The road from Ayo’s house to the Plaza of Kings led past the harbor, and whenever she went there with her father, she liked to stop at the docks and look out at the lagoon. There were long ships bearing the treasures of the south: leopard and zebra hides, potent drugs, ivory, copper and gold, jewels from the Diamond Coast. A few had even come from the north, with the purple-striped sails of Gades or the plainer ones of Syracuse and Tartessos: they knew that they’d probably have to endure much of the journey back under oars, but risked that in order to trade for Africa’s riches. [1] There was shouting in a dozen languages as men unloaded and haggled, and beyond them, hundreds of smaller boats out fishing or ferrying people from the villages and towns on the lagoon’s shores.
When Ayo looked at the ships, she could imagine strange lands, the smell of spices, cargoes beyond belief. And even at seven years old, she knew that the wealth that came through the harbor was what made Ikeja the jewel of the Asun Republic, what made it mistress of an empire rather than one among many quarreling city-states.
“Is our ship there?” she asked, straining to see it amid the forest of masts and furled sails.
“No,
omo,” her father answered, his hand resting lightly on her shoulder. “Our ship is at the Congo now, trading for medicines and okapi hides. It won’t be back for another month, the same time that your brother’s caravan is due in from Carthage. But now we have to go the festival.”
Ayo’s face brightened and she looked up at her father’s. “Will it really be seven days?” she asked. Her brother Ola looked at her as if she were stupid, but she had been two months old at the last Festival of Rebirth, and everything about this day was delightfully new to her.
“Yes,
omo – one day for each year of the king. And on the last day, we will choose a new king for the next seven years.” [2]
“Will you be king,
baba?”
“Silly!” Ola cried. “We’re not noble!”
“Ola’s right. Only kingmakers can become king. But I can vote for the new king – once only the kingmakers could do that, but now all the citizens do. But come now.”
His hand lifted off Ayo’s shoulder and pointed the way to the Five Cowrie Boulevard. [3] For a moment, she caught sight of the acacia brand on its back, the clan-sign he had been marked with when he was thirteen years old.
Touched with steel, he’d said, as all men of Asun were, as Ola would be next year. Ayo couldn’t imagine her brother as a man, but in her father it was clear: his graying hair was steel too, the mark of wisdom and spiritual power. As they walked out onto the boulevard, the sun caught it for a moment and it seemed like the metal itself.
The broad street ran from just outside the docklands to the Plaza of the Kings, past public buildings made of stone and others of brightly painted mud-brick and clay. [4] Behind them, in the back streets, were apartments of three and four stories. The boulevard itself was a hundred feet wide with gardens and black hardwood statues running down its length: the nearest one showed the gods, with their elongated faces, founding the city, and the others portrayed the deeds of kings, griots and warriors.
The boulevard was always busy, but today it was glorious chaos. Even the carts and hitching-posts were decorated with flowers and palm fronds, banners and cloth streamers. People from all the lands that paid tribute to Asun, and even beyond, thronged the street, men in long wide-sleeved robes and women in patterned dresses and intricately tied hair-cloths. Ayo didn’t know it, but there were three hundred thousand people in the city, and bringing food and water to them was the work of thousands more for miles around.
One, in particular, caught her eye: a widow making a procession up the street with an entourage of family, hangers-on, blond Cimbri bodyguards, and slaves. Her dress was silk, no doubt imported at hideous expense from Tandja [5], and both it and her gele were dyed in Tyrian purple. Ayo’s own clothing was of serviceable raffia-cloth, and the geometric patterns on it were lovingly made, but they were in no way as fine, nor could her necklace of shells and a single locally-mined tourmaline compete with the widow’s diamonds. A kingmaker’s widow, surely, and still a power in her family; no doubt she hoped to have much to do with who the next king would be.
Ayo’s suspicions were confirmed when she saw the woman stop to talk to a group of masked
egun-men. The masqueraders from the secret society were always there; they would interpret your prophetic dreams, and for a fee, they might tell your fortune or convey a message from your ancestors. Today, though, they had changed their raffia masks for wooden ones, and their costumes were covered with letters in the griot-hand and streamers in the gods’ colors.
“They’ll carry messages for the whole city this week,” her father said, seeing where she was pointing. “And they’ll tell us whether the ancestors approve our choice of king.”
“Why? He’s not their king…”
“Isn’t he? We’re all our own ancestors, hasn’t the griot taught you that? You,
omo, are the ancestor of the woman you will be, and she will see with the wisdom you store for her. I am the ancestor of your first child’s grandfather. And the city is its own ancestor too: the prophet from Urata [6] who came by the Palm Road taught us that it dies and is reborn every time the king is chosen. The ancestors know how much wisdom it has laid up in its current life, and they can tell us whether it will be reborn greater or less under a new king.”
“Do they ever say the king can’t be king?”
“It’s happened sometimes, when the law was broken - when the new king was from the same family as the old one, or when he was too weak to reign for seven years. They say it also happens when the
egun-men are bought. There was the year of four elections in my grandfather’s time – but there was a rebellion after the fourth one, and it taught the kingmakers and the
egun-men that they had to be careful…”
He looked away as another merchant, a master of desert caravans, came up and greeted him by his given name, Bogun. Ayo tried to follow the conversation, but soon got lost: it was full of names she didn’t know and details of the election. She got the idea they were at cross purposes with the widow she had seen, and that they knew
egun-men of their own, but the city’s political factions meant nothing to her.
And then they were at the plaza.
Ayo had been there before in recent days, and had seen the workers busily building the seats. Now they were finished, row on row, facing the palace and the stage that had been set up where the citizens gathered to make laws. This wasn’t where plays were normally performed – there was an amphitheater just outside the city gate – but the contest this year would take place where the old king had no choice but to watch and the would-be new ones no choice but to listen.
Ola led the way to an open seat while their father bought yams and skewers of grilled meat. Ayo ate, watching the stage intently, wondering with a child’s impatience when something might happen…
And there was suddenly the pulse of talking drums, and a double line of costumed actors ran onto the stage. They whirled and leaped in a formal dance, and as they did, they sang.
Ancient Dese, man and god,
Called to the Creator high;
Steel he brought from stars above,
With desire he came down…
“What story is this?” Ayo whispered.
“The first play is always a story of Dese. He stole the secret of steel from the star-gods, and he was punished by being made a man. He was the ancestor of the Nok, and he invented kingship and prophecy.” [7]
“Who were the Nok?”
“The first people. The makers of all things. But they became proud, and they didn’t listen to the wisdom of their youth. They were our ancestors, but they didn’t realize they were their own.”
On stage, the talking drum remained but the dancers had gone, and Dese, cast from the stars but still robed as a god, discoursed to two actors who seemed to be his subjects. He continually confused godhood with merely human kingship – hilariously so, to judge by some of the audience’s reaction, although others sat stone-faced. Ayo laughed too, less at the humor than the exaggerated body language, and clapped when the choral dancers returned.
The second act was more somber than the first: Dese still thought himself a god on earth, but he let it blind him, and he paid no notice when his subjects and the
egun-men came to tell him that his schemes had led to blighted fields and lost battles. Again, some of the audience looked on without expression – including, Ayo noticed, the widow she had seen before. She sensed that the play had something to do with the election, that it was a challenge to one faction or another, but there was also something else…
“The play was reborn!” she said suddenly.
“Quiet,
omo,” her father reminded. “What do you mean?”
“They told the story of Dese as a god, and it was funny. Now they’re telling it again and it’s sad.”
Her father smiled, a look of proprietary pride in his eyes. “Yes. And the third act will tell the story another time – when Dese has learned from laughter and tragedy both.”
“The play is its own ancestor…” she mused, and another thought came to her. “We don’t really have to wait seven years for rebirth, do we? We’re all reborn every minute.”
“Yes,
omo, so make sure you gain wisdom every minute. From the Nok, from the Aminni, from all the ancestors in every land. And from what you see and hear all around you.”
“Will the new king do that?”
“If we choose wisely, and if the ancestors do.”
“I hope…” Ayo began to say, but then the dancers returned to the stage. The third act was about to begin, and they sang a song of Dese the Nok’s reconciliation.
_______
[1] I’m assuming here that Hanno did get to Mount Cameroon and back in OTL, and that sea trade with West Africa is difficult but possible if there’s something worth trading for. Most of the carrying trade at this point goes across the Sahara, but there’s some contact by sea.
[2] It isn’t
that great a leap from kingmakers electing a king to citizens doing so, especially in a country where everyone is considered to have the gift of prophecy and therefore divine wisdom, and the kingmakers were rarely the only powerful group in West African city-states. Election for a term of years is somewhat more of a stretch, but they’ve been getting ideas from elsewhere for centuries by now, and officials who serve terms are a notion as old as Assyria.
[3] Between this and the city’s name, you should be able to tell where it is.
[4] You can get some
pretty impressive architecture with mud-brick and clay, and its use is common in Nigeria and elsewhere in West Africa
even for mosques and palaces.
[5] This comes through a mispronunciation and misunderstanding of “Tianxia.”
[6]
This is a misunderstanding of “Bharata,” via the East African end of the Palm Road. The East African Bantu traders who interact with India assumed the first syllable was the same as the Bantu plural prefix, thus concluding that "Rata" was the root word for Indians, "Bharata" meant multiple Indian people, and "Urata" - Rata with the territorial prefix - was the Indians' country. They figured out the error eventually, but by then, "Urata" for India was well established in East African speech and spread from there to West Africa.
[7] You may recognize, in Dese’s story, fragments of several legends from the first two updates, as well as other archetypes from this timeline and ours. As should be apparent from his name, he is a conflation of Inadese the Conqueror with earlier legendary figures from the dawn of the Iron Age. Of course, the play doesn’t tell the standard story of Dese, any more than Euripides simply retold the myth of Medea.
