Starbook

by Ben Okri

  'When the moon is full

  It spreads a light

  That is cool

  And round and white

  All over the land that is you.

  That moon is like my love.

  Even the air knows this is true.

  But my love never wanes like the moon –

  My love is not there only at night

  And like a ghost is gone before noon.

  My love has the power of seven.

  My love is the light

  And the promiise of heaven.'

  Sometimes, in her dreams, he took her hand and journeyed with her through all the happiest places in the universe, among the stars of ecstasy and delight, and to some of their ancient homelands in faraway galaxies. He showed her their palaces of pleasure, their castles of love, their cities of happiness.

  When he was not speaking to her in dreams, he arranged anonymous surprises for her in the waking hours. Children brought her bouquets of rare feathers. Strange children brought her rich brocaded cloth. When she was musing by the river an old man gave her a single flower that no one had ever seen before, or since. He said the flower came from the stars and that he was a messenger of one that would not be named. The maiden accepted the flower hesitantly, and smelt its fragrance. At that moment something happened in her heart. She was not sure what it was; but suddenly she felt things more clearly. The fragrance altered the wind. She heard the faintest echo of a melody. The river was calm. The old man had turned into the faintest mists of gold fading in the distance of the green cloud of the forest. The flower would never wilt, never die; but sometimes it became invisible and was lost, and it would reappear again, depending on how she was feeling. That flower, along with her only child, was the legacy she passed on to the next generation. Every now and again, for a decade, or for twenty years, the flower would be invisible, and then on an auspicious day it would appear in the hand of one of her descendants, always clarifying the heart. Such a curious flower was she given among the anonymous gifts from an unnamed and an unseen one.

  There were other odd gifts that the new pupil caused to come her way. One day a beautiful young woman brought the maiden a rare ruby. She claimed it came from the far heavens and she was a messenger from one who could not be named. Another beautiful young girl, with a dazzling smile and a bright countenance, brought her a pure white stone, not of this earth, and repeated the magic words of the other messengers. A child dressed in gold brought her a white bowl. When later the maiden ate from the bowl she noticed how well she felt, how contented. Then she noticed that the bowl somehow enriched her food, and in eating little she was not only satisfied quicker but that she experienced an unusual sense of nourishment. These gifts puzzled and frightened her a little, but she kept her puzzlement and fear to herself. She kept her silence. She refused to let even curiosity and a great sense of mystery divert her from her chosen course of delay, patience, and awaiting the wisdom of the revealed hour.

  But more gifts of astonishment came to her and left her, from one day to another, reeling as if in a strange moonlit intoxication. A child dressed in heavenly blue brought her a handful of shining ashes, and with enchanted words poured it into the maiden's palms. Then came special messengers, all seven of them, all beautiful, all dressed in white, repeating love verses from one who should not be named, but whose love came from the stars.

  By now the maiden was bewildered, then curious, then amazed, then enchanted, then fascinated by these gifts. She was so curious about this personage who should not be named that she followed the messengers and was astonished when, with a cry and a flash of light in the air, they vanished as soon as they entered the forest.

  Then, slowly, her love found focus. When the messengers stopped coming, when she didn't hear from them, nor receive any more gifts or verses from them again, she found that she missed the mystery quite deeply. Then she found that she had fallen in love with one who was unknown, with one she would never know. Her lovesickness had found an object, a personage, who was not there.

  CHAPTER SIXTY–THREE

  Through all this, time quickened for the new pupil. Time was hurrying towards the great gaps, pulling him towards his martyrdom. In dreams, he spoke to the maiden of love, and how love saves; and time spoke to him as he sat among the statues that were changing from raw carved wood or rough stone into works of art, changing with the ambiguities of the air, of time, of the silver sheen that a vital element in the atmosphere presses into the surfaces of the new carved works. As they changed from wood into wonder-bearing forms, from stones into statues of enchantment and frozen dreams, he changed too, from the new pupil into one who, through the gaps in time, would find himself in the hold of a ship, crushed with a thousand others, bleeding, starving and raw with beatings, his ankles and wrists in metal chains. He was unable to connect one moment with the other; a life in his own land, a pupil, free, and then less than an animal, in chains, in a ship bound for hell. The new pupil was more frequently snatched in spirit to that future or past condition, he couldn't say which. More and more it encroached on him, this martyrdom, the final suffering before his everlasting freedom from the mighty wheel of mortality. More and more he felt the great suffering drawing closer, till he could smell his blood on the chains, smell the deaths and the agony of the others and their disintegrating flesh all around him in the hold of the ship, in a torment that cannot be lived while being lived, and yet cannot be forgotten, or avoided. In such moments he wondered acutely if it wouldn't have been better to have died beforehand, considering what came later. Among the statues, he sent out to the world a message of the heart – make the most of the happiness in your life; it may be a prelude to something strange. In this vision he saw something worse than death, and he lived it. He saw a suffering beyond endurance, but which was endured; a suffering of a people so great that some of its excess had to be endured before and afterwards, in the form of the greatest happiness. Then he saw why some people, some races, had such an extraordinary gift for happiness and for joy, and for ecstasies of the spirit: it was the excess left over from the suffering to come and the suffering that had gone. It was a divine conversion of that suffering into exhilaration, happiness, and moments in paradise while alive, a sublime compensation for enduring the unendurable.

  The new pupil foresaw, among the shadows, the songs in the air, and the stones turning into art through time's alchemy, he foresaw his suffering to come. It was like another life; a martyrdom and a crucifixion in time. Man enchained and gagged with metal and enslaved ought to be the symbol and icon of a new religion: one that reveals how man's life was sacrificed for the wealth of others, and the building of civilisations. The new pupil found this so, in the hold of the ship, with all his flesh broken and his bones eaten by the chains and the lash. The only thing that saved him then was the vision, in extreme agony, that man is a vast spirit and a body, a silver formlessness surrounding a living mould of flesh and bone ...

  Enlightenment does not reduce suffering.

  CHAPTER SIXTY–FOUR

  The rains came and went; time sped on with epic grace; and the contests began. The maiden, in spite of being hopelessly in love with one who should not be named, maintained the dignity of her delay. She maintained, also, a charming distance from the fighting matches between contending suitors.

  During the long rains, most of the suitors had returned to their homes, for replenishment and fortification. They had come back, rich with magic potions and spells, and praise-singers, and witch-doctors to help them through their campaigns. The contests were violent and full of wonderful events which the bards have long elaborated in their songs and legends. All over the kingdom these marvels are familiar in moonlit stories around which children weave their improvisations.

  The contests drew great crowds from distant places. Many different forms of fighting and many skills of self-defence were displayed. The crowds gazed in awe at the jump-kicking of the Northern suitor, the anaconda wrestling style, sinuous and oily, of the
Eastern suitors, the leg-hooking techniques of the suitors from the Southern creeks, and the gyrating dervish swirling style of the Western free-form suitor, who fought to the wild and elliptical beat of a sinister and mesmerising talking drum. There were suitors who used curious crab-stalking techniques; they were stocky suitors, with devilishly low centres of gravity, who were as impossible to shift in their wrestling contests as the squat hills around. There were suitors with legs so baked and dry with the studied art of kick-fighting that they proved a nightmare to their opponents, whom they kept at a safe distance with the repeated tattoo of their peppery kicks to the face and body. And there were those who crouched like cougars, who fought like whirlwinds, and moved with the unpredictable and hypnotising rhythm of drumbeats administered by their witch-doctors.

  The fights were unpredictable, engrossing and passionate; no one was killed, but many suitors were wounded, and some were disfigured for life. The contests became legendary; and the Mamba proved the eventual winner.

  CHAPTER SIXTY–FIVE

  There are ancient tales where a man, faced with an enigma blocking his road, goes into the forest, to sleep with demons of the deep, wrestle with wild animals, and do battle with death. He lives a wild secret life alone in the depths of a cave, and he returns transformed. Sometimes he brings with him fragments of a new religion. Sometimes he returns with a vision. Sometimes he returns changed, and becomes a witchdoctor, herbalist or sage. The Mamba, spooked by the weirdness of the maiden with an awkward kink in her spirit, and seeing that he was being progressively destroyed as a man, and that he was doing it to himself because he was all askew, found life impossible in the village, and one night disappeared without a word.

  The Mamba simply vanished from the active life of the tribe. No one knew where he went; no one heard about him for a while; and no one speculated about his disappearance either. When he was there he had too much presence; when he wasn't there he had too much absence. It was a sort of curse. He wasn't noticed when he wasn't seen. He was not a man that anyone missed.

  Then events happened which ought to have been strange, but were not seen as such. His father died suddenly one day, after screaming that his heart had been loaned to a shadow. Then, not long afterwards, his mother died, after wailing that her spirit had been stolen by a shadow. The Mamba did not reappear to bury his parents; he sent no word; he sent no emissaries. His absence at the tribal burial of his parents was not remarked on. Then his parents' compound began to be haunted by dark forms that whispered like bats and created shadows that stood up straight and walked like real beings and danced in the moonlight. The rains came and the Mamba's abode was completely unaffected, but no one remarked on this as being strange either. The rains went, and one day, in the middle of a contest, people saw that the Mamba was one of the contestants. He had returned, and no one had noticed. It was then that people began to speculate. It was said that he had gone hunting a rare animal with which to amaze the woman who would be his bride. It was said that he had gone seeking for unusual powers in the deep dark places of the world, and had traded the lives of his loved ones for invincibility, for power over the known and unknown, the strange and the innocence that spooked him. It was said he had gone to acquire powers that would bend the hearts and minds of all people to his will; power over women of all kinds, and power over that which mysteriously perplexed his will. It was also said he had gone mad with love and lust and guilt and had been taken to a powerful herbalist deep in the forest to restore his sanity.

  And then, one day, he reappeared. He was darker, fiercer, and more menacing than ever. He was also more silent. He wore black. His eyes had changed. They saw deep things. He had stared into the depths of his own madness and had seen things of the deep and was initiated into the new art of the deep and the dark. Upon his return he was more feared than ever before. The very mention of his name sowed dread and made grown men quake. His very presence made them tremble, and often flee; and when they didn't flee they were rooted to the spot, mesmerised by a terror that they couldn't explain. And when he spoke people's minds often went blank. He had become truly awesome, like those spirits who, when they show themselves in war, make armies abandon their weapons and scurry away across the plains.

  The Mamba returned, was seen first in the middle of a fight, dressed in black, and before anyone could register the profound change that had come over him, he had beaten all the contestants in a manner so cruel that the crowds were appalled and fascinated in equal measure. He had broken the neck of one suitor, cracked the spine of another, and dumped the swirling dervish suitor on his head so roughly that the crowd was stunned by the grinding sound of his neck crunching into his body. The Mamba was simply the most brutal contestant among all the suitors. And, strangely, many women gasped in admiration whenever he appeared, and secretly wanted him to win. And when he did win husbands were dismayed, while the women, largely, rejoiced. It was said he had mastered the secret of women's hearts and their deepest desires.

  When he won the overall contest, however, people wondered about the next unfolding drama of this legendary set of events. They wondered what the maiden would do.

  CHAPTER SIXTY–SIX

  It was simple, what she would do. She refused to recognise the validity of the contests, and decreed that whoever told her the best story and the best dream and solved the riddle of the shadow would win her hand ...

  And all through this, because time was quickening for some but becoming slower for others, because time was running out in the land that is reached only through a unique gap in the world, the pupil continued speaking to the maiden in her dreams. And the maiden, though unknowing, was made happy by her dreams, and looked forward to sleep, and often lingered by the river, in the fragrance of wild roses, turning over in her mind the delightful elusiveness of her dreams. If only she could grasp them clearly and understand them, she thought, she would see things she needed to see, and would be happy. But even this state of puzzling out those images and fragments of verses that so perplexed her gave her a feeling of profound happiness too, as she spent her keenest hours by the river, gazing into the sky so blue and so bright with the gold of heaven.

  And still, in all this self-absorption, she didn't notice the new pupil. Sometimes an invisible hand would deliver a sign in front of her in the form of a carving, which prompted odd thoughts in her mind. Sometimes she would catch a glimpse of a face so beautiful, frail and familiar, like some gladdening image in a dream: she would blink and the face would be lost in a crowd. Sometimes a voice would reach her heart, and she'd give a strange start, and would wonder whether she was awake or whether once a god had spoken to her and she had done so divine a being an injustice by having forgotten. Sometimes, in a reverie, a voice, tender with great understanding, and light like a feather, would whisper these odd words right into her soul, piercing her so with a passionate and mysterious fire:

  'Time is not with youth;

  Time is with the truth.'

  And she would fall headlong into a waking dream, where carvings spoke, and statues danced, and a white horse, of dazzling beauty, beckoned her with its cheeky eyes to take her on a ride to paradise.