Robert Silverberg: Lion Time in Timbuctoo

“I saw that man in the marketplace this afternoon,” Selima said. “He was wearing a purple and yellow robe then. Down at the far side, beyond the dancers, for just a moment. He was looking at us. I thought he was magnificent, somebody of great importance. And he is.”

A little indignantly Michael said, “These blacks all look alike to me. How can you be sure that’s the one you saw?”

“Because I’m sure. Do all Turks look alike to you too?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“All English look alike to us, you know. We can just about distinguish between the red-haired ones and the yellow-haired ones. And that’s as far as it goes.”

“You aren’t serious, Selima.”

“No. No, I’m not. I actually can tell one of you from another most of the time. At least I can tell the handsome ones from the ugly ones.”

Michael flushed violently, so that his already sunburned face turned flaming scarlet and emanated great waves of heat. Everyone had been telling him how handsome he was since his boyhood. It was as if there was nothing to him at all except regularly formed features and pale flawless skin and long athletic limbs. The notion made him profoundly uncomfortable.

She laughed. “You should cover your face when you’re out in the sun. You’re starting to get cooked. Does it hurt very much?”

“Not at all. Can I get you a drink?”

“You know that alcohol is forbidden to—”

“The other kind, I mean. The green soda. It’s very good, actually. Boy! Boy!”

“I’d rather have the nut thing,” she said. She stretched forth one hand—her hand was very small, and the fingers were pale and perfect—and made the tiniest of languid gestures. Two of the black men with trays came toward her at once, and, laughing prettily, she scooped a couple of the nut-cakes from the nearer of the trays. She handed one to Michael, who fumbled it and let it fall. Calmly she gave him the other. He looked at it as though she had handed him an asp.

“Are you afraid I’ve arranged to have you poisoned?” she asked. “Go on. Eat it! It’s good! Oh, you’re so absurd, Michael! But I do like you.”

“We aren’t supposed to like each other, you know,” he said bleakly.

“I know that. We’re enemies, aren’t we?”

“Not any more, actually. Not officially.”

“Yes, I know. The Empire recognized English independence a good many years ago.”

The way she said it, it was like a slap. Michael’s reddened cheeks blazed fiercely.

In anguish he crammed the nut-cake into his mouth with both hands.

She went on, “I can remember the time when I was a girl and King Richard came to Istanbul to sign the treaty with the Sultan. There was a parade.”

“Yes. Yes. A great occasion.”

“But there’s still bad blood between the Empire and England. We haven’t forgiven you for some of the things you did to our people in your country in Sultan Abdul’s time, when we were evacuating.”

“ You haven’t forgiven us— ?”

“When you burned the bazaar. When you bombed that mosque. The broken shopwindows. We were going away voluntarily, you know. You were much more violent toward us than you had any right to be.”

“You speak very directly, don’t you?”

“There were atrocities. I studied them in school.”

“And when you people conquered us in l490? Were you gentle then?” For a moment Michael’s eyes were hot with fury, the easily triggered anger of the good Englishman for the bestial Turk. Appalled, he tried to stem the rising surge of patriotic fervor before it ruined everything. He signalled frantically to one of the tray-wielders, as though another round of nut-cakes might serve to get the conversation into a less disagreeable track. “But never mind all that, Selima. We mustn’t be quarreling over ancient history like this.” Somehow he mastered himself, swallowing, breathing deeply, managing an earnest smile. “You say you like me.”

“Yes. And you like me. I can tell.”

“Is that all right?”

“Of course it is, silly. Although I shouldn’t allow it. We don’t even think of you English as completely civilized.” Her eyes glowed. He began to tremble, and tried to conceal it from her. She was playing with him, he knew, playing a game whose rules she herself had defined and would not share with him. “Are you a Christian?” she asked.

“You know I am.”

“Yes, you must be. You used the Christian date for the year of the conquest of England. But your ancestors were Moslem, right?”

“Outwardly, during the time of the occupation. Most of us were. But for all those centuries we secretly continued to maintain our faith in—” She was definitely going to get him going again. Already his head was beginning to pound. Her beauty was unnerving enough; but this roguishness was more than he could take. He wondered how old she was. Eighteen? Nineteen? No more than that, surely. Very likely she had a fiancee back in Istanbul, some swarthy mustachioed fez-wearing Ottoman princeling, with whom she indulged in unimaginable Oriental perversions and to whom she confessed every little flirtation she undertook while traveling with her father. It was humiliating to think of becoming an item of gossip in some perfumed boudoir on the banks of the Bosporus. A sigh escaped him. She gave him a startled look, as though he had mooed at her. Perhaps he had. Desperately he sought for something, anything, that would rescue him from this increasingly tortured moment of impossible intimacy; and, looking across the room, he was astounded to find his eyes suddenly locked on those of the heir apparent to the throne of Songhay. “Ah, there he is,” Michael said in vast relief. “The prince has arrived.”

“Which one? Where?”

“The slender man. The red velvet tunic.”

“Oh. Oh, yes. Him . I saw him in the marketplace too, with Ali Pasha. Now I understand. They came to check us out before we knew who they were.” Selima smiled disingenuously. “He’s very attractive, isn’t he? Rather like an Arab, I’d say. And not nearly as dissolute-looking as I was led to expect. Is it all right if I go over and say hello to him? Or should I wait for a proper diplomatic introduction? I’ll ask my father, I think. Do you see him? Oh, yes, there he is over there, talking to Prince Itzcoatl—” She began to move away without a backward look.

Michael felt a sword probing in his vitals.

“Boy!” he called, and one of the blacks turned to him with a somber grin. “Some of that wine, if you please!”

On the far side of the room Little Father smiled and signalled for a drink also—not the miserable palm wine, which he abhorred and which as a good Moslem he should abjure anyway, but the clear fiery brandy that the caravans brought him from Tunis, and which to an outsider’s eyes would appear to be mere water. His personal cupbearer, who served no one else in the room, poured until he nodded, and slipped back into the shadows to await the prince’s next call.

In the first moments of his presence at the reception Little Father had taken in the entire scene, sorting and analyzing and comprehending. The Turkish ambassador’s daughter was even more beautiful than Ali Pasha had led him to think, and there was an agreeable slyness about her that Little Father was able to detect even at a distance. Lust awoke in him at once and he allowed himself a little smile as he savored its familiar throbbing along the insides of his thighs. The Turkish girl was very fine. The tall fair-haired young man, probably some sort of subsidiary English official, was obviously and stupidly in love with her. He should be advised to keep out of the sun. The Aztec prince, all done up in feathers and gold, was arrogant and brutal and smart, as Aztecs usually were. The Turk, the girl’s father, looked soft and effete and decadent, which he probably found to be a useful pose. The older Englishman, the little one with the red hair who most likely was the official envoy, seemed tough and dangerous. And over there was another one who hadn’t been at the marketplace to see the dancing, the Russian, no doubt, a big man, strong and haughty, flat face and flat sea-green eyes and a dense little black beard through which a glint of gold teeth occasionally showed. He too seemed dangerous, physically dangerous, a man who might pick things up and smash them for amusement, but in him all the danger was on the outside, and with the little Englishman it was the other way around. Little Father wondered how much trouble these people would manage to create for him before the funeral was over and done with. It was every nation’s ambition to create trouble in the empires of Africa, after all: there was too much cheap labor here, too much in the way of raw materials, for the pale jealous folk of the overseas lands to ignore, and they were forever dreaming dreams of conquest.