Muezzinland (22 page)

Chapter 16

So Nshalla and Mnada talked through the night.

Nshalla asked, "Why did you run away? It was so abrupt, so out of character."

"That depends on who I really am," Mnada replied. "What is my character? Who am I? You don't understand because you don't know the truth about Muezzinland."

"Tell me the truth."

Mnada shook her head. "I only know a part. That's why I escaped. I knew Muezzinland was the key to my spirit, I knew from the gossip I'd heard, from the whispered conversations, and from what I was able to gather from palace systems. It's something to do with my brain. With my mind."

"The Aetherium are involved."

"Yes. Mother. You know about that?"

Nshalla shrugged. "I was told."

Mnada continued, "Mother kept me under artificial conditions for a few years, in metallised rooms filled with her own aether, protected from the real aether outside. The plants in the plant pots were fake—they were miniature aerials. She wants me to become like her."

Nshalla hugged her sister, who now had tears streaming from her eyes. "That's terrible. Don't worry, I'll save you."

"You can't. I have to save myself if I'm to find out who I really am. That's why it's so important to find Muezzinland." She looked north, sighed, then said, "It's somewhere over the Atlas Mountains. I can feel it. But, Nshalla, you were part of the experiment too. You are the control. Mother's just as worried about you as about me."

"Something about our births…"

"Yes," Mnada agreed, "there is a mystery there. I am just like the Empress—identical, in fact. Yet your skin is so much lighter."

"That would be because of our father's genes."

"Our father… and there are other clues. The Empress was in labour for well over twenty four hours when she had you. That's unusual for a second birth. Yet I…"

"Yes?"

Mnada thought, then said, "It's almost as if I'm not related to Ruari."

Nshalla nodded, swallowing hard. She felt no sorrow, rather a tense anxiety. So she too had been a victim of experimentation, and she too had to reach into herself and make a bid for truth. "You had no freedom," she said.

Mnada, weeping freely now, said, "Slowly the pressure grew. When I escaped it was like a geyser going off. Total lack of control. All those years I'd been forced, moulded, manipulated. Mother's so selfish she didn't even see it coming. The shock she must have felt when she heard!"

"It was a bad week," Nshalla confirmed. "I was locked in the whole time. In a way, it made me think of leaving too."

Mnada shook her head and said, "Not leaving,
escaping.
I escaped. I ran all the way to the Golden Library, hoping to find precise details of Muezzinland. All I knew was the rough location. I was a madwoman. I couldn't control myself. I stole food, killed animals, damaged fields of yams, set fire to permaculture lots. It was continual release. I've never been so frightened. I know now what it's like to be possessed. I was possessed by a devil, and it was made from myself. A devil of Mnada-stuff. Can you imagine how frightening that was?"

Nshalla shook her head. "We got an inkling, though, because we heard tales of a shapeshifter."

"That's right. Even I didn't know I'd created that at first. I thought I was being chased by some local spirit, but I was running from myself, from my own image. No wonder I couldn't wriggle free of the shapeshifter."

Nshalla understood now why she had never caught up with her sister on the long trek north. They might as well have chased a solar bike.

~

The Queen of Nouveau-Nigeria is making a state visit. The Empress Mnada of Ghana stands ready on the steps outside the palace, waiting to receive the royal guest, her hair shining scarlet, her two daughters at her side.

The formality is stifling. Both children stand perfectly still, as the rules of state and good royal manners dictate, but both itch inside, an itch that is psychosomatic, created by the longing for free movement and sudden surprises and adventure. Teeth gritted, lips compressed lines, they await their turn.

Neither understands why their freedom has been taken away from them. It seems to them that their mother keeps their freedom in her pocket, Mnada's in particular, as if it is some wild beast that might spring out and ruin the formality of the occasion. Dull-eyed incomprehension leads to moping depression, fits, tiredness, a gloom that even the brilliance of the Accran sun cannot shift.

The formality is a cage, and because they are exposed to the possibilities of life outside the palace—outside Accra, even—they understand that they are caged, which makes it worse. But they are so powerless. They feel at times little more than palace servants. In name they are royalty, but what good is royalty when every minute of the day is timetabled, down to the clothes they will wear, the gestures they will use, the words they will speak? They fantasise about what speeches they shall give when Mnada succeeds her mother. They try to invent a secret language, but snoops and palace agents soon put a stop to that.

In the end they are forced into undignified responses. They wear dirty clothes under their palace costumes. It is a small victory, and of course an invisible one, but it makes a difference. They attach private meanings to state phrases and state formalities, but this is dangerous, for if one of them should explode into laughter there will be painful repercussions. The Empress believes in punishment.

And now here comes the Queen. She is a fat woman dressed in silks of yellow, blue and green, swaying regally, behind her a train of negro girls dressed as biotechnological machines in recognition of the parent country Nigeria-GrandeIBM.

The two daughters go over in their minds what they must do. If they forget a gesture, miss a sentence, then…

It does not bear thinking about. Mnada in particular must get this right. She must be a machine herself, clockwork, perhaps, filled with small variations on etiquette. She must be all surface, like a nut with no kernel, and that surface must be in the image of her mother. But she has a head start, for there is an astonishing physical resemblance between mother and elder daughter.

~

Nshalla said, "It was the isolation that got to me most of all."

"I felt like that, too," said Mnada, "but for me the continual pressure to be like mother was the worst. Yet that was a kind of isolation. Mother saw herself in me. She gave me hair like she had—"

"Yet," Nshalla interrupted, "even that wasn't from herself. She wanted red hair because of father coming from the West."

Mnada nodded in agreement. "I was subject to a particular kind of isolation. Because there was a role for me to fill, anything external, including friends, locals from neighbouring countries, even fragments of different cultures, was barred. The palace might as well have been a vacuum. Well, not quite a vacuum because it was filled with mother. But that's what it felt like."

"Do you still feel isolated? Even from me?"

Again Mnada sighed, and Nshalla felt inside her the weight of emotion that the gesture carried. Mnada said, "I've hardly seen you these last few years. As soon as I became a young woman, well… it was as if you weren't there. There was so much to do. I had a retinue of six people all of whom were dedicated to my daily routines. I couldn't do anything. They were scared of the Empress… of mother. No wonder they slapped me down if I tried to speak to people. Speaking out of place, they called it, as if the entire library of my future words was already written."

Nodding, Nshalla said, "For me, the isolation was horrible. I remember how astonished I was when I first saw a map of the palace. I'd imagined it as vast, infinite, almost. I never realised it could fit onto one transputer screen, and you could even label the rooms. I could
count the rooms.
That was a shock. I used to think I lived in a maze and only mother had the map. That was why she had the control. She knew where things were."

"She knew where everything was. I had to memorise the location of royal documents and things."

"And people?"

"Oh, yes! When I was older, I had to know the titles and functions of every single servant. For reasons of state, mother said. An Empress needed to know who did what."

Nshalla shook her head in wondering memory of such events. She said, "When I was really young I didn't realise there were doors in and out of the palace. Did I ever tell you? I thought people just lived there. Because nobody was allowed to see me except palace staff, I simply didn't realise. It was only when they put my biograins in that I got an idea of what else lay outside. Frightening. I couldn't sleep at night for fear of raiders coming in and dragging me off into the woods… I never feel really safe if I'm by a door."

Mnada gave a tearful grin. "I know. I've only just realised how different people are in the real world. At one point I thought everybody must be royal, because only royalty and dignitaries came to see me. That's the true isolation."

Nshalla hugged her sister again. "Not any more. We're women of the world, aren't we?"

In reply, Mnada gave a questioning glance.

~

Both daughters feel they have no parents. Early in their lives the concept of mother and that of Empress are confused, so that, even in later life, they are both unable to decide when those words should be used. Is it all right to use 'mother' in public? Is 'Empress' essential even during one-to-one private conversation? They cannot tell. The absence of personal contact means a normal relationship is impossible. It is as if husks are interacting. Husks of officialdom.

In response, Mnada in particular develops a fractured personality; to the world a royal girl, educated, polished, a likeness of her mother, but inside, tucked down so deep that even she does not know it exists until she flees the palace, another person entirely.

And how Mnada hates the nanny that Nshalla, by reason of her unimportance beside the heir of Ghana, is allowed to have.

Envy.

It is a summer day. The girls are indoors learning elements of Ghanaian history. Nshalla has a toothache and is given permission to leave.

Later, Mnada creeps through the passages of the palace to find out where Nshalla is. She suspects that she is with her nanny. She is right. There Nshalla lies, comforted by the nanny. She has been crying—Mnada can tell from her face—but now she seems happier, and that happiness Mnada suddenly rails against. She storms into the room, shouting, demanding that the nanny leaves her sister alone, stops hurting her. She will tell the Empress that the nanny has been hurting Nshalla.

The nanny, bemused, frightened by Mnada even though the girl is only nine, implores Mnada not to tell. She knows she has not been hurting Nshalla, but she, like all the palace servants, is afraid of the random wrath of the Empress, and the brutality of the transputer-shaman I-C-U Tompieme.

Mnada feels the sensation of power, of success. She drags Nshalla away.

Mnada has no nanny. It is not permitted for the daughter of the Empress to have a surrogate mother for that would be a slur on the abilities of the Empress. So Mnada has to make do with isolation, with her own company, with the cold, distant, uncaring, unthinking mother who is ruler of Ghana and no parent.

This emotional distance means that the husk that is the outside of Mnada, her public self, is calm, practical, normal, and not at all prone to questioning what is happening to her.

She does not question the isolation of the metallised room. That room, she later discovers, sends all outside electromagnetic waves to earth. She is shielded from the aether. But another aether, subtle, of the Empress' making, suffuses the room. As an infant she is influenced by it. As a child she is influenced by it. When she experiences the real aether she has been trained so well that many of its subliminal messages bypass her thinking mind and sink straight into her subconscious, like grenades sinking to the bottom of a bog. Later they will detonate.

Truth is an unpleasant concept for Mnada and Nshalla. The circumstances of their lives have taught them to believe what they are told and not what they feel. Their emotions are paltry or volcanic. They are afraid of their emotions. They understand cool distance, but they have never heard of passion.

Relationships for them are things set down by other people. As children, both have difficulty with other children, because, for Mnada especially, the idea of improvising, of chance, of casualness, are strange and not to be followed.

Nshalla escapes a cold fate because she is comparatively unimportant. When she matures she is allowed to meet ordinary people. One of the first people she meets is called Gmoulaye.

~

Mnada said, as she reminisced on palace life, "The whole place was a shifting morass of people. I was dazzled by speed. Nobody seemed to stay longer than a week. I could never get to know anybody who came. I only knew the palace staff, and they were just ciphers."

Nshalla agreed. For her too, the palace had been a whirl. "Everybody had so much to do. Everything was written down. Nobody could
relax.
"

"I think I might have learned to relax in the desert," said Mnada. "Though it was difficult."

Nshalla took her sister's hand. "Relaxing will help you find your true, inner self. Yet you envy me, and you want to be like me."

Mnada started shaking her head, as if the revelation was too much. "No, no," she cried.

Nshalla pulled her close. "It's true. You're struggling to be free. I'll help you as much as I can. And I'll help myself too! We'll do it together. You've got to believe me."

"I don't know who to believe any more."

"Me and you. You've got to trust your intuitions. It was right to create the shapeshifter. I think that image will go, soon, because we've admitted the truth to each other. The first stage is over—you left the palace. The second stage is over—I've found you. Now we've got to go on and find Muezzinland, and whatever lies there."