Starbook (32 page)

All this, and much more, the new servant learnt in silence. The silence was invaluable. The semi-darkness was invaluable. So also was the stillness in which he could learn to be free. He learnt more in the silence than in years of being told things.

Then, at a certain moment, he realised that he was learning things about the kingdom, about the palace, about the traditions, about the mysterious nature of the gaps, and about the white spirits and their silent invasion of the land through mirrors and with hidden fire.

He was even learning about learning.

Everything in the workshop was eager to tell him things, to teach him. The stones yielded the secrets of the structure of matter. The spiders yielded the secrets of the art of making, and of cohesion. The implements yielded the secrets of joining, of angles. The walls yielded up the art of the vertical. The air taught the art of invisibility. Feathers taught the nature of flight. And the light that came in through the chinks in the wall bore to him the underlying secret of all things, in fragments, hints, and undeciphered illumination.

Time was different in the realm of the artists: sometimes it was long, sometimes it was short, and often it simply did not exist at all. Mostly time for them was timelessness.

Everything in that village, in that tribe, was eager to teach him. He was eager to listen, and to learn.

Meanwhile, brooding darkness was gathering about the kingdom. First came the white wind that made things disappear; then came the brooding darkness. It was not there before. The old sages say that it came with a name, a word uttered, words used as an incantation to distort the land and make it more manageable to those who wanted to conquer and use it. They say the words created the darkness, and then the darkness came and hung over the land, and the people did not know it. The darkness thickened amongst them, and the elders did not see it. And when the darkness had made them more visible to those outside, the white spirits came and emptied the kingdom of its young ones, its virile men, its gifted children. And at first no one noticed. They didn't notice because of the darkness.

About this time the new servant made infrequent visits home through the forest. He noticed that there were more gaps than before. This filled him with mild alarm. In the palace he noticed changes in the air. The women were more silent. He peered into the faces of his people and he saw a new doubt he had never seen before, a new puzzlement. He asked them questions and they spoke of their dreams. Many dreamt that their bodies were taken from them in the brightness of day, when they were in the middle of their tasks and without knowing when they had become spirits who were performing empty duties in a place where nothing happened. Their bodies had been taken from them and worked the white fields of blood as if in a deep sleep of horror. They tried to get their bodies back, but they were stuck in that place, working the farms of the strangers. Many people reported having the same dream, of how their bodies had been snatched, and how they found themselves as spirits in the kingdom. Some said that eventually they managed to get their spirits to join their bodies in that far-off place, and then the agony of their nightmares began.

The prince was troubled by these dreams of his people. No one seemed able, or willing, to interpret them.

About this time the prince, in asking so many questions, began to rouse, unknowingly, the fears and unease of the elders. They feared once again that he was going to undermine them. They feared he was going to destroy their power and their institutions when he became king. They feared he would be a dangerous king, with too many new ideas, too many changes, making women equal to men, reducing the hierarchies of things, and, worse, changing the nature of their rough religion, and altering the laws which made them the secret masters of the land. And so they pressed forward with their schemes, plotting ways of getting rid of the prince. And then one of them – Chief Okadu, the Crocodile – had the brilliant idea of somehow offering the prince to the white spirits, so that they might carry him off to the seas and leave the elders free again to rule in secret, in the name of the laughing king.

There were times when the prince would stand near the centre of the village where the palace could be seen in the distance, and where all around he breathed in the immemorial air of his people, their harvests, their traditions, their births, deaths, their wars, their festivities. There were times when he would watch the women on their way to the farms, or the marketplace, or the river, or on visits to their relations; and, unaccountably, he would weep. There were times when the ochre of the huts, and the winding bronze paths that led to evergreen forests, and the rolling choruses of children's voices, and the clear sharp tinkling of bells rang out gently behind the passionate songs of the women or the deep-throated songs of the men in their gatherings at dusk, and the silvery blue quiver of the sky, and the brightness of the moon white as the most perfect gap that leads to other worlds, and the smell of the goats, and the lonely song of the hunter in the hills, and the sudden red and yellow cry of the women of the golden shrines, and the flight of the blue-headed sharp-eyed long-flying birds that precipitate auguries when they circle the palace three times before shooting upwards into the palm-wine sky – there were times when overcome by all this, standing in the square, dreaming of his ancestors who had come from the land that was now forgotten under the sea, there were times when the prince found that time itself had turned upside-down, had become scrambled, that the huts had turned to dust, that the children had all fled or been sold or only their spirits remained, that the forests had shrunk, that the stream had thinned into a ribbon, that only the very old remained, that the elders had lost their memories, that the aged mothers wandered the forests without voices, unrecognised by their children, and that the white wind had wiped away the traditions, and that only the dreams and the histories and a bitterness, tinged with songs, lingered in the dry hot air where his tears of an exile turned into stones as they fell from his face and piled up, white and sparkling as diamonds, at his feet.

There were times, in the farms, as he worked with the men, carrying sheaves of corn, or cutting the long grass with a machete, or hauling mounds of yam from their bundles to the village, there were times when time itself turned round and everything cleared and he found that the farms had gone and that he had fled from that distant land of slavery and had escaped on a great ship and had found his way, after many years, back to the continent, on a remote shore, and had begun his search for the homeland that he had been stolen from and which he hadn't seen for forty years. He was an old man, wise in many sufferings, which illumination had taught him to endure, and he searched for his homeland, travelling from one country to another, through countries without names, seeking for his kingdom that had been so vast and which also never had a name. He travelled through many countries with villages so similar to his, and saw palaces that could have been his, but nowhere could he find the kingdom he had left behind. And as an old man, who knew slavery, who knew freedom, and who had never ceased being a prince, and who in spirit had never left his homeland, he sought, in that brief time left, while he dreamt in the farm, for his homeland, and found it everywhere and never found it at all. It was as if it had been broken into fragments and scattered all over the vast continent. The years passed in dust and dreams, and he never stopped seeking his kingdom. And then one day, by a narrow stream, he heard in the wind the laughter of the king, and he fell down and fell towards the beautiful brightness of the sun. And when he stood up he found himself in the farm, surrounded by the women of the village, who were concerned for him, and who loved him with all their hearts, as if he were all of their sons. And they bore him in their arms, and carried him with songs, to the edge of the farm, ignoring his protestation that he was well, that he had only fallen into a strange spell of dreaming. And after they had made him drink some water, which tasted strangely sweet, with its taste of earth and stone, and after they had prayed over him, and shared their food with him, they carried him to the palace, singing and cheering, as if he were a hero returning from the noble wars ...

There were times when the prince stood in the square, in the middle of the village, and wondered about the kingdom, and the people, and what the strange hands of destiny were weaving for those that walked the land with long shadows.

Meanwhile, the maiden grew inflamed with a love that seemed to have no source and no object, a love that gripped her like the growth of a fever. She was possessed by a love that had no meaning, no purpose, and she went around with the feeling that she was slowly being driven mad by a love that had come upon her with invisible wings. She was under a peculiar spell.

This madness became more evident to her parents. But they said nothing. They watched her mooning about the place, pining away gently like a fading rose. They watched her eyes grow hollow in their sockets. They watched her staring at the moon and singing childish love songs. They watched her wreathe her hair with flowers and beheld her skipping down the village paths, singing out aloud:

'Who am I in love with
Who has poisoned my soul
Let me know, let me know.

Who has conquered my heart
Who has killed me with love
Let me know, let me know.

Who am I a slave to
Who is now my destiny
Let me know, let me know.

I am quite mad with love
I have lost my soul to love
Does it show, does it show?'

Then the maiden would play with the little girls and boys, suddenly laughing, suddenly bursting into song, suddenly weeping. She would trail behind her whispering companions and would not dwell long by the river. She had lost her taste for the river and the sky and the forest. She didn't even think of art or look at the new artworks that appeared in the square. For her there was nothing to see there. Often she walked round her father's workshop as if seeking the spot of hidden treasure. Often she would repeat the verses given her by the priestesses of the shrine. The more she pondered them the more obscure they grew.

Once she was sitting under a tree listening to her friends in the remote place where she felt more at home when a bird with yellow plumage landed in her lap and seemed to speak to her. She could have sworn she distinctly heard it say:

'The more you look
The less you see.
Let it be, let it be.'

But she could not let it be and she seized the bird and took it to her father. Her father was pondering how high a thing can be before human beings begin to see it; he was pondering how invisible a thing must be before human beings can see it; he was pondering how light a thing must be before human beings cannot destroy it – when his daughter intruded on his thoughts with a bird that she claimed had spoken to her.

'What did it say?'

She told her father.

'Then pay attention to it. First, let the bird go. Then, go back to your tree and see what happens.'

The maiden set the bird free and went and sat under the tree again and fell asleep with her back against the tree trunk. And when she awoke her head was clear. She felt a wonderful clarity within her, as though she had just had her first good night's sleep in a long time. She had a shining feeling within her, like the day after it has rained, and a storm has broken. She still felt the madness of her love, but it was a quiet, tranquil, beautiful madness, like the surface of the river on a clear moonless night.

The new servant returned from his visit home and resumed his life as a statue. No one noticed his departure except the spirits and the spiders. And on his return they began to weave webs of enigma about him again, layering the work they had previously done. Deeper into the mood of his new life went the new servant. He plunged deeper into the silent mysteries of the tribe. And in his deeper delving he found himself exploring the roots of legends, the source of myths, the dark secrets of creativity. And then, one day, or one night, he found himself falling into the abyss that was one of the strangest secrets of the tribe, a secret it kept even from itself. He fell into the abyss, and was falling a long time, in great horror, when he became dimly aware that the abyss, without form, and dark beyond measure, was the route through which the gods appeared in the minds of men. He cried out in the abyss and no one heard him. He fell without end for days and nights without end and it was a fall into the abyss that took him beyond nightmare, beyond chaos, beyond madness, beyond death, even.

The fall took him to the placeless place where the gods pullulated, where all things were mixed into one, where the universe seemed to converge in vastness and mingling, where all beings in all the universe merged and emerged, flowed into and out of one another as in one great unimaginable spirit that was neither darkness nor light, a place where all dreams came from and went to, where all deaths died into and where all life emerged from, a place raw and wild and sublime and bright beyond bearing, a place of fire and darkness, of great quivering columns, all seven of them, that seemed to be longer and deeper than it is possible to imagine. And still he went on falling. He fell through the dark secrets of the universe, through all the versions of lives and dreams and deaths of all beings, in all the universes, whether of humans, animals or plants, or creatures from realms unthinkable. And still he went on falling, without hope of ever stopping his fall, of ever emerging from the abyss, of ever getting to the end of his fall. And he might have gone on falling for ever in this space that was no longer a space, a hole that was no longer a hole but a gap that led into the infinite endlessness, and he might have gone on in this black dark bright infinity of a fall, till he was no longer anywhere, and till his body, woven now so thoroughly in profound mysteries, would have turned finally into a statue of flesh, preserved by spirits, if he had not been saved by a master's hand on his head raising him from this dying that was not a normal death.