The day toiled on, leaving trails of sweat wherever it went. People were too hot to move. It was almost too hot to breathe.

When the night came, a slight repose came with it. The city woke up as the sun edged away, dragging a cloak of star-studded black behind it. Suzuki brushed out her hair in the ridiculous mirror, her broken teeth bared in what might be a smile, and what might be a snarl. She did not look round as her door pulsed softly open.

When she finally condescended to turn around, she found Jafar sitting on the end of her bed, fully clothed. He was not looking at her but at a long blue feather. He turned it over and over in his fingers, apparently hypnotised by its rotations.

She glided to his side- another habit passed down from her geisha training. "Is that Iago's?"

"Yes."

"Where is he?" she asked, cautiously. Jafar's affections for his 'pet' were temperamental and changeable. If she was seen to favour Iago too much, Jafar would take it out on either of them in one of his rare but lethal explosions of rage. If he felt she was being callous, he would treat her with exceptional coldness for weeks on end and spoil Iago silly.

"Asleep, and dead drunk," Jafar replied without emotion. "He does not know it, but he possesses an animal instinct, and it is working overtime whether he is aware of it or not. He doesn't normally shed flight feathers, you notice. He can tell there is... tension." Finally he looked at his secretary. "You have been discourteous to me all day."

Suzuki's nostrils flared out and her eyes uncurled open. Her ugliness was complete. "How dare you!" she spat, in far better Arabian than she had ever spoken before. "I! Discourteous! Do you not think I know why that mirror is in my room? Do you not think I have been waiting like a peasant on death row for the day you would choose to come to the other side of the reflection? These five years have been lived in an anxious sickness for the time you prove yourself to be nothing more than a base, pathetic, uneducated man!" This last insult was also declared in passionate Japanese, then Suzuki fell silent.

"A mere man?" Jafar asked quietly. He was coolly watching the feather in his fingers, but Suzuki had served him long enough to see the warning signs. The loose skin under one eye was twitching unpleasantly.

"YES!" screeched Suzuki. "A mere man! Oh, I used to admire you for being so controlled, so very collected and cunning. There was nothing in you but a lust for power, and I understood and respected that in you. It placed you above other humans, other males." She spat the word out of her feminine lips, as if it enraged her to have it resting on her tongue. "And you," she continued in a hiss, "you used to have a respect for me, and my person. That too I admired in you, for it is a fool who does not recognise intelligence when he sees it. You saw me not as a woman but as a man in a woman's body. You and you alone understood. Or- or at least you seemed to," and here she broke off, her eyes filling with tears she had no desire to weep.

"You certainly chide like any woman," replied Jafar, watching the tears make their treacherous way down the round cheeks.

Suzuki cursed him in Japanese. "That is because a dumb woman is what you make of me!" she shrieked, then added, babbling, "And you didn't want to hear my interpretation of the poem, for all it might have helped you. There was a time when you would have listened dispassionately, damn you. I thought you understood me, but you don't understand at all, not at all. You- you didn't even try to give me any pleasure last night."

At this Jafar dropped the feather, aghast, and turned to her. "What?"

Suzuki repeated her accusation tearfully, wiping her streaming face on the sleeves of her kimono. It gave her ill-concealed pleasure that Jafar looked extremely discomfited at this outburst, and she was quietly revelling in her victory when Jafar snapped suddenly, "I didn't think women could."

Now it was Suzuki's turn to be aghast. "Excuse me?"

"I- I didn't think women could. You know. Feel any- achieve, you know, that." He stared blankly at a wall for a moment, then in a motion so sudden Suzuki stopped crying out of shock, smashed his fist into the bedstead. There was a crunching sound that Suzuki hoped would be the dicelike knuckles, but resolved itself to be the new dent in the wood. He was, to her tacit astonishment, blushing furiously. "I hate it," he added in his quiet, dangerous voice, "when there is something I don't know."

They sat side by side on the bed, consigned now to an awkward, post-argument silence.

"The Princess Jasmine wishes me to be executed," Jafar announced solemnly.

"I would have thought that was obvious," Suzuki told him levelly. She glided across the room to her washbasin and cleaned her stained face as best she could. It was still red and puffy when she glided back to her place on the bed.

"I mean, she seriously intends to put her fit of pique into practise," sighed the Grand Vizier. "And last night I- it weighed heavily on my mind. The- the things I have never achieved. I was always so careful with my life, you see, and so eager to make my way into power, I-" he broke off, but the explicit gestures that followed spelt out his meaning clearly enough. "I never did," he finished.

"Oh," said Suzuki. "Oh, I see." But it thrilled her, that moment. She was in a position of power; Jafar had chosen her over the many willing girls in the harem, or the noblewomen itching for favour, or the dancing girls in the brothels, all of them of his own race and religion. It thrilled her.

So she took off his ornate turban and placed it on the floor beside his staff. She tugged her obi free and slid out of her kimono, and slid her hands into the mysterious folds of his robes until she located the fastenings and freed him of them. She pulled him towards her deformed mouth and kissed him, the first kiss either of them had ever shared with another human being. For Suzuki's broken mouth was repulsive to the men who had paid for her and the women she courted vainly, and Jafar had never had time for kisses.

By and by, Jafar was balanced on his elbows above her. His elastic face clearly showed an expression of trepidation. He looked at her helplessly, then said, "What do you want me to do?"

Suzuki felt the same thrill of power walk its spidery way inside her skin. "Well, for a start do what you did last night," she told him. "But don't try to wrench me into new and unusual shapes this time." She was delighted to find Jafar did as he was told.

They spent a quiet, instructive evening exploring one another with rather more civility than the previous night's escapade, and by the time an hour or so had passed Jafar was pleased to discover his previous ignorance had been taught and relieved, and Suzuki, for all her preferences, was pleasantly alarmed to find she quite enjoyed Jafar's nude company.

They broke off and lay kissing. Both went about this operation with a certain amount of relish, since it was a hitherto undiscovered gratification.

Eventually Suzuki unpeeled free and lay her head on the Vizier's narrow chest. "Would you care to hear my interpretation of the poem now?" she asked in a husky, cooing voice that Jafar completely failed to respond to.

"No," he said urbanely. "Write it up and send it to me." A flicker of anger passed across Suzuki's face but she suppressed it. "I don't really want to talk about any of those affairs right now."

"What would honourable master like to talk about then?" Suzuki asked. If she was being ironic, Jafar could not see her face and so ignored it suavely.

"Mmm... I don't know." Jafar felt strange. Never in his life had he ever felt contentment like this. It was as if he was butter and someone had melted him over something sweet and delicious. He was used to the tingle of power, the adrenalin of command, even the bizarre semi-bliss of his friendship with Iago. He understood the pleasure of sadism well enough, and oft used it to escape the heady pounding of megalomania. But this sleepy, peaceful sensation was something he had never encountered before. He struck out vaguely for something to say; "Don't you think we ought to dress Jasmine in a few more veils?"

Ah, thought Suzuki. Men are all the same. "To hide that pretty, tender little body? Only fourteen and yet already a woman."

"No... well, yes she is," Jafar conceded. "She's a very- yes. Once she's married, though, she'll be as much a bore as the late Sultana. I had to have her murdered, did I ever tell you?" Suzuki nodded. "It would be dangerous to have a mind that could oppose me in a position of power. I and I alone know how to govern this wretched little country." Suzuki nodded again, more enthusiastically. "Actually, I just thought it would look nice."

Suzuki was startled. "Veils? Look nice?" she repeated incredulously.

"Oh, you know," Jafar said absently. He was suspended between conversation and slumber, and not balancing on the line very well. "Last time the Sultan held an official dinner, Lady Njala... er, she wore lilac veils. It looked rather well, I thought. Although the blossom in her hair frankly clashed with the entire outfit."

"Oh?" Suzuki said weakly.

"When the harem girls go out shopping they sometimes wear rather pretty veils," Jafar continued, oblivious. "Transparent, of course, and whorish, but given their occupations that's no surprise. Have you ever noticed, by the way, how excellently dressed the harem girls are, when they are clothed? Well, of course you would have, you visit that place more times in a week than I ever have in a lifetime... I suppose they spend so much time stripped bare that clothing becomes a luxury, and they pay more attention to the way they're dressed. Or maybe they just want to look alluring?"

"Honourable master," Suzuki interrupted, "you want to talk about clothes?"

Jafar very suddenly turned over, so that Suzuki was faced with the rather less attractive view of his mottled back. She ran a wary finger down the spine, which tied his neck down like a chain of angry knots, and he shivered. "Perhaps I ought to be getting back to my room," he said, somewhat frostily. "Iago will wonder where I am."

"I very much doubt it, given that you informed me he is comatose," Suzuki sighed. "I'm sorry, Jafar. We can talk about anything you wish."

"Anything?"

"Anything."

He rolled back to face her and Suzuki was a little perturbed to see a wide, cruel grin on his face. "Can we do anything?"

Suzuki hesitated. She had accompanied the Grand Vizier to some of his sub-ground nocturnal interrogations. He claimed he liked to 'work with his hands,' and that too much pure cerebration was exceptionally bad for the cerebrum. He enjoyed using a 'personal touch,' or so he told her. She had seen the twisted fire that stuttered up in his eyes when he gave the knife its final twist in what might have once been a person. However, she too was suffering from the same dulcet, soporific sensations that embalmed Jafar's body. This is why she nodded her head.

Jafar swung himself off the bed. Suzuki watched him with attention, for he moved with a snaky grace even without his robes and it was odd to behold. When he returned to the bed, he held her toy in one hand which (she couldn't help noticing) was trembling ever so slightly.

"Use it," he commanded. Suzuki hesitated just a moment too long. Jafar forced her down and plunged the instrument in himself. "Use it!" he hollered. "Use it! I'm on the other side of the reflections now, so use it, damn you!"