Thirty-one

At Ananporu it was hard to know just when to expect the major rainy season; sometime after the autumnal equinox. It was never hard to tell when it arrived, though. In any season there were rains, but when the rains came, they arrived with force and bombast. This year they'd been unusually delayed, but when he'd been drilling with Sergeant Yalabiin, clouds had arrived to cut off the sun, and the heavens had rumbled. During breakfast the rain had started, looking like great spears of water shattering on the pavement outside his open door. Afterward the sun came out, and the smell was wonderful.

Jilsomo was waiting for him when he arrived at his office, a Jilsomo more sober than usual. Troubled. "Yes, my friend?" the Kalif said.

"Your Reverence-" Jilsomo began, and stopped. It was as if he didn't know what to say next.

"Yes?"

"One of the staff gave this to me. This morning." He held out a slender book, booklet actually, perhaps a novelet. "A man outside the gate was handing them to staff who live away, when they arrived this morning. Wrapped and taped, to discourage examining them till later."

The Kalif frowned. The cover had a picture of a beautiful woman in an indecently short skirt, a style from the empire's early days, before the imperial kalifate. She had long smooth legs, hair the color of new straw, blue eyes, and a frankly inviting look. Her chest and buttocks were exaggerated, round and firm. The face was not Tain's-it was more triangular, the eyes had a slant, and the mouth was V-shaped-but there was no one else it could have represented.

The title was The Sultan's Bride. He opened it and began reading swiftly.

The print was large, the story short. It was a fantasy, about a sultan who had led his army to conquer a planet. The people there were fierce, and fought to the death, so prisoners were few. Among them was a woman officer who'd been captured unconscious, a wonderfully beautiful woman with blue eyes, yellow hair, and long legs. She wore colonel's insignia, though she seemed to be only about twenty years old.

It was a kind of book the Kalif had seen before, bordering on illegal, though in this case the cover and paper were excellent, and the binding. The story was risque from the start-low comedy. The prisoner almost escaped when the soldiers who found her began fighting and killing one another over her. Then a captain arrived and took her into custody, realizing that, because so few officers had been captured, the sultan would want to question her. She enticed the captain deliberately, asking if he'd like to see her bruises, opening her shirt and pulling up her skirt to show him. His throat so tightened, he could hardly swallow, and hastily he called in some other officers to protect him from himself. All asweat, together they took her to the sultan's headquarters.

The comedy continued. With the sultan she seemed a model of decorum, but even so, in more subtle ways she enticed, and the sultan melted into a parody of a sexually desperate man. He sent his aide away and tried to have her then and there, but she evaded him in a passage funny enough that the Kalif might have laughed, except for its allusions. Finally, out of his mind with desire, the sultan asked the prisoner to marry him, and she accepted.

One after another, his friends came to remonstrate with him. He in turn introduced them to his sultana to be, and without exception they relented. Her effects on them were actually quite amusing, in a low way. They couldn't speak, or if they could, their tongues got twisted. Seemingly they got erections, and tried to avoid them being noticed. They could hardly get away to privacy quickly enough.

The comedy went from risque to lewdly impossible on their wedding day, though falling short of pornography.

Later, as a sort of epilogue, it was learned that all the women in the enemy army were prostitutes, and received promotions based on how many men they serviced. The new sultana had been the highest ranking woman in the army.

Carefully the Kalif handed the book back to Jilsomo. "You're excused from council this morning," he said quietly. "Find out who printed this. Who wrote it and who published it. And especially, find who paid to have it done. Find out if it's been put in shops, and if it has, have it removed. If you can learn where it's stored, seize it. Make arrests as appropriate, but not arrests that might jeopardize a full investigation."

At council meeting, it was apparent that three of the five exarchs had seen the book. They had trouble looking directly at the Kalif, and weren't surprised when, after a very short session, he dismissed them all.

Afterward the Kalif left the Sreegana, forbidding his bodyguards to follow, and walked the streets nearby. Mostly people stared at him in passing; it was almost unheard of for the Kalif to walk about the city, even escorted. But already there were three or four who looked away, embarrassed. He stopped at a book shop, where the shopkeeper greeted him with astonishment and pleasure. The Kalif bought a book-something about cats.

Another bookshop was locked up; apparently Jilsomo was moving fast.

Finally he went home and had lunch with the kalifa. It was obvious she didn't know. He was poor company, saying little, and that little scarcely more than monosyllables. She let him be, without commenting on his mood. When they'd finished eating though, he reached across the table for her hand.

"I've decided to attend the Diet this afternoon. Will you come with me? You might find it interesting, and if it's not, we'll take advantage of a break, and leave."

The invitation surprised her, particularly given his mood. "Why yes, I'd like that. Are you going to speak?"

"I have no plans to. We'll sit in the gallery. That way they're unlikely to pepper me with questions."

She got up from the table. "I'd better get ready then. How much time do we have?"

He hadn't thought of that. "Barely an hour," he said.

She left, and when she reappeared, only twenty minutes later, it seemed to him he'd never seen her lovelier.

They applauded her introduction, most of them. And some of the nobles, after the session, made a point of meeting and talking cordially with her. When finally she left with her husband, she was flushed with pleasure.

"They are very nice men, Coso," she said. "Most of them. It's hard to believe that some of them don't like you."

He grunted. "Which ones weren't nice, would you say?"

"Well, I'm not sure I can tell nice from not nice at a glance. But some of them looked unpleasant. Surly. In a section on the far right."

His laugh held no humor. "I'd say you did very well at a glance," he told her. And said no more about it.

Thirty-two

"It appears there was no publishing firm, Your Reverence," Jilsomo told him. "The publisher listed on the copyright page is fictitious. Apparently there were simply some men, still unknown, who arranged the preparation, printing, and distribution of this one book.

"We've had the book examined by a senior editor in the Imperial Publications Office, for clues as to who might have published it. He says that while it's literate, it's quite unprofessional-lacks niceties of editorial style and format. He insists that even very hurried production by an actual publishing firm wouldn't account for the technical idiosyncracies."

The Kalif grunted. "I assumed it wasn't an established firm," he said. "An established firm would be ruined by something like this, and its executive staff in prison or worse. They'd know that."