Wizard of the Crow (76 page)

So Tajirika was not only at the center of charges and countercharges between Machokali and Sikiokuu, but also at the source of suspicions and resentments in the mind of the Ruler. He sensed the tension but assumed it had something to do with his confession, and, like Machokali and Sikiokuu, he expected to be asked about it. But even the two ministers, familiar as they were with the unexpected ways of the Ruler, were taken aback by the first question from the judge.

“What have you brought us?” the Ruler asked Tajirika almost gently.

“Your Mighty Excellency, they came for me in the morning and I did not have the time to, uh, to …” Tajirika stammered and then stopped.

The Ruler realized what had made Tajirika pause and hastened to put him at ease.

“Don’t worry about coming here with empty hands. Send your gifts later. What I am now asking you is this: what do you want to tell me in the presence of these counselors?”

“About what?” Tajirika asked, puzzled, for he felt that he was being treated as if he was the one who had asked for the audience.

“Whatever weighs on your conscience. Anything that troubles you,” said the Ruler, trying to make it easier for Tajirika to confess about the money. “Do you have a weight in your heart that you want to lay before me?”

The question threw Tajirika into turmoil. He had always dreamt of an opportunity for precisely such an audience with the Ruler, and now he was at a loss for words. Maybe he was caught off-guard by the Ruler’s solicitous tone, which had reminded him of a pronouncement he had heard long ago:
Come unto me all ye that are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Or was this a trap? Will I reveal my innermost thoughts and in the process land myself in more trouble?
Come unto me all ye that are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
How alluring the words! Relief was being tendered! Where would he start? He went over recent events in his mind—from the humiliation of having his chairmanship of Marching to Heaven weakened to being beaten by women—to see which burden he would first lay at the feet of the Lord. He recalled lying on a cold cement floor under the weight of three big strong women, and he felt the pain of being beaten with renewed force. He thought of Vinjinia, his own wife, being dragged to a dark forest by none other than Kaniürü, his usurper who had him arrested simply for refusing to obey a summons to appear before him. How could Kaniürü dare lay his dirty hands on his wife? This seemed a bigger blow to his manhood than anything else. He remembered that Kaniürü had been acting on behalf of Sikiokuu, and the bitterness of the humiliations from the man who now sat before him almost choked him. He now unconsciously opened his mouth to unburden himself.

“What I don’t understand, even now,” Tajirika said, as if continuing a soliloquy already begun, “is the connection between Sikiokuu and the women of the people’s court.”

“People’s court?” asked His Mighty Excellency, glancing in the direction of Silver Sikiokuu.

“Your Mighty Excellency,” Sikiokuu said defensively, “I have not
had the opportunity to brief you fully on everything. I think Tajirika is referring to the women alleged to be beating up men.”

“And they started with me,” Tajirika said in self-pity. “I ask myself: why me?”

While Sikiokuu was baffled and worried by the direction of things, Machokali for his part felt a bit more buoyant, for the conversation was drifting away from the charges of treason. He even felt like laughing at the thought of his friend being beaten by women, but he controlled himself.

“This is not a laughing matter,” said the Ruler, as if he had sensed Machokali’s thoughts. “It is very serious,” he added for emphasis, recalling the drama of shame at Eldares, especially the women’s call to set Rachael free. Somehow these reflections made the Ruler feel closer to Tajirika as a fellow sufferer of shame at the hands of women. “Go on, Titus,” he told him.

Tajirika sensed pity in the Ruler’s voice, giving him the courage and strength he needed to tell the story of his misadventures. He told how the women kidnapped him and then later charged him with domestic violence before sentencing him to several strokes of the cane, and as he now came to the end of his ballad of woes, Tajirika felt overwhelmed by a sense of joy and gratitude at having shared his misery with a sympathetic audience. May His Holy Excellency live for ever and ever, he sang to himself.

“And how does Sikiokuu come into this?” asked the Ruler.

“No connection. Absolutely no connection!”
said Sikiokuu, flapping his ears from side to side.

“I am not asking you,” the Ruler told Sikiokuu.

“What I don’t understand is this: why did Sikiokuu stop me from beating my wife? Or let me put it this way. Sikiokuu orders me not to beat my wife. But I, desiring to assert my male prerogative, lay my hands on her. A week hardly passes before these women come for me. And after they punish me, they warn me not to beat my wife, the very same words that I had first heard uttered by Sikiokuu.
What a coincidence!”
he added in English.

“Those were not real women,” shouted Sikiokuu in desperation, unable to restrain himself. “They were shadows created by the Wizard of the Crow.”

Tajirika looked to the door as if he feared that the wizard might be
standing there. Machokali and the Ruler did the same, but the latter pretended not to have heard properly and now fixed his eyes on Sikiokuu. For a few seconds there was nothing but silence.

“Mine were real women,” asserted Tajirika, breaking the silence.

“When did the women beat you up?” Machokali asked Tajirika sympathetically.

“When the Ruler was in America,” said Tajirika, trying to nail the date down.

“But that was when the Wizard of the Crow was in America,” said Machokali, forgetting that Tajirika did not know this.

The Ruler, Sikiokuu, and Tajirika looked at Machokali at the same time but for different reasons: the Ruler because Machokali’s mention of the Wizard of the Crow revived the pain inflicted by the sorcerer’s letter; Sikiokuu because he knew well that Machokali was trying to keep alive a story that was against his interests; and Tajirika because he was hearing about the Wizard of the Crow being in America for the first time. What games were the two ministers trying to play, with Sikiokuu claiming that the women who beat him up were mere shadows and Machokali claiming that the Wizard of the Crow had somehow escaped prison and gone to America? Tajirika thought.

“I know nothing about the Wizard of the Crow being or not being in America. All I know is that I left him in prison,” said Tajirika.

“You were in prison?” asked the Ruler. In the reports that he read the night before, there was no mention of this. “Why were you in prison?”

“Your Mighty Excellency, I was intending to brief you on this and other matters,” Sikiokuu said. “Tajirika wasn’t actually arrested—it was just
protective custody.
Or, what do you say, Titus?” Sikiokuu asked, hoping that Tajirika would confirm this.

“No, no,” protested Tajirika. “I was being detained for real. I was imprisoned in a real cell. But Your Mighty Excellency, being put in a prison cell was not the worst …” Tajirika paused as if overcome by the recollection of past wrongs.

“Go on, Tajirika,” the Ruler said encouragingly. You have the floor. What is this that you say was worse than prison? A conscience troubled for not disclosing some wrongdoing?” the Ruler added, hoping to direct Tajirika’s revelations to the question of money.

“No, not even that.”

“What could be worse than withholding vital information or keeping bad deeds locked up inside oneself?”

“Being thrown into the same cell with that sorcerer. The Wizard of the Crow.”

“What is all this about?” the Ruler asked Sikiokuu.

“I will explain everything when I report about Nyawlra,” Sikiokuu said, looking at the Ruler with eyes desperately pleading for mercy and understanding.

“Tell me something, Sikiokuu: when you put the Wizard of the Crow in prison, was that before he left for America or after?” asked Machokali innocently, but still trying to stoke the fire of tension. “The Wizard of the Crow cannot have been in two places at once. If he was in America when Tajirika was being beaten, when did he manufacture and unleash these shadows?”

“You should know,” Sikiokuu shouted at Machokali. “Stop pretending. You were the one who requested that the Wizard of the Crow be sent to America. I have kept all your faxes and e-mails on the matter. The Ruler is ill, you alleged in one of them.”

“I did not call you all here to hear you crow about the wizard,” the Ruler said, wagging his finger at Machokali and Sikiokuu. “Why can’t you two talk plainly like my chairman of Marching to Heaven?” he added, nodding toward Tajirika approvingly.

Tajirika felt joy continue springing within. If things continue this way, he might emerge from this ordeal free from the power of these two ministers.

“Thank you,” he told the Ruler.

“Titus,” the Ruler called him by name, still trying to soften him up with regard to the money,
“you see now the kind of ministers I have?”

“Well, you will have to do with what you have. What gives birth in the wilderness suckles in the wilderness,” Tajirika said.

“What did you say?” the Ruler shouted at Tajirika. “What did you say about giving birth?”

Only Machokali knew why the Ruler had become so touchy. Still, he did not show by look or gesture that he understood. He and Sikiokuu turned to Tajirika as if adding oil to the fire with the unspoken
Yes, why did you say that!

“It is just a proverb,” Tajirika said quickly, wondering why the Ruler had so suddenly turned against him. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?”

“Forgive me.”

“Forgive you for what? Just answer my questions plainly. Riddles and proverbs are for evening entertainment at one’s own home.”

“Yes, Sir Holiness.”

“Listen to me. I have it on good authority that the queues started outside your office,” the Ruler said, to change the subject from pregnancy and sorcery to queues and money matters.

Fajirika had no clue that the Ruler was so sensitive on this subject, and in his eagerness to undo the error he had made with his proverb he now hastened to expound his theory that it was the Wizard of the Crow who had started the whole queuing mania. At that, Sikiokuu cast him an evil eye, for he had expressly told Tajirika not to make the Wizard of the Crow the originator of the queuing mania, for that explanation would tend to exonerate Machokali. Machokali, for his part, cast him a glance of gratitude. Tajirika saw the evil look from Sikiokuu, but he knew that the eyes of a frog in a brook do not prevent cows from drinking water. Instead of halting his narrative, Tajirika now sat up and recounted how the Wizard of the Crow came to his office disguised as a job seeker …

“Why are you so obsessed with this sorcerer?” the Ruler interrupted him. “Cut out the business of who started the queues and go straight to the question of envelopes of self-introduction.”

In a second it dawned on Tajirika what the Ruler had been driving at all along. Was that really why he had been summoned to the State House? To answer questions about money that he had not used or even banked? The money was cursed, and it had now come to haunt him even inside the State House.

“The envelopes? I was coming to that. You see, there is a connection between the queues and those envelopes,” he said without hesitation.

He told how he had learned of his appointment to the chairmanship of Marching to Heaven and how soon after that a queue of seekers of future contracts had formed outside his offices, how they handed him envelopes of self-introduction, and how by the end of the day he had filled up three big sacks, each at least five feet by two, with money.

“Three sacks full of money? And each bag more than five feet by two? In one day?” asked the Ruler.

He could not tell where or how it came to him—it may have been
triggered by the eagerness for knowledge in the Ruler’s eyes—but the idea of vengeance against Kaniürü suddenly formed in his mind and Tajirika found himself exaggerating the story of the money and enjoying it.

“It was not even a whole day” he now said. “Just a matter of a few hours in the afternoon.”

“One afternoon? A few hours?” pressed the Ruler.

“Yes, a couple hours.”

“And three big sacks, each more than five feet by two, full of money?”

“Not just full. I had to push the notes down with my hands and even with my feet until each bag was tight and as heavy as a sack of grain. But, alas, just when I thought that I had finally crossed the valley of poverty into permanent wealth, I became ill.”

The idea of vengeance, initially vague, was growing, and now it formed itself into a definite plan. So far he had talked only about money in general, and his listeners understood it to be in the form of Burl notes. Now in the plan the Burls became dollars. All he had to do was find a way of dropping the name of the currency to ensure maximum impact on his listeners. Tajirika paused and bent his head slightly in a dejected manner, and this reflected in his voice as he now said:

“But after getting well I never once received another envelope stashed with dollars, all in hundred-dollar bills.”

“Dollars? They bribed you in American dollars?” the Ruler kept asking.

“Well, they were out to impress me. Some said openly that they knew that the Aburlrian Burl was nothing, that it changed its value every other day the way chameleons change color.
Bunni bure,
some would say in Kiswahili, and, because they wanted our friendship to be firm, they thought that it could be made so only by money that was global, firm and permanent in value, and the American dollar fits the bill.”

“They said Burls were valueless?” the Ruler repeated. He was about to explode with expletives, but he changed his mind. “Why no more dollars afterward?” he asked.

“Your Mighty Excellency, when I recovered from my illness, I found that all the powers of my office had been assumed by my deputy, John Kaniürü.”

“And your deputy, did he also receive envelopes of self-introduction?” he asked.