“Ali Pasha!” Sir Anthony called. “Can you tell us what’s happened? Is there bad news?”
The vizier turned. He seemed radiant with self-importance.
“The Emir has taken a turn for the worse. They think he’ll be with Allah within the hour.”
“But he was supposed to be recovering,” Michael protested.
Indifferently, Ali Pasha said, “That was earlier. This is now.” The vizier seemed not to be deeply moved by the news. If anything his smugness seemed to have been enhanced by it. Perhaps it was something he had been very eager to hear. “The caravan must camp outside the city walls until after the funeral. There is nothing more to be seen here today. You should all go back to your residences.”
The ambassadors began to look around for their drivers.
Michael, who had come out here with Sir Anthony in the embassy motorcar, was disconcerted to discover that the envoy had already vanished, slipping away in the uproar without waiting for him. Well, it wasn’t an impossible walk back to town. He had walked five times as far in his night of no sleep.
“Michael?”
Selima was calling to him. He looked toward her, appalled.
“Walk with me,” she said. “I have a parasol. You can’t let yourself get any more sun on your face.”
“That’s very kind of you,” he said mechanically, while lunatic jealousy and anger roiled him within. Searing contemptuous epithets came to his lips and died there, unspoken. To him she was ineluctably soiled by the presumed embraces of that night of shame. How could she have done it? The prince had wiggled his finger at her, and she had run to him without a moment’s hesitation. Once more unwanted images surged through his mind: Selima and the prince entwined on a leopardskin rug; the prince mounting Selima in some unthinkable bestial African position of love; Selima, giggling girlishly, instructing the prince afterward in the no doubt equally depraved sexual customs of the land of the Sultan. Michael understood that he was being foolish; that Selima was free to do as she pleased in this loathsome land; that he himself had never staked any claim on her attention more significant than a few callow lovesick stares, so why should she have felt any compunctions about amusing herself with the prince if the prince offered amusement? “Very kind,” he said. She handed the parasol up to him and he took it from her with a rigid nerveless hand. They began to walk side by side in the direction of town, close together under the narrow, precisely defined shadow of the parasol beneath the unsparing eye of the noonday sun.
She said, “Poor Michael. I’ve upset you terribly, haven’t I?”
“Upset me? How have you possibly upset me?”
“You know.”
“No. No, really.”
His legs were leaden. The sun was hammering the top of his brain through the parasol, through his wide-brimmed topee, through his skull itself. He could not imagine how he would find the strength to walk all the way back to town with her.
“I’ve been very mischievous,” she said.
“Have you?”
He wished he were a million miles away.
“By visiting the prince in his palace that night.”
“Please, Selima.”
“I saw you, you know. Early in the morning, when I was leaving. You ducked out of sight, but not quite fast enough.”
“Selima—”
“I couldn’t help myself. Going there, I mean. I wanted to see what his palace looked like. I wanted to get to know him a little better. He’s very nice, you know. No, nice isn’t quite the word. He’s shrewd, and part of being shrewd is knowing how to seem nice. I don’t really think he’s nice at all. He’s quite sophisticated—quite subtle.”
She was flaying him, inch by inch. Another word out of her and he’d drop the parasol and run.
“The thing is, Michael, he enjoys pretending to be some sort of a primitive, a barbarian, a jungle prince. But it’s only a pretense. And why shouldn’t it be? These are ancient kingdoms here in Africa. This isn’t any jungle land with tigers sleeping behind every palm tree. They’ve got laws and culture, they’ve got courts, they have a university. And they’ve had centuries to develop a real aristocracy. They’re just as complicated and cunning as we are. Maybe more so. I was glad to get to know the man behind the facade, a little. He was fascinating, in his way, but—” She smiled brightly. “But I have to tell you, Michaeclass="underline" he’s not my type at all.”
That startled him, and awakened sudden new hope. Perhaps he never actually touched her, Michael told himself. Perhaps they had simply talked all night. Played little sly verbal games of oneupmanship, teasing each other, vying with each other to be sly and cruel and playful. Showing each other how complicated and cunning they could really be. Demonstrating the virtues of hundreds of years of aristocratic inbreeding. Perhaps they were too well bred to think of doing anything so commonplace as—as—
“What is your type, then?” he asked, willy-nilly.
“I prefer men who are a little shy. Men who can sometimes be foolish, even.” There was unanticipated softness in her voice, conveying a sincerity that Michael prayed was real. “I hate the kind who are always calculating, calculating, calculating. There’s something very appealing to me about English men, I have to tell you, precisely because they don’t seem so dark and devious inside—not that I’ve met very many of them before this trip, you understand, but—oh, Michael, Michael, you’re terribly angry with me, I know, but you shouldn’t be! What happened between me and the prince was nothing. Nothing! And now that he’ll be preoccupied with the funeral, perhaps there’ll be a chance for you and me to get to know each other a little better—to slip off, for a day, let’s say, while all the others are busy with the pomp and circumstance—”
She gave him a melting look. He thought for one astounded moment that she actually might mean what she was telling him.
“They’re going to assassinate him,” he suddenly heard his own voice saying, “right at the funeral.”
“What?”
“It’s all set up.” The words came rolling from him spontaneously, unstoppably, like the flow of a river. “His stepmother, the old king’s young wife—she’s going to slip him a cup of poisoned wine, or something, during one of the funeral rituals. What she wants is to make her stupid brother king in the prince’s place, and rule the country as the power behind the throne.”
Selima made a little gasping sound and stepped away from him, out from under the shelter of the parasol. She stood staring at him as though he had been transformed in the last moment or two into a hippopotamus, or a rock, or a tree.
It took her a little while to find her voice.
“Are you serious? How do you know?”
“Sir Anthony told me.”
“Sir Anthony?”
“He’s behind it. He and the Russian and Prince Itzcoatl. Once the prince is out of the way, they’re going to invite the King of Mali to step in and take over.”
Her gaze grew very hard. Her silence was inscrutable, painfully so.
Then, totally regaining her composure with what must have been an extraordinary act of inner discipline, she said, “I think this is all very unlikely.”
She might have been responding to a statement that snow would soon begin falling in the streets of Timbuctoo.
“You think so?”
“Why should Sir Anthony support this assassination? England has nothing to gain from destabilizing West Africa. England is a minor power still struggling to establish its plausibility in the world as an independent state. Why should it risk angering a powerful African empire like Songhay by meddling in its internal affairs?”