Starbook

by Ben Okri

  All manner of men, women, children, spirits, ancestors, beasts and insects converged, from many lands and realms, and camped outside the palace. They had all been drawn there, moved by the gentle spirit of the prince, which they had heard about in the murmured rumours of the world. They had converged, and kept on converging; they chanted, sang, prayed, and dwelt in long silences, holding up their lanterns for the prince, encouraging him to get better, so that the land could be whole again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The elders were astonished and frightened by the effect that the prince's illness had on the people. They were the guardians of tradition and of history; and in all their years, with all their combined memories, they had never witnessed or known or heard of a more extraordinary display of affection for a prince. The king, of course, can command such adoration, if he is a good and wise king; but a prince is another matter. Besides, they were puzzled at how the prince had managed to become so famous.

  The elders thought that they were the controllers and manipulators of fame and reputation. They thought they were the guardians at the gates through which a person's name and deeds are trumpeted to the world. They had not done any such trumpeting for the prince because they were looking forward to reducing his powers when he became king. He seemed such a weak and fragile figure, a perfect candidate, in fact, for royal demotion, for control, for intimidation by tradition. Then the elders intended to make themselves more powerful. Then, eventually, they might get rid of the future king altogether, and the land would forevermore be ruled by them, the council of elders.

  All these, of course, were vague whispered notions, dreams, hopes, concealed and hinted at so indirectly, in such convoluted proverbs, that only the most subtle of elders could detect this intangible current of thinking. Visibly, the elders were the very models of loyalty, and the loudest and most passionate defenders of the existing order. It would constitute treason to think otherwise, even for a moment. It was in such an atmosphere that the elders found themselves amazed and trapped by the great love the people bore the prince, people who had never known him, never seen him, and perhaps never would. There is a kind of expressed love which is easy to subvert. When a figure is loved for their deeds, their conquests, their heroism, their goodness, their love of the people, these are easy enough to destroy. Rumours, whispers, lies, distortions, facts revealed, can undo such reputations, such bonds. But there is a kind of love which is felt for apparently no reason, purely because of affinity and kinship, purely because a people can't do otherwise; a love inspired, it seems, by the gods, which it is impossible to fight, distort, destroy or weaken. In fact, the attempts to destroy such loves only strengthen them. And to do nothing allows them to continue to grow at their natural pace, inexorably, till this love becomes a wide and silent adoration.

  The elders found themselves confounded by such a magical love. And it left them helpless and rendered them powerless. They were marginalised by it. Suddenly they found they had nothing to do. They felt acutely how primarily useless they were. They found themselves spectators in a grand love story between the people and their prince. They realised how unknown, and how unloved, they were. And, strangely, they resented it. This resentment was new to them. It was a sign that their ancient institution, their place in the scheme of things, was insecure. They felt a new age dawning, and they were not in that new age. The prince's illness was in fact killing them off. They were dying with the prince, with the great tide of love the people felt for him. It did not take the elders long to realise that something had to be done.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The king was moved by the tenderness of his people. He watched from the palace window the great crowds that had gathered from all over the known world to show their support for his family. The ragged women, the fishermen, the market women, the quarrelsome bar owners, the seamstresses, the warriors from distant lands, the one-armed, the one-legged, the crippled, the blind, the mad, the refugees from other kingdoms, the fugitives, the clowns, the fools, the celebrated heroes, the boxers, wrestlers, jugglers, mendicants, the pregnant mothers, the albinos, the runaways, the exiles who had returned home in disguise, the disheartened, the lonely, the old, the dying, the young, the brave, the merchants, the salt-traders, the city-builders, the prophets and visionaries, the adventurers and explorers of remote places, the dreamers, the insomniacs, all who suffered excessive love or anxiety or fear of death, women who sought husbands, men who wanted wives, all those weighed down with too many problems, and perplexed by strife, the hallucinators, the overly superstitious, all kinds and forms and manner of men and women were here, and kept on coming, and converging, as if the illness of the prince were the illness of the world.

  The king, who was wise in heart and great in innocence, embraced in his spirit the wonderful and varied crowds that had overrun his palace. He was no stranger to wonders. All his long life he had lived in wonders. All that he saw about him he had in some way helped to bring about; and all things made him laugh, for the wonder he had hidden in them. He knew the hearts of men and women at a glance; he could read their intentions. He knew the inclinations of all the courtiers, the chiefs, the elders, his wives, his children, the servants, the horsemen. He knew the destiny of their thoughts. He knew of the disasters to come, and the great adventures. He knew what the stars foretold in their misalignments, in their chaos. And in all things he found laughter. He found laughter in good as much as in evil. He found laughter in all those who thought they could escape the effects that they set into motion by their hidden deeds and dreams. He laughed at the harvest of good and bad intentions. And he laughed with love in his heart.

  The king, who had fathered the new mysteries in the kingdom, who had guarded the secret rites that had been brought to his land by a caravan of magi long ago; the king, who had been initiated as a child into the wonders of the sages from the land of the magic river where stones had been raised into perfect structures for the adoration of the sun; the king had long ago entered and crossed the chambers of death and dwelt among the higher beings who whispered the secret ways in silence all through the timeless moments of an eternal life that shone above the African sands. The king had glimpsed all things in an inward glance; and the world as he saw it, obscure and yet so clear, was a place where the drama of unfolding is staged, for the education of the gods through the evolution of the spirit of the people. And so the king saw the people as the children of his love, as a farmer loves the seeds that will become the fruits and flowers of the kingdom, for the nourishment of the dreams of the great ancestors, and the ultimate enrichment of the stars.

  It was with such simplicity of spirit that the king beheld the crowds gathered outside the palace; and he laughed silently at the tender spectacle of the drama of their unfolding, their piety, their love. And the king sent food and blankets out among the gathered peoples; he sent his medicine men to make sure that the ill among them were tended to, that the pregnant women were comfortable and well, that the women who gave birth did so in satisfactory conditions. He sent his court bards among the crowds to bear witness to their expressions; he sent historians to register their reality; and at night, while they slept, he went out among them in simple disguise and watched over their sleeping forms and partook of their dreams and shared their distress. It was a great education for him; and it greatly enriched his laughter.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The prince, however, remained ill. On his favourite bed of hardened clay, he tossed in dreams. He turned in horrors. He awoke while asleep and lived in a separate realm, as if freed from his body, and he got lost in a labyrinth of images and narratives. His sickness was very deep indeed and it snatched him away from his home and dragged him through the forests, past the elders, who were men of teak and thunder. The elders became giants that he encountered everywhere and they blocked his way and always he had to find a way through them in order to continue on his quest. The sickness dragged him through mud, through valleys, across rivers, over mountain
ranges, and down into the dark earth. He journeyed with the sickness in a darkened world where there was no moon, only voices. The voices echoed in the dark, as in a giant room. Then he recognised the voices of the elders. His sickness took him deep into the earth and at last he emerged in a grey world, where everything was made of ash, and a pale and sickly light that was no light was spread evenly over everything. There was no one there, in this world. There were no spirits, no shadows, no ancestors, no voices, no laughter. Just a world of ash, and a pale dull sickly even light that was no light. And the prince sat still in that world without shadows and waited patiently for time to turn him into nothing. Or everything.

  Book Two

  THE MASTER

  ARTISTS

  Part One

  CHAPTER ONE

  Many are the things to be read in the inscriptions of the world. Many are the facts, dates, times, events; many also are the signs and omens, the symbols and resonances, the secret messages, the hints, the enigmas, the mysteries, and the tantalising flashes of meaning to be sensed in the inscriptions of the world. Many are the faces to be seen in cracks on the wall, in the shapes of clouds, in buckets of water seen at odd angles in a certain frame of mind. Many are the people noticed standing still in a forest, seen as a stick, or at a distance in the dark, that turn into bushes clustered, when a moment before they were women conniving or a group of men plotting evil. Many are the marches of battalions that sail past in cloud formations, massed towards war. Many are the days and evenings when the sun seems to bleed light as if leaking out all the blood spilt in wars and pogroms and genocides and murders and secret evils, bleeding light back into our world for all the wicked deeds that we send up to heaven under the all-seeing eye of the sun.

  Many are the times when the moon waxes and seems to quiver in its overflowing hallucinating power, as if it were an oracle bloated with too many prophecies, or a transparent gourd of palm-wine intoxicated with its own excessive magnetic force over the spirits of all liquid things. Many are the moments when the moon speaks a strange tongue to the eye, when it is half eaten by the sun or the dark, when it is red, or too blue, or flecked with diverse images that perplex the mind, or riddled with letters of an obscure alphabet, or cracked, or chewed at the edges by a cosmic mouse, as if at cheese prophetic, or when its face is pitted with signs, or when faces old and strange, the face of one's grandfather, or of a stranger once glimpsed in a crowd, or of a face that betrays an emotion too complex for the human heart to comprehend appears on the moon's visage, above our bewildered superstitious gaze.

  Many are the empires that reveal themselves in decay on blotches and stains on stone walls. Many are nations that appear in patches of mud long after the rains have gone. Many are the shapes of divination that show up in coffee stains on white pages, or on tablecloths. The mind sees myriad things in the illusory surfaces of the meaning-transparent, meaning-infested world.

  But many are the well-studied forms of divination; the readings of fortunes in the arrangement of leaves at the bottom of the teacup; and angles and configurations of cowries thrown and deciphered by the master's spirit; the flow of the wind and its scattering of the petals of certain flowers at dawn; the tinkling of bells teased by the breeze; the aerial formations of birds of prophecy when summoned by the gods of destiny to speak to lands that will not listen.

  Many are the ways the gods speak to us: through dreams, which we misread, which we do not experience clearly, which we forget, which we wrongly interpret, creating more chaos instead of achieving more clarity; dreams that we act on directly, as if they spoke a literal language; dreams that we fear; dreams that perplex and which we get others to explain to us, when the message and key is with us alone.

  Many are the ways of seeing the future, glimpsing the past. Some stare into crystal balls, into clear waters of prophecy; some read the fall and placement of kola nut lobes in enamel bowls; some read the shapes and direction of the footprint of herons or chickens or rare birds; some read the past in momentary visions had outside time; some use the Bible or other sacred texts; some resort to sorceries and consult wizards that may or may not know the mystery of the stars; some travel in the minds of tortoises to the beginnings of the race; some fly to the moon on the back of beams of light; some wander deaf amongst angels; some consult the ancient oracles and ponder the incomprehensible messages from the gods, delivered in verse to the sibyls. Some listen to the prophecies that fall from the mouths of babbling children, or the language of crows, or the accidental words that reach them in marketplaces, or pay too much attention to words said to them by strangers or the insane. Such are the perplexities of the ways of man and woman in a world where the past and future do not speak, and where the present has not fully revealed itself to our partial-seeing eyes. And thus we live our days between knowing and unknowing, blind and deaf in a vast panorama of revelations, a perpetual theatre of timeless events where history is as much the future as the past, an infinite living book in which all things are present. We live in these wonders and do not see.

  Many are the wonders to be glimpsed in the book of life: the beginnings of the universe, the death of stars, the obscure life of a thief, the rich hidden life of a maiden, the abstracted life of a queen, the last days of a musician leaning against a column, a mysterious flood, the lives of the ancient philosophers, an evening in Atlantis, the afternoon on a normal day in a desert town, the sight of a baby lost in a city of groundnut pyramids, the glorious dream of Alexander, the happy exiled days in the life of my mother, the magical adolescence of my father, and all stories known and unknown, lived and unlived, in the endless chain of universal life.

  Many wonders to be glimpsed in this eternal book, and I have chosen this one, and I don't know why.

  CHAPTER TWO

  On that day, by the river, when she heard the mysterious questions in the wind, the maiden's life changed for ever. Before that day she lived deep in a dream. The world was strange to her. All things were strange to her. It was as if she had come from another constellation, another world, and had found herself marooned on an odd planet where she was completely lost. Her only good fortune, it seemed, was that she was born into a tribe of artists, into a family of gold-shapers, bronze-workers and dreamers.

  Her tribe was a nomadic tribe with a place, a land as their hidden centre. They lived in the forests, away from towns and cities. And their lives were entirely dedicated to listening at the oracles and creating sculptures in secret and displaying them at night in the village centre, as a guide and warning of events and troubles and disturbances happening in the land, in the world, in the tribe, in the family, or in the spirit of one man or woman. And so it was not unusual for the tribe to wake up one morning and find a wooden sculpture of a man chained to another man, and wonder what it meant.

  These images led to great discussions, interpretations and misinterpretations. They were like dreams made public. Sometimes many years would pass before a famous image mysteriously displayed near the shrine would reveal its true purpose and social meaning, or spiritual value. Then suddenly a familiar image became strange as it began to speak, to reveal what it was warning the tribe of, future events waiting to unfold, hidden events brought gradually to light, past events that take on a new aspect. These images required master interpreters, image-readers, sign-decipherers to help decode them, or their continued mystery bothered and perplexed the tribe. Often they would send for wise men from far away to come and help with the unravelling of the bewildering images that haunted their shrines, uninterpreted. There were few things as intolerable as an uninterpreted image.

  How many famines, plagues, wars, earthquakes, abductions, outrages, were minimised because one of the invisible artists of the tribe had felt the overwhelming pressure of a vision, and created an image that freed that vision, displayed it, and had seen it properly interpreted for the larger benefit of the land? There were many; so many, in fact, that the tribe had become legendary. And in their legend they had gained their free
dom to live as they felt best, as they felt best able to serve their vision and the goddess of artistic revelation.

  They were a unique tribe, and to many they were a rumour, a legend; which is to say that many people did not believe that they really existed. This suited the tribe immensely; it cloaked them with invisibility; it freed them from external restraints; it made them wholesome creators, listeners, makers, guides, revealers, dealers in mysteries, messengers of unknown divinities, travellers between realms, image-bearers, and supreme creators of beauty in the land.

  They were free. Not all their creations related to divination, revelations, omens, warnings. They also created images of lamentation, images of jubilation, bronze castings celebrating life in the round, good harvests, a young man hunting, a famous athlete, lovers, mother and child. They created works which were simply beautiful in themselves, works that had no meaning but which gave great pleasure, joy and health to all who gazed upon them. Works that were like sunlight, like rainbows, like lights glinting on the surface of rivers, like the sparkling eyes of a happy child. These works were dreamt up, made in secrecy, and appeared one morning in the most prominent or surprising places in the village.