~I. Madagascar, April 1828~
A cow will never starve to please a god.
Yet there he is, Radama, my blundering bull of a husband, refusing to partake of the zebu sacrifice to honour his ancestors.
From the shaded corner of the palace courtyard, a fan held in front of my face, I quiver with rage and shame to see him, calling foolishly for fish as though the long-horned royal herds were not a sacred channel for communication with the blessed dead. As though the Lenten fast should mean anything to a king of the Merina.
And if the dead should curse him? If he should lose all that our father gained, the rule of the whole island, from sea to sea? Is he already cursed? Is that why demons of drink keep him from my bed, when I am the only one of his twelve Great Wives sanctified to bear the royal heir?
Three servants wait on me in the courtyard. The Royal Cook, the Royal Ombiasy and the Royal Weaver. All three of them have been loyal since the day, almost twenty years ago, that I was adopted by the old king and betrothed to Radama. They expected, as I did, that I would fall pregnant quickly, that my position would be secured. We were all mistaken.
My womb remains empty. Even Andrianmihaja, my valiant young officer, my true love, has not been able to fill it. He fills my heart but a full heart is not enough. Only greater piety can win the ancestors’ favour. Only greater respect for tradition can win a child for Radama and for me.
The king refuses the red meat a second time. He refuses to see he is leading us to disaster.
“Shall I fetch some fish for him, Great Wife?” the Royal Cook whispers. A tall and wide-hipped woman with big, scarred hands, she squats on her heels in her lamba wrap to keep her slave’s head lower than mine. Her teeth are very white and her cheeks dimpled.
“It is one thing to serve fish to foreigners,” the Royal Ombiasy mutters. “Quite another for the king to insult the very bloodline that brought him to the throne.”
The Royal Ombiasy wields supernatural powers. He is a wearer of crocodile teeth, a selector of suitably marked zebu for sacrifice and a guardian of one of the twelve royal sampy. The sampy are exceptionally powerful talismans, sometimes worn, sometimes paraded, always respected and feared, which grant victory to armed forces, warn of danger and foretell the future.
He is also a skinny old man with a round, bald head and conspicuously protruding ears. When he grows too bossy with me, I rub his head to ignite his temper. I am not afraid of the Ombiasy. The sampy Ingahibe, though he seems no more than several ornamented wood-sections to an outsider, is another matter.
“Fetch the king some blackfish from the west,” the Royal Weaver suggests salaciously. “Radama will lick the bones clean.”
My anger abruptly alters direction. I find it difficult not to strike her. The Royal Weaver was born a princess, as I was, and sometimes forgets how far she is fallen. She dares to speak to me of Radama’s favourite wife, she of the ebony skin from the Sakalava tribe in the west. He licks her clean. That is certain. She has birthed his child, but that child will never rule.
“Do not irk me,” I say, fluttering the fan, “unless you wish to begin weaving your own funeral shroud.”
“Forgive me, Great Wife.” The Royal Weaver bows her grey head.
“Fetch my husband what he asks for,” I tell the Royal Cook.
“At once, Great Wife.” The Cook backs carefully away from me, turning the corner before she straightens to her full height.
“Fish!” I seethe in the hot stillness. “It is not fit for a king.”
In my mind, I beg the ancestors for their forgiveness.
~II~
What do you see
Keeper of the Sampy
through a god’s eyes?
Through a god’s eyes?
Interpret the vintana
the inexorable destiny
look to the east
along the axis
between living and dead.
Healer, astrologer,
mpanandro,
maker of the day.
What does
the sampy say?
Death comes!
Death desires him!
Death will not be denied!
But he will go alone
long before his queen.
She was born on a Friday
a red day
the day of kings.
~III~
The Royal Cook was born on a Thursday.
Thursday is the black day. It is the day of slaves. As she stands in the great kitchen where the zebu meat is being cooked without spices or adornments, where none will comment on the delicious smell for fear of implying that the sacrifice is mere food, she sees the runner girl crying in her corner cot and feels the unluckiness of her vintana, her inherited destiny, twisting the world around her.
“What is wrong with her?” she asks the water-fetcher.
“The wound in her foot. It turns black. They do not want her in the slave hut. If she dies there, they will have to burn it down.”
The Royal Cook understands. If the runner girl dies in the kitchen, her cot-corner will simply be blessed by the Royal Ombiasy. There can be no burning down of palaces, not even to satisfy taboo.
“Then I must go to the lowlands for fresh fish.”
The water-fetcher says nothing. She has a clubfoot and is slow. The capital in its glorious seat on the high plateau is three days from the closest port. No roads have been built to Antananarivo. King Radama proclaims that paved highways invite invasion.
And yet he wishes to dine on fish when the high lakes have been emptied by Christian converts.
“Get me water for my journey.”
The Royal Cook hides her overwhelming fear as the water-fetcher scurries away. A long, slow march through the lowlands is how royalty disposes of royalty without the taboo of shedding royal blood. One bite from the wrong mosquito in that dark, wet forest or mud-legged in the suffocating, sweaty swamps will send her on the path her parents took many years ago.
On the plateau, it is windy, cool and clean. It is safe. She is only a servant but she is a servant of the Merina and does not wish to die of the dreaded disease. As she begins her run through the maze of square huts and terraced paddies that cover the hillside, she thinks of the cattle herder with the sun-kissed streak in his black hair. She thinks of how she has not bled this month and begs her ancestors for protection.
They hear her. Before noon the next day, she meets a zebu-cheese merchant half way down the slope to the sea, returning from the coast where he has traded cheese for trepang and sea turtle meat. He gives her a woven basket of salt-packed golden trevally and takes two-sixteenths of a silver coin cut into pieces.
He tells her that fishermen are blessed, because Jesus chose them for his disciples, and the Royal Cook tries not to think of the snarl that would form on the Great Wife’s face if she could hear the merchant speaking.
It takes another night and morning for her to return to the palace. Without sleeping, without stopping, she goes to the great kitchen to prepare the fish. Great pots of rice simmer there for the midday meal. The runner girl moans and turns but has not yet died. The water-fetcher tells her that the king has drunk rum for two days and, though he has eaten rice, he still bellows for fish.
Even curried, the fish smells nauseating to the Royal Cook. Perhaps it is the child she suspects she carries, or the half-delirium of exhaustion. She scratches a new itch on the back of her calf and allows herself to be soothed by the burning-rice aroma as the water-fetcher readies fresh ranonapango to accompany the King’s meal.
Servants take the dishes from the kitchen. The Royal Cook sighs, leans against the preparation table and touches her belly.
She smiles. She has survived; they have survived. Soon, ancestors-willing, she may have a lychee-smeared little face to wipe with the corner of her lamba. The Great Wife will not care that the Royal Cook is unwed. It is proper, and profitable, that slaves should breed.
But what if the king is displeased with the lateness of his meal? What if he should order some brutal punishment?
Her eyes feel filled with sand, but she cannot resist slinking towards the dark servant’s hallway with its concealed spyhole, to make sure that her monarch is satisfied with his meal.
The Great Wife lurks at the spyhole. Her shape is unmistakeable, even in the gloom. She grows old but her curling tresses remain black as night, her angled eyes ever more piercing with pink spots of anger blooming, as always, in her pale cheeks.
The Royal Cook flinches but she’s been seen. She bends her shaking knees.
“You might as well take a look,” the Great Wife says. She steps back from the hole.
The Royal Cook crawls forward until she faces the place in the wall, then straightens enough to put her eye to it.
The dining room blazes with the light of naked flame. Instead of eating on floor-mats, the glassy-eyed, soppily-smiling king and his pair of rice-faced foreign visitors sit on wooden chairs at a long table draped in lace. Radama wears French clothing and sits between them, to the apparent displeasure of the Royal Ombiasy and other advisors who cluster well back from the table.
One of the London missionaries reaches for the serving spoon as the servant sets the dish on the table, and as he ladles some onto his plate, left-handed, the Royal Cook gasps. The missionary serves his companion second and the king third. The king’s plate is wooden like the plate of a beggar.
“Wait, my child,” the companion says to Radama. “You forget. We must say grace.”
The Royal Cook slides down the wall and away from the spyhole, clutching at her palpitating heart. She turns to the Great Wife in speechless horror.
“Yes,” the Great Wife says viciously. “They dare to occupy the northeast corner, the noble corner. The chairs are of equal height. One serves himself first and calls the king a child. Clearly, they do not accept Radama’s divinity. If I were king, I would put them to death.”
She sweeps away, pausing to spare a glance over her shoulder for the Royal Cook, still slumped on the floor.
“Go and rest,” she says, frowning. “You do not look well.”
In nine days, the chills begin, and the fever.
The Royal Cook moans and turns.
“Come,” the water-bearer says gently, taking her hand, trying to lead her away from the wattle-and-daub slave quarters and toward the Great Kitchen, but the Royal Cook will not go.
If it is her destiny to die, let everything burn.
~IV. Madagascar, July, 1828~
Radama is one of them, now.
The ancestors have heard me and have called my husband to be one of them. They have proven their great power and I am afraid.
What if I should fail them, too? How should I proceed?
I summon the Royal Ombiasy. He hears their voices. He understands the visions they kindle before his bloodshot eyes. When he arrives, roused from his bed, rubbing his swollen-knuckled hands, he is baffled to see my handsome, faithful Andrianmihaja beside me in the lamplight.
“Great Wife to the king. What is happening?” The old man’s voice is tremulous. In his shuffle through the moonlit corridors, he must have heard something over the ring of crickets and songs of frogs. Maybe the rattle of weapons. The whisper of conspirators.
Andrianmihaja answers him, his eyes shining.
“You are speaking not with a Great Wife but with the Great Glory, Ranavalona Manjaka, Queen of Madagascar.”
I lift my chin. Manjaka. Majesty. Yes. I am Queen. Let those who do not acknowledge my divinity tremble.
“The king is dead?”
The Ombiasy has not used my new title a second time. I do not let my anger show. I have no choice but to forgive his lapse. I need him. The ancestors speak through him.
“He is dead. As you predicted,” I say, inclining my head. “Now I must know which of my colonels still come to you. Which of them still visit the shrines and kneel before the sampy. Tell me which of them honours the ancestors with his whole heart. He will be the one to defend me against false claimants.”
False claimants. Rakotoba. My husband’s sister’s oldest son. He is popular with some of the traditionalists, but favour with the living, with the great true-blooded web of interconnected kin, is meaningless. Only the will of the dead matters now, and my adopted father is one of them, the closest in the chain but one to this red earth. Let the sea be the borders of your rice field, had been his final command to Radama in life. He unified my kingdom, he raised me up and his desires shall come to pass; nothing can prevent it.
The sense of my glorious vintana surges through me, drowning out all fears of a misstep.
“I can think of two colonels from your home village, Manjaka,” the Ombiasy says, naming them.
I turn to Andrianmihaja. His bearing is so regal, his sober features so fine. Years have passed since he killed a scorpion on my windowsill, ate it without hesitation when I ordered him to on a whim, and looked on me with lust I had never seen in the king’s eyes. Andrianmihaja admires French warfare, studies their tactics while refusing their rum. He will be my proper husband, should we survive the night.
“My heart,” I say, “go to fetch these colonels at once.”
“I will go,” he says. “I will not be seen.” It was his eyes that first captured my interest but his fidelity that maintains it. Andrianmihaja has never taken any woman but me. He will never betray me.
I kiss him deeply, tasting the herbs that burned at Radama’s bedside in the last hours of his wretched life. It was the ancestors that placed my young officer on duty this night, so that he could come to warn me that Radama’s closest confidants were keeping the king’s death a secret.
That secret will work in my favour, not Rakotoba’s. They are all traitors. They would gift the Red Island to the foreigners. I will use the troops under the command of my faithful colonels to secure the palace. When the sun rises and the courtiers come, it will be to hear the declaration of my succession.
As for the missionaries, let them carry the news back to London.
There will be no fish at the table of Ranavalona Manjaka.
~V~
The Royal Ombiasy was born on a Sunday.
Sunday is the white day, the day of sacrifices and power, adoration and danger. All his life, the Royal Ombiasy has dreamed of horrors to come.
Now, he wakes from a dream, the same gods-cursed dream, of fire consuming the sampy. It is just before dawn, the time when his oracular powers are most true; it is why they call him maker of the day.
He refuses to believe that the vision of fire will come to pass. Even though Radama, poor, dead Radama, at the suggestion of the London missionaries, had all but agreed to destroy the great talismans that protect the Kingdom.
“He is gone,” the Royal Ombiasy says hoarsely to himself in the darkness. Ranavalona is queen, she who has been like a daughter to him. Before her adoption, he visited her village. The child gazed at him with impudent black eyes from the doorway of the palm-frond hut.
Sorcerer, she chirped. I wish to see him! I wish to see Ingahibe, the sampy who is second in power only to the great sampy Rakelimalaza.
Go from here, piglet, he admonished her. The Old Gentleman is not a trinket for your eyes to see.
She stamped her little foot.
I order you to open the box. I am a princess, not a piglet!
Her family apologetically dragged her away, terrified of the sampy guardian’s retribution, but he had smiled behind his hand when she was gone. She was swift, curious and full of fire, and when he first saw her in his dreams, he dared to hope that French ships, taking flight from her menacing red silhouette like frightened guinea-fowl, would be driven back in the waking world by her many sons.
Ranavalona Manjaka has no sons, but perhaps, like no woman who has lived before, she can drive the foreigners away with her own dispersal of hasina, the divine quality that is granted by a monarch to the armies.
The Royal Ombiasy crawls out of his bed as daylight creeps under the door. He dresses and performs a ritual over the sampy before leaving the shrine. Staying within the palace complex, he walks over beaten earth to the private stone hut provided for the manufacture of potions and cures.
There, he arranges cooked rice and chicken skin on many small platters. The Royal Cook is dead, but had she lived, she could not have prepared these deadly meals for Ranavalona’s day of judgement. The ancestors showed their displeasure by killing the Cook soon after she fetched the fish for Radama, but Radama is gone, now. His mistakes are paid for.
The Royal Ombiasy resolves that the sampy will not burn.
His mouth flattens grimly as he opens the pottery jar where he keeps the palm-sized, oval-shaped fruit of the small and fragrant tanguena tree. Cutting the fruit and cracking the seed, he extracts the kernel and crushes a little of the poisonous oily seed over each meal. Those fasting men and women awaiting judgement will eat the meal. They will be forced to drink water, and more water, until they begin vomiting. Those who bring up all three pieces of chicken skin are innocent in the eyes of the ancestors.
Those who bring up two or less pieces are guilty and will be put to death. The palace servants were tested yesterday. Officers are on trial today. So soon after the queen’s succession, all must prove their loyalty by tanguena trial if they are to continue to serve. Even if they have shown loyalty in the past, evil curses may have been placed on them by the queen’s enemies. This is the only way.
The Royal Ombiasy must, of course, abide by the wishes of the ancestors, but there are ways to ensure that certain ordeal subjects survive. Especially Andrianmihaja; the queen must not be deprived of her lover.
Only a small amount of poison, then, for some of these meals. And the Royal Ombiasy will add salt to the water that the queen’s lover will drink, to ensure that he vomits as quickly and violently as possible. Even then, the Royal Ombiasy will hide spare chicken skin on his person.
Just in case. The queen needs her loyal colonels to survive, also.
The second batch of meals, destined for the disloyal officers that the Queen wishes to purge, is prepared just as carefully. The Royal Ombiasy carries the meals in a basket across the courtyard himself. In one corner, silversmiths labour in the construction of the dead king’s casket. Quarried stone is carted past, toward the site where Radama’s mausoleum, foreign in style but with Malagasy mirrors and a west-facing door, is partly constructed.
Inside the palace, the Royal Ombiasy steps over the threshold of the throne room with his right foot. Officers kneel in three long lines before the queen. She stands, hair braided, in a sumptuous gown, but this is no betrayal; the Royal Ombiasy admires her instinct for appropriating the status symbols of the aggressors while still wearing, in their red silk pouch, the carved-figure royal talismans Fataka and Manjakatsir, along with crocodile teeth, falcon feathers and inherited cloth-patterns of power.
As he draws closer, he sees a drawing on the desk beside her, a crown she has ordered to be made in France of Malagasy-mined gold. It mingles the arches and glittering stones of foreign monarchs with the seven spearheads of the traditional Malagasy warrior. The falcon of Merina royalty will replace the Christian cross and the interior cap will be red velvet in place of purple.
The Royal Ombiasy smiles to himself as he sets the basket beside the drawing. The daughter of his dreams will reign well.
Andrianmihaja does not sweat or tremble like the soldiers kneeling to either side of him. It is not because the queen has guaranteed his safety. She has not. She is innocent of the Royal Ombiasy’s manipulations and must remain so, lest the ancestors choose to punish her. Andrianmihaja must be afraid. Many died yesterday. Many will die today.
But not him. The ancestors cannot object to the Royal Ombiasy’s actions, otherwise they would have warned him in a dream.
“Begin,” Ranavalona instructs tonelessly, and he wishes to carry out her order but is abruptly petrified by his last thought. What if the ancestors have warned him in a dream? What if the burning sampy is a consequence of his actions today?
What if they are a consequence of his previous actions?
For the tanguena fruit in the stone hut are not fresh from his most recent forest-wander. They have been there ever since the Royal Ombiasy poisoned Radama.
Radama would not die, the Ombiasy had reasoned to himself, unless it was the will of the ancestors. But Radama had died, and now that his spirit had found its way to the twelve hills, and not to heaven as the King had come to believe, would he not now be pleased by the Ombiasy’s actions?
“Manjaka, as you wish,” he says, dry-mouthed.
He takes a poisoned meal to Andrianmihaja and looks directly into the young man’s calm, brown eyes. He whispers the ritual words to invoke the ancestors. They surround him. Radama’s spirit is here, with them.
Are you not pleased? His silent question can only be answered by the rise or fall of the queen he would die to protect.
~VI. August, 1829~
The pregnancy is difficult. I am forty-one years old.
There are false labour pains. The feeling of boulders grinding my bones from the inside. On one occasion, a few months earlier, there was blood. Andrianmihaja, my Prime Minister, personal adviser and Commander in Chief of my army, swallowed it to keep it from the earth. Royal blood must never be spilled.
Lately, I have sent Andrianmihaja away. Intercourse is painful. My head pounds and my feet swell. Perhaps I will die in the birthing.
What price, a son? asks the imagined voice of my dead first husband. By our laws, any child born to a widow after the husband’s death is the legitimate offspring of the dead man, with full rights of inheritance. The ancestors are pleased with my suspension of the treaty with the British and the profits that flow with the resumption of trade in slaves. That is why they have given me a child at last.
“The ancestors,” I say, “will make sure you are born safe, my son.”
I can hardly hear myself with the racket that Rainiharo and his two brothers are making beyond the ornate, three-sided screen that shields me from their eyes. My maids, jewelled, unclothed and obedient, entertain the three young men. Kitchen slaves bring a constant supply of food and drink.
Rainiharo is a prince, but more importantly, he is the guardian of the most powerful royal sampy, Rakelimalaza, bringer of victories. His branch of the family must be brought closer. I must control the three brothers if I am to keep winning battles.
Rainiharo’s face, startling through the steam, grins like a demon.
“Great Glory, will you not drink with us?”
He brandishes a bottle of rum.
“How dare you approach me?”
“Your women say you have been in pain. Try this. It will help.”
“I am taking medicines prescribed by my Royal Ombiasy,” I snap, but my abdomen chooses that moment to ripple. Pain lances through my pelvis.
“Manjaka, I beg you to believe me.”
“That foul drink helped my husband into his tomb! I will not touch it!”
“I have seen your death,” Rainiharo says drunkenly. “My sampy has shown it to me. You are an old woman. Much older than you are now.”
I feel the blood drain from my face.
“Why have you never told this to me before?”
“The time was not right. All must be as the great talisman wills. Take the bottle, Manjaka.”
I take it. The fire-throated drinking of it is too much, at first; I rise from the bath and stand, desperate for cooling, under the exquisite marquetry and painted ceilings of the main palace hall where my waist-deep, honey-smelling tun has been filled with water and scented oils.
The pains continue. I bite my cheek to keep from crying out. I take another swallow of the liquor, and another.
After a while, the pains stop. My head feels cotton-stuffed. I sink languidly back into the water. The frescoes are now blurred, bright colours, like spirits dancing at the turning of the dead, and the booming laughter of Rainiharo and his brothers, mingled with the giggles and groans of the fornicating women, seems the divine music of life, fit music for my son, who turns within me as if dancing with the spirits, too.
“Are you well, Great Glory?” Rainiharo’s steam-wreathed face begs to know.
“I am well, Rainiharo,” I say. “You are wise.”
“You should make me your personal adviser.”
“Andrianmihaja is my personal adviser.”
“Is he, still? Forgive me, Great Glory, but I assumed that when he exchanged your bed for the bed of the girl-child, the young black princess, you must simply be taking your time deciding on the best way to have him killed.”
I can’t think. I can’t breathe.
“What did you say?” I shriek.
Rainiharo repeats himself. He is too stupid to be afraid. No, not stupid. He knows I cannot kill him, for the sake of the sampy that his bloodline holds.
Andrianmihaja. My beautiful, loyal, Andrianmihaja. I told him not to come to me.
“Could he not wait?” I scream. “Could he not wait until the child was born? Not even so long as that? And why, why did it have to be the only child of Radama’s that I let live?”
“He is repositioning.” Rainiharo answers promptly, though I had not been speaking to him. “Great Glory, you severed our ties with Britain. Commander Andrianmihaja realigns himself with the Christians.”
“He is loyal to me.”
“He is a traitor. Let him take the tanguena test again.”
“No!” I sit up too suddenly. My head spins. Flashes of Andrianmihaja’s hunched body, wracked with regurgitation, the bile on his lips and the fear in his eyes, return to me. I cannot stand to watch that again. I grip the edges of the tub to keep from drowning. Rainiharo’s face is splashed with water but he does not blink. He stares at my breasts in the flickering light of low-burning torches. “Andrianmihaja went through the ordeal when I was raised, barely a year past.”
And he is the father of my son, I do not say. Radama is the true, spiritual father of my unborn child. The giver of the seed is irrelevant.
“If Commander Andrianmihaja is innocent,” Rainiharo insists, “he cannot be harmed by taking the test again. It need not be public. Send for the Royal Ombiasy right now. Send one of these slave girls for Andrianmihaja. I know where he is. He is in the girl-child’s quarters, spreading her legs as we speak.”
Pain and rage bring me staggering to my feet.
“He is not!”
“If he is, Great Glory, will you put him on trial?”
“Yes,” I say. “But he will not be there. He will be in his room, here in the palace. Send a slave there, first, to fetch him!”
Maids rush behind the screen to dry my flushed, bulging body and wrap me in red silk. The screens are removed. Rainiharo nods to his brothers. One of the women is already leaving. Dimly, I wonder why they abruptly seem less drunk than before, but I am distracted by a whirlwind of maids picking up and replacing their discarded clothes, the clink of empty bottles and the whisking away of bone-covered trays.
All too soon, the slave girl returns, flattening herself in obeisance.
“The Commander is not in his room, Great Glory.”
It cannot be. It cannot be. First one husband, then the next.
“Leave the palace,” Rainiharo tells the slave. He gives her directions to Radama’s old harem, where the wives that were spared by my mercy still reside. “I will send two soldiers with you, as witnesses.”
Everything happens so quickly. I gasp for air. I thrust women away from me. Their faces do not come into focus.
When the slave girl and the soldiers return, they speak to Rainiharo and not to me.
“My prince,” the kneeling soldier says, leaning on his serrated spear, his musket slung over his back and his feet bare beneath his lamba, “I have spoken with Commander Andrianmihaja. After sending the girl-child back to her mother, I informed the commander that the queen wished him to be subjected to the tanguena trial to prove his innocence of treason.”
“And his reply?”
“My prince, the commander bade me tell the Queen that he will not subject himself to the trial again. She must take his word that he is loyal to her, or she must condemn him to death.”
My body sways as though Andrianmihaja has dealt me a physical blow. Who is he, to force my hand? Who is he, to say “must” to the Great Glory, the Queen of Madagascar, Ranavalona Manjaka?
He is no better than Radama. A Christian-loving traitor. A man who used me to gain power but does not love me. Not any more.
He will die while she still smells of his sweat and semen.
~VII. October 1830~
The Royal Weaver was born on a Wednesday.
It is the brown day, the eldest of all days. A day for women and a day for evil.
Her voice joins the joyous voices of the others, singing the songs of homage by the river, under the sky, as they wrap the washed bones of Andrianmihaja in his new burial shroud. The polluting wet matter has leached away, leaving the sacred dry matter behind. It is over a year since he received a silver spear through his bravely bared throat.
Though the famadihana is ordinarily raucous and unrestrained, the women are wary, owing to the circumstances surrounding the former army commander’s execution. Those that came in the morning, relatives of the deceased, danced with the shrouded remains, and passed them from hand to hand, but only where the agents of the queen would not see.
“Your son is well, Andrianmihaja,” murmurs the Royal Weaver, who was the commander’s great-aunt while he lived. “He is almost walking. He has a great and wondrous vintana. You know why he could not come today.”
The queen and her son must not ever be polluted by the presence of death. They are not permitted to weep in public, to tear their hair or mourn in any way. They do not even look in the direction of Radama’s mausoleum when they cross the courtyard. The dead king in his silver coffin has not and will not be exhumed. Royalty is the exception to the annual turning of the dead.
These bones, however, the pure and insoluble parts of Andrianmihaja which reflect his pure spirit, have been feted through villages during the day. They have enjoyed a tour of the new fields, new additions to the zebu herds, and new firearms produced by the queen’s White Slave. Warriors triumphantly told to them the tale of the French defeat at Foule Point, where the foreigners, crippled by chain shot from Merina cannons at the fort, tried to escape back to their ships but were overrun and cut down. French heads now rot on spears set into the sand along the beach.
The cloud-screened sun sinks low in the sky. Now, it is time for the bones to be re-wrapped and returned to the family tomb at Namehana. The Royal Weaver has made for her great-nephew a great many fresh silk, weft-patterned burial shrouds, each with the prestigious family geometry repeated around the edges. For days, the heddle was lashed to the rafters of the royal weaving hut while the Royal Weaver bent her aching back over the loom, separating the two sets of warp elements with a wooden stick from a baobab tree selected for its auspicious qualities by the Royal Ombiasy.
Rebelliously, the Royal Weaver incorporated royal red and silver thread in the innermost shroud. The others grow restless and uneasy when she produces it, but the Royal Weaver knows she can trust them to say nothing. Before the Merina came to dominate all the tribes of Madagascar, the Royal Weaver and all her family in the east had a right to these colours.
The bones are wrapped again, and again. The final, outer silk shroud is white as the clouds which obscure the white sun; white as the clothes of the crowd of mourners that surround the bier, waiting to take Andrianmihaja home. The women’s hair is loose. The men’s feet are white with dust from the thin trail that winds through the grassy hills.
The Royal Weaver cradles the package of bones. She remembers Andrianmihaja as a swaddled child. She kisses him, now, as she did then, with the same affection, and places him on the bier, joining the procession back to the excavated earth tomb, where he must be reinterred and the tomb sealed before daylight fades.
Birds twitter. Grasses sigh in the wind. The Royal Weaver sighs with them. She is the last to leave. She will close the west-facing door in the hillside.
The others are already distant, returning to the river to wash their feet in running water to cleanse themselves of the pollution of death, when the Royal Weaver notices the shadow by the east side of the hill.
“Who is there?” she calls sharply. The white-wrapped figure has the edge of its worn, rafia-palm lamba pulled up and over the face. Only the wet, weepy eyes are showing.
“There is daylight, still,” croaks a voice that is unmistakeably the queen’s. “Please, let me enter.”
The Royal Weaver falls to her knees, stricken. She can summon no protest as the disguised, amorphous shape of Ranavalona enters the hill, reaches for Andrianmihaja’s bundled bones and whispers something to them in the gloom.
There is daylight, still, but now the very life and light of the Sacred Red Island has been mingled with the darkness of the dead. Who can say what will happen?
On her old knees with her head bent, the Royal Weaver senses blood and pain running into the molten gold of the Great Glory’s royal vintana as the queen walks in stiff silence away from the tomb.
~VIII~
What do I see,
Queen of the Merina
with a god’s eyes?
With a god’s eyes?
I have done as you bade
my late husband to do,
O Andrianampoinimerina,
my father.
The borders of my rice field
are the seas.
Yet, the French come!
The French desire my rice field!
French oak slices red coral waters!
Let them come
in their winged villain’s ships.
I have eaten their god.
I was born on a Friday.
“Vintana” by Thoraiya Dyer