Starbook (28 page)

And so it was that at dawn, just when the sun was like a newborn child in the gentle golden mists of the east, when the birds were in competition as to which would waken the prince with the message of their incomprehensible melodies, the prince would rise, and greet his life, and try to remember and heed his dreams, and after performing the rites which he had devised from his death to keep him ever awake to the wonder of living, he would set off to the forest. He was not seeking adventures, but seeking only that which he had lost before he nearly died.

That vision had grown so much more now in meaning with each passing day. And that love which had lain sleeping in him was stirring with a restlessness that made his life quite intolerable without his being aware of it. Then, one day, he found himself pursuing an enigma, a riddle, in a dark forest. He was pursuing a white and golden antelope in a dream which he saw in the forest, still blinded by a love which he did not know possessed him like the life in his limbs.

The white and golden antelope led him past a stream he had never seen before, past a white house inside which he heard a girl singing a song so beautiful he nearly burst into tears, past a well in which he saw not water but a crowded cluster of pearls and diamonds, and yet he did not stop to investigate the well, but followed the golden and white antelope. It led him past two villages in which he found he was worshipped as a god, and when the villagers saw him they fell in mass prostration and in screaming ecstasy cried out that they had been blessed with glimpses of their divinity. The prince didn't linger to taste the pleasures of this ambiguous power but kept firmly on the trail of the white and golden antelope as it led him into a maze of trees and flowers at the centre of which was a gap the exact shape of the morning sun. The antelope leapt into the gap and vanished. The prince hesitated at the threshold of this mystery and then he said a quick prayer and without thinking, and with the courage that youth often has, and which those who age wisely are richly composed of, he leapt into the gap too, and found himself in a simple place in the forest, not far from the river, with his head quite clear, except that he was a little puzzled how he had got to where he was. He had forgotten how he got there. He remembered only that he had left the palace, entered the forest, and now found himself near the river, near his favourite hiding place in the flowering bushes, and he could hear the laughter of young women in the wind over the whispering waves. He could hear the laughter of young women and girls. He could hear their teasing, their sweet songs, their stories half told, their games and their names being called out. He could hear them the way you hear favourite moments from a childhood remembered in dreams.

Like a faun awoken from a gentle sleep by a rainbow that played a haunting melody in the sky, the prince awoke from his half-dreaming state and hurried to his place among the flowering bushes. And when he looked out from among the innumerable white and blue and yellow and red flowers that richly surrounded him on all sides, he saw, along the shore of the golden river all aflame with the gentle jealousy of the sun's rays on the pure liquid glow, the girls all in white, dancing in circles. They had flowers in their hair and cowries round their necks, and they were dancing as if they were performing a magic rite to the season of flowers and the rich green gift of the world after the gloom of death has passed over the land.

There they were, the girls in white dresses, dancing in circles with bangles of light-spangled bronze on their lovely wrists and anklets twinkling with gold on their slender ankles as they danced along the shore, in the beauty of youth, in a time without memory, in a pure happiness that cannot last, in a perfect beauty that the gods put there by the river to celebrate all creation. And the prince gazed on this happy sight with wonder in his heart.

And he listened with rapture as they sang a peculiar ditty, one that somehow seemed to move the river itself to smiling, or so it appeared to the prince.

'If you touch me

And I touch you

Then this is true

And that is true,

Too.'

The last word detached but connected to the other words in the song had an odd effect on the prince. It made him aware of a figure whose presence made his heart shiver and the world changed and the lights darkened a little, as at an eclipse, and then brightened better than before, and a higher colour was restored to all things, as if a veil had dropped from his sight. And then he beheld the one girl among the dancing girls who was apart from them, but not aloof. She stood in a pool of water on the shore, staring into the horizon, turning a flower round in her hand, spinning its stalk so that it was the blue flower that danced, spinning, in her hand, to compensate for her stillness.

And she was there, as in a dream that time forgot, in the perfect enchantment of a lifetime. The prince, upon seeing her, and without knowing why, began to weep silently, with a smile in his soul as warm and tender as the young sun in its moment of early gold.

At that same moment, the girl who stood apart called out to her companions and they gathered about her in a circle and she said:

'My friends, I feel today a special sadness, as if at last a god has given me all I ever wished for, but I can't see it because I am such a fool. How can this be?'

And her companions giggled at her riddle and danced around her in a circle, singing their ditty, in sweet melodies, without giving her an answer.

And she turned and turned with their dancing till she was quite dizzy and then beyond dizzy and began to dance herself and then they all began a game of chasing one another up and down the shore and into the forest and back again.

And then the prince noticed that she was alone. They had come to do their washing on the stones of the river and the morning had cleansed away their task; and their games, which were their celebration at their task's end, were over. They had eaten fruits and laughed and talked of suitors and mimicked the various men characters in the life of the tribe and had shared dreams and notions and had borne their sundry buckets on their heads and had gone back to their homes. And only the one who stood apart now lingered at the river, as if waiting for its god, or for a voice, to address her, as once it did, when she was more innocent. But when nothing happened, when she waited, and sang a little, and looked about her expectantly, and a wind bore down on her, making her tremble a little, she decided to return home. She now had three flowers in her hand, which she played with. One was yellow, another blue, and the third one was red, and she seemed to love them all.

She seemed also to fall into a happy smile of a half-dream as she made her way through the flowering plants and into the forest.

When she had looked about her expectantly the prince had the desire to speak to her, but a wiser urge made him hold his peace. At last he was learning the lesson of the heron, his personal bird-spirit. He kept silent when he most wanted to express that within him which was too much to express. And he watched her as if his soul had left his body and had joined her being for ever. But he kept still. And he breathed gently properly, as if he were breathing in the sweet life of the sun itself. And when she started to wander away from the river, he had no choice but to follow. He had no idea if this was the right thing to do or not, but as the moon draws the tides, or the sun setting in the west draws our gaze homewards, so he found himself following this dream of his life that had at last come alive.

She moved gently among the shadows in the forest. She alone of all the girls bore no bucket on her head. She had come empty-handed, to keep her friends company in their tasks, and was leaving with flowers. Her slender form and smiling walk delighted the imps of the forest.

She seemed merely to be wandering. Wandering in a dream. The prince followed her through the trees that her presence made magical. Everything that she went past changed with her passing. He followed her through new villages where sculptures of him rose from the shrines. He saw the sculptures but did not recognise them for what they were. She went down into a valley and emerged into another forest that was blue within the shade of its trees. It was a complicated journey. She seemed on a private ritual of discovering the world about her. Often she would stop to gaze at the trees as if looking for something or someone within them. Often she would feel their trunks and tap them and listen to their interiors. She behaved quite strangely, and this fascinated the prince.

And then, at a certain junction, where paths met, and where you could have a clear sight of the sky, and where the air fairly bristled with unaccountable whispers, she did something quite amazing. She suddenly stopped, and became alert, and awake, and stood very still, like a warrior waiting for a sign before charging into battle. Then she looked to the left and to the right, she looked above and then below, and the prince watched in baffled astonishment as she stepped into one of the gaps between the trees. She walked into the gap and disappeared completely, as if into a dream, or as if from a dream fading in daylight. And he hesitated for one moment only before he hurried and leapt into the same gap between things that she had vanished into; and on the other side he found himself in quite a different world, the same world but different. He found himself in the same place as he was before he leapt into the gap between things, but it was strange. The shadows were still blue. He was still in the same forest. The junction where the paths met still quivered with enigmas. But it was not the same. In the distance he saw her walking and singing to herself along the forest path that was like a rough ribbon of subdued gold amid banks of wild greens and high trees. He saw her stop and talk to a snail on the path and saw her lift the snail and place it among the plants on the other side.

Not long afterwards he followed her into the dazzling environs of her village, where the fabled tribe of artists lived and created in secrecy and to maximum effect, in the unseen spaces of the kingdom.

Following the principle of the heron, the prince made himself indistinct and indistinguishable and managed to wander among the tribe of artists without drawing attention to himself. And so he was able to see into what building she entered, that was her home; and so he was able to make discreet enquiries and learn something about her family. He explored the environs of the village, lingered in the palm-wine bars, asked further questions from fellow drinkers, and contemplated spending the night at the edge of the forest. But he had visions of eating raw tuberous roots and not sleeping for all the noises of wild animals circulating the darkness and he imagined himself being devoured by wild beasts if he so much as dozed off, and so he decided to return home instead. But he was lucky that day, for as he set off home he saw her leave her house and he followed her round the edges of the village, past the shrine, into the woods, and saw her step into another gap which shone like a little moon barely visible in daylight. And when he hurriedly stepped through that gap as well he caught sight of her disappearing into an unusual-looking hut with an ordinary door. She was in there a long time. Then just as he was about to leave someone came out of the door and looked around. The man who came out had eyes like those of a wild eagle. He was clearly a man of mysteries in the fullness of his powers. He looked about him, as if sensing something new in the air; then, uttering a few potent incantations, he withdrew into the hut, leaving some mysterious quivering form of his spirit lingering outside, still watching, till that too faded into afterglows.

The prince didn't linger a moment longer, but hurried home the way he had come. He was careful to return through all the gaps, thereby making sure that he left nothing of himself behind and that he didn't get trapped in the forest, or lost in a world he did not know, a world, maybe, of forest dreams, and legends.

The more the elders of the kingdom tried to fill the gaps, the more gaps appeared. The elders and the chiefs of the king's court precipitated a great crisis among themselves and in the kingdom. And they caused many evils to come into existence because they feared that the gaps that loomed and appeared to their paranoid scrutiny were in the world about them and in tradition. With each passing day doubts grew amongst them about the truth of anything. They were no longer sure when a certain innovation had become the beginning of a tradition, or whether the tradition had been there since the beginning of the world. Their earth became shaky, and one day they overheard the prince saying to one of the children in the palace that the world stood on air, and that nothing held up the earth in space, and that in a dream he had seen the world as a shining blue bowl in a vast sea of nothingness, dotted with stars.

'This earth is held up by air, by mystery, by nothing,' he said to the children.

'How come we don't fall off then?' one of them asked.

'Because it is the same nothing that keeps us on the land. Some people walk upside-down, with their heads facing downward, and they don't fall off into the big nothing. A power invisible keeps us here, not our power.'

The children were silent. Then one said:

'So the earth stands on air?'

'On nothing,' the prince said, smiling.

The chiefs and elders overheard these words and this began another bout of talk and fevered discussions. It awakened more fears. They met at night and gazed into the heavens and could not see that which held the earth in space. This made them see more gaps, which they had to destroy.

Often the chiefs and elders, unable to sleep, watched the gaps growing in the kingdom. This phenomenon began to paralyse them. Chief Okadu was heard screaming in his sleep. His wives assured him that there were no gaps in the world, but his raw red eyes could not unsee that which he had begun to see. The paranoia of the chiefs, made worse by the horror that they stood on air, that their world was held up by nothing, began the destruction of the potent mythology by which they controlled the kingdom in the name of the king. They thought of having the prince poisoned, and enlisted the support of one of the king's wives, the most disaffected. Three times they attempted to poison the prince but each time the food was eaten by an eagle, or a dog, or a monkey that appeared in the prince's chamber before he was ready. Three times he saw empty plates on the table where food should have been; and he took it as a sign to fast. He fasted till he received another sign which he took to mean it was time again for him to meet the family of the maiden, in disguise at first, following the principle of the heron. The sign came in the form of a dream in which he was sitting at the foot of a master and the maiden was at the door, looking out at a spectacle in the street.

The prince told his father that he would be away for seven days and would return each night. His father nodded and asked no questions, and didn't laugh. But there was an odd twinkle in his eyes.