had no mother. His mother had died early, when he was still a child. He knew her only by stories, by myths and royal legends. And by sighs.

  For the first time, he became aware how hard the women worked. He went up to some of them and engaged them in conversation while they worked. They woke early, before dawn, prepared food for the family, swept their yards, cleaned the house, bathed, went to the river to wash clothes, went to the market miles away, returned home, prepared the afternoon meal, washed the utensils, then went to the distant farms again, then to the market to trade. They often came back with heavy bundles on their heads. Then, making several journeys there and back, they fetched water from the wells. They prepared dinner. They attended the meetings of women. Back home they discussed family matters with their husbands and relations. They took part in the social and communal business of the village, and made their contributions to looking after the sick. Then they slept very late at night. They were usually the last ones to sleep in the whole family, and the first to rise. In addition they bore several children, tended them, told them stories, taught them the traditions and legends of the tribe. They supported their husbands in all major undertakings, and were the pillars on which the village, indeed the kingdom rested.

  'But you must be slaves!' the prince cried when he learnt how hard the women worked.

  The women were offended.

  'We are not slaves! We are freeborn women. We are the mothers of the kingdom, upholders of tradition. Without us nothing will work in the land. We are half of the kingdom. Do you not think we are proud of it? The children and all the men depend on us. This is a great thing. We have talked enough and must now return to our work.'

  The prince left them and wandered back to the palace, and sought out the elders and the custodians. When they gathered, under the watchful eye of the king, he said:

  'If I am to be future king I want to know about the lives of our women. How do we treat our women? Why do they work so hard, from dawn to dusk? And what do we do for them in return?'

  The king began laughing again. The elders, taking his cue, laughed with him, but not as enthusiastically as before. They were becoming increasingly troubled by the persistent questioning of the young prince. Never before had any royal asked so many fundamental questions about the kingdom and how it was governed.

  'Answer the prince!' bellowed the king, as he shook in laughter.

  'We treat our women very well,' replied the chief custodian. 'They have no complaints.'

  The prince was astonished at this reply. And before they knew it, he was gone, he had vanished, and returned, not long after, leading a group of women, old and young, into the chamber of elders. As before, soldiers and guards were in commotion; there was shouting. An elder cried: