Robert Silverberg - Lion Time in Timbuctoo

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, Michael: 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?”

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’etat 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 in Brazil—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 facade 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.