Beyond the Gate of Worlds, Page 2

  The dying king lay swaddled, despite the great heat, in a tangle of brilliant blankets of scarlet and turquoise and lemon-colored silk on a rumpled divan to Little Father’s left. He was barely visible, a pale sweaty wizened face and nothing more, amid the rumpled bedclothes. To the right was the royal roof-garden, a mysterious collection of fragrant exotic trees and shrubs planted in huge square porcelain vessels from Japan, another gift of the bountiful Czar. The dark earth that filled those blue-and-white tubs had been carried in panniers by donkeys from the banks of the Niger, and the plants were watered every evening at sunset by prisoners, who had to haul great leather sacks of immense weight to this place and were forbidden by the palace guards to stumble or complain. Between the garden and the divan was the royal viewing-pavilion, a low structure of rare satin-smooth woods upon which the Emir in better days would sit for hours, staring out at the barren sun-hammered sandy plain, the pale tormented sky, the occasional wandering camel or hyena, the gnarled scrubby bush that marked the path of the river, six or seven miles away. The cowrie-studded ebony scepter of high office was lying abandoned on the floor of the pavilion, as though nothing more than a cast-off toy.

  Four curious figures stood now at the foot of the Emir’s divan. One was the Tijani, a member of the city’s chief fraternity of religious laymen. He was a man of marked Arab features, dressed in a long white robe over droopy yellow pantaloons, a red turban, a dozen or so strings of amber beads. Probably he was a well-to-do merchant or shopkeeper in daily life. He was wholly absorbed in his orisons, rocking back and forth in place, crooning indefatigably to his hundred-beaded rosary, working hard to efface the Emir’s sins and make him fit for Paradise. His voice was thin as feathers from overuse, a low eroded murmur which scarcely halted even for breath. He acknowledged Little Father’s arrival with the merest flick of an eyebrow, without pausing in his toil.

  The other three holy men were marabouts, living saints, two black Songhay and a man of mixed blood. They were weighted down with leather packets of grigri charms hanging in thick mounds around their necks and girded by other charms by the dozen around their wrists and hips, and they had the proper crazy glittering saint-look in their eyes, the true holy baraka. It was said that saints could fly, could raise the dead, could make the rains come and the rivers rise. Little Father doubted all of that, but he was one who tended to keep his doubts to himself. In any case the city was full of such miracle-workers, dozens of them, and the tombs of hundreds more were objects of veneration in the poorer districts. Little Father recognized all three of these: he had seen them now and then hovering around the Sankore Mosque or sometimes the other and greater one at Dyingerey Ber, striking saint-poses on one leg or with arms outflung, muttering saint-gibberish, giving pass-ersby the saint-stare. Now they stood lined up in grim silence before the Emir, making cryptic gestures with their fingers. Even before Big Father had fallen ill, these three had gone about declaring that he was doomed shortly to be taken by a vampire, as various recent omens indisputably proved—a flight of owls by day, a flight of vultures by night, the death of a sacred dove that lived on the minaret of the Great Mosque. For them to be in the palace at all was remarkable; for them to be in the presence of the king was astounding. Someone in the royal entourage must be at the point of desperation, Little Father concluded.

  He knelt at the bedside.

  “Father?”

  The Emir’s eyes were glassy. Perhaps he was becoming a saint too.

  “Father, it’s me. They said you were rallying. I know you’re going to be all right soon.”

  Was that a smile? Was that any sort of reaction at all?

  “Father, it’ll be cooler in just a few weeks. The rains are already on the way. Everybody’s saying so. You’ll feel better when the rains come.”

  The old man’s cheeks were like parchment. His bones were showing through. He was eighty years old and he had beeri Emir of Songhay for fifty of those years. Electricity hadn’t even been invented when he became king, nor the motorcar. Even the railroad had been something new and startling.

  There was a clawlike hand suddenly jutting out of the blankets. Little Father touched it. It was like touching a piece of wom leather. By the time the rains had reached Timbuctoo, Big Father would have made the trip by ceremonial barge to the old capital of Gao, two hundred miles down the Niger, to take his place in the royal cemetery of the Kings of Songhay.

  Little Father went on murmuring encouragement for another few moments, but it was apparent that the Emir wasn’t listening. A stray burst of breeze brought the sound of the marketplace music, growing louder now. Could he hear that? Could he hear anything? Did he care? After a time Little Father rose, and went quickly from the palace.

  In the marketplace the dancing had already begun. They had shoved aside the booths of the basket-weavers and the barbers and the slipper-makers and the charm-peddlers, the dealers in salt and fruit and donkeys and rice and tobacco and meat, and a frenetic procession of dancers was weaving swiftly back and forth across the central square from the place of the milk vendors at the south end to the place of the wood vendors at the north when Little Father and Ali Pasha arrived.

  “You see?” Ali Pasha asked. “The life dance. They bring the energy down from the skies to fill your father’s veins. ’ ’

  There was tremendous energy in it, all right. The dancers pounded the sandy earth with their bare feet, they clapped their hands, they shouted quick sharp punctuations of wordless sound, they made butting gestures with their outflung elbows, they shook their heads convulsively and sent rivers of sweat flying through the air. The heat seemed to mean nothing to them. Their skins gleamed. Their eyes were bright as new coins. They made rhythmic grunting noises, oom oom oom, and the whole city seemed to shake beneath their tread.

  To Little Father it looked more like the death dance than the dance of life. There was the frenzied stomp of mourning about it. But he was no expert on these things. The people had all sorts of beliefs that were mysteries to him, and which he hoped would melt away like snowflakes during his coming reign. Did they still put pressure on Allah to bring the rains by staking small children out in the blazing sun for days at a time outside the tombs of saints? Did they still practice alchemy on one another, turning wrapping paper into banknotes by means of spells? Did they continue to fret about vampires and djinn? It was all very embarrassing. Songhay was a modem state; and yet there was all this medieval nonsense still going on. Very likely the old Emir had liked it that way. But soon things would change.

  The close formation of the dancers opened abruptly, and to his horror Little Father saw a group of foreigners standing in a little knot at the far side of the marketplace. He had only a glimpse of them; then the dance closed again and the foreigners were blocked from view. He touched Ali Pasha’s arm,

  “Did you see them?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes!”

  “Who are they, do you think?”

  The vizier stared off intently toward the other side of the marketplace, as though his eyes were capable of seeing through the knot of dancers.

  “Embassy people, Little Father. Some Mexicans, I believe, and perhaps the Tirks. And those fair-haired people must be the English.”

  Here to gape at the quaint tribal dances, enjoying the fine barbaric show in the extravagant alien heat.

  “You said they were coming by barge. How’d they get here so fast?”

  Ali Pasha shook his head.

  “They must have taken the motorboat instead, I suppose . ’ ’

  “I can’t receive them here, like this. I never would have come here if I had known that they’d be here.” “Of course not, Little Father.”

  “You should have told me!”

  “I had no way of knowing,” said Ali Pasha, and for once he sounded sincere, even distressed. “There will be punishments for this. But come, Little Father. Come: to your palace. As you say, they ought not find you here this way, without a retinue, without your regalia. This evening you c
an receive them properly.”

  Very likely the newly arrived diplomats at the upper end of the marketplace had no idea that they had been for a few moments in the presence of the heir to the throne, the future Emir of Songhay, one of the six or seven most powerful men in Africa. If they had noticed anyone at ail across the way, they would simply have seen a slender, supple, just-barely-still-youngish man with Moorish features, wearing a simple white robe and a flat red skullcap, standing beside a tall, powerfully built black man clad in an ornately brocaded robe of purple and yellow. The black man might have seemed more important to them in the Timbuctoo scheme of things than the Moorish-looking one, though they would have been wrong about that.

  But probably they hadn’t been looking toward Little Father and Ali Pasha at all. Their attendance was on the dancers. That was why they had. halted here, en route from the river landing to their various embassies.

  “How tireless they are!” Prince Itzcoatl said. The Mexican envoy, King Moctezuma’s brother. “Why don’t their bones melt in this heat?” He was a compact copper-colored man decked out grandly in an Aztec feather cape, golden anklets and wristlets, a gold headband studded with brilliant feathers, golden earplugs and noseplugs. “You’d think they were glad their king is dying, seeing them jump around like that.”

  “Perhaps they are,” observed the Ttirk, Ismet Akif.

  He laughed in a mild, sad way. Everything about him seemed to be like that, mild and sad: his droopy-lidded melancholic eyes, his fleshy downcurved lips, his sloping shoulders, even the curiously stodgy and inappropriate European-style clothes that he had chosen to wear in this impossible climate, the dark heavy woolen suit, the narrow gray necktie. But wide cheekbones and a broad, authoritative forehead indicated his true strength to those with the ability to see such things. He too was of royal blood, Sultan Osman’s third son. There was something about him that managed to be taut and slack both at once, no easy task. His posture, his expression, the tone of his voice, all conveyed the anomalous sense of self that came from being the official delegate of a vast empire which—as all the world knew—had passed the peak of its greatness some time back and was launched on a long irreversible decline. To the diminutive Englishman at his side he said, "How does it seem to you, Sir Anthony? Are they grieving or celebrating?”

  Everyone in the group understood the great cost of the compliment Ismet Akif was paying by amiably addressing his question to the English ambassador, just as if they were equals. It was high courtesy: it was grace in defeat.

  Turkey still ruled a domain spanning thousands of miles. England was an insignificant island kingdom. Worse yet, England had been a Turkish province from medieval times onward, until only sixty years before. The exasperated English, weary of hundreds of years of speaking Hirkish and bowing to Mecca, finally had chased out their Ottoman masters in the first year of what by English reckoning was the twentieth century, thus becoming the first of all the European peoples to regain their independence. There were no Spaniards here today, no Italians, no Portuguese, and no reason why there should be, for their countries all still were Turkish provinces. Perhaps envoys from those lands would show up later to pay homage to the dead Emir, if only to make some pathetic display of tattered sovereignty; but it would not matter to anyone else, one way or the other. The English, though, were beginning once again to make their way in the world, a little tentatively but nevertheless visibly. And so Ismet Akif had had to accommodate himself to the presence of an English diplomat on the slow journey upriver from the coast to the Songhay capital, and everyone agreed he had managed it very well.

  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 Tiirks 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 v/as 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 Se-lima, 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 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 Tlirk. 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.