Starbook

by Ben Okri

  Many things happened in the kingdom that were baffling. During that time, for example, a strange plague was abroad in the land. At first it appeared in the form of a new wind that blew over from across the great seas. It was a cold white wind and wherever it blew it created vacant spaces. The wind was at first a beautiful wind, bringing melodies and fragrances and pleasant dreams. At first it was a soothing wind that brought hints of new visions of the world and the heavens. It seemed to clear the sky, and stars that had always been in the heavens were seen more clearly for the first time. The wind was at first cleansing and fresh and bracing and it cooled the humid air of the sun-loved land. The white wind brought coolness to the skin and mind, and a window into new ways of being and feeling, and a lovely hint of a wider world than suspected, a horizon where dreams of a different sort travelled on the white wind to enrich the dreams of the land. At first the white wind was a thing of wonder, a phenomenon strange and delightful to behold. It swept through the land, changing the appearance of things, and brought a new light to the bright light of the day and a new light to the brilliant darkness of the night.

  Then, imperceptibly, the nature of the white wind changed. It began to erase that which it passed over, or passed through. The white wind began to erase hills and valleys, it erased the memories of people, it erased villages and towns, forests and gold mines and rivers and animals and flowers and whole portions of land. Slowly, mysteriously, things began to disappear. The weather changed. The seasons were altered. Songs began to vanish. Artworks from the tribes evaporated into the white wind. Then, most strangely of all, the gods began, one by one, to be erased from the enduring pantheon of the kingdom. No one noticed this momentous silence of an event for a long time. And the silence of the gods was taken as a sign of tranquillity, of good fortune, of harmony and plenitude in the land. And so no one noticed when the gods began to vanish from the visible and invisible pantheons, erased by the white wind. It was impossible to tell which of the gods went first, which god vanished first. Those who can see that which they didn't see at the time say they remembered first that a great malaise, a profound unease came amongst the people, making them sleepy, in-turned, divisive, slow, intensified in superstitions and sluggish in their reading of signs.

  Some say that the first thing they were aware of was a strange new failure and unwillingness to decipher the signs and omens that multiplied in the land. The people lost the will or the desire to interpret their dreams, to listen to the oracles, to listen to their prophets, or to pay attention to the images that were born in the inspired dreams of their artists. The people no longer listened and no longer interpreted. This should have been noticed at the time, for the land was always rich in significations, in signs and wonders, in omens, in warnings, in hints and messages from the stars, the gods and the ancestors. And with the advent of the white wind blowing from across the seas an unsuspected lassitude of the mind came among the people, as if the wind erased, gently and seductively, their will to be aware, and to interpret; inducing a sleepwalking quality into a land that so loved the interpretation of things. And so it seems that the first to vanish or be erased from the pantheon by the white wind was the god of interpretation.

  Such an important and oddly decentred god, never fully noticed at the best of times, silently vanishes, and no one notices. Then again, according to those who can see long after the event what they did not see at the time, there followed the god of questions. For, after the sleepiness and the malaise that descended on the land, the people, who were as much prone to contestation as to silence, stopped asking questions of things.

  They stopped asking why and when and who-it-is-for and why-is-this-so; and they just accepted the reality they saw as the world as it should be. They accepted what they saw. They accepted what was there. They accepted and believed what they were told. This was a new kind of sleep. It was a sleep of the mind. A sleep brought on when the white wind, in its sweetness, its enchantments, seduced the senses and lulled the spirit of the people into dozing. Then the god of questions vanished from the pantheon, and no one asked why, or how, or what it meant.

  Then followed the god of harmony ... for there had always been battles between tribes and villages and clans and families, there had always been discord and enmities, but these elements existed in harmony within the kingdom, the way different colours and energies exist in nature, or contending animals coexist in a forest. Beneath the differences were harmonies, even if it was the harmony of people maintaining their different space. Then, with the advent of the white wind the people saw one another differently; for the white wind cleared the air of obscurities that make a people shrouded in mystery, a mystery that is respected. Suddenly, they all saw one another too well. Mystery was dispelled. Suspicion took its place; then fear, then rumours, then misinterpretations, then open antagonisms, and then were created the conditions for future wars too vile to contemplate. And so it was that the god of harmony, normally invisible at the best of times, was erased by the white wind from the great pantheon of the land.

  After that the rest was easy. The god of memory was forgotten, and vanished. The god of mysteries was laid bare, and turned into dust. The god of love was defiled and passed into the air. The god of thunder became a murmur. The god of sacrifice perished at the altar of change. All the mother gods and the goddesses of women fell into silence, and became cults practised in hiding, in lowly conditions. And even the great god, the father god, succumbed to the etiolations of the white wind, and proved the easiest to efface, on account of his great seriousness. The white wind made him seem ridiculous and unlikely and soon no one believed in him. And when the people stopped believing in the father god he seemed useless and without effect and then was forgotten, and became only the shadow of a memory, his form occupied by another notion that came in the wake of the white wind.

  The people were to pay a great price for the loss of their gods, for allowing their gods to perish and disappear from the pantheon. They were to pay a terrible price indeed, in the fullness of time. And they would never know that the suffering they would endure in the time to come was because of the loss of their gods. They would never make the connection, because they would become a different people, a changed people. And they could never be the people they were again. They had lost their gods for ever. They could not go back again. They could not resurrect that which they had allowed to die. They became a people without their own gods. In time they would find other ways to the same energy of the pantheon, their own new and future ways. But till then great confusion and plagues and suffering and chaos and all the troubles of a people who have lost their way will come upon them. Many tribes will vanish. Many languages will fall silent for ever. Many secrets of the people will be lost. Many clans, many little nations, many peoples will perish and die out and disappear from the face of the earth. When gods die many great things in a people die with them.

  And then a something greater than all the gods reveals itself. And, in the cycle of things, greatness returns to the people.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  But for a long time the only god not effaced by the white wind was the trickster god, the god of paradox, transformations, illusions, chaos, change and humour; a god tinged with an element of danger, of the sinister. And this god was not effaced because he had made sure he was both in and not in the pantheon. He was ineffaceable because he had no face. He had long escaped the security of the pantheon, had long freed himself from the form of the pantheon, and become without form. This trickster god had found it more congenial to seep into life, into the life of humanity, into the world, into reality, into the ever-changing conditions of things.

  Change was his home. The trickster god was at home, whatever the dispensation. He had become a part of life and of change itself. The people never understood, or saw, or appreciated, or worshipped the trickster god. He was too strange and intangible and nebulous for them to grasp. The trickster god liked this. Being worshipped as such was not his thing. He wanted to have
sublime and unpredictable and uninterpretable effects. He was a high agent of the divine. He was a warrior of simplicity itself, a sublime puzzler; and everything he did, with its flashes of celestial danger, of a paradox and riddling that almost drives people mad, was designed to bring the mind of the people to the very edge of things, to the brink of the deadly abyss of the mind, and to push them over, that they might fall into an intolerable white emptiness in which illumination might flash awake in the spirit of a people who are so deeply asleep to the highest things.

  The trickster god makes all thing inside out, makes all things go into reverse, to obverse, to perverse, in combinations of all, to trick and fool the intelligence, to awaken that which is greater than reason, but which reason prevents from being awoken, because it thinks it knows, when it can't.

  The trickster god wakens, by his fiendish ways, that which knows within, that which knows all.

  The trickster god loved the white wind. The wind brought the perfect conditions for his reign and his mischievous flowering.

  There is no telling when, and how, in what atrocious circumstances that aren't what they seem, or in what wonderful moment that conceals the seeds of tragedy, there is no telling when and how the trickster god is working. Perhaps even now he is working with these words on your mind ...

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The white wind was the first sign of the plague that came upon the land. The white wind was part of the plague. For first the gods began to vanish, then trees, philosophies and traditions; and then it became most noticeable when healthy young men and women began to disappear. It was a great mystery, a sinister mystery. The young men suddenly began to vanish. Whole villages lost their young. No one knew how. There were no wars that devoured them. But there were tales of people being lured away by spirits; but no one knew where they were lured to. Their bodies were never found. Those tales, presenting an intolerable mystery, did not satisfy ...

  CHAPTER SIX

  Soon it was rumoured everywhere that white spirits had come into the kingdom and bought and kidnapped the strongest and bravest of the land and carried them off in great ships to distant places or to the bottom of the sea. There was much talk of vast farms where the missing young of the land worked from dawn till dusk in captivity to the white spirits at the bottom of the sea. But only children believed these tales.

  The plague of spirits was a great mystery and brought great fear to the land. No one had seen these white spirits. To see them was to be lost, was to be captured by them. Those who saw them were already caught. Only a few isolated seers, sages and masters in the kingdom, only the occasional child, only the odd strangely gifted girl could see them in dreams and spoke out of what they were doing. In their different communities they spoke of chains of iron; they spoke of instruments that spat out fire and death; they spoke of long lines of young men and women of the land being flogged and gagged; they spoke of the chained men and women, of the chains binding their hands and ankles; they spoke of how they were dragged away by the white spirits; they spoke of bleeding hands and ankles, and the trail of blood they left behind as they were dragged off to ships in which they vanished; they spoke of trails of blood that ended at the sea.

  These were dreadful rumours and visions indeed; so fantastical were these rumours that no one believed them. No one believed that even evil spirits would be so wicked to human beings. People therefore dismissed the visions as rumours that were being used to hide some greater problem.

  The king held several important meetings of the elders to discuss this terrible plague; and all were baffled. During these sessions the king listened, and said nothing. At night, while these fears grew wilder, and the plague grew fatter, the mysterious laughter of the king could be heard throughout the kingdom.

  But the disappearance of the young continued, till the land began to be quite empty of healthy young men and women. In many places the ones who survived were only the lucky ones, or the scrawny ones, or the sons and daughters of chiefs, kings and the powerful; or only those under the protection of powerful elders, or those who belonged to tribes that lived far away from the popular routes and centres, those who lived in the deep inlands, the weird hinterlands, protected by murky creeks and vile insects and legions of mosquitoes. Only those survived who were hidden from the famous coasts and ports, where the white spirits did the best of their inhuman business in draining the kingdom of its young, of its future hope, the pride and glory of the land, the strong, the brave, the criminal, the war-like, the gifted ones of the happy land.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Meanwhile the prince remained, hovering, in the land of death. He had no idea of the effect his dying had on the people. He didn't hear them, or see them, for he dwelt in the grey land between dying and living.

  While he lay there, in his room, with courtiers and handmaidens and the women of the palace in great mourning all about him; while he lay there, on his bed, unmoving for several days, believed dead, and yet with the softness and the faintest fragrance of a smile on his face, the crowds that had gathered to pray for his recovery had grown so large that many feared that the village wouldn't be able to support their vast numbers.

  They kept on pouring in, from all over the land, and from distant lands, and from distant realms. Never before had a prince had so great an effect on the hearts of a people. Emissaries of grief were sent from remote kingdoms of the continent, and from remote kingdoms across the world. The fame of this prince who was dying became a thing unto itself; and those who had no idea who he was, or what his kingdom was, or the name or the place, were moved by the very thought of this gentle prince, loved by all, who was dying, and who attracted such great crowds. More people came to the village and made extraordinary pilgrimages there just because others did. And women and girls and hardened men and fierce warriors who heard of this astonishing mass of people travelling to keep vigil for the dying prince burst into tears and couldn't stop themselves weeping for the sheer sweet sorrow of this gentle death taking place in the middle of their lives.

  So great and famous was the phenomenon that long after its time people referred to anything that happened during that period as 'that which took place during the great gathering for the dying prince'. And musicians and bards composed poignant elegies and epics and haunting melodies of that mysterious event, that inexplicable moment in the story of the land.

  There are people who, though they seem to have accomplished nothing visible in the world, manage, by their fate, to move the hearts of millions for reasons far beyond reason itself. So it was with the prince. His dying brought great shivers of grief to all peoples, to those who heard about it and even to those who didn't. For it was widely reported that during that time never were people more prone to spontaneous weeping, to sudden accesses of inexplicable sorrow and shakings and tremblings of heart. Such an overpowering sensitivity to grief and suffering swept over the land, and the force of an irrational sadness dwelt in most hearts for reasons they couldn't explain.

  During that time there were many beautiful poems composed, and the loveliest and saddest music that the land came to be famous for was created; and a strange flowering of art, of sculpture, of rock and cave paintings, of architecture, of stories and legends sprouted all over the land, born from the current of a sweetening grief that circulated among the dreams of the people like the fragrant breezes of a hidden paradise.

  In the midst of all this the prince dwelt in the land of death.

  And in silence his father, the king, would sit by his side, at night; and in silence he would laugh into all the realms of his kingdom.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Then one day a soothsayer made his way through the vast crowds to the palace and demanded to be presented to the king. After much delay and many lengthy interviews with courtiers he finally was granted an audience. And to the king he said:

  'Your son is dying because of all the evils in the land. Only love can save him.'

  The king laughed.

  'You think the
re is no love in the kingdom?'

  Rocked by the powerful laughter of the king, the soothsayer fell silent, chastened.

  'That is not what I meant, your majesty,' he said.

  And then he went on to tell the king that the only thing that could save his son is if they found the maiden of the tribe of gold-makers, the tribe of bronze-casters, the forgotten tribe of artists.

  'How do you know this?' asked the king.

  'I was directed to tell you this in a dream.'

  'Who told you in your dream?'

  'You told me in my dream,' said the soothsayer.

  'Me?'

  'Yes, you, the king.'