by Ben Okri
'You can't bring women into the hall of the custodians!'
But it was too late; the prince had ushered them into the presence of the king. And under his questioning emerged a strange life led by women, one he had never suspected but which seemed so terrifying a burdensome yoke to him that he kept looking around in consternation. Then he gazed about him in utter surprise that everyone thought the lives of women so normal, especially the women themselves, who seemed to make light of what seemed to him so intolerable.
The prince felt he was under a spell, under an enchanted misunderstanding, or that he had come from a different world, as he listened to the catalogue of duties and functions. In a flash he heard them, for the first time. Marriage at an early age. Circumcision. Having children while still being almost children themselves. The lifelong unremitting chores, in illness or in health. Impossible tasks fulfilled every day. Little sleep. And no representation in the council of elders for all their extensive labours. They bore the death of children or husbands, in addition to all their labours, and carried on. They lived through wars and famines, and carried on. They aged quickly, seemed insufficiently loved, had no holidays, but worked and worked at one thing or another, and then died. And were replaced by another wife. And so on. There seemed no end to the catalogue.
The prince was dazed. Did he live in the same space as other people? Had he been in a dream? The king watched him as he listened to the women. Tears formed in the prince's eyes. These were all his mothers, his sisters, his companions, these women. The elders made fun of the women as they spoke of their duties. The elders teased the women about how much they exaggerated, how much they enjoyed their responsibilities, and the power it gave them to have the world so dependent on their diligence. The women laughed and said women had all the power and the leisure. The chief custodian said:
'But, your royal highness, the women have not told you of their benefits. They have special festivals, feast days, cults, mysteries and rituals. They are the ones who choose, in secret;, the superior custodians. Don't let them deceive you into thinking that they have no power. Nothing happens in the land that doesn't have their spiritual approval. More than that, they are the secret movers of the kingdom. Men rule by day, women rule by night. Men perform deeds in public, women undo them in private. Men make history, women make legend. Legend lasts longer. Men conquer bodies, women conquer hearts. Hearts feel longer. Men think, women dream. Dreams create the future. Men fight, women bring light. Men think they rule the world, but find the world has turned to water. Women understand that water. Men make laws, women make ways. Men build, women make the building live. Men know death, but women know life. If men make mistakes thousands die, if women make mistakes a whole tribe perishes. The folly of men ends in fighting, the folly of women leads to death. The folly of men is a stupid thing, the folly of women is of historical significance. Men can be stupid and the world will not fall down; but if women are stupid the world comes to an end. The responsibility for women to be wise is truly great. The greatness of a people is a tribute to the wisdom of its women. If a kingdom is hopeless it is because its women are foolish. Show me a kingdom, a village that is collapsing and you will find that its women have been slack. The strength of women is the backbone of the land. God help us if women should fall into lazy ways and get foolish thoughts in their heads and forget their ancient greatness, their powerful responsibilities, for then the kingdom will turn to dust and be scattered to the four winds. A kingdom cannot afford its women to lose themselves, to lose their vision, and have nothing significant to do, and forget how their ancestors held up the world. Sometimes I see visions of a world gone mad because women have abandoned their shrines and lost the wisdom of their goddesses and become wild and too free. Such a world as I saw was a world without sense, without belief, a world of suicides and despair, folly and madness. Such a world is a world already cursed by the departure of the gods. An empty world. So, your royal highness, there are two sides to this. Much labour on the one hand, great invisible power and blessings on the other. It is women who bring happiness to this world, through their mysteries.'
CHAPTER ELEVEN
There was a great silence when the custodian finished. Then, in the silence, the king made a sign. The prince declared himself.
'I want to know about the nature and mystery of women, of mothers,' he said, in a gentle voice.
The king roared with laughter. But the women regarded the prince in silence and looked at one another significantly. The elders and custodians laughed too; and all the way down the corridors, throughout the palace, the servants, the cooks, the handmaidens all laughed because of the echo of the king laughing.
And soon the whole palace and kingdom and forests and rivers were laughing too. But the prince did not laugh, for he was serious. He wanted to share in the suffering of women, their beauty and their secret majesty. Their grace. Their hidden humiliations. And because of his interest he was the first and only man ever to be initiated into the mysteries of women, the nature of mothers, the great cults of the goddesses. The initiation took place that night, in his sleep, in his dreams, in a place where women do their greatest work, deep in the secret consciousness of men and the world. They initiated the prince with the help and the intervention of the spirit of his mother, who was most powerful in the highest court of women, where she carried out great advocacy for the life of her son with the weavers of destiny, and the wonderful angels of fate.
CHAPTER TWELVE
That night the prince asked to be told about his mother, whom he never knew. The king told him about her till he fell asleep and all the rest that he wanted to know he learnt in his dreams; for a goddess came to him in his sleep and took him to the realm of the dead and showed him that his mother was not there. The prince saw many people he did not recognise, people who had recently arrived. He saw a few people who told him they were from his kingdom and that they had died suddenly or of diseases or had been poisoned or murdered. This place of the dead was like that of the living, only it seemed to have no depth and no time. It was not a place, as such, but a realm like life, only that the voices were more real than the bodies.
Then the prince realised that the dead were like people in a dream, but it was a dream they couldn't wake up from, a dream that was like real life. The prince was marvelling at this discovery when the goddess took him to another realm and showed him the book of life, and in the book he saw the life of his mother, and she seemed to come alive and he spoke to her and listened to her a long time in the most blissful experience of his life.
Then he fell into a deeper sleep in which his mother disappeared and in which the women initiated his spirit in their mysteries. He left his room in a sleepwalking state and wandered to a secret shrine near the river and figures in white clothes buried him in the earth, leaving space for him to breathe, and performed rituals over his buried body. Then, still in a sleepwalking state, newly born, newly bathed in the river, and anointed with potent oils and blood and the juices of nocturnal herbs, and having been made to recite certain oaths, and permitted to dwell in the presence of the radiant great mother of all things, the prince returned to his bed and continued the fabulous sleep of his initiation.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The prince awoke the next day a different person, but he didn't know how he was different. He felt he had developed an extra faculty, another head, or that his eyes saw things he had never seen or noticed before, as if on loan from the spirits. The world was new to him, and yet ancient and familiar. He understood more things than he had lived; and his being seemed to bristle with the knowledge of countless lives. He seemed to carry within him the wisdom of countless multitudes, a thousand forms of dying, a million ways of living, and an understanding of the simplicity of all things. He felt possessed of the simple certainty that the many ways led to one place, that the many forms were one formless harmony, the thousand histories were all one moment, one breath, one story, and that all suffering, all flesh, all living was just
one astonishing tale of illusion in a dream in which the boundaries seemed fixed in the body but limitless beyond the body.
The prince felt himself both light as a bird, free as a dream, and troubled by this shining knowledge that burned in him like a tragedy about to be revealed in the dark by lightning flash.
He told no one of his new condition, but all the women looked upon his face with love, with secret knowledge in the glint of their eyes, with a smile on their faces, as if they were thinking of making love to him in public, there and then, if only decorum would allow it.
In short, he had become beautiful to women in an inexplicable way, a way that had nothing to do with his face, but with a light that shone from him which women felt so powerfully in all their secret places and which made their eyes linger on him. He had that effect too on spirits. Even objects seemed to fall in love with him and fall under his unknowing spell ...
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
On the third day of his peculiar enlightenment he found himself at his hiding place, on the riverbank, waiting for the maiden to appear. He dimly remembered what it was he sought. He waited now because he had fallen into the condition of waiting for a long-forgotten manifestation. He had almost forgotten when he began waiting. The thing he remembered most was that setting out, finding his place among the reeds, looking out over the river and its shore, and dwelling in shining anticipation for some kind of mystery to appear, were among the most delicious moments of his life. It was for him like going from one dream to another.
It was the first light of day, and the river that never sleeps seemed, in that dawning, to shine, flow and quiver with a beautiful light he had never seen before. How golden and brown and great the river was that morning. White birds, cranes, herons, sunbirds, played on its shores. The prince watched the proud solitary heron as, like an actor on a stage with a majestically melancholic monologue, it strolled to a lonely eminence and brooded nonchalantly over the water. The prince was very fond of herons. He loved their ability to be great and small, visible and invisible, majestic and minor, tall and insignificant. The heron could conceal its own magnificence and appear to be a raggedy creature not worthy of being noticed. It was a royal creature that understood that to survive in the world you must not overly dazzle out your brilliance, otherwise you wouldn't catch true fish, and you would be hunted for your beauty. Only a truly beautiful creature could so conceal its own beauty for a higher purpose.
The prince watched the way the heron walked. With long thin legs it walked with such stealth, such lightness, such humility, as if it didn't want to make the slightest sound, as if it didn't want to displace even the air, as if it didn't want to have any effect at all on reality. It seemed, therefore, not to walk on the ground, but to tread just above it, with a tentativeness that was almost tender. Such a gentle, humble, wise, patient bird. And yet while affecting perfect uninterest in anything at all in the universe, how swiftly, how indirectly it strikes with its beak into the water and, unaffectedly, gobbles down a fish it has so casually caught. And yet what magnificence, what majesty, what grace and power, what a flashing slow white miracle that mesmerises the gaze when it flies low above the water, as if not flying, as if, in fact, almost unable to fly. And yet how it flies – flies with such economy of energy, using all the support of the wind, barely needing to stir its marvellous and awkward wings.
The prince loved the heron so much that he stared at it a long time in a dreaming sort of contemplation. And the heron, so sensitive, so intuitive, knew that it was being watched, and adjusted its body ever so slightly so as to achieve a condition totally lacking in visual interest, designed to bore the eyes, so that the looker might be induced to find something else to look at. But the prince knew this subtle trick of the heron, and wasn't going to be fooled.
And, in love, and fascination with a creature of marvels that didn't want to be noticed so that it could go about its business of making the miraculous ordinary, the prince kept his enraptured but awakened and vigilant gaze on that most cunning of birds. The heron was a test of his concentration, his ability to maintain interest in that which deliberately oozes boredom, deliberately emanates plainness, in order to be successfully invisible, and within that condition, wonderfully happy. The heron was a challenge to the prince. He couldn't take his eyes off this bird that had now made itself so bedraggled, so devoid of interest and stimulation; and yet he had to keep his eyes open with great effort.
He kept his gaze fixed on the heron even when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a most extraordinary form materialising from the air, or emerging from the earth. The prince was so mesmerised by this double vision that he had the greatest difficulty keeping his eyes on the heron. For, it seemed, the more boring and plain and unappealing to the eye the heron made itself, the harder and purer the prince's concentration had to be. And the purer the prince's concentration was on the heron, the more marvellous was the thing that was forming on the shoreline, out of the corner of his eye. Then, before he knew it, he began to hear things. This was such a severe test for him.
He heard voices, guttural, unreal, thin, reedy, comical, loud, savage, unnatural voices. He heard thunderous drum-rolls and tinkling bells and rattled cowries and cowhorns blaring and rattles shaking and seashells cascading and above, beneath and within the instruments, voices singing, hollering, wailing, in notes piercing and deep, as if a whole world was coming into being out of the myth and mysteries of the river. And while all this was happening, while the shoreline was populating with figures, the prince kept his tender gaze on the white heron. It was truly an epic battle of attention.
The prince felt himself being torn in two, between an overwhelming interest in the magnificent spectacle unfolding on the shore and a complete loyalty and undying fascination with the mysterious heron that stood so humbly, so undrama-tically in a quiet, barely noticeable section of the shore, standing on decaying reeds, partially concealed by the dreary patch of faded bushes around. And yet, what an unequal contest. How could the poor-looking unmajestic bedraggled heron compete with the epic spectacle which had bloomed with all power on the riverbank? For it seemed that in wavering between the wretched-looking heron and the mighty spectacle, the heron vanished just a little more from reality.
The more attention the prince paid to the great spectacle the more the heron was effaced from the world. It became smaller, it shrank, it became more unattractive and uglier the more the spectacle revealed itself in its wonderful glory. For the spectacle was glorious, was grand, was, indeed, almost monstrous, and fearful. The prince saw, as if in the horror of a dream, the appearance, on the riverbank, of a most fantastic masquerade.
It shone and blazed in rich colours of red and yellows, with black toes, white feet, purple legs, and glittering, flaming materials of orange and gold, of red and violet and green. It was as gigantic as a big tree. The masquerade, with its enormous presence, its branches of fire and flashing lightning, black smoke billowing from its vents, was like the figure of a terrible deity. It was more terrifying than death itself was fabled to be. And it had seven heads.
So mighty was this masquerade that its shadow alone stretched halfway across the river. Its seven heads blocked out the sun. All about its person were things too horrible to behold. For, when the prince paid closer attention, out of the corner of his eye, to the items bristling on the ferocious body of this gigantic masquerade, he saw the writhing forms of dead babies, he saw disembodied heads dangling from golden ropes with their eyes wide open, their tongues sticking out, pulling agonised faces. He saw limbs of bodies, twitching and alive; feet that kicked and wriggled their toes; fingers that flicked and stuck out and writhed; eyes that stared every which way with wonder and horror at what they saw; nostrils still breathing; lips still jabbering; and hearts that pumped blood interminably, blood that flowed down the horrid raffia and vegetation dress of the grim masquerade.
And the masquerade, mighty as an iroko tree, began dancing like a monster set free from an eternal slavery.
It danced a dreadful terrifying dance. It waved its trunk-like arms in the air, in vile exultation. Every step it took made the earth shake and the kingdom tremble. Every time it jumped the land quaked, the riverbed cracked. With its ferocious dance the river heaved as if a storm had been unleashed at the bottom of the world, as if creation itself was being broken down and destroyed and split asunder ...
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
And all this time the prince struggled to keep his devoted attention fixed on the insignificant-seeming heron.
But it was a difficult struggle, and the heron began to pale into insubstantiality as the masquerade became more awesome, and as its dance began to break down the real world.
And when the masquerade began its utterances, a cacophonic tribe of voices speaking from all over its vast and mighty body, the heron practically dwindled to a point, a dirty white spot, still kept alive by the sheer strength of an unintentional will. The masquerade, now so gigantic that it dwarfed the highest trees around, started to utter intolerable incantations, vile and practical prophecies; and the prince was mesmerised by the dreaded poetry of the fearsome figure. It was a poetry that accompanied its destructive dance. And the poetry, the incantations, was so powerful, so monstrous, that it made the dance more violent. The words unleashed great evil forces in the air of the kingdom. The poetry, when uttered, turned dark and murky in the air, and turned into nightmare forms that populated the riverbank and began to devour everything. The ugly forms that formed from the poetry uttered by the horrid figure remained connected to it through pulsing umbilical cords. And what the forms devoured fed the masquerade's gargantuan appetite.