Robert Silverberg - Lion Time in Timbuctoo

Then the envoy from the Teutonic States said, “Is that not the prince arriving now?”

“Where?” Michael demanded in a tight-strung voice. “Where is he?”

Sir Anthony’s hand shot out to seize Michael’s wrist. He squeezed it unsparingly.

In a low tone he said, “You will cause no difficulties, young sir. Remember that you are English. Your breeding must rule your passions.”

Michael, glaring toward Little Father as the prince approached the city gate, sullenly pulled his arm free of Sir Anthony’s grasp and amazed himself by uttering a strange low growling sound, like that of a cat announcing a challenge. Unfamiliar hormones flooded the channels of his body. He could feel the individual bones of his cheeks and forehead moving apart from one another, he was aware of the tensing and coiling of muscles great and small. He wondered if he was losing his mind. Then the moment passed and he let out his breath in a long dismal exhalation.

Little Father wore flowing green pantaloons, a striped robe wide enough to cover his arms, and an intricately deployed white turban with brilliant feathers of some exotic sort jutting from it.

An entourage of eight or ten men surrounded him, carrying ironshafted lances. The prince strode forward so briskly that his bodyguard was hard pressed to keep up with him.

Michael, watching Selima out of the corner of his eye, murmured to Sir Anthony, “I’m terribly sorry, sir. But if he so much as glances at her you’ll have to restrain me.”

“If you so much as flicker a nostril I’ll have you billeted in our Siberian consulate for the rest of your career,” Sir Anthony replied, barely moving his lips as he spoke.

But Little Father had no time to flirt with Selima now. He barely acknowledged the presence of the ambassadors at all. A stiff formal nod, and then he moved on, into the midst of the group of caravan leaders. They clustered about him like a convocation of eagles. Among those sun-crisped swarthy upright chieftains the prince seemed soft, frail, overly citified, a dabbler confronting serious men.

Some ritual of greeting seemed to be going on. Little Father touched his forehead, extended his open palm, closed his hand with a snap, presented his palm again with a flourish. The desert men responded with equally stylized maneuvers.

When Little Father spoke, it was in Songhay, a sharp outpouring of liquid incomprehensibilities.

“What was that? What was that?” asked the ambassadors of one another. Turkish was the international language of diplomacy, even in Africa; the native tongues of the dark continent were mysteries to outsiders.

Sir Anthony, though, said softly, “He’s angry. He says the city’s closed on account of the Emir’s illness and the caravan was supposed to have waited at Kabara for further instructions. They seem surprised. Someone must have missed a signal.”

“You speak Songhay, sir?” Michael asked.

“I was posted in Mali for seven years,” Sir Anthony muttered. “It was before you were born, boy.”

“So I was right,” cried Manco Roca. “The caravan should never have been allowed to enter the city at all. Incompetence! Incompetence!”

“Is he telling them to leave?” Ismet Akif wanted to know.

“I can’t tell. They’re all talking at once. I think they’re saying that their camels need fodder. And he’s telling them that there’s no merchandise for them to buy, that the goods from upriver were held back because of the Emir’s illness.”

“What an awful jumble,” Selima said.

It was the first thing she had said all morning. Michael, who had been trying to pay no attention to her, looked toward her now in agitation. She was dressed chastely enough, in a red blouse and flaring black skirt, but in his inflamed mind she stood revealed suddenly nude, with the marks of Little Father’s caresses flaring like stigmata on her breasts and thighs. Michael sucked in his breath and held himself stiffly erect, trembling like a drawn bowstring. A sound midway between a sigh and a groan escaped him. Sir Anthony kicked his ankle sharply.

Some sort of negotiation appeared to be going on. Little Father gesticulated rapidly, grinned, did the open-close-open gesture with his hand again, tapped his chest and his forehead and his left elbow. The apparent leader of the traders matched him, gesture for gesture. Postures began to change. The tensions were easing.

Evidently the caravan would be admitted to the city.

Little Father was smiling, after a fashion. His forehead glistened with sweat; he seemed to have come through a difficult moment well, but he looked tired.

The trumpets sounded again. The camel-drovers regained the attention of their indifferent beasts and nudged them forward.

There was new commotion from the other side of the plaza.

“What’s this, now?” Prince Itzcoatl said.

A runner clad only in a loincloth appeared, coming from the direction of the city center, clutching a scroll. He was moving fast, loping in a strange lurching way. In the stupefying heat he seemed to be in peril of imminent collapse. But he staggered up to Little Father and put the scroll in his hand.

Little Father unrolled it quickly and scanned it. He nodded somberly and turned to his vizier, who stood just to his left. They spoke briefly in low whispers. Sir Anthony, straining, was unable to make out a word.

A single chopping gesture from Little Father was enough to halt the resumption of the caravan’s advance into the city. The prince beckoned the leaders of the traders to his side and conferred with them a moment or two, this time without ceremonial gesticulations. The desert men exchanged glances with one another. Then they barked rough commands. The whole vast caravan began to reverse itself.

Little Father’s motorcar was waiting a hundred paces away. He went to it now, and it headed cityward, emitting belching bursts of black smoke and loud intermittent thunderclaps of inadequate combustion.

The prince’s entourage, left behind in the suddenness, milled about aimlessly. The vizier, making shooing gestures, ordered them in some annoyance to follow their master on foot toward town. He himself held his place, watching the departure of the caravaneers.

“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.