Starbook

by Ben Okri

  But that night, by the river, as they stared naked at one another in the afterglow of their shattering pleasure, they probably sensed that their magic moment was over, that such unnatural joy was not meant to last. They probably sensed that their sublime consummation was a brief gift from heaven as a promise for a future renewal, and a consolation for what was to come.

  They had been followed. And as they lingered in the starburst of their love-making by the river, they were set upon by the Mamba and his followers, bearing flaming torches, leaping out from the undergrowth ...

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In confusion and horror, the two lovers fled into the forest, holding hands. The maiden, unable to keep up the fury of the pace, demanded that her lover make his own escape and that he should return for her later, when times were more auspicious. The new pupil, in the chaos of the moment, in furious whispers, told her of the gaps in the forest, and the right one to choose when seeking for him should he be successful in his escape or should she not hear from him. Then he made off into the darkness of the forest.

  The new pupil, in his haste, in the chaos, in the trap sprung by the audacious fates, chose the wrong gap between trees, a gap fiery with the dark light of an agonising destiny; and he appeared in his village at the moment when, their plan hatched and ready to be born, Chief Okadu and the usurping elders had decided, should he return, to have the prince either killed, or delivered up to the white spirits to be carried off into the sea of oblivion.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In his nakedness the prince, guided by an intuition, did not go back to the palace when he managed to find his way back to the village. He hung around in the dark, waiting near the village shrine for anyone who might happen past. A woman late returning from the market saw him crouching and heeded his call. From her he learnt about the changes that had happened in his absence. Stripping off a layer of cloth, the woman covered the prince's nakedness and led him, under the protection of darkness, to her humble family abode, where the prince could collect his thoughts and fortify himself with food, and where he could meditate and pray. What he had learnt, what he found out, was indeed momentous. The world had spun out of its axis. Celestial night had fallen over the land.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When he arrived back home, his father was no longer there. Only his laughter now ruled as an echo in the kingdom.

  His father, it was said, had simply vanished on a white wind, and had left all his laws and his legacy in his laughter.

  No one witnessed the disappearance of his father.

  And then even the laughter could no longer be heard in the growing wastes of the land.

  The elders were now rulers of the kingdom.

  And when they heard of the return of the prince they immediately denounced him as a fraud and decreed that if caught he should be killed ...

  There was a dead new silence in the kingdom without the laughter of the king.

  Some say that it was with this silence that the real fall of the kingdom began ...

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Somehow the spies of the new dispensation got wind of the prince's hiding place in the abode of the market woman. They learnt of his presence there not long after he had arrived. Fortunately the prince was informed that they were coming for him and he cut short his prayers and began his final sojourn away from the land. His exile began in the midst of his prayers, his exile from the kingdom.

  For the second time that fateful day the prince had to flee; and unfortunately he fled, in the dark, on the margins of the forest, right into the trap of the white spirits. He was caught, chained, gagged with a metallic contraption, and bundled off on a long trek across the savannah to a waiting ship where, in its hold, he found a thousand others. Those who were caught and chained together were from different tribes and nations and spoke different languages and could not communicate with one another except through gestures, through agony, through thought. And thus began the great trial and the great suffering of the race. Those who didn't perish under the lash, who were not thrown overboard, who didn't die in the crush and torture in the hold, those who made the crossing, all manner of men and women and children, they were sold, they worked the fields and the earth of alien lives; and they took with them a new destiny, the spirit of freedom, the colour of justice, and the mystery of music and art to a new world. The prince was sustained only by the laughter of the king that sounded all over the universe, beyond the power and the evils of men.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  But that is only one side of the story. On the fateful day when the Mamba pursued the two lovers, the maiden managed to escape, and made it back home, where she appeared in a state of near-deranged nakedness.

  What followed is unclear. In the book among the stars one reads with the spirit and interprets through memory; and there is much that is vague when the spirit is not perfect.

  The masters of the tribe decreed that the tribe commence one of its seasonal migrations, to escape the cycle of doom that had been hovering like a thundercloud over their lives. They also declared the Mamba an outlaw and banished him, too late, from their midst. The maiden bore her child; and having awaited for many moons the return of her loved one, she left home one night and went seeking him. She too went through the fated gap of an agonising destiny, was captured by the white spirits, and suffered the sea crossing which should never be forgotten in the forgetfulness of men and women.

  When she disappeared, the tribe of artists lost its soul. Then one night, through the same fated gap in the forest, which had widened beyond measure, the white spirits came, and descended on the unsuspecting tribe. It might never have happened if it were not for the activities of the Mamba and his followers.

  They had become marauders in the forest, and the Mamba's chief obsession was to find and kill the pupil who had so humiliated him.

  Often the Mamba and his followers raided villages, and plundered and pillaged the surrounding countryside. Often they would return to the edge of their old village and look on at the preparations the tribe made for their migration. They looked on, and wept at their banishment ...

  But it was the Mamba and his followers who attracted the attention of the spies of the white spirits, who followed them one night and saw a village without fortifications. That night the white spirits fell on the tribe and carried away its strong and its young. They destroyed the village and scattered its inhabitants among the hills. Those that were caught were gagged and bound and sent across the seas; many of them perished in the crossing; those that made it over, in their suffering, spread an unconquerable spirit in the new land; because their spirit, from ancient times, had always been strong.

  CHAPTER NINE

  What was left of the tribe of artists regrouped, and changed location, guided by their dwindling masters. They moved on, they grieved. After the destruction there was a scattering of the tribe, its dream, its people and its art. They became etiolated, and slowly vanished in the mists of time. Then there was silence ...

  ... and it was only after a century, on several other continents, that their fire was kindled again, in different forms ...

  But in the old land, after the silence of their ways, only standing stones and mysterious sculptures that endure the wrath of time's decay remain in enigmatic places in the forest, among wild plants and trees that have grown over their old habitation. Their shrine turned to dust and returned to the air. Their gods returned to the deepest realms of dreams.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The elders ruled for a while in the kingdom of the prince, and in the absence of the king. They ruled with unwisdom, and much dissension broke out amongst them, and the people distrusted and undermined them, and one by one they fell to each other's blades at night, or to secretly administered poisons by day. Their children were mostly lost to a terrible lassitude, others to a madness that took the form of incurable fits of fiendish laughter; and they laughed themselves into early graves. Then the gaps began to devour the kingdom. And then the full force of the whi
te wind descended on them and wiped out great areas of the past, and wiped out memory, and dissolved many traditions. And then the white spirits came and the land lost the spring of its ways. Forgetfulness followed and new ways grew over the oblivion of the old ways. And those that came after were not heirs to those that went before, because of the great gaps, and the onslaught of the white wind that almost created a desert out of a flowering land.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  For a long time it did seem as if all was lost. But, after a century, a myth began again in the minds of historians and artists who sought an explanation of how such a rich artistic heritage came to be, and how or why the community that created it so suddenly and completely disappeared. Its legacy was now spread throughout the world, enriching the hearts and dreams of strangers and the secret children of the tribe all over the globe. The hidden masters maintain still that nothing is ever lost, but abides in the dreams of humanity, and in the infinite story, in the infinite book among the stars.

  But in the land, with time's passing, only children playing in the dreamtime of their most innocent years, when spirits are as real to them as birds or trees, only such children would one day stumble on the monoliths and statues and enigmas in stone of the vanished people, and release ancient spells into new centuries.

  It seemed that only their dreams given form remained, concealed. And when these works were discovered it would be surmised that they were created by masters from a distant planet, a more advanced civilisation ... alien artists creating in solitude and homesickness for their magic constellation ...

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ... and the prince had undergone his final test; as a slave he had endured his last crucifixion. Among the slaves he had spread dreams of freedom, dreams of illumination, which never perished. He was, by all accounts, a secret master who saw it all, suffered it all. It is whispered that this was his last time on the wheel, in the dust of living.

  After the years of slavery, spreading a new message in the undergrowth of those who suffered, he returned, it is said, to the realm of his father, the laughing king; and served the kingdom in the highest way, among the stars and in the whispers of the soul.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The maiden's parents survived, as did their grandchild. The tribe did regroup from among those who scattered in the forest and among the hills; and quickly, leaving everything behind, they began their migration, never staying anywhere long enough to be noticed. Time passed and one day a mysterious deputation of wise men and women appeared amongst them and came to claim the grandchild as their future king. They brought great gifts. The masters of the tribe of artists recognised this act of destiny, and the maiden's parents acceded to this extraordinary claim. In ceremonial splendour the grandchild was led back to the palace of his paternal ancestors, led to the throne, and to his rightful inheritance. His coronation was as legendary as the mystery of his lineage. But the kingdom ever awaited the return of his father; and the laughter of the original father was heard again, in faint harmonies, growing in clarity, throughout the kingdom.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Though the tribe of artists had regrouped, it had only partially recovered; and its strength was no longer able to hold out against the dissolution wrought on it by the destruction of its old ways. The tribe survived long enough as a people to have one last stage of almost great flowering. It was the swan song of their golden age. It was the last days of their old dispensation before they vanished into the dust of time.

  They must have felt acutely this last air of their days. An elegiac mood pervaded their works. They created with the terrifying intensity of a people who know they are dying and want to populate the world, to fertilise the universe, with the potent seeds of their invention, their creativity. These last years, before they succumbed to oblivion, were their most poignant. Everyone created, shaped, dreamt in stone, in wood, in nondurable material, on cloth, in songs as if turning their lives into forms that must endure and survive the passing of their flesh, their bodies, their hearts. Children created as intensely as the aged who were dying. Everywhere among the tribe they began to create their testimonies, their whimsies, fantasies, prophecies, and pure forms of no purpose other than to salute the mystery and the unappreciated joys of living.

  The maiden's parents were very old now. Most of the masters had gone to join the ancestors. The Mamba and his followers had raged in the forest for a time, had marauded, and terrified surrounding peoples, had, some of them, been caught and bundled off to slavery, and others had grown old too, and were heard from no more. No one knew what became of the Mamba, though tradition has it that one day, following the legend of the gaps that led to a fabulous kingdom of gold and happiness, he had stumbled into one of the worst gaps of all, and had been seen spontaneously combusting into wild red and fiery green flames from which he could not be rescued. And such was the awesome nature of his fiery consummation that his followers, such as were left, were terrified by the sign and fled away from the forest, back to the open plains, and sought ways to redeem themselves among the living.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  How did this tale come down to my mother, this tale that she began to tell me when I was a child?

  Somebody has to create a myth. Somebody has to turn a life into legend. Someone has to project a story into the future. This is how a fragment of that legend came down to me.

  Around the time of the swan song of the tribe in its elegiac stage, the maiden's father, now on the verge of death, and in great secrecy, invented a new kind of drama. He had long abandoned the art of sculpture, and had been silent as an artist since his daughter disappeared one night and was never found again. Out of his great silence, his great age, and the profound nature of his myth, he created a new form to add to the ritual and memory of the race. And so one day actors appeared near their new shrine and performed a new kind of story-telling theatre, and astonished the tribe in their dying years. The first act went something like this ...

  Griot (standing in a circle's centre): Memory is better than gold. And so listen to this legend as it is told. Now that there is little time left, this is the only way to tell it quickly. Listen wisely with your souls, and not your eyes or ears. Become this drama I am about to show you. Listen as if to the good ones dead, who have a light in your head.

  Then silence. Then in the darkness different voices, interspersed with hells, drums, sighs, bird calls, flutes, koras, cowhorns, recite these lines.

  Voice: If you enter through the magic gate, if you walk through the encampment of the tribe ...

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ...You will find them carving at wood sculptures in open workshops, hammering at bronze, singing poignant songs in groups, in lovely harmonies. You will see children making new objects out of rejects, drawing pictures on the ground. You will see the women painting cloth in vivid colours, or creating new forms with jewels and cowries, practising new dances in the square. You will find the old at work, directing great projects, telling stories to the young, listening to the dreams of maidens.

  You will see sculptures everywhere, in wood, in shining bronze, in copper, in stone. You will see sculpted shapes of animals imagined or dreamt, of visitants from the sky, of gods, ancestors, the unborn, of spirits, or the noble busts of sages. You will see images of harvests and beautiful women, and strong men, images of the future, shapes drawn on walls.

  You will find a place alive with art in every corner, art in the square, art all around the shrines. You will find a place alive with constant creativity. Such was the place the prince encountered as he entered the encampment of the tribe, disguised as a humble man, according to his principle of the heron, in quest of a maiden.

  He had for many years heard tales of gods who made love to maidens disguised as birds or gentle animals. He had understood from this that to get to the best woman the man must be simple as a swan. He had also taken from this that it is best not to frighten a special maiden with too much power. To be lowly, to be low, was t
he only way to gain her trust. The highest became the lowest to do their highest work. The seduction of the maidens by the gods he took to be a metaphor of enlightenment, of the penetration of the soul of humanity by the ecstasy of the godhead. The soul of man is a beautiful virgin; the god is the instrument of the great God. These thoughts he had toyed with in the forest as he journeyed onward. Now that he was of the tribe of artists, he was overwhelmed by the beauty of their way. More than anything, he felt at home there.