“Who is this girl you speak of?” he asked her.
“No one,” she said, lying to him in a way he could understand. “No one.” Just like the poor women in her country, she was no one. In a world that liked to stratify, she was no one.
And so, she was given a small crown, a small crown for a tall woman with a fierce look in her big, brown eyes. A woman who wore a long, black, sleeveless dress. The only jewellery she wore were small pearl earrings that glowed against her golden-brown skin. These used to be Mireille’s. queen maria wore her small crown of flowers, which were so rare that she wondered where the people had found them. Maybe they grew them away from the Council’s prying eyes. She was told they were called “bougainvillea”, and their cream colour was the rarest variety. She recalled reading about this plant in Maita’s Old Botswana journals.
“Queen of what?” The short man appeared again in the dead of night, clearly agitated. His eyes kept darting about, trying to understand how she made contact with the outside world.
“How is it,” he asked, “that you can display such laziness one day, such fortitude and stamina the next, such ill discipline on another day, and still, they love you and crown you queen?”
maria looked up from her work for just a few seconds, but then continued typing as she spoke.
“You give me all the fortitude, all the tools I need to carry on. It is your voice I listen to when I write the character that is a lover. It is your voice that I listen to when I write the character of a ruthless politician or a would-be killer. It is your voice…that drives me. I write about the past so we can all have a future. This is all the Council wants to prevent. A future with a real past. And this is why you are here.”
“You give me no choice, maria, but to pull the plug on you. The Council gave me full powers. It is up to me now.”
“Go ahead. Are you scared of what I will write or what I have already written? You make me more powerful when you try to silence me. In my absence the spectre of what I could have been will lean heavier and become greater than anything I do while I am free. So, go ahead; make this easy for me as queen. I am free.”
“I insist that you issue a statement, asking your followers to respect your privacy and to not commit any acts in your name.”
“And what would those be? Pretending to be me? hing some of my works in a voice they think I would appreciate? Protesting?” maria stretched her long body at the desk, raising her arms so the tips of her fingers reached out to space. The man moved back so her toes would not touch him. She had no hair and, as she twisted her neck to ease some of her tension, she caught fear reflected in the man’s eyes, the kind of fear you see in a soldier’s prey,”
“Why are you so scared?” she asked him.
“People are reading what you are writing. It does not make sense to let you go on.”
That had been yesterday. Or, so her calendar had told her. In a room where true time does not exist, she could never tell. She only told true time by what the planets told her. And the moons, the moons told true time. She rarely looked outside, mostly within. So, for the most part, time did not exist.
maria got up. Outside, the blue dawn had risen and the planets were aligning. The man, the muse, the Council representative, he of the short stature and nondescript face, of the unhealthy tint to his skin and the follower’s demeanour, was really going to do this. She knew that those on the inside, those who lived as her followers, those who were her children, past and future subjects, her characters and those she gave birth to, would appreciate her escape. From the tall filter window of the light-yellow room in which she worked, she could see the rest of her world. In the streets below, an army surrounded her tower. They had been there from the day she started to write. The day she took up residence in the six-story, grey-stone tower, with the single flight of stairs, spiralling inside and outside, they had appeared. The sound of their boots was enough to alert her to their presence; otherwise they never made direct contact. Sometimes, she’d catch a few of them looking up at the tower, at its strange construction and its pointed dome, much like the spindle of an old-fashioned sewing wheel. Perhaps she’d dreamed it up from some photographs of Old India that Great-Grandmother Mallika kept for her children. Or, from books that her own mother read to her when she was very young. Some stories about a little, evil creature who kept a king’s daughter imprisoned in a tower. Eventually, she had dreamed up her prison and there she sat. She felt that the Council would never understand her intention and for this she was grateful. Being free—of the Council, of expectation—was something she greatly craved.
The Council knew that a woman from this part of the world, writing, was a greater threat than any other they had yet faced. She had the bloods to prove it and her bio told them that history could repeat itself. After all, it was women who wanted to unseat them. It was women who tried to rewrite the balance of power. It was women that the Old Countries went to war for, in Ancient Times. They had all the excuses to keep women away from knowledge and a better way to lead, and read, the world they lived in. Rather a docile system of Womanhood, anywhere in the world, than any form of a unified and strong Womanhood, in many parts of the known world. Keep them different, docile, weak, and dis-unified.
As the moons carved a trajectory across the sky, and the light from the ships let it be known that another imposed day was upon the planet, she felt that her people would contact her. And they did. Without knowing how much time had passed, she felt surrounded by a warm energy. She was on the floor, lying down, without remembering how this came to be.
Soon, one of her own whispered to her. Then, all she could see was a woman dressed in white, opening the filter window. maria got up from the floor and scrambled after the woman, who was clearly about to jump. All maria could grab was cloth and then, finally, a slim hand, as the woman in white slipped from her grasp. Before she let her hand go, on the very ledge from which maria watched the world below, the woman said, “You are everything. I had to die to let you know. Don’t let them stop you. Keep writing in yellow. Then send in red. The colour of life.” And then she let go, her long, dark hair billowing around her, but her body pliant and ready, not angled in fear. She smiled as her body met the pavement. maria had used the ternary glasses she kept for just such an occasion, to see everything that happened. Below, her follower was the colour of life in seconds, and was immediately surrounded by soldiers. Some looked up. The man appeared to her a short while later. He held handcuffs and talked to her about inspiration.
“You inspire us to make this more difficult for you,” he said to her, his eyes almost catching light, almost becoming alive.
“You inspire me to write. She died for a reason. The part of me that never dies, dies in this world. On another, freer world, she is everlasting. My Followers do not weep for this. We rejoice, because we know Freedom is soon coming.”
“You’re naïve. Who will you go to? You know your voice cannot carry beyond these walls. We made sure of that. Only the Followers in your head, when they appear, know of you.”
“If I told you my plans, I would not live beyond the three moons, and beyond this world. There are many who wait for my shape to enter its chosen space. This is what frightens you. And the more I write, the more ready my chosen space. For you to keep appearing, it means I am close to my goal.”