minister, although they had public disagreements as to whether all four posts carried executive powers.
Internationally, recognition from Washington was quickly followed by others. It was only at the domestic front where all was not well. Vinjinia refused to become Empress Beatrice, claiming that she was too old for such royal games. She would be content to look after their house and their properties. If Tajirika wanted to appoint an official hostess, she would not raise any objection unless the hostess crossed the line and violated the marriage bed.
The climax of Tajirika’s ascension to power came when he addressed the nation and pronounced the end of Baby D. A new era of imperial democracy had dawned, he said, and ordered the construction of a modern coliseum on the site once earmarked for Marching to Heaven.
10
And then the Wizard of the Crow reared his head again and dulled the celebratory mood. Who would have thought that a dead man could raise his head in the very heart of the Imperial Palacer
It happened that as some security men were cleaning up a room rarely used, they came across a tiny bundle of hair carefully tied in a small plastic bag. The room was last occupied by the captive Wizard of the Crow just before his address to the assembly, but the men did not know. It was Njoya and Kahiga, the newly installed imperial executioners, who recognized the plastic bag they had given the Wizard of the Crow at the basement of the All Saints Cathedral and which contained all the hair they had collected before their unceremonious dismissal from their jobs. But how had it ended up in the Imperial Palacer
This question was very troubling to Emperor Titus Flavius Ves-pasianus Whitehead until he consulted with the bearded spirits, who came up with the answer in the crocodiles of the Red River. No charms, even those from the dead, could escape from the belly of the monsters. But how were the monsters to swallow human hair without the human person?
One night Kaniuru was invited to the Imperial Palace for dinner as a revered artist, and was conned into swallowing meatballs inside which were some of the remains of the hair of the Wizard of the Crow. Later the same night, Njoya and Kahiga, happy in their anticipation of sweet revenge, took Kaniuru to the Red River. What they did not know was that they, too, had eaten bread with some of the sorcerer’s hair in it and that the four masked spirits were waiting for them at the same riverside. They joined the Ruler in the belly of the crocodiles of the Red River, afterward renamed the Imperial River, and the scaly lizards Imperial Crocs, in honor of their having swallowed up all threats from the dead Wizard of the Crow.
11
Nothing could have prepared Kamltl and Nyawlra and the entire Movement for the Voice of the People for what had happened in Aburlria, the Ruler’s SID particularly. He had survived the absurdities of self-induced expansion, self-induced pregnancy, and certainly all the other previous attempts on his life, only to fall to masked spirits. That Nyawlra’s former boss and Kamltl’s tormentor had successfully carried out a palace coup was stunning, to say the least, and Kamltl could not help but recall that other time when Tajirika escaped from prison with a bucket of shit between his legs.
“But shit is still shit, even by another name,” commented Nyawlra. “The battle lines may be murky, but they have not changed.”
12
One evening Nyawlra told Kamltl that two men would come for him on the following day and take him to meet the Central Committee of the Movement for the Voice of the People so that he could say in his own words and from his own lips that he wanted to become a member. Kamltl was expecting them and yet was shocked a little. It was the first time since their last return from the mountains that he had seen another person enter their place, and he realized how much of a sheltered life he had been leading with Nyawlra, newspapers, and the radio his only windows to the world. The two escorts looked his age and there was a lot about which they could have chatted, but there was not much talk between them and Kamltl was left to his own thoughts. He reviewed his life since that fateful day when he flew out of his body at the city dumpsite, setting in motion subsequent happenings like his flight in time and space in bird form, that added to the miracle his life had become, making him wonder about the thinness of the line that divided the real and the unreal in human lives.
“We are already there,” said one of his guides, jolting Kamltl from his reverie.
His two escorts ushered him into a room, showed him a seat, and went into another room. Alone, Kamltl let his eyes pan the walls, over posters and drawings of some heroes and heroines of Aburlrian and African anticolonial resistance who were never mentioned in official documents. Then his eyes rested on a big map of the world with Africa at the center. On the map were red paper arrows pointing at cities circled with a black marker. He was contemplating these circles when he saw, at the Nile Delta, a neon-lit arrow. The arrow began to move down the map, and when it reached a town it would stop and flicker as if asking him to note the spot well. This was too unreal, and he stood up and went near the map to make sure. Yes, the arrow was moving along the trail he had followed and it flickered only at those towns he had visited in the body of a bird. What was the meaning of this?
“We are just trying to learn our history,” Kamltl heard a voice say, and he quickly turned around to face six men and four women. One of them was speaking to him as the others listened. “We try to locate our origins and know all the places to which black people have been scattered, from India, where dwell the Siddis, to Fiji in the Pacific, where the people claim Tanganyika as the site of their origins.”
“And what about this flickering arrow?”
“Which arrow?” the man asked, wondering what Kamltl was talking about.
Kamltl looked back at the map and was surprised to find that the neon arrow was not there.
“Oh, I was thinking about these red arrows,” Kamltl said, as if the matter was not of consequence.
“Those arrows are pointing at the centers of ancient black civilization,” the man said. “They are the sources of black power.”
They sat down in a semicircle. Again, Kamltl could not believe his eyes. Were these not the ones who used to work at the shrine? However, he now kept his thoughts to himself in case his mind was deceiving him again. The man said that they were still waiting for the chairperson, but even before the man had finished-was Kamro dreaming or not?-Nyawlra entered.
“The chairperson of the Central Committee of the Movement for the Voice of the People and commander in chief of Aburlrian People’s Resistance…”
13
The comrades took him on a tour, a journey imbued with magic more potent than that in Maritha’s story of suspended motion and suffused with wonders more amazing than those in the healing laughter of Maritha and Mariko. Here, in the new venture, the extraordinary, the magical, the wonderful, and even the strange came out of the ordinary and the familiar. His guides were those he had always known as workers in the shrine. But they now looked different. Nyawlra looked different. He was seeing the Eldares Mountains anew through other people’s eyes.
They took him to their farms where they grew foods, millet, sorghum, yams, and arrowroots, as well as varieties of Aburlrian berries. Elsewhere Aburlrian soil was dying from being doused with pollutants, imported
