Starbook

by Ben Okri

  But the wise men and women were hard to find and mostly did not want to be found. And when he made enquiries and was directed to this hut or that place, when he arrived he would discover that the wise man, learning that the prince was seeking him, had disappeared, had, as they say, made himself scarce. The prince was puzzled by this.

  'Why do the wise flee from me? Are there gaps among the wise too?'

  Everywhere he went seeking the wise they were not at home or were seen leaving their abodes by the back door or had moved or had gone on long pilgrimages or were reputed to be performing great feats of the spirit somewhere else in the kingdom. Not a single wise man or woman could he find. Maybe, he thought, their wisdom also included not being found by people who sought them. But this left him with his own perplexity, and with no one with whom to share this discovery of the phenomenon of the gaps. He wandered back home that evening, lost in thought, occasionally disappearing from the world as he strayed into great holes of contemplation. And when he came back again to himself he saw the darkness gathering and the stars shining between the deep blue gaps in the sky ...

  The next day he summoned the elders and asked them about the gaps in the people, the gaps in tradition, the gaps into which people disappeared, never to return.

  His father listened to his questions with a smile on his face, radiant with curiosity and pride in his son.

  One of the elders said:

  'Gaps? What gaps? There are no gaps in our tradition, our history, or our people, or anywhere. We are fine. The foundation is secure, the house is stable. We are solid. We have no gaps among us.'

  Another elder stepped forward, and said:

  'There is a proverb: "Only the person who sees the world as mad is mad." We don't mean you, our dear prince, nor do we mean any disrespect. But you have not been well, you have not given yourself enough time to recover, and you are looking at things too hard from your convalescence. Maybe the gaps are in you.'

  Then the first elder, more emolliently, said:

  'I would not go so far myself, but maybe, our prince, you need to get better. And then you will see that the land is fine and our traditions are secure and that there are no gaps anywhere among us.'

  The prince held his silence, and did not press the issue on this day.

  But his unease continued in the following days when he saw birds in the sky suddenly flying into nothingness, into pure invisibility. Or when he saw children playing near the stream and they would run, laughing, and completely vanish in the twinkle of an eye. Or when he saw drummers playing an extraordinary flourish, beating out complicated and beautiful ideas in cross-patterns in the white heat of an inspired syncopation, and they would slowly drum themselves into invisibility, vanishing as they played more intensely, as if obliterated by their own fabulous harmonic discoveries. Or when he saw whole portions of farmland vanish into nothingness, and farmers with them. Or when he saw strips of the palace slowly crumble into thin air, as if wiped away by strange effacing clouds. Or when he saw the shrines slowly evaporate into the trembling vibrations in the hot air of an intolerable afternoon, till only the ghosts of the resident gods quivered in the space above the shrine, till they too were blown away in the general atmosphere of the hallucinating sky.

  He beheld these things and kept his counsel, as he now knew that no one would believe him if he spoke of them. But having to be silent at such momentous things as he saw became unbearable to him, and they tormented his sleep and perplexed his dreams, and he could find no solace anywhere.

  To see these things and to have no one with whom to speak of them introduced a strange new pressure and alienation into his life. He was possessed of a dreadful tragic isolation and a sense of being an outsider in his own land. The people seemed happy enough, the elders carried on as they more or less did, scheming and intriguing; and his father, the king, was silent and mysterious. The only sign he gave of his presence was his characteristic universal laughter which could be heard from the rooftops or trembling on the light breeze in the long afternoons into which the gods, one by one, were vanishing.

  And so the prince found himself alone. Finding himself invaded by signs of a world being obliterated by a mysterious phenomenon which no one else saw, he did not know what to do with himself. Sometimes he thought himself mad. Sometimes he thought everyone else mad. Sometimes he thought the world was dreaming. Sometimes he thought he was living in a perpetual dream in which nothing was real, except for the gaps. Only the gaps seemed to him real. They seemed real because no one else saw them. There were times, however, when he thought that he had died, and that all he witnessed was from the viewpoint of the dead. This troubled him.

  He might have done something truly dreadful to himself in this state of mind if one night his father, the king, had not appeared to him in a dream, dressed in his full splendid regalia, and said:

  'My son, seek out the maiden of the tribe of artists, and be a servant to her father. Study the daughter. Then win her hand. This will not be easy. But your children will eventually be the saviours of the land.'

  The prince woke up with the distinct feeling that something in him had changed for ever. But his great unease at the things he saw hadn't changed. Only now he had a clear sign of what he had to do. So, at dawn, after his morning rituals, he set off to the place beside the river, with the hope that one day, some day, the maiden would return again.

  Meanwhile, so as to cover all fronts, and in spite of official protestations that it had been done before, and done extensively, and that all previous missions had failed, the prince sent emissaries all over the kingdom to find the secret tribe of artists, so as to find the maiden of the river. And, one by one, they eventually returned, saying that the tribe could not be found, and in fact that the tribe did not exist.

  So also, day by day, every day, at dawn, from the freshness of hope like dew on the grass, till the blazing heat of noon that blinded all things that could see, the prince waited for the maiden. And she did not materialise, or return. It was as if his previous sighting of her had been a dream, or had happened in another life, in a distant realm, when life was younger and more beautiful, and true.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  But some of the elders were not pleased at the recovery of the prince. The elder who spoke first at the meetings which the prince convened, and whose name was Okadu, was chief among those who were not pleased. Chief Okadu was an elder of some efficiency, a man enormously pleased with his abilities as a strategist and organiser, and a great sycophant to the king. He had crocodile eyes, discoloured red lips, a general slimy manner, and a certain complacency based on having secured for himself the economic management of aspects of the kingdom.

  He had no power himself, but he had the ear of the king. He despised the people, he believed in hierarchy only if he was at the head of it; in fact he believed in anything only if it would benefit him. He was given to striding about the place with his hands in his pockets as if he owned the world. Chief Okadu was foremost among those who were deeply ill at ease with the prince's restoration to health. He was most threatened by the prince's notion that there were gaps in the kingdom, gaps in tradition, gaps in history. Chief Okadu hated the idea of gaps and ever since the prince had raised the subject he had gone around to the other elders and asked them if they knew anything of the gaps about which the prince had spoken. Without exception, none of them did.

  'I don't see gaps anywhere. What does he mean by gaps anyway? Do you think he was referring to us?'

  The elders went about the village, and made their own interrogations, and they stared at the world, and wandered around, and talked to those the prince had spoken to, and they re-converged and discussed their findings. They still had not seen gaps anywhere.

  Chief Okadu's crocodile eyes grew more sinister than ever; and he acquired, in his quiet opposition and his grasp of the play of things, a strange power over the minds of the elders, a power that had been growing all along in his sycophancy and his general mode of appea
sement. But now he was the force behind the elders, and they all held him in silent awe; and it could be said that, all of a sudden, and quite mysteriously, they realised that they feared him more than they feared the king. And so silently in the kingdom, in the shadows, in whispers, in the bushes, in the dark, in mutterings, Chief Okadu came to be known as the Crocodile. He was called the Crocodile whose eyes never shut and whose jaws never sleep.

  Under the Crocodile's insistence, the elders came round to the notion that the prince was talking in code, and that he might be hinting that they – the elders – were the gaps, or they created the gaps, that they were corrupt, or that they distorted the laws, or misused their powers, or stole from the kingdom and the people, and impoverished the traditions, the history and the land; or that they were somehow a negative force in the kingdom.

  'It seems to me quite clear,' said the Crocodile, in heavily accented menace, 'that we are the ones the prince is referring to; and the way he is going he will sooner or later want to get rid of us as a class and as a force. He is our natural enemy. We wish him nothing but good, but he sees us as the cause of destruction in the kingdom. We have much to fear from that prince when he ascends the throne.'

  The Crocodile paused. Then in a low gentle slimy voice that insinuated fear into the mesmerised elders gathered in the gloom of their meeting place, he said:

  'Unless there is no longer an ascension ...'

  He paused again. Then giving a sign to his minions to blow out the lanterns in the gloomy hall where they met in secrecy under his summons, and when darkness gathered about them all like a thick blanket against the cold, he said, almost in a whisper that could not be heard or confirmed:

  '... or a throne ...'

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The gaps that the prince had asked about, the existence of which they denied, began to haunt the elders and create gaps in their minds. They began to suspect that the prince had found out things about them, their secret activities, their corrupt practices, their ritual sacrifices, their secret societies, their secret taxation of farmers, market women and traders which they kept for themselves, at the expense of the kingdom, while so many starved and suffered. The elders were for the first time troubled by revelations they feared would emerge any moment.

  They did not like the prince's recovery, his new-found awareness, courage and clarity. And above all they were not pleased at the great love the people bore him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  What were the elders to do, faced with the notion of the gaps that the prince had insinuated into their minds? They hated the notion of gaps in things. It revolted them. It disgusted them. It threatened, profoundly and mysteriously, their establishment. It threatened the foundations. It threatened their grasp on reality. And so, because of this, the elders, over a period of time, like strange cultists performing dreaded operations on the natural world, became involved in activities which the uninitiated saw as perverse, as monstrous, as evil spells, as rituals meant to seal their powers and their grip on things in the structure of the kingdom.

  They went around, at night, with lanterns, and began to tap at things. They tapped walls, buckets, trees, buildings, floors. They tapped to find any hollow spaces. They tapped with sticks, canes and bones. They tapped with ritually treated objects. They listened to the noises of the hollows. They noted the spaces between buildings, trees, earth and sky, above the stream, and between people. They were overwhelmed by the open spaces that led to the stars and the heavens. They were bewildered by the sheer multiplicity of spaces.

  They all began to have bad dreams. They had nightmares in which the spaces oppressed them. They contemplated filling up all the hollows, blocking up the spaces. They wanted to eliminate all gaps, but in doing so they did not want to create bigger gaps. They became obsessed with filling up all the gaps, and whenever they saw a gap they saw a force undermining their foundation. They dreamt up ways of jamming up all the empty spaces with things. They couldn't find a way, however, to cram the spaces that led to the stars and the heavens. And because they associated these vast accusing spaces with the prince and therefore the throne, for the first time in millennia they began to scheme against the king and to devise ways to get rid of him. They no longer heard his laughter in the air.

  CHAPTER TWENTY–ONE

  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.

  An
d 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.