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They drove in silence. Now and then Salah pointed out an ancient ruin in the desert, or a distant nomad encampment. Desi laughed aloud when they came up behind a pickup truck carrying a young camel which was hunkered down with its legs folded beneath it, complacently regarding them over the tailgate, chewing its cud.
‘And my camera’s packed in my case!’
‘You have a camera?’
‘Of course! I want to—’
‘You will not be able to take photographs at the dig,’ Salah said.
‘Oh! Is—’ But she was afraid to ask why for fear of exposing her ignorance. ‘Have you been to the dig before?’ she asked instead.
‘A few times,’ Salah said. ‘When it was first discovered.’
‘What can you tell me about it? I couldn’t find any information. Sami said it might be contemporary with Sumer. It sounds really exciting.’
It was barely three weeks since Desi had first heard of Sumer, the ancient civilisation that thrived between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers five thousand years ago, but she wasn’t faking her interest. There was something about five thousand years of history that sparked her imagination now as much as when she was eleven.
She had crammed a lot of study into the short time she had to prepare. But although she could bone up on the Sumer period and archaeology in general, she had found absolutely nothing about the site Salah’s father was working, so far from where ancient Sumer had prospered. Some mysterious outpost, some far city?
‘My father is maintaining very close secrecy until he can publish,’ he said. ‘You he could not refuse, but no other outsider has been allowed to visit. No media. A hand-picked team. You understand.’
‘I see,’ Desi said lamely, who didn’t know what it meant to ‘publish’ a site, couldn’t imagine why an ancient site would be kept secret, and was dismayed to learn she was on the receiving end of such a massive favour. ‘I didn’t realize what I was asking for. I mean…’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Sure?’
‘Sure you didn’t realize what you were asking for.’
His voice was hard suddenly. In anyone else she would have called it suspicious, but what could he be suspicious of as far as the dig went?
‘I’m new at this,’ she pointed out mildly.
‘And just by chance you happen upon the most tightly kept secret of archaeology of the last thirty years and discover an interest.’
It was suspicion. She couldn’t imagine what he suspected her of, but after last night, how could he speak to her in such a voice?
‘I didn’t go looking for this, you know,’ she pointed out calmly. ‘Sami is my best friend. Why shouldn’t she tell me about her uncle’s work when I told her what I was planning? I’m sure she has no idea how secret it is. She’d have said something.’
‘Sami should not know about it herself.’
‘She knows because it’s the reason marriage negotiations aren’t taking place yet. Till your father gets back from the dig. But by all means let’s not discuss the dig if you’d rather not!’ Desi said. ‘Let’s talk about something else. We’ve made love two nights running. Have you got the closure you wanted?’
Immediately she wished the words unsaid.
Salah turned his head and looked at her with a look so smouldering she felt physical heat. Memory roared up, making her weak.
‘Have you?’ he countered.
‘I wasn’t the one looking for closure. Why won’t you give me a straight answer?’
‘You were looking for something. Have you got it yet?’
‘I was looking to go to your father’s dig,’ she snapped. How much hurt he could still inflict! ‘Are we there yet? No? Well, then, not.’
He flicked a glance into her eyes.
‘So you didn’t come here to see me?’
‘Salah, how many times do you need that question answered?’
‘Truthfully, only once.’
‘By which you mean, you won’t accept any answer till you hear what you want to hear. I’m happy to oblige. What answer would you like? Let’s get it out of the way.’
‘Desi.’ His voice was almost pleading, and her eyes jerked involuntarily to his face. ‘I know that you are not here for the reason you say. I know you. You can’t tell me a lie and I don’t know it.’
‘You don’t know anything about me,’ she said, as bitterness welled up in her throat. ‘You don’t know me now, you didn’t know me then. You couldn’t have written that letter if you’d known the first thing about me.’
He shook his head at the attempt to derail him. ‘Tell me why you have come.’
‘Not from any motive you are contemplating.’
‘Is that an admission? What motive, then?’
‘Oh, leave it alone!’
The honeyed languour was gone from her body. Sunlight was beating into the car with such ferocity she was getting a headache. Heat and sun rarely bothered her, she blossomed in the heat, but this was different. A strip of chrome on the wing mirror was reflecting the sun straight into her eyes. She realized she hadn’t put on her sunglasses, opened her bag and pulled them out.
‘Hiding your eyes won’t help.’
‘On the contrary, it may prevent a headache,’ she said sharply. A herd of camels grazed on nothing in front of a settlement of half a dozen mudbrick houses. Tourists pressed cameras against the windows of a bus, snapping pictures as they passed. The highway curved around to the west; Mount Shir was behind them now. Ahead was an endless stretch of sand, shimmering in the heat, the highway a silver-grey ribbon laid across the vastness.
The road to nowhere, she thought.
After lunch in a small village restaurant, where they waited out the midday heat for another hour, Salah turned the four-wheel drive vehicle off-road and struck out across the dunes.
Now they were completely alone. Within a few minutes they had left all signs of civilisation behind, and were surrounded by the rich emptiness of the desert. Heat shimmered over the dunes; the sun was a white blast furnace against a blue of startling intensity; the pale sand, broken by rocky outcrops now and then, stretched to infinity. Only when she turned to look back at Mount Shir was there any relief for her eyes.
After several hours, the sun began to set ahead of them, the sky turning fiery red and orange and the sun getting fatter and heavier as it approached the horizon. As she watched, the sky shaded to purple, and now the sun was a massive orange ball, larger than she recalled ever seeing it before. When it began to sink behind the horizon, the sky above turned midnight blue.
The sun disappeared in a blaze; the sky went black very quickly. And still they drove.
Salah did not put on the headlights. The world was shadows. There was no human light visible anywhere, just stars and a moon almost at the full, bathing the dunes in ghostly purple. Desi was seized with a sudden, atavistic dread.
She shifted nervously. ‘When do we stop for the night?’
‘Soon,’ he said. ‘An hour or so. Are you tired?’
She shrugged and took a sip of water from the bottle ever present between them.
‘A little. Aren’t you going to put the headlights on?’
‘What for?’
‘Can you drive in the dark?’
‘Why not?’
‘But how do you know where you’re going?’
Salah laughed. ‘There is only one way to navigate in the desert, Desi—by the sky. In daylight, by the sun. At night, by the stars. My forebears have done it for many thousands of years. Don’t worry—if my ancestors had not been good navigators, I would not be here.’
She laughed, and the strange dread lifted. They spoke little, but a feeling of peace and companionship settled over her as they drove on into the night. She almost forgot the harsh accusations of the morning in her pleasure at being with Salah in a world of two.
She had no idea how long they drove when at last a flickering light appeared in the distance. ‘What’s that? Is that a town?’
‘You will see,’ he said, and flicked on the headlights.
A cluster of strangely patterned tents met her eyes: a Bedouin encampment. By the time they reached it, a party of tall robed men was there to welcome them. Under instruction, Salah parked the Toyota against the wire fence of an enclosure, and they got out to be greeted by the men.
They were a tall race, clearly. The men towered over her in their flowing robes and turbans, with the dignified bearing of those who have never lost their connection to the land. They chatted with Salah in soft welcoming voices and led them past the wire enclosure, which proved to be a camel corral. In the flickering torchlight as they passed she saw a dozen beasts crouching on the ground, chewing and whuffling, their outrageous long curling eyelashes made even more seductive by moonshadow. Her heart leapt with the alien magic.
They were led to the centre of the encampment of tents, where there was torchlight and a charcoal brazier. Other men were moving about, laying a carpet with plates and food. Another took their bags and disappeared.
‘Is this a hotel?’ Desi asked in amazement.
‘It is a nomad camp. But the people are by tradition very hospitable. They are used to strangers appearing out of the desert. There are guided tours of the desert for foreigners. Such tourists nowadays often stay with the desert nomads like this.’
Desi was enchanted. A tall moustachioed man of impressive bearing and impregnable dignity bent to offer her a silver basin and a bar of soap, poured water over her hands as she washed, then gave her a weather-beaten square of cloth to dry them.
‘Is this a work camp?’ she asked. ‘Why are there no women?’
‘Women do not serve strangers,’ Salah said. ‘In the morning probably some will come and show you their craft work.’
‘Lovely! What sort of things do they make?’
‘Dolls, pottery, maybe. You will have to wait and see.’
Very soon food was laid before them.
‘Is it the desert air, or is this food totally delicious?’ Desi demanded, falling on it with a reckless abandon that she would have to pay for by eating starvation rations soon.
‘We haven’t eaten since lunch,’ Salah pointed out mildly.
‘Yes, but I’m so used to going without food, it shouldn’t get to me like this,’ Desi said. ‘I’ve been eating far too much since I got here; at this rate I’ll have to fast completely for a week!’
‘Not on this trip, please. The desert is dangerous enough without that.’
Desi nodded, taking his point, and consciously slowed her eating.
‘They use so much oil!’ she protested. ‘In the palace, too. Is that what makes it so flavourful? How on earth does everybody in this country not turn into an elephant?’
Salah laughed aloud. ‘Olive oil,’ he corrected her, as if he were talking about gold. ‘Olive oil is very healthy, as well as giving its delicious flavour to food. We grow our own species of olive. Barakati olive oil is rare but very prized in the world, and very little is exported. Its flavour is excellent.’
When the last of the food had been presented, they were politely left with only each other and the stars. Above them a shooting star rushed along a golden pathway to oblivion.
Suddenly the night air was heavy around them, weighted with awareness. And now that there was nothing to cloak it, their hungry need rose up like heat from the sand to cloud the space between them.
‘They are preparing our tent,’ Salah said, his voice low and hoarse. ‘Will you sleep with me, tonight, Desi? I want you.’
Chapter Eleven
HER heart leapt with yearning, her body melted into instant need. But she looked at him for a moment, resisting, remembering his harsh words earlier in the day.
‘Tell me what it means to you, that you want me,’ she said quietly.
‘It means you are a beautiful, sensual woman.’
‘Not good enough. Next answer.’
‘What do you want to hear?’
‘You’ve thought yourself too good to talk to me for something like ten years. Now you’re sleeping with me. Have you looked at that fact?’
‘Is this why you came? To prove something to me?’ he asked.
‘My interest in proving anything to you runs in the minus figures, Salah. I find that when a person makes an accusation, he’s usually talking to a mirror. Are you trying to prove something to me?’
‘You forget that I did not go to your country. You came to mine.’
‘You forget that I did not go to your bed. You came to mine.’
‘Why did you come out to me? You came to me. You knew I was waiting.’
‘I think we’ve agreed the old sexual fire still has live coals amongst the ashes,’ Desi said. ‘Still, I don’t call stepping out of my room to get some air “coming to you”, exactly.’
‘You called my name. You knew I was there.’
‘I didn’t, actually. Why were you there?’
‘You know it,’ he said.
‘Closure, you say. What do you need closure on, exactly, Salah? Because you look as though you’ve had closure on everything in life. You look as if you’ve shut down everything except the food intake. What’s left?’
He put out one hand to catch her chin and turned her head. For one tremulous moment his eyes met hers.
‘You know what is left.’
Honeyed sweetness flooded up her body, making her neck weak.
‘You stirred up what was frozen, Desi. Until you came, I had forgotten how much I once loved you.’
‘Salah!’ she whispered.
‘And how little you loved me.’
‘You think?’ she said bitterly.
‘You did not love me at all. You said so, and you were right.’
‘I was sixteen!’
‘Yes. You were young. I also was young, too young for such powerful feelings. I could not control what I felt. You said I was like the Kaljuks, and my only thought, Desi, was to prove to you that I could never be like them.’
‘Is that why you joined Prince Omar?’ she breathed, horrified.
He shrugged. ‘I was running across a rocky ledge, looking for a way down to a Kaljuk gun emplacement that had been shelling a mountain town for a week.’ Unconsciously he stroked the scar that ran across his cheekbone to above his ear. ‘There was an explosion of light in my head, that’s all I remember. I woke up in the hospital.
‘You were there with me day and night, Desi. You were my solace and my torment, in one. I dreamed of you, sleeping and waking. I wanted you more than anything in the world. I begged you to come to me. You did not come.’
‘I tried, but Leo…’ Immediately she wished she hadn’t pronounced the name.
‘Yes, Leo,’ he said in a different tone. ‘Sami sent me a letter with pictures of you in your new life with this old man. Then I understood. You did not love me, you could never be mine. I wrote you the letter to tell you I knew it.
‘But I could not defend myself against the knowing. It went straight into my heart. The pain was like the end of the world, Desi. I did not recover, not even after I told myself I did. When you love someone the way I loved you…Every day and every night I yearned for you. In the bed of other women, I dreamed of you.’
Suddenly she had to choke back tears.
‘Why did you never tell me? Never try to get in touch?’ she demanded. ‘It was up to you, wasn’t it? After that letter did you expect me to try to contact you again?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I expected nothing. You were with Leo. My love died, a terrible, painful death that I thought had killed my heart.
‘One day, I awoke from the pain. But still I was not free of you. Then it was the memory of love itself that haunted me. Fool that I was, I wanted to find this feeling again, with another woman. I thought you could be wiped from my memory forever and I would feel alive again.
‘But that is impossible, I learned that. I can never feel such an impact again. I don’t know why it is so, but it is. I was ten times a fool to wish it. Such love is weakness. An addiction.’
He paused, but she had no words.
‘I thought it was dead, Desi. Before you came I thought there was nothing left, not even ashes. When my father told me he would let you come, I was angry, that was all. I thought, it is over. What business does she have, to come to me now?
‘Then you came, and it was not what I expected. Anger was only the first of many feelings. I understood things I did not understand before.
‘Our love and its death has affected every decision of my life from that moment, every breath I took, every woman I rejected as a wife. I understand it now.’
‘God,’ she whispered. Her heart was choking her.
‘I want to free myself, Desi. My parents urge me to get married—for ten years they have wanted this. Now even I see it is time. But I can’t go to my future wife with such a burden of the past. Not now that I feel its weight.’
Her mouth opened in a soundless gasp as she took in his meaning.
‘It is time to leave this behind. We have a few days together. I want to finish with these broken hopes. I want to bury the past once and forever. I want to go to my new wife with a heart free and ready to accept her.’
She was silent, struggling with feeling. A sound like gunshot startled her as one of the flaming torches fell to be extinguished in the sand, and its dying spark shot skyward like a soul going home.
‘And how will sleeping with me for a few days free your heart?’ she asked at last.
‘I have been haunted by you, Desi, by the memory of lovemaking that moved the earth. Nothing has matched it, but it is because nothing can match it. You can’t match a dream. It is a fantasy, I know it, born from the fact that you were my first experience of love.’
She wanted to tell him how it had been for her. The tearing grief, the bottomless yearning for that souldeep connection, the determination to forget. Then Leo’s terrible betrayal, and afterwards, the emptiness, the feeling that that part of her had died. And the terrible shock, seeing Salah again, to discover that it might still be there.
‘I want that haunting to stop. Can you understand this? And I think—to put out my hand and know that it is you, and that the sex is what it is and no more—then I can close the book. I want to close it, Desi.’
‘You’re going to marry my best friend, feeling like this?’ she protested.
‘Don’t you see, it is not feeling? It is a memory, that is all.’
‘What if it worked the other way? What if this revived your love? Then what?’
Salah shook his head. ‘Do not fear for me, Desi.’
‘And what about my feelings? They don’t matter?’
He was silent, his eyes meeting hers. He didn’t believe she had any feelings to be hurt, that was obvious. And she just could not open her mouth to tell him. What would he do with such knowledge?
‘You’re sure this is not a disguised desire to punish me?’ she pressed.
‘How would this punish you?’
‘You might think I’m vulnerable. You suspect me of coming here to see you. What did you imagine I wanted?’
An odd expression crossed his face in torchlight. ‘What power do I have to hurt you?’
Before she could answer, one of the Bedouin came and spoke to him.
‘Our tent is ready,’ Salah said. ‘Come to bed.’
And in spite of everything, her heart kicked with cell-deep anticipation.
The interior of the tent was softly lighted in the glow of two hurricane lamps. The earth was covered with reed mats and carpets, the space was divided into two sections by curtains of mosquito netting. On one side there was a large basin and two jugs of water behind a curtain. The other side held cushions and a thin mattress spread with a clean striped cloth.
A small spade was placed discreetly by the entrance, and Desi picked it up and went out to walk into the dunes. When she returned Salah had washed and was behind the netting, zipping their sleeping bags into a double. He turned and looked at her, and suddenly she was remembering the night they had spent in a little cabin on the island. Then, too, they had lit hurricane lanterns.
Then, too, the air between them had been thick with anticipation, and her limbs had been heavy with it.
They did not speak. He got up and went out.
Desi got out her sponge bag and went into the little space to bathe. She had packed unperfumed soap, to avoid enticing insects, but now she wished she could risk using some scent. Nor could the cotton pyjamas she had packed be called anything but plain.
She knew she was being a fool. She was storing up heartbreak for herself.
But if for Salah lovemaking was a necessary way of coming to terms with the past, for her it was thirst in the desert.
All those years of telling herself it had been nothing to him. That if he had truly loved her, he could never have written what he did. What he told her this evening was like a firestorm in her. He had loved her.
If she had known that, would she have had the courage to write back, to shout at him for his despicable attitude? To fight?
But how could she have been happy with a man who harboured such alien, archaic views? Would he ever have treated her as an equal? A man makes love to a virgin and then calls her a slut? When she looked at it squarely, she knew she had had a lucky escape.
If only it felt like that.
When Salah returned to the tent, she was lying in the sleeping bag reading by the light of one of the lanterns. She looked up.
He stood gazing at her from the other side of the heavy netting, a shadowy silhouette, tall and powerful in a flowing robe, perfectly still. For a moment, as they stared at each other, the world stopped. There was no past between them, no future, the silence whispered, there was only the moment. Then he lifted the netting and stepped inside her little cocoon.
The little slow intake of her breath as she watched him was perfectly audible in the silence. Rivulets of anticipation coursed through her. She put down her book.
Lamplight caressed his curling black hair like melted gold. His desert cloak was open. She took in the vision of a flat, hard stomach, snug boxers, legs that were powerfully muscled. So different, and yet still there was the shadow of the eager young body that she had first seen so long ago.
A thin pale mark ran from his abdomen, over one hip and down his thigh almost to the knee. That was the line that marked the frontier between then and now: his battle scars.
He had a light dusting of hair on his forearms as well as a neat mat of chest hair. A delicate line of black curls tracing the middle of his abdomen gathered momentum as it reached his shorts. His flesh stirred as he looked at her.
It was unmistakably, primitively male.
And primally, powerfully erotic. She could not remember a time when the mere sight of a man’s body had affected her so deeply, drawing her irresistibly.
Salah shrugged off the robe and dropped it on the carpet. His shoulders looked even more powerful now. He sank down onto his haunches, and then he was beside her, his mouth searching for hers, his heat enveloping her.
Her hand went of its own accord to the flesh at his groin, and she stroked him hungrily as it turned to marble, drunk on the knowledge that her touch had such power over him. She had seen statues of gods with erect sex, and tonight she understood the primitive urge to worship such flesh.
His head fell back at the assault of pleasure, and she slipped her fingers inside the elastic of his waistband, to draw the black fabric down and off his body. Then he lay naked in glowing lamplight, his eyes watching her with a black fury of need that stirred her to the depths. Her hand enclosed him again, and she bent down over him and almost without conscious volition, because in some deep part of her she was compelled to it, took him into her mouth.
His breath caught, and the sound shivered over her skin. She closed her eyes and gave herself up to the pleasure of giving pleasure. She felt his hands in her hair, cupping her head, felt the intensity of his need.
‘Too much,’ he said hoarsely after a few moments. His hands moved to catch her shoulders, and he drew her up into a fierce embrace. ‘Too much.’ He leaned away from her for a moment, she heard the puff of his breath, and then the tent was in darkness.