by Ben Okri
CHAPTER THIRTY–NINE
The suitors were of many kinds. There were famous mask-makers, respected bronze-casters, and feared image-makers whose images bristled with power and strangeness and were used as war fetishes by alien tribes. There were warriors and dancers, tremendous master-musicians and courtiers. There were chiefs from far-off kingdoms and members of royal families. It made the tribe come alive again to witness such an array of brave young men assemble for the hand of one of the celebrated daughters of the land.
But the maiden herself was indifferent. She drifted in a living dream. She was deaf to the serenades, blind to the works of powerful inventors brought for her amazement, cold to the gifts of gold and cows, to the visits of wealthy intermediaries, and resistant to the pleas of her mother to be more gracious.
And her aloofness worked unintended wonders at inflaming the passions of the suitors for her unattainable hand and her proud untameable spirit.
From her otherworldliness seemed to come the message not that they were not good enough for her, but that she was beyond being interested in them ...
Somehow they had to gain her attention and establish their reality in her consciousness.
To her they were all a blur, they were all variations of one suitor.
CHAPTER FORTY
Around this time the maiden took to wandering off with her female companions and lingering by the river. She played games with her few friends when she could, but mostly she just stared at the river, its reflections, its lights. Sometimes she glimpsed future events in evanescent fragments as she stared, lost in deep reverie, into the surface shimmer of the river when it appeared quiet in its steady flow.
Mostly listening to the water lapping on the shore, staring at the birds, always absent-minded, lingering at the hinges between here and there, she dreamt things which her mind barely registered, but which filled her with a delicious sweet melancholy of which those days of youth were composed.
Sometimes, in a flash, in an evanescent mood of a dream surrounded with golden moments, she would see but not register a ship tossing about in the wild billows of a brutal sea, she would smell without knowing the smell of blood and decomposing bodies lashed to wooden structures in a cramped hull. She would feel without feeling her ankles in chains, an intolerable agony from her wrists, and men bearing down on her. She would see herself without seeing that she was standing naked in an alien marketplace being sold like a goat, and would sense the heat of the whip, would glimpse white faces and silk, would hear without hearing an inexpressible cry of abandonment. She would catch without knowing that she caught the mood of an alien land, cold blades in the air and underfoot, a universe empty of hope ...
And sometimes she constructed dialogues dreaming in her head. Were they her thinking? Such things perplexed her lightly as she woke from those golden states, standing. And she would continue a daylight activity, as if there and here were the same. Sometimes such a dialogue went like this.
'Tell us a story,' someone would say.
'I will tell you the story of a girl by the river in Africa,' she said, and never spoke a word of the story. 'But stories can't be told in too much pain, my dear child,' she would then say.
Was she dreaming, or thinking a dream as she thought it? Time has pressures upon the brain, as does timelessness, and presses things there from innumerable spaces.
'Do you remember the moon?'
'The moon died in the big sea.'
'Do you remember the land?'
'The land died with chains around my neck.'
'Do you remember your mother?'
'My mother died when I stood naked sold like a goat.'
'Do you remember your father?'
There was a pause. Then:
'To remember is the worst form of suffering. Spirits torment me saying the past cannot be real. Only death is real. I long to die. And then maybe I will find true happiness.'
And then she would wake from the hinges between here and there ...
... a delicious sweet melancholy of which those days of youth were composed, beside the great river.
CHAPTER FORTY–ONE
The maiden grew to love the river and one night dreamt that a god or goddess would address her from its shore. She dreamt also that a lady of the river would rise in a golden shower and bring her wedding gifts of pure white flowers and a dress made by the mermaids and a ring fashioned by the little people who worked for a king.
And she dreamt that her husband would be a young god come from a mysterious land whom she would not recognise but whom she would save from death not once, but twice ...
All this from the river.
And so the river became her dream. It was a languorous dream of past, present and future. Her whole life was there. And many lives and deaths and births of moons and skies and suns in its watery depths and surface. The whole history of her tribe was there; and the magic and sadness of things sparkled in the glimmers of rays on the water's face. All she didn't know, all that was whispered to her heart heaving in joy and dread of all that was to come, all was there. And often she would in such happiness find herself weeping at mysterious feelings. And often she would catch a glimpse of a face of one who loved her more than the moon and the earth. The glimpse of a face in the river.
And so the river became her dream. She waited for it to yield her its promises; and many moons went past and only dreams came to her, and glimpses, unrecognised, of the future. Her whole life was planted there by the river, on its surface, in images stolen, but not kept, from the future.
Sometimes she travelled the river, in a canoe; and with her companions she sang sad songs for the mermaids to bring them gifts now that they were still young ...
It was around this time, in a state of expectancy, that she heard the voice from the bushes, the voice asking her mysterious questions, along the riverbank. And she thought, at last, that the god or goddess had kept their secret promise ...
CHAPTER FORTY–TWO
The man who was the best of all the suitors was handsome, virile, a marvellous hunter, a good enough artist, a famed warrior, and of the right age. He had strong eyes, wonderful instincts and great cunning. He had that gap in his upper front teeth that traditionally sent young girls into raptures. But the maiden was indifferent to him, and this inflamed his lust to possess her even more, and brought out the hunter in him, and the greatest cunning. For he knew that marriage to the maiden was marriage to legend, and that he would thus be set up not only for life but in the long memory of the tribe. In effect she was his best chance at immortality, as he saw it.
And so he set about his conquest of the maiden with all his ingenuity, cruelty, stealth and calculation. He began by creating the most powerful series of sculptures that it was in him to create. This suitor, who because of his wrestling style they called the Mamba, was known for his guile, his slipperiness and his extraordinary tenacity. They say what he holds on to, what he clings to, what he sets his mind on, and gets his hands locked into, never escapes his grasp. He had killed at least two people in the famed wrestling matches he had taken part in many miles away from the tribe, wrestling competitions in distant villages, from which he had brought back the winning crowns. This same mind that grasps without rest, this relentless mind, he brought to bear on his desire to possess and wed the maiden.
Just as in his wrestling matches he ruthlessly studied the styles of those he fought, coldly analysing their slightest weaknesses, and just as when he caught their necks in an arm lock and never let go till the legs of his opponent stopped twitching, just so did he concentrate on the artistic task of wooing the maiden. He studied, coolly, from a distance, the secrets of the maiden's father's art. He paid spies and servants for information. He tried to see as many of the works attributed to the master as possible. His reasoning was simple. The maiden's taste would be formed by the influence of her renowned father. She would love in art that which reminded her of what she had grown up with in the works of her father. This would be
her weakness: her taste would be bound up with her love as a daughter.
And so the Mamba studied what he could of the works of the master. But how could he be sure that those works were indeed the works of the master? This was a profound problem, the dimensions of which he could not fathom. For the master conceals his work even when the work is evident. The master reveals only that which is the least of him. That which is taken for the works of the master are often his cast-offs, his rejects, his second thoughts, his diversions, his red herrings, his false trails, meant to mislead those who seek only the normal, the evident, the superficial power, the material power, the form and structure of the world, those who seek worldly mastery and fame. These the master traps in the labyrinths of false achievements.
But the master's true works, which lead to illumination and mastery of the spirit, and freedom from the dominion of matter, earthly power and illusion; the true works of the master, which guide the true seeker to the gates of their own self-discovered heaven, these are concealed, they are hidden, they are to all intents and purposes non-existent, invisible, and become visible only to those on the true path, and whose hearts are pure.
And so the Mamba studied what he could find of the master's works, and imitated, almost to perfection, the flaws, the illusions, the errors, the false beauty, and the labyrinth concealed in all such works. He studied them, imitated them, with variations of his own, and produced sculptures of inverted twins, carvings of fishes swimming in opposite directions, carvings of a great mother with stars all over her body, of a great god with a sun in his head, of a great sage with a snake as his thyrsus, images of the illuminati, which he, the Mamba, did not understand and so used indiscriminately, as with a language not grasped and in which one speaks nonsense.
The Mamba thus presented his works to the shallow astonishment of the uninitiated, and to the cool appreciation of the maiden, who looked upon them, saw the poor imitations of her father's masterful gems, and passed on without comment. The works merely confirmed what she suspected. Masters are born only once or twice in the life of a people, or an age. Even the truly gifted are rare, being at best only very hard workers or good imitators or combiners who have found a personal language with which to say nothing profound. The deep can only come out of the deep, as her father always said, for as long as she could remember.
And so while not wholly abandoning the wooing of her through art, the Mamba chose another course of action to conquer this brilliant and unattainable maiden. He took to following her, to stalking her, like a shadow ...
CHAPTER FORTY–THREE
All these activities surrounding the wooing of the maiden concealed from the tribe the sense that portentous events were going on in the undercurrents of the world. It is not necessary to be deaf not to hear loud noises around you; all that is required is that there be sounds played close to your ears. The smallest sounds heard in the ears blot out the thunder sounding all around. It is not necessary to be blind not to see; all that is required is to be distracted. A brighter light close by can divert our gaze from a terrible tragedy happening right in front of us.
All the activities of a people – masquerades, festivities, funerals, harvests, rites and seasonal events – are but constant distractions from unspecified occurrences drawing ever closer that would change the life of a people for ever. The sages of the tribe used to advocate long periods without rites or celebrations, without public events or ceremonies, so that people would be undistracted and so more open to the signs of things that were coming or that were already present, here, now. But these suggestions were ignored over the passing years because the people's need for events, for distraction, was so great, and worse mischief would have occurred if they had persisted in this event-starvation. And so the tribe gradually lost the faculty for communal stillness which allowed for a greater sensing of events to come, the receptivity to signs, omens and warnings.
There was great unease in the undercurrents of the age. The tribe sensed it, but did not know it. The masters of the tribe sensed it, knew it, but could not identify its form. They were paralysed by the power of what they sensed. They were paralysed by the future. They were like individuals who gazed into an abyss and no longer knew if they were still gazing or if they were falling or if they were dreaming. These were conditions which were perfect for being possessed by the abyss into which they gazed; till they became one with it, and fell into it, through self-enchantment.
When a people sense their own extinction what do they do? They either throw themselves into an orgy of distraction, or they try and resist the inevitable vision by deeds which make the feared thing happen, or they do nothing, as if they had sensed nothing; or they create, in a sublime fever of hope, magic works to divert disaster, or to perpetuate their memory, so that the earth will not forget that they once existed and were passionate under the sun.
There were those who had glimpses of this extinction and were perfectly tranquil, as though it were a necessary part of a universal plan ...
There were others who resisted this inevitability ...
But their different attitudes and responses amounted to the same thing.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
The memories of a land are vast and deep; they are more than the land itself. The memories are a place, a realm unto themselves, a separate space and continent, in which all things exist at once which once appeared to exist in sequence.
Deep were the memories of the land in the time which the tribe passed through. Births and deaths, rites and rituals, murders and wars, love stories and rape, suicides and loneliness. The smell of burning tapers, of kaoline piled high in sacrifice, of slaughtered chickens goats cows at the altars shrines and thresholds. Ghosts that wander bewildered through grey timeless zones of the land. Sunsets that bleed odd omens on hot nights. Babies born in the dark forest and abandoned and devoured by ants. Women branded, men from strange tribes caught as slaves and slaughtered, proverbs of great wisdom salting the dusk, the lowered moon that pulls out stories from villages like the tides that rise, boys that play and discover the differences that are girls, diseases and witchcraft, quarrels in families about land, harvests in the farms, celebrations, and then ghosts, and the disappearance of a whole people devoured by disease or famine or wars, then new arrivals, with old histories, in a new cycle, settling into building huts, fishing, hunting, farming, dying, passing on, living in difficult days and hot nights, and ghosts, and laughter, feathers in the wind. Dust in the air. Leaves from the trees. The river's majestic winding flow. Bones of those long dead. Spirits in the forest. Lions in the wild. Birds that circle the air. Drifting clouds. Moon over the land. Sun with spears of light. Footpaths that wind through the trees. Insects in the undergrowth. Seeds bursting into shoot on walls, on clothes, in the eye sockets of the dead. The abnormal fertility of the land. Things growing everywhere. Flies and flying insects pestering the new villages. Then they too move on.
Deep the memories of the land, deep with tragedies, with comedies, with ghosts, with silences, with blood, with riddles, with laughter, with death.
And yet there are spaces there vast enough for more memories, millions millions more than there have been. That is how endless the land is in its depth. And out of this what is yet to be is not hinted at. The space will accommodate whatever comes to be. Who can measure the depth of that space? Who can draw from it all that is needed for renewal?
When a people sense the end of a way, of an era, of a dream, they always sense it as the end of the world.
Who can stop the end of the world?
CHAPTER FORTY–FIVE
The masters sensed all things going on in the tribe. Some of them sensed all things going on in the land. One or two of them sensed all that was going on in the whole world.
Some of them knew that the events surrounding the marriage of the maiden were not isolated events in the history of the tribe, or the land, or the world; but that they were linked to some vast catastrophe and some vast future redemption through
fire.
