Starbook (36 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Maybe she was too young to notice what she saw. She only noticed much later, in another land, in the burning heat of the difficult years, when, in looking back, she saw what she should have seen, what was obvious to see, but which she hadn't.

She was too young to notice how fortunate she was, how blessed, how lucky, how loved, how watched over, and how brief was her hour of such glory, such blessedness, such living beauty in the land of art.

She was too young to notice things. She saw only dreams, hopes, ideals, vague notions and moods. She lived in a vapour of time. She didn't see evils there, or looming. She didn't see the contests. She didn't much notice the Mamba. She loved her parents more than she noticed them. She loved her land, its skies, its hills, the women, the mass of faces, the smells, her father's workshop, the shrine, the forest, the farms, and the dazzling river where she played, washed and dreamed, more than she noticed them. Only later did they become so real, when she had lost them all, irredeemably. Only later did she learn to see that which she had loved in the blur of her being.

She was too young, for example, to notice that when the new pupil smiled the sun lingered in his smile long after he had left the presence of the person he was greeting. She was too young to notice how quickly the smile left the faces of most people who had just vacated your presence. She was too young to notice many things about him ...

But he saw her more clearly than anything in the world ... and studied her deep hidden nature every moment of his being ... as if she were his secret soul ... and often when he pondered her and entered her dreams he saw her in strange images, and peculiar notions ... often a lamb-like nature had been left alone and years later in its place was a lioness ... how to see the true person that would later be, later emerge, in the tender graceful and peculiar youth that now was ... how to remember the lamb that was the lioness ... riddles of the shadow ...

The Mamba was infuriated at the change in the rules for the maiden's hand. Convinced that he had won, convinced that there was a conspiracy or whispering campaign or evil voice against him, the Mamba's paranoia became worse than ever before. But it was an unfocused paranoia, without an object.

Then, one night, he saw the maiden's silhouette, under a powerful spell of moonlight. His head went slightly crazy with the beauty and the mystery of her. All the powers that he had acquired from the deep did not protect him against the shimmering effect of her innocent profile charged by the enchantment of the moon. In fact, all his powers worked against him, for they too, like the tides, fell under the immeasurable sway of a force invisible which wholly captivated his heart and reduced him to a broken colossus. Odd hallucinations passed before his eyes. Odd voices sounded in his head, whispering of spirits and insanities:

'Beware of the moon
When above it looms
And shines on the hairM
Of the girl who is fair.
Madness and hell
Ring their bell
From the silk
Of the moon
In her hair.
Beware.'

And the Mamba, in his hiding place among the trees, gazed and was lost to the voices and the hallucinations. Then, suddenly, he saw the form of a slender man, or was it squat, and round, or was it tall and strong, it kept changing, he wasn't sure. The Mamba instantly felt a laceration of heart, a great unnameable awe, and fear and suspicion and dryness of mouth all at once. And he knew that this changing form of a man was his real enemy and rival, though he had never seen this being or person before ... or maybe he had, in another form, in another way ...

This person stood under the eaves of the maiden's father's workshop. The moonlight did not fall on him. Behind his head was the shape of a lamp. He was in deep shadow but the Mamba could make out something of his presence; for the Mamba sensed he was seeing the reality of a vision he once had, the vision of one who would spell the destruction of the tribe, their ways, their art ...

The person gazed too at the maiden, as if he were the moon.