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 charge-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. Westminster 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.