“You see?” Ali Pasha asked. “The life dance. They bring the energy down from the skies to fill your father’s veins.”
There was tremendous energy in it, all right. The dancers pounded the sandy earth with their bare feet, they clapped their hands, they shouted quick sharp punctuations of wordless sound, they made butting gestures with their outflung elbows, they shook their heads convulsively and sent rivers of sweat flying through the air. The heat seemed to mean nothing to them. Their skins gleamed. Their eyes were bright as new coins. They made rhythmic grunting noises, oom oom oom, and the whole city seemed to shake beneath their tread.
To Little Father it looked more like the death dance than the dance of life. There was the frenzied stomp of mourning about it. But he was no expert on these things. The people had all sorts of beliefs that were mysteries to him, and which he hoped would melt away like snowflakes during his coming reign. Did they still put pressure on Allah to bring the rains by staking small children out in the blazing sun for days at a time outside the tombs of saints? Did they still practice alchemy on one another, turning wrapping paper into bank notes by means of spells? Did they continue to fret about vampires and djinns? It was all very embarrassing. Songhay was a modern state; and yet there was all this medieval nonsense still going on. Very likely the old Emir had liked it that way. But soon things would change.
The close formation of the dancers opened abruptly, and to his horror Little Father saw a group of foreigners standing in a little knot at the far side of the marketplace. He had only a glimpse of them; then the dance closed again and the foreigners were blocked from view. He touched Ali Pasha’s arm.
“Did you see them?”
“Oh, yes. Yes!”
“Who are they, do you think?”
The vizier stared off intently toward the other side of the marketplace, as though his eyes were capable of seeing through the knot of dancers.
“Embassy people, Little Father. Some Mexicans, I believe, and perhaps the Turks. And those fair-haired people must be the English.”
Here to gape at the quaint tribal dances, enjoying the fine barbaric show in the extravagant alien heat.
“You said they were coming by barge. How’d they get here so fast?”
Ali Pasha shook his head.
“They must have taken the motorboat instead, I suppose.”
“I can’t receive them here, like this. I never would have come here if I had known that they’d be here.”
“Of course not, Little Father.”
“You should have told me!”
“I had no way of knowing,” said Ali Pasha, and for once he sounded sincere, even distressed. “There will be punishments for this. But come, Little Father. Come: to your palace. As you say, they ought not find you here this way, without a retinue, without your regalia. This evening you can receive them properly.”
Very likely the newly arrived diplomats at the upper end of the marketplace had no idea that they had been for a few moments in the presence of the heir to the throne, the future Emir of Songhay, one of the six or seven most powerful men in Africa. If they had noticed anyone at all across the way, they would simply have seen a slender, supple, just-barely-still-youngish man with Moorish features, wearing a simple white robe and a flat red skullcap, standing beside a tall, powerfully built black man clad in an ornately brocaded robe of purple and yellow. The black man might have seemed more important to them in the Timbuctoo scheme of things than the Moorish-looking one, though they would have been wrong about that.
But probably they hadn’t been looking toward Little Father and Ali Pasha at all. Their attention was on the dancers. That was why they had halted here, en route from the river landing to their various embassies.
“How tireless they are!” Prince Itzcoatl said. The Mexican envoy, King Moctezuma’s brother. “Why don’t their bones melt in this heat?” He was a compact copper-colored man decked out grandly in an Aztec feather cape, golden anklets and wristlets, a gold headband studded with brilliant feathers, golden ear-plugs and nose-plugs. “You’d think they were glad their king is dying, seeing them jump around like that.”
“Perhaps they are,” observed the Turk, Ismet Akif.
He laughed in a mild, sad way. Everything about him seemed to be like that, mild and sad: his droopy-lidded melancholic eyes, his fleshy downcurved lips, his sloping shoulders, even the curiously stodgy and inappropriate European-style clothes that he had chosen to wear in this impossible climate, the dark heavy woolen suit, the narrow gray necktie. But wide cheekbones and a broad, authoritative forehead indicated his true strength to those with the ability to see such things. He too was of royal blood, Sultan Osman’s third son. There was something about him that managed to be taut and slack both at once, no easy task. His posture, his expression, the tone of his voice, all conveyed the anomalous sense of self that came from being the official delegate of a vast empire which—as all the world knew—had passed the peak of its greatness some time back and was launched on a long irreversible decline. To the diminutive Englishman at his side he said, “How does it seem to you, Sir Anthony? Are they grieving or celebrating?”
Everyone in the group understood the great cost of the compliment Ismet Akif was paying by amiably addressing his question to the English ambassador, just as if they were equals. It was high courtesy: it was grace in defeat.
Turkey still ruled a domain spanning thousands of miles. England was an insignificant island kingdom. Worse yet, England had been a Turkish province from medieval times onward, until only sixty years before. The exasperated English, weary of hundreds of years of speaking Turkish and bowing to Mecca, finally had chased out their Ottoman masters in the first year of what by English reckoning was the twentieth century, thus becoming the first of all the European peoples to regain their independence. There were no Spaniards here today, no Italians, no Portuguese, and no reason why there should be, for their countries all still were Turkish provinces. Perhaps envoys from those lands would show up later to pay homage to the dead Emir, if only to make some pathetic display of tattered sovereignty; but it would not matter to anyone else, one way or the other. The English, though, were beginning once again to make their way in the world, a little tentatively but nevertheless visibly. And so Ismet Akif had had to accommodate himself to the presence of an English diplomat on the slow journey upriver from the coast to the Songhay capital, and everyone agreed he had managed it very well.
Sir Anthony said, “Both celebrating and grieving, I’d imagine.” He was a precise, fastidious little man with icy blue eyes, an angular bony face, a tight cap of red curls beginning to shade now into gray. “The king is dead, long live the king—that sort of thing.”
“Almost dead,” Prince Itzcoatl reminded him.
“Quite. Terribly awkward, our getting here before the fact. Or are we here before the fact?” Sir Anthony glanced toward his young chargé d’affaires. “Have you heard anything, Michael? Is the old Emir still alive, do you know?”
Michael was long-legged, earnest, milky-skinned, very fair. In the merciless Timbuctoo sunlight his golden hair seemed almost white. The first blush of what was likely to be a very bad sunburn was spreading over his cheeks and forehead. He was twenty-four and this was his first notable diplomatic journey.
He indicated the flagpole at the eastern end of the plaza, where the black and red Songhay flag hung like a dead thing high overhead.
“They’d have lowered the flag if he’d died, Sir Anthony.”
“Quite. Quite. They do that sort of thing here, do they?”
“I’d rather expect so, sir.”
“And then what? The whole town plunged into mourning? Drums, chanting? The new Emir paraded in the streets? Everyone would head for the mosques, I suppose.” Sir Anthony glanced at Ismet Akif. “We would too, eh? Well, I could stand to go into a mosque one more time, I suppose.”
After the Conquest, when London had become New Istanbul, the worship of Allah had been imposed by law. Westmin
ster Abbey had been turned into a mosque, and the high pashas of the occupation forces were buried in it alongside the Plantagenet kings. Later the Turks had built the great golden-domed Mosque of Ali on the Strand, opposite the Grand Palace of Sultan Mahmud. To this day perhaps half the English still embraced Islam, out of force of habit if nothing else, and Turkish was still heard in the streets nearly as much as English. The conquerors had had five hundred years to put their mark on England, and that could not be undone overnight. But Christianity was fashionable again among the English well-to-do, and had never really been relinquished by the poor, who had kept their underground chapels through the worst of the Islamic persecutions. And it was obligatory for the members of the governing class.
“It would have been better for us all,” said Ismet Akif gravely, “if we had not had to set out so early that we would arrive here before the Emir’s death. But of course the distances are so great, and travel is so very slow—”
“And the situation so explosive,” Prince Itzcoatl said.
Unexpectedly Ismet Akif’s bright-eyed daughter Selima, who was soft-spoken and delicate-looking and was not thought to be particularly forward, said, “Are you talking about the possibility that King Suleiyman of Mali might send an invasion force into Songhay when the old man finally dies?”
Everyone swung about to look at her. Someone gasped and someone else choked back shocked laughter. She was extremely young and of course she was female, but even so the remark was exceedingly tactless, exceedingly embarrassing. The girl had not come to Songhay in any official capacity, merely as her father’s traveling companion, for he was a widower. The whole trip was purely an adventure for her. All the same, a diplomat’s child should have had more sense. Ismet Akif turned his eyes inward and looked as though he would like to sink into the earth. But Selima’s dark eyes glittered with something very much like mischief. She seemed to be enjoying herself. She stood her ground.
“No,” she said. “We can’t pretend it isn’t likely. There’s Mali, right next door, controlling the coast. It stands to reason that they’d like to have the inland territory too, and take total control of West African trade. King Suleiyman could argue that Songhay would be better off as part of Mali than it is this way, a landlocked country.”
“My dear—”
“And the prince,” she went on imperturbably, “is supposed to be just an idler, isn’t he, a silly dissolute playboy who’s spent so many years waiting around to become Emir that he’s gone completely to ruin. Letting him take the throne would be a mistake for everybody. So this is the best possible time for Mali to move in and consolidate the two countries. You all see that. That’s why we’re here, aren’t we, to stare the Malians down and keep them from trying it? Because they’d be too strong for the other powers’ comfort if they got together with the Songhayans. And it’s all too likely to happen. After all, Mali and Songhay have been consolidated before.”
“Hundreds of years ago,” said Michael gently. He gave her a great soft blue-eyed stare of admiration and despair. “The principle that the separation of Mali and Songhay is desirable and necessary has been understood internationally since—”
“Please,” Ismet Akif said. “This is an unfortunate discussion. My dear, we ought not indulge in such speculations in a place of this sort, or anywhere else, let me say. Perhaps it’s time to continue on to our lodgings, do you not all agree?”
“A good idea. The dancing is becoming a little repetitious,” Prince Itzcoatl said.
“And the heat—” Sir Anthony said. “This unthinkable diabolical heat—”
They looked at each other. They shook their heads, and exchanged small smiles.
Prince Itzcoatl said quietly to Sir Anthony, “An unfortunate discussion, yes.”
“Very unfortunate.”
Then they all moved on, in groups of two and three, their porters trailing a short distance behind bowed under the great mounds of luggage. Michael stood for a moment or two peering after the retreating form of Selima Akif in an agony of longing and chagrin. Her movements seemed magical. They were as subtle as Oriental music: an exquisite semitonal slither, an enchanting harmonious twang.
The love he felt for her had surprised and mortified him when it had first blossomed on the riverboat as it came interminably up the Niger from the coast, and here in his first hour in Timbuctoo he felt it almost as a crucifixion. There was no worse damage he could do to himself than to fall in love with a Turk. For an Englishman it was virtual treason. His diplomatic career would be ruined before it had barely begun. He would be laughed out of court. He might just as well convert to Islam, paint his face brown, and undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca. And live thereafter as an anchorite in some desert cave, imploring the favor of the Prophet.
“Michael?” Sir Anthony called. “Is anything wrong?”
“Coming, sir. Coming!”
The reception hall was long and dark and cavernous, lit only by wax tapers that emitted a smoky amber light and a peculiar odor, something like that of leaves decomposing on a forest floor. Along the walls were bowers of interwoven ostrich and peacock plumes, and great elephant tusks set on brass pedestals rose from the earthen floor like obelisks at seemingly random intervals. Songhayans who might have been servants or just as easily high officials of the court moved among the visiting diplomats bearing trays of cool lime-flavored drinks, musty wine, and little delicacies fashioned from a bittersweet red nut.
The prince, in whose name the invitations had gone forth, was nowhere in sight so far as any of the foreigners could tell. The apparent host of the reception was a burly jet-black man of regal bearing clad in a splendid tawny robe that might actually have been made of woven lionskins. He had introduced himself as Ali Pasha, vizier to the prince. The prince, he explained, was at his father’s bedside, but would be there shortly. The prince was deeply devoted to his father, said Ali Pasha; he visited the failing Emir constantly.
“I saw that man in the marketplace this afternoon,” Selima said. “He was wearing a purple and yellow robe then. Down at the far side, beyond the dancers, for just a moment. He was looking at us. I thought he was magnificent, somebody of great importance. And he is.”
A little indignantly Michael said, “These blacks all look alike to me. How can you be sure that’s the one you saw?”
“Because I’m sure. Do all Turks look alike to you too?”
“I didn’t mean—”
“All English look alike to us, you know. We can just about distinguish between the red-haired ones and the yellow-haired ones. And that’s as far as it goes.”
“You aren’t serious, Selima.”
“No. No, I’m not. I actually can tell one of you from another most of the time. At least I can tell the handsome ones from the ugly ones.”
Michael flushed violently, so that his already sunburned face turned flaming scarlet and emanated great waves of heat. Everyone had been telling him how handsome he was since his boyhood. It was as if there was nothing to him at all except regularly formed features and pale flawless skin and long athletic limbs. The notion made him profoundly uncomfortable.
She laughed. “You should cover your face when you’re out in the sun. You’re starting to get cooked. Does it hurt very much?”
“Not at all. Can I get you a drink?”
“You know that alcohol is forbidden to—”
“The other kind, I mean. The green soda. It’s very good, actually. Boy! Boy!”
“I’d rather have the nut thing,” she said. She stretched forth one hand—her hand was very small, and the fingers were pale and perfect—and made the tiniest of languid gestures. Two of the black men with trays came toward her at once, and, laughing prettily, she scooped a couple of the nut-cakes from the nearer of the trays. She handed one to Michael, who fumbled it and let it fall. Calmly she gave him the other. He looked at it as though she had handed him an asp.
“Are you afraid I’ve arranged to have you poisoned?” she asked. “Go on. Eat it
! It’s good! Oh, you’re so absurd, Michael! But I do like you.”
“We aren’t supposed to like each other, you know,” he said bleakly.
“I know that. We’re enemies, aren’t we?”
“Not any more, actually. Not officially.”
“Yes, I know. The Empire recognized the English independence a good many years ago.”
The way she said it, it was like a slap. Michael’s reddened cheeks blazed fiercely.
In anguish he crammed the nut-cake into his mouth with both hands.
She went on, “I can remember the time when I was a girl and King Richard came to Istanbul to sign the treaty with the Sultan. There was a parade.”
“Yes. Yes. A great occasion.”
“But there’s still bad blood between the Empire and England. We haven’t forgiven you for some of the things you did to our people in your country in Sultan Abdul’s time, when we were evacuating.”
“You haven’t forgiven us—?”
“When you burned the bazaar. When you bombed that mosque. The broken shopwindows. We were going away voluntarily, you know. You were much more violent toward us than you had any right to be.”
“You speak very directly, don’t you?”
“There were atrocities. I studied them in school.”
“And when you people conquered us in 1490? Were you gentle then?” For a moment Michael’s eyes were hot with fury, the easily triggered anger of the good Englishman for the bestial Turk. Appalled, he tried to stem the rising surge of patriotic fervor before it ruined everything. He signaled frantically to one of the tray-wielders, as though another round of nut-cakes might serve to get the conversation into a less disagreeable track. “But never mind all that, Selima. We mustn’t be quarreling over ancient history like this.” Somehow he mastered himself, swallowing, breathing deeply, managing an earnest smile. “You say you like me.”
We Are for the Dark - 1987–90 - The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume Seven Page 36
