Michael let the slight to his country pass unchallenged, possibly because it seemed less like a slight to him than a statement of the mere reality. He searched instead for some reason of state that would make what he had asserted seem sensible.
After a moment he said, “Mali and Songhay together would be far more powerful than either one alone. If England plays an instrumental role in delivering the throne of Songhay up to Mali, England will surely be given a preferential role by the Mansa of Songhay in future West African trade.”
Selima nodded. “Perhaps.”
“And the Russians—you know how they feel about the Ottoman Empire. Your people are closely allied with Songhay and don’t get along well with Mali. A coup d’état here would virtually eliminate Turkey as a commercial force in West Africa.”
“Very likely.”
She was so cool, so terribly calm.
“As for the Aztec role in this—” Michael shook his head. “God knows. But the Mexicans are always scheming around in things. Maybe they see some way of hurting Peru. There’s a lot of sea trade, you know, between Mali and Peru—it’s an amazingly short hop across the ocean from West Africa to Peru’s eastern provinces—and the Mexicans may believe they could divert some of that trade to themselves by winning the Mansa’s favor by helping him gain possession of—”
He faltered to a halt. Something was happening. Her expression was starting to change. Her façade of detached skepticism was visibly collapsing, slowly but irreversibly, like a brick wall undermined by a great earthquake.
“Yes. Yes, I see. There are substantial reasons for such a scheme. And so they will kill the prince,” Selima said.
“Have him killed, rather.”
“It’s the same thing! The very same thing!”
Her eyes began to glisten. She drew even further back from him and turned her head away, and he realized that she was trying to conceal tears from him. But she couldn’t hide the sobs that racked her.
He suspected that she was one who cried very rarely, if at all. Seeing her weep now in this uncontrollable way plunged him into an abyss of dejection.
She was making no attempt to hide her love of the prince from him. That was the only explanation for these tears.
“Selima—please, Selima—”
He felt useless.
He realized, also, that he had destroyed himself.
He had committed this monstrous breach of security, he saw now, purely in the hope of insinuating himself into her confidence, to bind her to him in a union that proceeded from shared possession of an immense secret. He had taken her words at face value when she had told him that the prince was nothing to her.
That had been a serious error. He had thought he was making a declaration of love; but all he had done was to reveal a state secret to England’s ancient enemy.
He waited, feeling huge and clumsy and impossibly naive.
Then, abruptly, her sobbing stopped and she looked toward him, a little puffy-eyed now, but otherwise as inscrutable as before.
“I’m not going to say anything about this to anyone.”
“What?”
“Not to him, not to my father, not to anyone.”
He was mystified. As usual.
“But—Selima—”
“I told you. The prince is nothing to me. And this is only a crazy rumor. How do I know it’s true? How do you know it’s true?”
“Sir Anthony—”
“Sir Anthony! Sir Anthony! For all I know, he’s floated this whole thing simply to ensnare my father in some enormous embarrassment. I tell my father there’s going to be an assassination and my father tells the prince, as he’d feel obliged to do. And then the prince arrests and expels the ambassadors of England and Russia and Mexico? But where’s the proof? There isn’t any. It’s all a Turkish invention, they say. A scandal. My father is sent home in disgrace. His career is shattered. Songhay breaks off diplomatic relations with the Empire. No, no, don’t you see, I can’t say a thing.”
“But the prince—”
“His stepmother hates him. If he’s idiotic enough to let her hand him a cup of something without having it tested, he deserves to be poisoned. What is that to me? He’s only a savage. Hold the parasol closer, Michael, and let’s get back to town. Oh, this heat! This unending heat! Do you think it’ll ever rain here?” Her face now showed no sign of tears at all. Wearily Michael lowered the parasol. Selima utterly baffled him. She was an exhausting person. His head was aching. For a shilling he’d be glad to resign his post and take up sheep farming somewhere in the north of England. It was getting very obvious to him and probably to everyone else that he had no serious future in the diplomatic corps.
Little Father, emerging from the tunnel that led from the Emir’s palace to his own, found Ali Pasha waiting in the little colonnaded gallery known as the Promenade of Askia Mohammed. The prince was surprised to see a string charm of braided black, red, and yellow cords dangling around the vizier’s neck. Ali Pasha had never been one for wearing grigri before; but no doubt the imminent death of the Emir was unsettling everyone, even a piece of tough leather like Ali Pasha.
The vizier offered a grand salaam. “Your royal father, may Allah embrace him, sir—”
“My royal father is still breathing, thank you. It looks now as if he’ll last until morning.” Little Father glanced around, a little wildly, peering into the courtyard of his palace. “Somehow we’ve left too much for the last minute. The lady Serene Glory is arranging for the washing of the body. It’s too late to do anything about that, but we can supply the graveclothes, at least. Get the very finest white silks; the royal burial shroud should be something out of the Thousand and One Nights; and I want rubies in the turban. Actual rubies, no damned imitations. And after that I want you to set up the procession to the Great Mosque—I’ll be one of the pallbearers, of course, and we’ll ask the Mansa of Mali to be another—he’s arrived by now, hasn’t he?—and let’s have the King of Benin as the third one, and for the fourth, well, either the Asante of Ghana or the Grand Fon of Dahomey, whichever one shows up here first. The important thing is that all four of the pallbearers should be kings, because Serene Glory wants to push her brother forward to be one, and I can’t allow that. She won’t be able to argue precedence for him if the pallbearers are all kings, when all he is is a provincial cadi. Behind the bier we’ll have the overseas ambassadors marching five abreast—put the Turk and the Russian in the front row, the Maori too, and the Aztec and the Inca on the outside edges to keep them as far apart as we can, and the order of importance after that is up to you, only be sure that little countries like England and the Teutonic States don’t wind up too close to the major powers, and that the various vassal nations like China and Korea and Ind are in the back. Now, as far as the decorations on the barge that’ll be taking my father downriver to the burial place at Gao—”
“Little Father,” the Vizier said, as the prince paused for breath, “the Turkish woman is waiting upstairs.”
Little Father gave him a startled look.
“I don’t remember asking her to come here.”
“She didn’t say you had. But she asked for an urgent audience, and I thought—” Ali Pasha favored Little Father with an obscenely knowing smile. “It seemed reasonable to admit her.”
“She knows that my father is dying, and that I’m tremendously busy?”
“I told her what was taking place, majesty,” said Ali Pasha unctuously.
“Don’t call me ‘majesty’ yet!”
“A thousand pardons, Little Father. But she is aware of the nature of the crisis, no question of that. Nevertheless, she insisted on—”
“Oh, damn. Damn! But I suppose I can give her two or three minutes. Stop smiling like that, damn you! I’ll feed you to the lions if you don’t! What do you think I am, a mountain of lechery? This is a busy moment. When I say two or three minutes, two or three minutes is what I mean.”
Selima was pacing about on the porch where she
and Little Father had spent their night of love. No filmy robes today, no seductively visible breasts bobbing about beneath, this time. She was dressed simply, in European clothes. She seemed all business.
“The Emir is in his last hours,” Little Father said. “The whole funeral has to be arranged very quickly.”
“I won’t take up much of your time, then.” Her tone was cool. There was a distinct edge on it. Perhaps he had been too brusque with her. That night on the porch had been a wonderful one, after all. She said, “I just have one question. Is there some sort of ritual at a royal funeral where you’re given a cup of wine to drink?”
“You know that the Koran doesn’t permit the drinking of—”
“Yes, yes, I know that. A cup of something, then.”
Little Father studied her carefully. “This is anthropological research? The sort of thing the golden-haired woman from England came here to do? Why does this matter to you, Selima?”
“Never mind that. It matters.”
He sighed. She seemed so gentle and retiring, until she opened her mouth.
“There’s a cup ceremony, yes. It isn’t wine or anything else alcoholic. It’s an aromatic potion, brewed from various spices and honeys and such, very disagreeably sweet, my father once told me. Drinking it symbolizes the passage of royal power from one generation to the next.”
“And who is supposed to hand you the cup?”
“May I ask why at this particularly hectic time you need to know these details?”
“Please,” she said.
There was an odd urgency in her voice.
“The former queen, the mother of the heir of the throne, is the one who hands the new Emir the cup.”
“But your mother is dead. Therefore your stepmother Serene Glory will hand it to you.”
“That’s correct.” Little Father glanced at his watch. “Selima, you don’t seem to understand. I need to finish working out the funeral arrangements and then get back to my father’s bedside before he dies. If you don’t mind—”
“There’s going to be poison in the cup.”
“This is no time for romantic fantasies.”
“It isn’t a fantasy. She’s going to slip you a cup of poison, and you won’t be able to tell that the poison is there because what you drink is so heavily spiced anyway. And when you keel over in the mosque her brother’s going to leap forward in the moment of general shock and tell everyone that he’s in charge.”
The day had been one long disorderly swirl. But suddenly now the world stood still, as though there had been an unscheduled eclipse of the sun. For a moment he had difficulty simply seeing her.
“What are you saying, Selima?”
“Do you want me to repeat it all, or is that just something you’re saying as a manner of speaking because you’re so astonished?”
He could see and think again. He examined her closely. She was unreadable, as she usually was. Now that the first shock of her bland statement was past, this all was starting to seem to him like fantastic nonsense; and yet, and yet, it certainly wasn’t beyond Serene Glory’s capabilities to have hatched such a scheme.
How, though, could the Turkish girl possibly know anything about it? How did she even know about the ritual of the cup?
“If we were in bed together right now,” he said, “and you were in my arms and right on the edge of the big moment, and I stopped moving and asked you right then and there what proof you had of this story, I’d probably believe whatever you told me. I think people tend to be honest at such moments. Even you would speak the truth. But we have no time for that now. The kingship will change hands in a few hours, and I’m exceedingly busy. I need you to cast away all of your fondness for manipulative amusements and give me straight answers.”
Her dark eyes flared. “I should simply have let them poison you.”
“Do you mean that?”
“What you just said was insufferable.”
“If I was too blunt, I ask you to forgive me. I’m under great strain today and if what you’ve told me is any sort of joke, I don’t need it. If this isn’t a joke, you damned well can’t withhold any of the details.”
“I’ve given you the details.”
“Not all. Who’d you hear all this from?”
She sighed and placed one wrist across the other.
“Michael. The tall Englishman.”
“That adolescent?”
“He’s a little on the innocent side, especially for a diplomat, yes. But I don’t think he’s as big a fool as he’s been letting himself appear lately. He heard it from Sir Anthony.”
“So this is an English plot?”
“English and Russian and Mexican.”
“All three.” Little Father digested that. “What’s the purpose of assassinating me?”
“To make Serene Glory’s brother Emir of Songhay.”
“And serve as their puppet, I suppose?”
Selima shook her head. “Serene Glory and her brother are only the ignorant instruments of their real plan. They’ll simply be brushed aside when the time comes. What the plotters are really intending to do, in the confusion following your death, is ask the Mansa of Mali to seize control of Songhay. They’ll put the support of their countries behind him.”
“Ah,” Little Father said. And after a moment, again, “Ah.”
“Mali-Songhay would favor the Czar instead of the Sultan. So the Russians like the idea. What injures the Sultan is good for the English. So they’re in on it. As for the Aztecs—”
Little Father shrugged and gestured to her to stop. Already he could taste the poison in his gut, burning through his flesh. Already he could see the green-clad troops of Mali parading in the streets of Timbuctoo and Gao, where kings of Mali had been hailed as supreme monarchs, hundreds of years ago.
“Look at me,” he said. “You swear that you’re practicing no deception, Selima?”
“I swear it by—by the things we said to each other the night we lay together.”
He considered that. Had she fallen in love with him in the midst of all her game-playing? So it might seem. Could he trust what she was saying, therefore? He believed he could. Indeed the oath she had just proposed might have more plausibility than any sort of oath she might have sworn on a Koran.
“Come here,” he said.
She approached him. Little Father swept her up against him, holding her tightly, and ran his hands down her back to her buttocks. She pressed her hips forward. He covered her mouth with his and jammed down hard, not a subtle kiss but one that would put to rest forever, if that were needed, the bit of fake anthropology he had given to her earlier, about the supposed distaste of Songhayans for the act of kissing. After a time he released her. Her eyes were a little glazed, her breasts were rising and falling swiftly.
He said, “I’m grateful for what you’ve told me. I’ll take the appropriate steps, and thank you.”
“I had to let you know. I was going just to sit back and let whatever happened happen. But then I saw I couldn’t conceal such a thing from you.”
“Of course not, Selima.”
Her look was a soft and eager one. She was ready to run off to the bedchamber with him, or so it seemed. But not now, not on this day of all days. That would be a singularly bad idea.
“On the other hand,” he said, “if it turns out that there’s no truth to any of this, that it’s all some private amusement of your own or some intricate deception being practiced on me by the Sultan for who knows what unfathomable reason, you can be quite certain that I’ll avenge myself in a remarkably vindictive way once the excitements of the funeral and the coronation are over.”
The softness vanished at once. The hatred that came into her eyes was extraordinary.
“You black bastard,” she said.
“Only partly black. There is much Moorish blood in the veins of the nobility of Songhay.” He met her seething gaze with tranquility. “In the old days we believed in absorbing those who attempt to conquer u
s. These days we still do, something that the Mansa of Mali ought to keep in mind. He’s got a fine harem, I understand.”
“Did you have to throw cold water on me like that? Everything I told you was the truth.”
“I hope and believe it is. I think there was love between us that night on the porch, and I wouldn’t like to think that you’d betray someone you love. The question, I suppose, is whether the Englishman was telling you the truth. Which still remains to be seen.” He took her hand and kissed it lightly, in the European manner. “As I said before, I’m very grateful, Selima. And hope to continue to be. If I may, now—”
She gave him one final glare and took her leave of him. Little Father walked quickly to the edge of the porch, spun about, walked quickly back. For an instant or two he stood in the doorway like his own statue. But his mind was in motion, and moving very swiftly.
He peered down the stairs to the courtyard below.
“Ali Pasha!”
The vizier came running.
“What the woman wanted to tell me,” Little Father said, “is that there is a plot against my life.”
The look that appeared on the vizier’s face was one of total shock and indignation.
“You believe her?”
“Unfortunately I think I do.”
Ali Pasha began to quiver with wrath. His broad glossy cheeks grew congested, his eyes bulged. Little Father thought the man was in danger of exploding.
“Who are the plotters, Little Father? I’ll have them rounded up within the hour.”
“The Russian ambassador, apparently. The Aztec one. And the little Englishman, Sir Anthony.”
“To the lions with them! They’ll be in the pit before night comes!”
Little Father managed an approximation of a smile.
“Surely you recall the concept of diplomatic immunity, Ali Pasha?”
“But—a conspiracy against your majesty’s life—!”
“Not yet my majesty, Ali Pasha.”
“Your pardon.” Ali Pasha struggled with confusion. “You must take steps to protect yourself, Little Father. Did she tell you what the plan is supposed to be?”
Little Father nodded. “When Serene Glory hands me the coronation cup at the funeral service, there will be poison in the drink.”
We Are for the Dark - 1987–90 - The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume Seven Page 41
