Muezzinland (23 page)

"But I can't do it," Mnada wailed. "I don't know anything. It's all a blur, all those people, milling around in palace rooms, mouthing nothings, not knowing who I was and what I wanted to be. I'm too stupid to overcome being shallow."

"No, you're not!"

"How would you know? You had proper friends. You know people. I'm as shallow as a puddle."

"But you're not."

Mnada struggled to be free of Nshalla. Anger made her face twist. "I am if I say so! You said to believe myself, well, I believe I'm shallow!"

Nshalla took her sister's hands, and said, "Be angry. Get angry with me, I can take it."

Mnada flung herself at Nshalla and wrestled her to the ground, but then returned to tears. Nshalla drew her close.

At length, Nshalla said, "This is right. It's right that we do this, because we love each other." She almost said that it was their revenge upon their mother, but she thought better of it.

"I don't understand stability," Mnada said. "You can hold me and say you love me and everything, but I was forced to live in a whirlwind of people. You can't make stability out of a storm, can you? I'm damaged. Damaged beyond repair. I'm unstable. The shapeshifter image proved that."

Nshalla shook her head, utterly sure of her reply. "Inside there is stability in everybody, in me and you. You just have to find it. It'll be hard, yes, but at least we have a plan. And each other. Besides, the shapeshifter wasn't strictly you, was it? It was an expression of you finding out what it's like to be free from chains. All those identities coming out… all those people you wanted to be. You're plumbing your own depths."

"Do you think so?"

When Nshalla heard this, and looked into her sister's vulnerable eyes, she knew there was hope.

~

It is the annual yam feast. A kaleidoscope of people are in the palace, and the Empress' daughters are confused by names, places, all local, but all difficult. And there are more exotic visitors to meet: royalty from Togo-IBM, from Nigeria-GrandeIBM, and from Ashanti, dancers from New Tigaliland, and corporate couriers from T-Shok, from BioWhere, and from C-Grain/Ghana.

In a world where almost nobody travels more than a few dozen kilometres, the daughters are privileged—if it is a privilege—to meet people from parts of West Aphrica they had never dreamed of. Togo-IBM! Nouveau-Nigeria! These are places they only experience via the voyeuristic medium of the transputer, during history lessons. Because they are the daughters of the Empress, a wider world is opening up.

But after a few hours of the social whirl Nshalla begins to feel dizzy. There are too many people, too many images. The feast is an unstable entity. She cannot get a grip on anybody long enough to form even a passing relationship. She must meet all these new people. It is the story of her life: always meeting people who come to the palace. And the glittering chandeliers, encrusted with diamonds and emeralds, begin to dance around, and the drink held so carefully in her right hand begins to slip to the floor.

She falls. Her head is spinning.

It is quiet.

When she wakes her mother is standing over her. Mnada is at the Empress's side, looking on in horror.

The Empress screams abuse. Doesn't Nshalla know how important the yam feast is? By fainting she has made a scene. She has shown Mnada her sister up, who is the heir to Ghana. What will people think of an heir who has such a sister?

Nshalla blubbers a reply, but it is cut off.

Mnada shrinks behind a chair.

The Empress yells, doesn't Nshalla realise that she has a role to follow? She is royal. Royal daughters are privileged. If they are so weak as to faint in public then they lose their privileges.

Nshalla and Mnada do not understand. When one of the dogs had a fit on the lawn one day, their own mother cradled the animal, then shouted for help. Now Nshalla has fainted, but it is different.

They do not know why it is different. They are ten and twelve. They cannot even begin to guess.

The fleeting press of innumerable guests makes a shaky foundation for the daughters to create relationships. They cannot have a proper relationship with their mother. They cannot fraternise with palace staff, except Nshalla and her nanny. They meet all kinds of people at all kinds of social events. Nothing lasts. Nothing is deep. Nothing stands the test of time.

~

"I wanted to sculpt," Mnada said.

"You did. I remember."

Tears rolled down Mnada's face as she continued, "I used to lie awake at nights wondering how I could convince mother of what I wanted to do. I knew there had to be a way, but I never could think of it. When she got to know, anything malleable was taken away from me—clay, plastic, paper even."

"She said sculpting was bad for you."

Mnada shook her head. "How could it be? It seemed so natural at the time. A skill. I could develop a skill. I thought that would make her love me. Her daughter… skilled. But no."

"She restricted your choice."

Mnada nodded, then said bitterly, "I had a right to choose. All people do, I think. Was it an accident that I was born to an Empress, or was it fate?"

~

Nshalla and her sister are playing with clay. One of the palace servants has left some in a polythene bucket. Because they are still children they feel naughty taking the soft, ruddy-brown material, but Mnada insists.

Mnada has expressed desires before to be a sculptor. And when she does, curious eddies of violent emotion shiver inside Nshalla as though she is being taunted, tortured by her big sister's desires, forced to bear the fate that has left her, the younger, less important sister, in the shadows. So she follows, two steps behind…

Mnada however, because she is the heir, has had less time than Nshalla to absorb fragments of knowledge, and so Nshalla takes great pleasure in telling Mnada of the significance of sculpture to Aphricans. Her speech is an act of revenge. But Mnada is engrossed in manipulating the clay, slapping on slip, squeezing, pulling, until Nshalla is despite herself quite absorbed by what she is watching. Angrily she reminds herself of what she was saying. Mnada's thoughts seem elsewhere! The gaze of her shining eyes is captured by the sensuous beauty of the forms she is creating. For Mnada, sculpture is an act both of her emerging femininity and of her future power: female and male in one impulse.

Nshalla hits out at the clay form, knocking it to the ground before stamping on it with her bare feet, sending clay blobs and splashes everywhere, over the floor, their clothes, their skin. Mnada sits back, horrified.

Breathing in short, shallow breaths, Nshalla cries, "Don't ignore me! I'm talking to you!"

Mnada is too shocked for anger. She looks at the ruins of her sculpture.

Nshalla stomps around her elder sister. "I'm not violent. Don't you dare tell me I am, it's a horrible thing to say. You're just trying to make trouble with mother."

"I'm not—"

Nshalla has tears of frustration in her eyes as she screams, "I'm not violent!
Nobody
can say that. I'm not!"

And then she runs away, wailing, "You hate me, you hate me because you're the heir," although in truth the reverse situation is closer to reality. But Nshalla, being royal, has no means to express hate, let alone anger, and the emotions clog up her mind like scar tissue becoming ever stiffer around a once flexible limb.

~

"Gmoulaye believes in a land of the pre-born," Nshalla said, recalling her friend's former beliefs, "but for myself I'm not so sure. I don't think I believe in fate."

"That's your luxury," Mnada retorted. "I had no choice. If persuasion didn't work she forced me. Choice was banned for me. You could choose what you ate for supper when your nanny made it. I never had the choice. Every day, I ate with mother and her retinue, or her guests, saying the nice, sweet, uncontroversial things I'd been taught to say." A great shudder passed through Mnada's body, before she concluded, "And everybody used to say, oh, isn't she like her mother! An exact image! Little did they know that an experiment was going on, that I was a vessel for her, and not my own woman. They would have fainted from repulsion had they known, all those dignitaries, royalty, the nobles and the corporate rich from Greater Accra. Yes, they would have."

"You did have one choice," Nshalla said, "and that was to know it was wrong, deep inside. If you hadn't made that choice, that decision, we wouldn't be here now."

Mnada hammered the ground and shouted, "It's not true! I had no choices! Everything was mapped out for me. That's why I've got to find Muezzinland. Something of me is there, I know it. Some secret spark. But what?"

Again she wept. Nshalla wondered to what she was alluding. The clues to the truth were hidden like mysterious metaphors in Mnada's speech. Mnada had picked up alot of what the Empress was doing. She had no choice. It was up to Nshalla to disentangle the dross from the diamonds.

Mnada was wise, but did not know it. Nshalla, secretly, would have to be wise for her. Just for a while. Nshalla looked down at her sister, deep in thought. She knew that her own salvation lay in the discovery of truth, for she had been the control of the experiment; she also had been forced away from her true self. Meeting Mnada here in Mengoub had brought that realisation to her.

Nshalla then knew that their personal salvations lay in the hands of the other.

~

It is a cool morning. The daughters of the Empress are preparing their make-up for a visit by an important Ghanaian official. There is to be a melon breakfast.

The Empress enters the room, I-C-U Tompieme at her side.

She feels the quality of their make-up is poor for the daughters of an Empress. She dismisses the maids, who run off with the wide eyes of the petrified.

The Empress sarcastically asks, haven't they been told how to put on make-up? They are royalty. There is no time to make mistakes. It must be right first time.

Nshalla and Mnada glance at one another, and the same thoughts run through their heads. If they are not allowed to make their own mistakes how can they learn? Only by having information placed in them. But that is not education.

Mnada is told to copy how her mother does it. The Empress, elaborately, and with considerable skill, puts make-up onto her own face, encouraging her daughter to follow suit. Slowly, Mnada copies her mother.

This is a common scene. Mnada is a master of copying. She copies her mother's speech, her style, her appearance. Her hair is lustrous and red, just like her mother's—and her father's…

But that is only the exterior. Mnada has been forced by the world's most advanced aether technology into the mould of the Empress. She is a little Empress.

The melon breakfast begins. Nshalla remembers just in time how to hold the special silver melon knife, while Mnada remembers just in time that she has to sit to the right of her sister, and not the left. And the strain is beginning to take its toll, for Nshalla is tetchy and tired, sleeping poorly, while Mnada, now she is growing tall and beautiful, is more and more under the Empress' watchful eye.

For there have been palace rumours of boys. One night the Empress furiously confronts her daughter and says that if Mnada is not a virgin when she marries, she will be banished from the country and made to live as a villager in a tribal settlement, far, far outside the city. Mnada declares her innocence. The Empress says that she was a virgin when she married, and so therefore her daughter must likewise be.

Later, there is a shameful inspection by a rough male doctor.

The inability to make choices from day to day, except in the most basic facets of their personal life, means that Mnada in particular has little conception of freedom. Freedom for her is intimately entangled with rebellion. Yet rebellion seems impossible.

~

So Nshalla and Mnada talked into the day.

"Do you know," Nshalla asked, "the identity of the people who are struggling against mother and the Aetherium?"

"I used to keep a secret diary," Mnada replied. "In it I'd put my secret thoughts. I wonder what happened to that? To all those files?"

Nshalla waited until her sister's eyes refocussed upon the real world. She repeated her question.

Mnada replied, "I've had dreams about them. The hawatif? They're the spiritual good, or so they told me."

That was most likely a lie, Nshalla thought. She said, "Have they approached you?"

"Only as text files flying through the aether. I think they were frightened of me because I was so ferocious. They were like fireflies at the edge of my vision. They know about me because I mutter about my dreams in the morning. I always try to remember my dreams. Do you?"

"No…" Nshalla said, wondering if she should have lied. Mnada would want support.

"Dreams are important," Mnada said. "Everybody knows they're from the subconscious. Even
I
knew that. I used to remember them all. I'd relate them to myself. I had this idea that they were messages from somebody."

"Your hidden self," Nshalla murmured.

Mnada nodded. "I know that now. The odd thing is that now I hardly ever dream."

"The hawatif have completed the first stage of their plan by making their gods in the real world. Who knows what they want next?"

"I'll tell you the odd thing about my diary. I pictsymed the files on polythene memopads. Yet each time I pictsymed a new dream or new thought, the old ones had gone, as if somebody had stolen them. A spirit, maybe. Or some wisp of the aether."

"Is that so?" Nshalla said. "Maybe the hawatif stole those pages."

"You think so?" Mnada seemed interested. The introspective state had gone.

Nshalla related all she knew, concluding, "The hawatif and their gods are the enemy the Empress is fighting, and you're involved somehow in her struggle. I think she wants you to be a psychic copy of her so that she can wage this war."