Summer Sheikhs: Sheikh's Betrayal / Breaking the Sheikh's Rules / Innocent in the Sheikh's Harem

The sky was showing the first signs of morning, the moon palely giving way to her ferocious brother as the sky paled. The air was deliciously fresh and crisp. Beneath her feet the sand was cool. When she dug at it with her toes, the layer underneath proved to be still warm, as if the earth were a living creature and she had burrowed under its fur. She stood, shivering a little, her feet warm in the sand, savouring the lonely sound of the muezzin’s voice against the utter peace of the desert, until it fell silent.

Then she took the spade and went into the dunes. When she returned, the camp was beginning to stir.

It was her first desert dawn, and Desi was moved by its perfection. She went back into the tent to discover Salah up and gone, and the pitchers filled with fresh water. She hurried with her washing and dressing, not to miss a minute of the morning.

When she got outside again, dressed in khaki shorts and a T-shirt but still barefoot, the sky was the colour of smoke, with a straggle of cloud and a swathe of rich, deep pink at the horizon. She set off running. Overhead slowly the sky revealed itself as blue, while above the horizon the pink expanded into red, gold and yellow, setting the cloud alight, and a tiny burning arc of fire appeared behind the dunes.

She jogged out towards the camel corral, where the beasts regarded her with placid condescension as she passed, and up the steep side of a nearby dune, her feet sinking deep into the sand, which brought her to the top breathless.

She stood looking out over the vista as the newborn sun painted the tops of the dunes in bright gold. The camp was revealed as a few broad, low tents pitched around a small central area where a pit had been dug to form a brazier. A man was stirring the coals into life.

Not far away from the camp, women were drawing water from the concrete housing of a well. In the light wind of morning their brightly patterned robes and scarves fanned out against a backdrop of endless pale sand. A herd of white and black goats clustered around, eagerly pushing towards the broad troughs that the women were filling. Their bleating was the only sound on the morning air, a dozen different pitches and rhythms like strange music.

The women were covertly watching her. From her vantage point on the dune she waved, and two of the older women smiled, one of them shyly waggling her hand at chest height. The younger ones drew their scarves up to cover their mouths and dropped their eyes.

Back in the tent, she found Salah, looking handsome and intimidating in desert robes, seated lotus-position on the ground, consulting a map. When she came in, fresh-faced with her exercise and the morning chill, he looked up and smiled. Her breath caught with surprise. It was the first time she had seen him so relaxed. The frown was gone from his eyes.

‘Ready for breakfast?’ he asked.

‘Ravenous! Is it going to be local fare again, or do they provide the usual tourist stuff?’ she asked as he led her outside to where someone had placed a carpet for them with cushions side by side in the sun. A man in flowing robes and turban was setting down plates.

‘They aren’t so changed yet. The few travellers they see are still the sort who want to experience what the world has to offer, not impose their own lifestyle on it. We will be offered the best of their own food.’

‘Can’t wait!’

As last night, the only utensils were spoons, and again she washed her hands under the stream of water poured for her from a ewer.

Little bowls of yoghurt and a curious mudcoloured paste were set before them and Desi was negotiating with the yoghurt when the pièce de résistance arrived: a huge, deliciously sizzling, buttery, puffy pancake that had been grilled over charcoal. Something that looked suspiciously like honey was drizzled all over it.

On the pure desert air the scent of it was tantalizing.

‘Oh, totally too fattening! I must remember to ask before I go around demanding the local food,’ Desi exclaimed helplessly.

‘You can eat all the yoghurt.’ Salah grinned and tore off a large chunk of the pancake, expertly rolling it up in one hand before taking a bite. Honey dripped onto his lower lip and he licked it off, his eyes closing with enjoyment.

He turned his head and looked at her from under lowered eyelids. ‘Hot. Sweet.’ Like you.

The thought of what those long, strong fingers, his tongue and mouth had done to her last night stormed through her. Her neck was suddenly too weak to hold up her head.

She took a hasty mouthful of the yoghurt and shivered as a blast of sourness reached her nerves. ‘I give in!’ she cried, reaching to tear off a bit of the pancake and dipping the end in a little pool of honey that had collected in the lower levels of its bubbly terrain.

‘Delicious! That’s so yummy it should be classed as a dangerous weapon! Is every meal over the next few days going to be diet sabotage?’

‘Boiled camel feet sometimes lack that certain something,’ he advised. ‘Eat while you can.’

‘Between the suntan and the fat, my agent will kill me.’

‘Start a fashion for voluptuous,’ he suggested.

‘You don’t understand. I am voluptuous. I abandoned the waif figure years ago. Do you think this body is size zero? Think again.’

‘What is size zero?’

‘That’s the size models try to be. I’d have to lose ten or twelve pounds to get there. As a model I’m considered borderline fat, as my agent keeps warning me.’

Salah stared at her for a moment, then began to laugh. It started as a chuckle, but quickly descended to his belly, where it took on a deeply contagious quality that drew her irresistibly into laughter, too. With great gusts and hoops, they were caught so helplessly that finally Salah fell backwards into the sand.

She turned to look down at him, at the black curls dusted with sand, sun-crinkled eyes, white teeth and laughing mouth. A new expression came into his eyes, and the laughter died on her lips.

He lifted his hand up her back and clenched it in her hair.

‘You are perfectly beautiful,’ he said, and for an uncharted time they were still, gazing at each other through ten long, wasted years.

Then Salah’s eyes widened in something like alarm. His face became shuttered and he sat up.

‘It is time to leave,’ he said flatly. And only then did Desi breathe again.

As he had predicted, several of the older women were sitting near the camel corral as they left, with their crafts and other wares spread out for examination.

Desi crouched down in front of the spread. Dolls made of bits of cloth and coloured thread, stones with fossils embedded in them, some pottery bowls with a curious design, and, best of all, some beautifully etched and painted bits of camel bone.

Desi oohed and aahed over everything, miming her admiration, and, unable to disappoint such dignified, open people, who clearly were very poor, carefully chose several items.

The camel bone work was exquisite: carved and engraved rings and pendants, and little etched scenes on flat strips of bone that looked for all the world like ivory.

Desi picked up an oval medallion bearing a delicately etched camel. Brown paint had been rubbed into the etched lines, so the outlines were dark against a smudged paler background blending into the creamy white of the bone.

‘This stuff is gorgeous!’ she said over her shoulder to Salah. ‘Where did she learn to carve like this?’

Salah briefly spoke with the artist, a middle-aged and weather-beaten woman with a thin face and calloused, graceful hands.

‘She learned it from her father. He learned it from his own father, and as none of her brothers survived childhood, he taught her. Her father used to colour such etchings in many colours, but she can no longer find the substances to make the paints, so she paints mostly in monochrome. She misses having the colours and apologizes because the work is not very pretty.’

‘It’s lovely. Can you find out her name for me, please?’

As Desi drew out her wallet, one of the women signalled to her, then opened a bit of cloth to show her something.

A small clay statue of a woman with a large tiara and hair exquisitely moulded in tumbling curls down her back and over her shoulder. She had prominent breasts, and her pubic hair was clearly marked, but her body had been given a dress of paler clay that flaked easily when she picked it up.

Desi examined it curiously.

‘How old is this?’ she asked.

‘“Very, very old”,’ Salah translated for the women.

‘Do you think that’s true? I mean, if so, wouldn’t it be in a museum?’

‘It is unlikely that anyone in this tribe would make a forgery of that kind. They would consider it blasphemous. That is why they have given her a modest cover-up before selling her.’

Forgery or not, Desi was taken by the little figure.

‘How much is it?’

Again a short colloquy. ‘Twenty dirhams.’

Desi blinked. ‘But it must—it has to be a forgery. If it were genuine they’d be asking a lot more, wouldn’t they?’

‘They find such things in the sand as they travel. They used to destroy them, thinking them some sort of witchcraft. Then they learned that foreigners liked them. For them, twenty dirhams is a lot of money, especially for a found item. They don’t understand why tourists like things that are old and broken like this.’

‘Well, I certainly like her.’

When she had paid and everything had been wrapped in rags or bits of old newspaper and put in a very distressed plastic bag, she thanked the women and got to her feet. With many goodbyes they were on their way.

‘Where do they spend the money?’ she asked later, as they headed out over the desert.

‘Taxis sometimes come and take them to town.’

‘What, such a distance?’

He flicked her a look. ‘They are not always camped so far from civilisation. But mostly they buy from the travelling shops—trucks loaded with every kind of merchandise, which service the nomad communities.’

‘But no chance for that artist to buy manufactured paints?’

‘Probably not.’

‘If I found her some paints, would there be a way to send them to her?’

After a short silence, Salah asked, ‘Why do you bother with this?’

‘Because she’s an artist, and art this good has a right to the proper materials. Are you going to answer my question?’

‘If you sent her something, eventually it would find its way to her. Tell me, when did you develop an interest in the indigenous art and antiquities of Barakat?’

‘I do a lot of travelling in my job, Salah. Half the time I don’t get to see anything more than the inside of my five-star hotel and the shoot site. It’s not the art so much as the people. I rarely get to meet real people in a real environment. Those women are lovely people, so friendly, and they look as though they can use the money.’

‘But the goddess is a collectors’ item. Are you a collector?’

‘The goddess? Is that who she is? How do you know?’ Her interest sparked, Desi dug into the bag of goodies and unwrapped the little clay statuette. She held it cupped in her hand.

‘What’s her name?’

‘It depends on where she was found. It’s almost impossible to say with certainty. My father would say, a love or fertility goddess.’

Desi frowned, accessing recent memories. ‘Inanna! Wasn’t she the goddess of love?’

Salah flicked her a look and said gravely, ‘In Sumer. Yes.’

‘Could it be her?’

‘You would have to ask my father.’

‘Oh, but it’s impossible. It would mean this was five thousand years old!’

‘It probably is.’

Desi gasped. A feeling of wonder flooded her, and a strange energy, as if the little goddess’s locked-up power had suddenly been released into her palm.

‘That’s amazing,’ she whispered. ‘But—why…I mean, how is it I can buy something so valuable just like that?’

‘She might be taken away from you at the airport.’

‘Really?’

‘It is illegal to take antiquities out of the Barakat Emirates. It is part of our cultural heritage. We have museums where such pieces belong.’

‘Seems a pretty poor way to manage resources. Wouldn’t it be better to stop the sale in the first place?’

‘We can’t police the entire desert. Instead tourists are searched before they leave, and such valuable items as your little goddess are confiscated. This discourages tourists from making such purchases in future.’

She laughed. ‘So I’ll have to give up my little talisman?’

‘Not everything is found, of course. Perhaps less than forty percent. If you pack it carefully, you might get away with it.’

She looked at him quizzically. ‘What makes you think I would want to “get away with” taking something that belongs in the country’s museums?’

‘You seem to like it.’

‘You think I steal everything I like? Have you noticed me wearing any of the Crown Jewels?’

‘You paid for it. Most people would not consider it theft.’

‘Oh, give me a break! We make love at night, and in the morning you salve your conscience by suggesting I’m dishonourable, is that it? We’ve been there before, Salah, and I got enough of it last time. Can’t you just enjoy the sex for what it is and leave your condemnation in your pocket?’

His jaw tightened. ‘No, that is not it. I apologize. In my work I see many people who consider themselves honest but who are without any conscience at all in this area.’

‘In your work?’

‘One of my areas as Cup Companion is antiquities security.’

‘Say what?’

‘My task is to prevent the smuggling of antiquities to foreign markets. Both West and East have many wealthy men who are interested in the ancient cultures of the Barakat Emirates. Organizers pay what to poor nomads and farmers seems a good price for any artefact they can steal or dig up, then sell them on to unscrupulous dealers for many times more. They in turn sell it on. By the time it reaches the collector, he is paying thousands of times the sum the finder got. Our heritage is in danger of being destroyed by this practice.’

‘Are you saying your personal mission is to stop it? How do you go about it?’

‘In various ways, none of them satisfactory. People mostly rob the sites of ancient cities and settlements which have not yet been studied, near the villages where they live. It is a big problem for archaeologists like my father. As you know, once something is dug up and removed, its provenance can never be discovered. So even if we recover that piece, its historic value is lost.’

‘Of course.’ Archaeologists must know exactly where something is found before it can shed light on history: Desi had learned that in her researches. A jug was just a jug unless you knew what else it was found with, its period, of what civilisation it had formed a part.

‘But theft is not my father’s biggest worry.’

There was something in his tone that caught her attention.

‘Really? What is, then?’

‘The answer is in your hand.’

She thought it was a covert challenge, that he wanted to know if she had any real archaeological interest or understanding. She held up the little statue.

Goddess of love. What did she know about the goddess of love? Worshipped as the one who made animals and land, as well as humans, fertile. Her sexual characteristics painted over by whoever had found it, because now her blatant sexuality was seen not as powerful, but immodest.

‘Oh my God!’ Desi whispered.

Found in a land where to worship the divine in any form but as Allah was blasphemy.

‘Tell me I’m wrong!’ she begged. ‘Is your father afraid that religious fanatics might…Oh, no!’

‘There is a significant risk. My father thinks the site is a city devoted to a love goddess. It could rewrite history. But if the Kaljuks and their supporters here in the Barakat Emirates hear of this find, and learn where it is located, the risk is worse than ordinary theft—they may try to sabotage the site itself. They would want to destroy it completely.’

Desi’s strongest emotion after dismay was exasperation. ‘For God’s sake! Four thousand years before Islam even happened!’

‘They do not care about that.’ Salah slowed the vehicle and turned his head, and his black eyes found hers. ‘That is why, Desi, I ask you if you have any other reason for wanting to visit this dig.’

‘What?’ she asked blankly.

‘If someone has asked you to try to find out what you can about the site my father is digging, you must understand that it is unlikely to be for genuine academic purposes.’

‘What are you trying to say?’ She blinked at him.

His voice was rough now, his eyes probing.

‘I know you are not here for the reason you have given. Do not be the innocent tool of villains, Desi. If someone wants to know about this project, it is because they want to steal our history from us, one way or the other. Tell me who asked you to use your connection with our family in this way.’

She felt as if he had slapped her. She had to open her mouth twice before she could speak.

‘What do you imagine you’re talking about?’ she cried. ‘No one asked me to visit the dig! No one asked me to come here!’

‘This is not the truth, Desi! Tell me their names! Such information can be invaluable to us.’

‘I am not anyone’s tool, innocent or otherwise!’ she cried indignantly. ‘Do you imagine I could be so stupid? Or maybe you think I’m the cheat myself? Is that what you think?’

‘Why are you here?’

‘I told you why!’

He was silent, watching the guarded look come into her eyes. The lie was in her tone; even she could hear it. But she had to glare back at him with the best outrage she could muster.

‘I am not anybody’s tool,’ she insisted, hating the expression on his face, hating the lie she was living. How she wished she could throw the truth at his head.

He said, ‘I will take you to my father, if you insist, Desi. But I tell you now that you will not learn where the site is, even though you see it with your own eyes—the desert does not tell the uninitiated where they are. You will learn no village name. Do you still wish to make the journey?’

‘Of course I do!’ she cried. ‘And I couldn’t care less about knowing the compass coordinates! You can blind-fold me if you want to. That’s not why I want to visit the site. I told you—I had no idea how important it was till you told me the other day. I thought it was just another site. I had no idea I was asking for such a big favour.’

‘My father could not say no.’

‘Well, I’m sorry. I wish I’d known.’

‘And now that you do?’

With every fibre of her being she wanted to say, Forget it! I don’t want anything from you or your father.

But she couldn’t. She said lamely, ‘Well, aren’t we nearly halfway there now?’

He nodded without speaking.

‘Salah, I swear to you I am not here to steal any secrets for anybody.’

He looked at her as if there was nothing in the world he wanted more than to believe her. But when he said, ‘Good,’ she knew he was still doubting.

‘You always did judge me,’ she reminded him bitterly.

‘Not without cause.’

‘Then, as now, the cause was all in your own head.’

He laughed, seemed about to say something, then changed his mind.

For one powerful, compelling moment Desi had the conviction that she should confide everything to Salah—should just tell him, Samiha doesn’t want to marry you, she’s in love with someone else.

She half opened her mouth and closed it again. If she were wrong, she would not be the one to suffer.

Or at least, not more than was already on the cards.

Chapter Thirteen

THAT day was spent crossing the bleakest imaginable desert, emptier than she could ever have dreamed. For miles they saw nothing but sand and rock. No animals, no trees, not even any scrub.

The sun was scorching. The Land Cruiser was air-conditioned, but that did not stop the sun coming through the windows, and setting her skin on fire. Desi had always loved heat, but this was something else. There was no shade anywhere, it was hour after hour of burning sand, till her eyes grew hypnotized and her brain tranced.

She would not protest or complain, because she suspected he was waiting for just that. Nor did she want to give him any excuse for turning back. It’ll be hell on wheels, Desi, Sami had said, but even she could not have foreseen this.

Desi lifted the bottle of water to her lips for the fiftieth time that day, and took a long swig. She’d never drunk so much water in her life.

‘I suppose if we ran out of gas or water out here, we’d be dead in an hour,’ she observed mildly.

‘It would take longer than that. But we will not run out,’ Salah said.

At noon they stopped only briefly to eat and drink. Salah, wearing his desert robe and the headscarf she had learned to call keffiyeh, got out to stretch, but Desi remained in the vehicle. To step outside in this heat would be tantamount to suicide, or at the very least, instant second-degree burn. She had put on shorts and a T-shirt in the nomad camp this morning, and now she was sorry. But it was too much effort to think of changing into something with sleeves.

After only fifteen minutes they were on their way again.

In late afternoon Salah pointed through the windscreen. ‘We’ll camp there,’ he said.

Desi frowned and shaded her eyes till she saw it: a large outcrop of sand-coloured stone ahead. She would not have seen it if he hadn’t pointed it out. The best way to see anything out here was by the shadow it cast, and there was no shadow.

‘Will there be some shade? Why can’t I see a shadow?’ She was desperate to be out of the sun.

‘On the other side. The sun is behind us now.’

‘Are we heading east?’ Desi frowned and looked at the sun. They were. She hadn’t noticed him change direction. ‘Why?’

Salah glanced at her ruefully. ‘I’m sorry. I overshot. We should have reached it an hour ago.’

‘Thus the great desert navigator whose ancestors survived to produce him!’

‘As long as the mistakes are not fatal, of course, one survives.’

‘You can’t imagine how comforting.’

At least they could laugh.

Ten minutes later—how deceiving distances were when you had no real landmarks!—they reached it. The mound was much bigger than she had imagined, a small hill, the size of a substantial building. As Salah slowed the Land Cruiser and pulled around to the other side, Desi gasped in relief.

‘An oasis!’ she cried. ‘A real, true blue oasis!’

‘At this season the water will be brackish.’

Two dozen palm trees surrounded a large pool of water in the rock’s welcome shadow.

‘Heaven is a relative construct, I see,’ Desi said.

Salah pulled the vehicle up underneath a rock overhang and Desi tumbled out.

Even in the shade it was boiling hot. She gasped. ‘Wow! How right you were about travelling in this heat! Is it all going to be like this?’

‘No,’ he said, opening the back and beginning to unload supplies. When Desi moved to help him he waved her away. ‘Leave it to me for now. You are too hot. Go and sit in the shade.’

He was right there, and she could assume he was more used to this heat than she. She sank down on a rock and watched him heave out the tent.

‘I think I’ve drunk four litres of water today! Do we have enough?’

‘We have plenty. When did you last take a salt tablet?’

She told him, and he nodded approval.

She knew she must be sweating, but she’d never have known it by her skin. In such dry air, sweat seemed to evaporate before you saw it.

‘I suppose this is as good as a detox cure,’ Desi mused.

When Salah had unloaded the equipment and supplies, he slammed the tailgate and turned to look into the sun.

With his eyes narrowed, his chiselled face outlined by sun and shadow, he looked fiercely handsome, a face from another century. Desi felt lightheaded, almost drunk, with his beauty.