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ISBN 9781407022550

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First published in 2007 by Rider, an imprint of Ebury Publishing This edition published by Rider in 2008

Ebury Publishing is a Random House Group company

Copyright © Ben Okri 2007

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ISBN: 9781407022550

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In memory of my father, Silver Okri, 1928–1998 With gratitude for the magic foundation

I wish to express my special thanks to the Marsh Agency,
To Paul Marsh, Camilla Ferrier and Jessica Woollard for their tenacity;
To Judith Kendra for her vision, and to all at Rider Books;
To Rosemary Clunie and the ongoing alchemy.

This is a story my mother began to tell me when I was a child. The rest I gleaned from the book of life among the stars, in which all things are known.

In the heart of the kingdom there was a place where the earth was dark and sweet to taste. Anything that was planted grew in rich profusion. The village was built in the shape of a magnificent circle. And in the centre of the circle stood the palace of the king. Four rivers met in the forest around the village. The shrinehouse was at the edge of the village and the path that ran past it led to the outside world. The forest was dense about the village, and it seemed that those in the heart of the kingdom lived in a magic dream, an oasis of huts and good harvests in the midst of an enveloping world of trees.

There is an ancient saying in the village that my mother used to tell me. They say that it is not who you are that makes the world respect you, but what power it is that stands behind you. It is not you that the world sees, but that power. The village was small but, behind it, all around it, stood the power and the majesty of the dense forest. At night the forest was dark and rich with magic and enchantment. In the day it was lovely and of a sunlit green, and a haunting barely audible music could be heard from its earth. Gifted children often said that they could hear the trees singing charmed melodies. On certain nights, when the moon was full and white like the perfect egg at the beginning of creation, the wise ones claimed that the trees whispered stories in the abundant darkness. Those stories, they said, took form and wandered about the world and one day would take on a life of their own. The people of the village very rarely went into the forest because it was so powerful, so unpredictable, like the immeasurable mythology of an unknown god.

Long ago, in the time when the imagination ruled the world, there was a prince in this kingdom who grew up in the serenity of all things. He was my mother's ancestor, and he alone of all the people in that village loved playing in the forest. He was very handsome and fair and bright and the elders suspected that he was a child of heaven, one of those children from another place, who was not destined to live long. He was never so happy as when he played alone in the forest or by the river. He was a favourite of the mermaids and the mysterious girls of the forest and he took them flowers and things he had made and he played music to the spirits of the river. Because he was a child of heaven, he was left alone to do as he pleased, so long as he did not express a wish to die.

He was a surprise to the royal family. The soothsayers at his birth predicted for him an unusual life. He will be a king and a slave, they said. He will be sold like a goat, treated like an animal, he will fight in a war, he will suffer like a great sinner, he will live like a god, and will know freedom more than the freest of men. The most puzzling thing the soothsayers said, however, was that he would die young in his old age or that he would die old in his youth.

The elders expected him to be sickly. He never was. They didn't know whether to groom him for kingship. He showed no interest. Politics and royal duties bored him. He seemed to much prefer working with the common people in the farms, harvesting corn, teasing the maidens, building huts for the frail old women of the village, splitting firewood, and piping music around the edges of the kingdom, as if he were haunted by a sad beauty that fringed the limits of the world. It touched the hearts of the elders to see his fragile body bent to such difficult tasks he set himself, or to see his fading presence dissipate itself in the lovely music that he teased out in the dappled shadowy realm of the myth-infested forests that was his second home. What were they going to do about this royal vagabond, this noble tramp who so swayed the hearts of the women and the elders, who fascinated the young, who moved the heart of the kingdom like a string instrument plucked to perfection by a dying master? It was like watching a strange game of life and death being played out before the eyes of everyone.

No one dared offer him their daughters for fear that he would early desert them for the land of death that he seemed to find so sweet. And yet all the maidens loved him passionately, mutely, dreamily, from a distance. When he spoke to them with his soft and confident and thrilling voice, they became petrified with an unmasterable enchantment. And when he touched them, it was like being scalded by something sublime, and some maidens were known to cry out suddenly, others to suffer great pain and agony, and many became unwell afterwards and shivered in love fevers undiagnosed for weeks. Later, one maiden whom he played with and wrestled into the river fell profoundly ill, lost her senses to incomprehensible love ravings, and died, when least expected, of a kind of fatal happiness. Some said, in malice, that a curse hovered over our young hero, and that one day ...

And so time passed as he grew up in mystery. In accordance with the rites instituted by the ancient traditions of the royal family, our young hero was initiated into the deep mysteries of the tribe, and of royalty. He underwent seven initiations, most of which took place when he wasn't aware of them. There were the mysteries of the hidden order that showed his place among the stars, the sands, the gods, the ancestors. There were the mysteries that revealed to him his place in the royal tradition, revealed the terrors of kingship, the dread that attends noble blood, the fire that follows the line of his birth, the madness he must overcome as a gift of his birth, and the greatness of heart he must cultivate in the midst of the tangled threads of a strong destiny.

These initiations took place at night, in the forest. He witnessed the raising of the ancestral spirits in their fearful splendour, and spent seven nights in the company of the illustrious and the infamous dead of all times and all places, so that all the great and most wicked and most loving deeds of men and women would never be a stranger to him.

These initiations into the mysteries began in him an unsuspected transformation. He became more silent, and yet more open. His utterances, though perfectly clear, were completely opaque. His voice changed and took on tones that were at once deep, surprising and gentle. Sometimes he seemed hard, cold, remote; and other times joyful, rich with love, basking in wonderment. He became an enigma to the village, but was a bigger enigma to himself. He didn't know who he was any more.

And so he spent more time in the forest, around the river, in the hills, listening to the birds, searching for God to give him the answers to the questions that the initiations had awoken in him like thunderous bells, or drums.

The royal family began to fear that the initiations had done him more harm than good. Instead of making a bigger man of him, they had, it seemed, made him more vulnerable, more unstable. They feared he was going mad. Or that, worse, he might take his own life, in an attempt to return to heaven. So they decided that what he needed was a wife.

He didn't need a wife. He needed time. No one thought to leave him alone so that he could come round in his own way. They fretted over him and troubled him with their fears and projections. They made him the concern and the problem and the focus of the kingdom. They interfered with every aspect of his life. They gave him no space to grow into his own man. They robbed him of space and time. They spied on him everywhere he went. They reported his every move. They misunderstood his every gesture and utterance. They magnified his silence. They distorted his stillness. They suspected his prayers. They saw sinister aspects to his complete innocence. And so, unwittingly, they drove him further and further away from the kingdom.

He began to roam, to explore the deep forests, in unconscious attempts to escape the prying eyes that gave him no peace. If they hadn't worried over him so much, and made him seek escape, what happened would never have happened; and, mysteriously, the world would have been smaller for it. Destiny conceals strange illuminations in the suffering life visits on us. The tale of fate is entangled with mysteries. Dare one say such and such shouldn't have happened? History is replete with monstrosities that shouldn't have happened. But they did. And we are what we are because they did. And history's bizarre seeding has not yet yielded all of its harvest. Who knows what events will mean in the fullness of time? Our hero ran away from the prison of his royal role into something much worse. Who is to say why, or what its purpose and ultimate meaning was? In the presence of great things glimpsed in the book of life one can only be silent and humble. The ultimate meaning of history is beyond the mortal mind. All one can say is that this happened. Make of it what you will. Our hero went searching for God in the hills, and one day came upon a maiden by the river, with a bucket of water on her head. She was returning to the farms. And he took her for a sign.

She was not, at first, beautiful. She became very beautiful later on. She was, at that time, quite plain, quite odd in the face, like a work of art in formation, verging on ugly, but rich with the potential of many different kinds of harmonies emerging from the early stages of the manifestation of a personality. There was something about her that was rare, special, hidden, waiting. Something fine, clear, like a cloudy uncertain dawn that, to the trained eye, already hints at an especially brilliant day.

Our hero didn't fall in love with her at first sight. Nor did she notice him. She was like a swan in infancy, all clumsy, out of colour, perplexed, seeing things all wrong. How unpromising excellent things are in their youth. How awkward true beauty seems in its early stages. Who could tell that a butterfly would emerge from such a mess of matter that is a caterpillar? She was such a creature, all at sixes and sevens, at odds with her own unique spirit growing within her. And yet her eyes, how clearly they revealed the presence of diamonds within. Except that the young all have clear eyes. But hers had a touch of heaven. He didn't notice. He saw her as a sign.