By now, Maria had made her exit. Plum rose and dusted himself. “Excuse me. I got excited. I’ll be better now.”
The guards muttered. “Go back in your hut!” Meekly, Plum accommodated them.
The next day Hakim was too busy to pass judgment on Plum’s madness. A Druze spear-wallah came for the proofs for issue three, collecting them far ahead of the deadline. The next Sijill had to be hurried out, with Hakim’s sermonette on the Potemkin’s night passage and what it meant. The neighboring kingdoms might get uppity, after all. They’d be less afraid of the Druze, after
seeing how their technology was outclassed. They had to be preached back into a cooperative frame of mind.
Again the hawkers went out in their dhows, and came back with news: The Potemkin had interrupted its long voyage to the end of the river. The Rastafarians were entertaining the ship’s sailors along their downstream shores.
The good news was that the magazine was a hot item among both Russians and Jamaicans, so much that the dhows returned laden with food. The slowest breezed into home port just ahead of the lights: Hours before the Potemkin had slipped anchor and reversed course.
From the steamship’s bridge, an officer shouted in Esperanto, then English. “Bring us P.O. Wodehouse!” Such was Plum’s isolation that his first inkling of this was when the garden guard was redoubled. The place bristled with spearmen.
“I could go to them,” Plum announced to the Druze generality, who glinted at him in resentment, ice forming on their upper slopes. “I’d hate for there to be any fighting. Not for my sake. Jim, what’s going on?”
Jim hustled to Plum’s side, back from some palace excursion. “Hakim’s digging in. He’s being stubborn.”
Clearly the Apache had more to say. “Yes?” Plum prompted him.
“You’re a hostage. Hakim’11 kill you if they attack. That’s what he’s told them.”
“Cor!”
There was a fuss by the garden entry. “Let me through!” Maria announced in her queenliest tones. “I come from Hakim.”
Plum converged on her. “What—?”
“Those Jamaicans!” she spluttered. “They put the
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Russians up to it. You’re just a cause celebre. Something to make the war popular. You’ve got fans in the Russian crew who think you’re what this is all about, and so they’ll do anything.-1 know the truth, and Hakim does too. This ultimatum is all to humble the Druze, but what can he do? Spears against guns!”
“I’m supposed to feel sorry for the blighter?” Plum asked incredulously. “He’s threatened—”
“I know. He’s lost his soul to power. Nothing’s too low for him anymore. I’m just the same. Nothing’s too low for me, either.” Maria Montessori undid a knot, and flung off her robes. Naked, she stepped to close the final distance. “Kiss me. We’ll die together.”
“Of all the bally—!”
It was the last straw for the outraged Druze guards. On the far side of the chiclet stones, a great gun boomed. On this side, arms dragged Plum and Maria to the tree trunk. “Kill the mockers! This is all their doing!”
“We’ll try again together!” Maria shouted. “Another funny book!”
The gun boomed again. Masonry walls toppled in on Hakim’s throne room. In the Occult Master’s garden, spears flew simultaneously.
“—And so, here we are,” Plum told President Firebrass of the Republic of Parolando. “I’d never heard about this ‘simultaneous resurrection’ business before. Have you?”
Firebrass shook his great head.
“Hakim’s wishful thinking. But there’s always a first time,” Plum conceded.
Maria poured herself another cup of wine and curled into her seat by the fireplace. ‘ “These stores—mysterious strangers. Agents. The gods behind the curtains, who
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move among us like spies. Parolando is full of rumors.”‘ She looked at Plum. “What do you think about your friend Jim?”
“Jim?”
“Who else could have arranged this unique ‘cheap trip’ for us? Hakim himself?”
“Hakim! What can I do with that man?” President Firebrass asked. “He sounds like a complete scoundrel.”
Plum’s eyes widened. “Yes! Maybe it was Jim after all! I remember telling him: Tyrant, vamp, and fool. Publisher, editor, and writer. Why else send the three of us to be reborn in Riverworld’s greatest literary tnecca?”
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