Starbook

by Ben Okri

  She was surprised when she arrived not to find the prince there. She was so surprised that she went among all the statues and touched them one by one, and stared into their faces, into their eyes, expecting one of them to move suddenly and come alive, revealing the one and only love she would ever have in her life, in this life and the next. But not one of the statues moved, or changed, or stirred into life, or became the one she had yearned for and loved, the one who could not be named, who have lived in her, it seemed, all her life, and before.

  Then a sort of terror came over her, a terror that bordered on madness at the thought that she would never see him again. She stood absolutely still in her father's workshop, among the statues of stone, of wood, and of bronze. And she felt, for a moment, how cruel a fate it was that all this time she had not seen him when he was there, and now that she could see him and craved for him and wanted him more than life itself, he was not there. She felt keenly her punishment at her blindness, at her inability to see. And she felt, as she stood there, that there was nothing left for her any more, not on earth, not in life. She had no idea how long she stood there in silent lamentation and intolerable grief, for one she had loved without knowing it, and who loved her as the sun loves the earth, as the birds love the air. She had no idea what to do except die. Death seemed the only answer to her loss. In a dream of death, of the joy of dying for the loss of the unknown love of her life, she locked the workshop and wandered to the forest, singing a lullaby. All who passed her early that morning thought she was both happy and mad.

  In a daze she wandered through the forest, picking flowers of every colour, singing gently a song of happy death while she did so. She picked wild roses, and white lilies, and blue flowers with mysterious calyxes, and yellow flowers, and marigolds, and hibiscuses, and held them to her face and wandered to the river. She did not notice anything. She did not hear the birds, nor the wind, nor see the gently gold and red and quivering yellow of sunrise, nor did she even feel the dew or the softness of the sand beneath her feet. She dreamt only of one thing, guided by the angel of love that had blanked out her mind to all awareness except the happiness to be found with her loved one who was waiting for her in the kingdom of the goddess in the depths of the river.

  She began to sing a song of farewell to all things. Then she fell silent and rose and, holding the flowers in her hand as an offering to the goddess, she began to walk towards the river, away from life as she had known it. She was gone from life now, gone from her body, gone from the earth; she was going to the only legend that was forever true, the legend of love, of death and love, beneath the river.

  And then she heard the voice on the wind that she had heard long ago, the voice that had first woken her from the sleep of her life, the voice that she had once taken to be that of a god. And all about her everything sprang to life. All at once she saw the river, big and swollen and mighty, and she feared that it would without warning engulf her and take her under, to a frightening kingdom. Then she saw the sky, vast and clear and of a blue so pure she felt that it would snatch her soul away. Then she noticed the sunrise, golden and gentle red and quivering on the rim of the river and so beautiful that she felt if she breathed she would be wafted away to some homeland beyond the stars. And then she heard his voice again and all the clamour and agitation in her heart, her belly, and the wild unknown hunger between her legs came awake in her and she stood rooted to the sand, not hearing what was said. Then a darkness passed over her eyes and cleared and she found herself staring into the blinding adoration and passion of his gaze. His eyes were all the world then and she did not see the sky or the shore or the sunrise or the forest or the river, just his eyes. And she stood there gazing into the depths of his eyes completely lost to everything else on earth and in heaven or maybe she had found everything that she sought on earth and in heaven. And before she knew it they were lying side by side on the shore, near a bank of flowers, just gazing into one another's eyes, mutely, almost without breathing.

  They say that it is not just things of this world that one sees but one does not know one is seeing. And as the prince and the maiden gazed into one another's eyes, as they gazed deep into the depths of the whites, and into the mystery of the emerald or green or brown or golden centre at the centre of the eyes they caught glimpses of what they had been to one another in time past beyond memory and what they would be to one another in the beautiful time to come beyond death, in another life, where their true story of love would seem to begin. They gazed as into crystal balls and were mesmerised and slightly frightened by the intolerable depth of love they saw deep within the other. It seemed a love too strong for mortal life, a love that would make itself the sole purpose of living, a love that was like eternity gazing into the mirror of eternity, a love that would do nothing but simply exist in the blissful light of the other as in the light of the sun after the darkest night. In their silence they exchanged all the tokens and signs and secrets of mutual revelation so that, among the millions of people who dwell on the earth, if they were to meet in their appointed future hour of destiny, it would take only a glance into the other's eyes to know that this was the one they were seeking. And so they planted the certainty of finding one another in the life to come by the depth of the speech of their mutual gazing into the mystery of each other's eyes. And not only that: for as they gazed they journeyed through time, through many realms and planes of pure happiness where they already lived the joyful life they were meant to live. They touched those other lives and returned refreshed and reassured. And then the prince changed the nature of their mutual enchantment.

  Without seeming to breathe, quivering in the warmth of the world at sunrise, the prince peeled off the maiden's wrapper and her white blouse and beheld the beauty of her clear pure skin. It shone like the surface of the river in the tenderness of sunrise. Then without touching her he passed his open palms along the surface of her skin, not touching her and yet touching her more deeply than if he had grabbed hold of her in a wild passionate embrace.

  He passed his hands over her face and lingered over her eyes, her cheeks, her ears, her forehead, her chin, and hovered over her throat. At first she was still. She breathed gently. Her eyes were shut. Then something strange happened to her. She felt a fire pierce her heart and it burned her right through in a golden pain and then she was gone. Breathing felt as if the air was made of a beautiful deathly powder, for every breath she drew was a sublime agony; and as he passed his hands slowly over her body the more piercing was the fire in her heart and the fire in her belly And she began to cry out an unknown name and was not aware of it. And soon her cry and her love, her fire and her joy were one. And it was so unbearable that she opened her eyes in a wild abandon, a holy rage at being so unwrapped and so full of an inexplicable yearning.

  And then he lay down next to her, so close they were not touching and yet not close enough that they were almost as one. And then he brought his lips close to her tender soft lips ... There was something special, almost forbidden in the manner in which they kissed; it is a secret that is not to be shared. It was a kind of kissing that was unique to them and they had kissed one another thus in all the times past and in all the planes and in all the future time that they had spent and were to spend with one another. It was a kiss that can only be described as the way in which certain angels kiss if such a thing can be imagined; it was the kissing of their souls. It was the only true way that their souls can speak to one another, the only way they can be understood, in bliss.

  And after this secret kiss, their lips touched and they moved into the second kind of their secret forbidden kissing. The maiden felt herself to no longer be herself but the prince, and the prince was no longer himself but was now the maiden, and each to the other was a sort of eternity. There is a kind of love, a kind of bliss that borders on blasphemy in that it breaks one of the unwritten laws of life as it is meant to be lived in the body. And that law is thus: thou shalt not feel too much. The prince and the maiden, lost in t
he labyrinths of their kissing, had somehow gone back to a forbidden moment under the sun. And their lips came together fully and they did not move and all the rivers and seas came together and the laws of time and space were torn asunder and what was to happen to them pressed closer as if the power of their conjoining would provoke the evil that was to befall them in their unimaginable dissolving of one soul into another. It is possible that too much love can awaken an evil destiny: why else are love and tragedy so twinned on earth?

  But they plunged deeper and went past the tree of good and evil and lived its consequence and they came to the tree of knowledge and waited under its enchanted fruits, not moving, their hearts still. And they glimpsed the angel of ecstasy and they went past the tree of knowledge in their kissing and went right into the golden place that they'd been in once before in which they heard the sweetest singing in the air. And they dwelt there, like two swans in the lake of paradise ...

  And then, seized by a sudden violence, she began to touch him all over. And she felt and loved and moulded every single part of him, singing to him in her mind, mapping him in her pleasure, for she never knew that there could be a pleasure on earth greater than feeling the wood or stone out of which a statue emerges, and that flesh and the body of a man can be more beautiful than dreams. For she had such dreams, such notions and inexplicable feelings as she felt the prince and lavished her senses on the magic of his skin and his muscles and his quivering trembling limbs. And when she had felt him all over, she was astonished to feel her fingertips tingling and her palms shimmering inwardly as if possessed by a supernatural energy, a radiant delight. She had never known this miraculous sensation before, and she was even more amazed to catch, in a glimpse, the way his skin shone all over, and the light that poured out of him, from his skin, as if she had polished a lamp of gold and any moment now a spirit would leap out from it, the spirit of the light that it would shine for ever. And the light around him, full of many colours, for a second resolved itself into a golden aureole and she was so overcome that she fell on him in tears of unmentionable love and adoration. And they held one another in fearful embrace, as if they wanted to become spirit again and penetrate one another's beings, right into the core.

  Tightly in their embrace, so that the one did not know where they ended and the other began, they remained still. They just lay still, locked and merged in one another's love, and like that they drifted away together. They could hear whispers at the far end of the village. They could hear the wind over a wave in the farthest reaches of the river. They could hear the call of the sunbird far in the sky beyond the horizon. They could hear the cry of a baby in the remote depths of the kingdom. They could hear footfalls drawing closer to them, and murmurs, and rumours, and the clasping of roots in the black earth, and the flowers opening to the sun, and the dew forming on the silk of the calyxes of roses, and the pure music up in the distant reaches of space among the stars, and the slightest movement of the wings of a butterfly and of an angel, and they could hear all manner of thoughts, of dreams, but they could not hear one another breathing or weeping in silence.

  And then having been taught by her what to do, and how deeply it was possible to feel if felt with the enchantment of art and love, he now began to touch her too, mapping in his soul the memory of her body as if he knew that this was the one time only in this life that he would have to love her and enjoy her beyond the limit of what was possible. And so he prayed for the wisdom and the knowledge and the passion and the joy of being able to love and enjoy her more than it was given to a mortal to do during these moments of being alive and having her there before him in all the beauty and glory of her youth and her love.

  And when she felt him entering her, the strangest thing happened, and the fire between her legs made sense at last, and she let herself slip into the warm waters of the river and sink slowly into the realms of the goddess, for now she was all liquid and fire and senselessness. And they moved together sometimes as one, sometimes divergently, often in odd wild rhythms, and mostly in the rhythms of the waves of the river as it crashed on the shore or lapped silently on the rim of the land so that it felt that they were both the river and the land, both the sun and the earth.

  And then she was falling, not into an abyss, but deeper and deeper to the bottom of the river, falling without end, and she was unbelievably happy in her fall till she became aware for the first time that she could not breathe and she loved it so. The more she gasped for air the more she found herself unable to breathe and the more bliss she felt and this got worse and better and worse still, this inability to breathe and the insane pleasure, that it reached a point beyond which she feared it was too dangerous to go in the excess of her feelings. She knew then that she would surely die and yet she wanted to and she let herself go and he went on moving in her and kissing and clutching at her an irregular way and then she went over and she panicked, for she saw something very dark and fearful and inviting, summoning her, a thing or being vast and dark and bright in the midst of her bliss, and she had come to the end of her inability to breathe and she was going away now, getting utterly lost, and she screamed and cried:

  'Oh my mother, save me, I'm drowning, I'm drowning!'

  And he didn't hear her at all, for he had caught a spark of dangerous fire, and he found himself on a crest of such shining relentless ecstasy that it seemed he was possessed of a living fire, and every movement he made was like touching a live spark of screaming joy that could not be put out, like being touched in a raw place with sparkling tongues of an immortal burning; and it got worse and more unbearable till it was the core of his being that was the beautiful burning and the feeling; and he too went past a point and went over.

  Neither of them could stop moving now, stop racing towards their doom, their disaster and their redemption; and she gasped and her mouth opened wide and she cried out long and silently; and his mouth was open wide, uttering no sound, but screaming in a high pitch. And then there was a long silence, and a sudden long stillness, as if they had been both momentarily transformed into statues of grotesque and sublime pleasure. And then a long terrible double cry was heard that resounded in the depths of the river and up in the heights of the sky, a long-sustained much delayed much desired cry of creation, and then a single burst of light, bright beyond measure, as at the birth of a significant star.

  Book Four

  THE ALCHEMY OF

  ALL THINGS

  CHAPTER ONE

  There was rejoicing in all the high places. They had made love once, but that once was enough. Each changed the other's world and the story of the earth changed too in that once.

  Nothing could undo what would happen, what would continue to happen because of that once. Their love had, at last, after centuries of missed opportunities, finally found its great moment. And their love in a future time would last a lifetime and an eternity for having finally connected on this earth, where such a possibility is all too rare.

  Yes, there was rejoicing in all the high places.

  CHAPTER TWO

  As night fell, the maiden said:

  'I always thought you were not real. I always thought you were something strange, like a dream, a white horse in a dream. I always thought you were something brought to life by a miraculous touch. Not entirely human. You appeared like a being created by my father's magic art. Now I have to see you as a human being, and love you as a man. To me you will always be something unique, something more than just a human being. Maybe before all this and after all this you are just my dream.'

  'I am a dream and not a dream; I am real and not real,' said the prince.

  'There is only one thing left though.'

  'What?'

  'How do you give me your shadow?'

  'I have given you my shadow because I have given you my death and my love.'

  'But you have not told me a story.'

  'That's because we have lived it.'

  'And the best dream?'

  'You have dreamt it.'
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  CHAPTER THREE

  Afterwards came the changes. It all happened so fast that their lives passed from the greatest happiness to the greatest despair in what seemed like a lightning flash of unreal time. But the moments in which they were happy, even delirious, were themselves a lifetime, an eternity. These moments were deep enough to last in the memory that never fades, till they were to meet again and live the lives of two lovers whose time to be happy and to be together at last arrives on earth, or somewhere else more suitable ... And these future lives would not be much worth telling a story about because of the simple pleasure and harmony of their togetherness, their happiness.