Muezzinland (3 page)

Chapter 3

Nshalla found their accomodation. In the Street of the Talking Drums, Rue de Kalengo in some foreign tongue, she saw, high up, a polythene drum illuminated orange from the inside, and under that a sign:
Inn de Chanson de Kalengo.
It looked pleasant enough. City wise, Nshalla understood the meaning of clean windows, tiled roof, no animal dung around the front of the building, and the little hammer sigil that told of a lack of scorpions and spiders indoors.

"We'll lodge here," she told Gmoulaye.

Gmoulaye said nothing. Nshalla knew that she disliked the cosmopolitan life, having lived almost all her life in bush villages outside Accra. Gmoulaye shrugged, as if to say she had agreed to undertake this journey and would have to suffer the consequences.

Inside, all was quiet. Nshalla found herself in a dark common room, floor sandy, woven palm leaves on the walls decorated with masks smuggled by some brave traveller out of Kenyataland. She spied one person, a man reading a gently glowing scroll; one of the new breed of self-updating newspapers. Nshalla nodded to herself, for such technology came straight from the Pacific Rim and implied that the owner of the inn was well connected with the centre of civilisation. She approached.

"Good evening," she said in hesitant New-Oriental.

The man glanced up and smiled. "Likewise, my lady." His accent was pure Ashanti, but his manner seemed educated.

"A twin bed room for tonight, if you please, and maybe for a couple more nights."

He rolled the scroll. "Follow me."

He limped as he led them up rickety stairs to the top floor. Nshalla said, "You favour your left foot."

"An accident with a genetically unsound lion, my lady."

The room he offered was clean, lit by insecticidal candles. "Three cowries per night," he said.

Nshalla tossed over the pouch she had prepared, which contained ten brass cowries. Etiquette demanded that she hand over control of inn monies. If he was as educated as he sounded he would appreciate the compliment. Gmoulaye gaped at them both, not understanding the interplay.

He left. "This will be fine," Nshalla said. "We'll stay here a couple of nights at most."

Gmoulaye nodded, looking with suspicion at the beds. Like a hunter she flung back the covers of one, but nothing lurked underneath. She took off her belts and lay down.

"Aren't you hungry?" Nshalla asked.

"I prefer not to eat so late. You go down and take supper. I shall eat like a donkey in the morning."

Nshalla returned to the ground floor. The innkeeper's daughter, a thin child on the edge of puberty, was commanded to make a meal. A bowl was brought to her in minutes, steam escaping from under its lid, where lay a stew of beans, aubergines, tomatoes and onions, with lumps of gooey millet porridge.

Nshalla noticed scars on the girl's temples that seemed medical rather than tribal, speaking of some botched biograin implantation, perhaps by the local quack. "That's a nasty—"

But the innkeeper was at her side. He grasped her hand and raised it to his own temples. Nshalla gasped as she recognised the scarification. He was a shika, like his daughter.

"Very, very rare," he said, "but we do exist."

More from fright than anything, Nshalla replied, "You don't know what you're missing. The aether isn't inhuman."

He smiled. "Perhaps not, but I am still human. Biograins and the aether are just the latest in a long line of imperial tools designed to control Aphricans."

Nshalla shook her head. "No, no, not at all! The aether is just the next stage on from last century's virtual realities. The difference is it's not neutral, like cyber space. It's
cultural.
Perhaps you don't know it evolved? It did, in an environment of human culture. We perceive it like morning mist, though we aren't wearing VR goggles or earphones, but we don't see mathematical shapes and geometries, we see representations of human culture. And it
does
look human, so much so that our inner selves can broadcast themselves telepathically." She sighed. "Oh, you're missing so much."

But the innkeeper just smiled again, and turned away. More guests arrived as the evening became night, but Nshalla went to bed early, deciding not to make further conversation.

~

The Golden Library stood against the city's north wall. It was baroque in appearance, with polished sandalwood doors, multi-coloured windows and a clay tile roof. But in the morning sun it was the frames of doors and windows that stood out, made as they were from gold inlaid with copper and native peacock-ore.

Inside, all was quiet. Nshalla found herself in a hall lined to the ceiling with bookshelves. A few other people wandered the alcoves, many wearing wrist transputers showing them the way to books they had selected. Most disconcerting however were rows of eyes built in lines into the sandstone walls, many with fluorescent optical cables spiralling down to transputer bays. She shivered.

"There is a librarian," Gmoulaye whispered, nudging her forward.

Nshalla approached, coughing to indicate her presence. The ancient woman looked up, taking off her spectacles to clean them, then replacing them. "Good morning?"

Nshalla launched into her request without preamble. "I need to find the location of Muezzinland," she said. "The library must have lots of books, or maps."

The librarian took a transputer and tapped codes into its memory, then handed it over. "Follow this," she said.

The screen showed a single arrow pointing left. Head bowed to see when it changed, Nshalla followed the edge of the hall, stopping when the screen arrow changed to a circle. She looked at the spines of the nearest books.

"Oh," she said.

"What?" Gmoulaye asked.

"These are all in writing. I can't read or write." She turned to Gmoulaye. "You can't, either."

"Why should I need to read or write?"

Nshalla returned to the librarian. "Um… do you have anything in pictographic symbolic? I can't read or…"

The librarian smiled. "That small section in the centre of the hall."

A circular bookcase two metres high and stacked with a few hundred books greeted the disappointed Nshalla. She found the history section and pulled out a volume at random. The pictsym was spidery, but artistically done, though Nshalla noted the regularity of marks that showed a machine had pictsymed it. Nothing about Muezzinland, however. Nor did the next volume mention Muezzinland, nor the next.  Eventually, at the end of the section, she came across a Coca le Cola World Atlas, edges pummelled from decades of use, but clean enough inside. There was a chapter on fables. Taking the book to a table, she went through this chapter. It was easy to follow; transputer pictsym lacked identity, lacked flair. It was like following scientific reports. She had to turn the sound off, however, since it confused her. Aphrican pictsym was always accompanied by tonal phonemes.

"Any use?" Gmoulaye asked.

"I'm just wading through a chapter about legends, myths, old stories. Ah! Muezzinland."

"What does it say?"

"Let me see." Nshalla followed the paragraph, but emerged disappointed at the end. "It's to the north. That's really all it says."

Bored, Gmoulaye drifted away, her attention caught by local drummers sending messages. Nshalla considered her position, then returned to the librarian. "Not much help," she said. She gestured to the plastic bound volumes on the main shelves, saying, "These old books, they'd mention Muezzinland. Would you be able to translate for me if anything could be found?"

The librarian breathed in, then exhaled slowly. "Possibly, possibly. What is this Muezzinland?"

"A country, or so I believe. My sister's gone there and I have to find her. You haven't seen her, have you? She might have come here."

"What does she look like?"

Nshalla grimaced. "Lots of red hair."

The librarian shook her head. "However, if your sister knew where to go then the country must be locatable. All we can do now is go to where the transputer first led you."

Some hours then passed as the librarian searched through dusty volumes, but at noon Nshalla began to realise that the old woman was becoming irritated with her lack of success. She sighed. "There's nothing, I'm afraid. The likelihood is that the name was orally created and orally transmitted, probably quite recently. It doesn't seem to have been written anywhere."

Nshalla whimpered. "Isn't there anything we can do?"

"There is one last option."  She walked over to an eye and plugged in one of the transputer studs on her bangle. "This will connect me to the transputer pool in the economics quarter." She sent her requests, then led Nshalla back to her desk. There a giant screen glowed with pictsym.

The symbols were variations around some basic theme. "What are we looking at?" Nshalla asked, not recognising anything.

"These are transputer generated variations on the theme of muezzin," the librarian replied. "Look at the symbol without trying to understand it. What image does it represent?"

Nshalla looked. The basic theme seemed to be circular, with dots, short lines, and a gouge in one side. "A fruit?"

"A head?" countered the librarian.

They came to no firm conclusion, but the idea of visually interpreting the pictsym variations gave Nshalla an idea. She waved to Gmoulaye.

"Play Gmoulaye the phoneme accompaniment," she told the librarian. This was done. "Do you recognise anything?" Nshalla asked her friend.

Gmoulaye hesitated. "Possibly… it is not a musical snatch I recognise, but it has a certain feel, a barren quality, perhaps. Are those the graphics?"

"Yes."

"But they are singers."

As Gmoulaye said this the image slipped into Nshalla's mind. Of course. Each symbol was an upturned head with its mouth open. Singing.

She said, "Muezzinland must be a land of singers. Well, that's one extra clue."

Already she had another idea. Pictsym had evolved through transputer culture from the ideographic writing of the original Chinese and Nippon cultures, and from the icons of Apple lore, replacing writing over the decades. "Find the nearest matching original symbol," she said, "then ask what it used to mean."

After some minutes spent searching data bases on the other side of the city, the librarian said, "There is no Chinese character that matches, nor a Nippon one. "

"Try the cultures that used to sit on the Pacific Rim."

After a longer wait, the librarian grunted and nodded to herself. "There used to be a country called Indonesia," she said, "and they had something similar to our glyph. It meant singer. I suppose that is not a coincidence."

Nshalla realised they had searched as far as they could. All the old countries of the Pacific Rim had fragmented during the previous century. They would find nothing more.

Gmoulaye wandered off. Nshalla wondered if this was the end of her quest. "Where else can I look?" she asked.

"Well, there is only one place I know of, and that's the Library of West Aphrica."

"West Aphrica? Is that a country?"

"It used to be a geographical description, but it's no longer relevant." The librarian smiled and took Nshalla's hand. "You don't realise how big Aphrica is, do you? The library is in Timbuktu, almost one and a half thousand kilometres away. Such a journey would be impossible."

Nshalla was shocked by the immensity of the distance, but refused to countenance failure. "I
have
to find my sister,"  she said, "Timbuktu or not."

"Then I wish you luck."

Suddenly weary, Nshalla returned to the sunny street, where Gmoulaye waited, sitting on a doorstep. "What now?" Gmoulaye asked.

Nshalla quailed. In her naiveté she had expected the journey to finish somewhere in Ashanti. She could not tell Gmoulaye that a far greater journey awaited, yet she had to, for without Gmoulaye she would be as vulnerable as a desert mouse. "My friend," she began.

Gmoulaye turned away, as if knowing what was to come.

"We've got to walk some more."

Gmoulaye frowned. "We have taken a risk coming so far. We are the freaks who walked for ten days. Nobody travels these days."

Nshalla took a deep breath. "There—"

"Let us consult a diviner."

"What?"

Gmoulaye stood and clapped her hands. "A diviner we will see."

It seemed Gmoulaye already knew where to walk, for she led Nshalla down a passage covered with polythene sheeting and then into a courtyard filled with numerous tents. She stopped in front of the largest. Made from red hessian, it boasted a pole outside from which a dessicated snake skin hung.

Gmoulaye flung aside the flap and entered, Nshalla following, sneezing when her nose was assailed by a concoction of pepper and sweat.

The diviner was a pygmy, black as night in the gloom, and bald. As her eyes became accustomed to the dark Nshalla spotted the accoutrements of his trade. Clad in adinka cloth, he wore mirror shades, headphones, and in front of his mouth a microphone on a wire. Doubtless this was some aether augmented image, transmitted from the depths of his subconscious to her own mind, each peculiarity the symptom of some facet of his identity. Nshalla said nothing, feeling neither trust nor confidence.

Gmoulaye however seemed almost chatty. "We have been told we must make a long journey," she said, "and we need to know if this is the truth or some devious lie. What omens do you interpret?"

"I am a haematomancer."

Nshalla glanced around the tent as he said this. She had wondered what the scratching, scrabbling noise was, and now she saw a number of cockerels in cages, their beaks tied shut with silver wire. The pygmy drew a knife, fantastically curled like an antelope horn, with one glittering side and a handle of gem encrusted bone. He began to sing in a low voice. Gmoulaye's fingers tapped a rhythm in the dust. Nshalla wondered if that was an unconscious act, or whether she was communicating to him in some arcane language.

The pygmy set an enamelled tin bowl on the floor, took one of the cockerels, and slit its throat. Blood spattered the enamel. He bundled the dying bird into a sack, lit a candle, then bowed low over the plate, as if to sniff the blood.