The King of Masks

The rule of the ceremony of the Great Face was simple: put your head through the opening of a great wooden mask, pull the most frightening face, and win the title of King of Masks.

The festival had definitively buried Madi's story. The whole hall crowded around the giant mask. One by one, heads appeared: puffed cheeks, twisted eyes, mouths stretched to the ears.

At every grimace, the crowd howled with laughter.

— Stronger! More frightening!

Then a head appeared, and the game stopped dead.

An eye buried under a dented brow. A crooked mouth. A whole face in upheaval, as if crumpled by a giant hand.

The effect was immediate: a cry, then an immense laugh, then thunder.

— That one! The King of Masks! Chosen! Chosen!

They laughed all the harder when they understood: that face was not playing.

It was his face.

— It's Soro!

Few people knew his voice, but all Kandara knew his name: Soro, the one who struck the great drums of the House of the Ancestors, up there behind the walls, and who was almost never seen in daylight.

They pulled him from the mask, hoisted him onto a makeshift throne, set a crown of woven straw on his head and a ceremonial cloak far too large for his deformed shoulders.

Soro let them.

He now towered over the whole hall. From up there, he looked out at that sea of laughing faces turned toward him. Was he proud? Was he wounded? Both, perhaps. His marked face let nothing be read, and the years of thundering drums had long ago damaged his ears.

There were thousands of them looking at him.

Nobody tried to understand what he felt.

They lifted him onto a litter, and the procession of the King of Masks set off to parade through the streets of Kandara, to the beat of every drum in the city.

The crowd screamed with joy.

And while Kandara laughed, far away, on the still-empty great square, another destiny was approaching.