“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 once before, 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.”