House as the Ruler’s General Liaison Officer.
They talked about the disappearance of Nyawlra and the Wizard of the Crow. Tajirika looked at his thumbs and realized almost suddenly that the sorcerer who had dogged his life since he had first come to his offices at Eldares Modern Construction and Real Estate, pretending to look for a job, would no longer shadow his life. His powers to ever do Tajirika harm, even a simple harm like withdrawing the protective magic he had once given him, had gone forever.
“You have conquered the Wizard of the Crow. You have triumphed over our enemies,” Tajirika told the Ruler, tears of personal gratitude threatening to spill.
For seven nights and days the Ruler thought about Tajirika’s words, for they echoed vague thoughts in his mind, and then it dawned on him ever so clearly why everything had been going so smoothly.
On the day of the autoexplosion he had not only conquered the bodily form of the Wizard of the Crow but had also incorporated his occult powers into himself. With the wizard and the Limping Witch out of the way, he was the sorcerer supreme, able to manipulate Aburlria, the West, the Global Ministry of Finance, the Global Bank, democracy, the living and the dead-the whole lot. He was now the number one sorcerer in all of Aburlria.
9
But he had nothing else to conquer, he moaned. No more adversaries to overcome. After sending his two beloved ministers, Kaniuru and Tajirika, to America for talks with the Global Ministry of Finance, the Global Bank, and the American government, the Ruler retreated to his private chambers at the State House, where he wept freely, agonizing over his dilemma. Even when the official hostess tried to calm him down the Ruler could not be consoled; he fumed for want of challenges from worthy adversaries.
One night his grief reminded him of tears he had hoped to see but had not seen. His wife, Rachael, had resisted his attempts to break her and had yet to beg for mercy and forgiveness. His grief at the lack of challenge now became a rage at the thought of a woman defying him and getting away with it. He called the guard permanently stationed at the entrance to Rachael’s seven-acre plantation and engaged him in idle conversation. He learned, what had been the subject of rumors for months, that late at night when people should be snoring in their beds, Rachael could be seen roaming about the yard or the house, bearing a light, a lantern, perhaps, like a ghost. To the plantation we go, he called out to his loyal biographer late one night. He wanted this moment recorded to become a centerpiece of the official biography.
What happened when the Ruler, accompanied by Luminous Karamu-Mbu, went to visit Rachael that night is much disputed. The guard with the key to the gate at the entrance to the compound was nowhere to be seen. There are those who say that the Ruler squeezed through a narrow opening between the wall and the gate and, given his new slim body, this posed no problem. He crawled on his belly the rest of the way to catch Rachael unaware before she could wipe her tears away. When finally he reached the house, he peered through a window, and it was then that Rachael, still wearing the dress she wore the night they had quarreled over his predilections for young girls, and thinking that she had seen a long-necked something with a tiny head and a forked tongue, threw the lantern at the thing. The paraffin poured out, the house caught fire, and, seeing this, the Ruler and Luminous Karamu-Mbu ran back the way they came.
Other accounts say no, it was not quite like that, the guard had been disappeared, and when the Ruler went to the house Rachael had come to the door and told him, I know it is you, and instead of crying she laughed in his face, and because she had not laughed for a long time her ribs shook with the laughter and collapsed from within, and Rachael disintegrated into a heap of dry bones. The lantern fell on the heap of bones, caught fire, and the flames from the fire of her immolation ignited the rest of the house, spreading to the plantation. A ball of fire detached itself from the rest and pursued the fleeing Ruler and his faithful biographer all the way back to the gates of the State House.
The memory of the ball of fire in relentless pursuit gave him insomnia, and to induce sleep the Ruler had his loyal biographer, Luminous Karamu-Mbu, read him a chapter from the book he was writing. The biography was not complete, a work in progress, the biographer would say, but the Ruler told him to read from the copious notes he had taken. Every night a chapter was read, and this made the Ruler revisit the scenes of his past challenges, battles, and triumphs, a strange sensation, almost as if he were living his life twice or thrice over again. There were sections that the Ruler wanted read over and over again, often telling him what to take out and what to add. One night he told Luminous Karamu-Mbu to read the section that dealt with his most recent triumph, and the biographer faithfully read how blasts of thunder like stealthy missiles had fired from each of his seven orifices and then exploded in turns; he had described in detail how the second blast of thunder had launched the foreign doctors sky high and how he, Luminous Karamu-Mbu, bravely hung on till he, too, was launched, a human missile, into the sky, by the fifth or sixth blast of thunder, and so had no details of the seventh but… The Ruler did not listen to the end, for his mind was occupied with the sudden realization that the loyal biographer knew too much, that if he could write and record what happened so openly, so vividly, and so graphically, an account that completely contradicted the official version of the Ruler’s and his generals’ heroics as they struggled with bombs exploding, what could he inadvertently say about the story of Rachael and the plantation fire? This man had no imagination to sugarcoat reality and make it more palatable. How did I engage such a foolr
Whatever the case, Luminous Karamu-Mbu, the ex-Communist born again as a loyal biographer, was never seen again, with rumors later claiming that the man had been crushed under the weight of his huge pen and notebook.
There are some who say that the seeds of the biographer’s SID came from the official hostess, because, even though the two had abandoned communism, the war they waged against each other during their revolutionary days had left incurable scars. After the smog disaster, Yunique McKenzie was asked to move her office to the State House, and she said she would never do so as long as Luminous Karamu-Mbu was a regular at the palace. It was noted that it was soon after the biographer’s disappearance that Dr. Yunique Immaculate McKenzie, PhD, ONH, moved her offices to the State House and the Ruler engaged the services of one Morton Stanley, a white royalist from London, to write an unexpurgated, independent, and objective biography of the Ruler through the Ruler’s eyes, with material generously provided by the Ruler and his handlers.
The eradication of Rachael may not have met his quest for challenges worthy of his new powers, but still he counted it as successful, especially after he saw that it was not followed by remonstration from his children or angry demonstrations from women.
The crowning moment of his undiluted successes came when his ministers Tajirika and Kaniuru returned from America with tangible results:
The Minister of Defense and war hero John Kaniuru signed an agreement for loans to enable Aburiria to buy arms from the West, and the Minister of Finance and business hero Titus Tajirika signed agreements with several oil companies to explore oil and natural gas at the coast and mining companies to prospect for gold, diamonds, and other precious metals in northern Aburiria.
But the most salient part of this success story was that the Global Ministry of Finance and the Global Bank had agreed to release the previously frozen funds now that the plans for Marching to Heaven had been abandoned, replaced by Baby D.
“You have done well,” the Buler told the two ministers.
“The power is yours, my Lord,” Tajirika exclaimed.
“And the glory” said Kaniuru.
“Long Live Baby D,” they said in unison but accidentally, for each had hoped to have the last word in sycophancy.
10
One evening Kaniuru was watching a porno video when he got a call from security about a guest at the gate. Who is that calling at this inopportune moment?
