The Fierce and Tender Sheikh Read online

  There was one thing that she hadn’t yet done, and one morning Shakira set out from the palace, accompanied by Sharif, to return to her childhood home.

  It was in a pretty village some miles from the capital, in the foothills of the mountains. “It was the summer residence of some nobleman,” her grandmother had told her, in one of their many conversations about family history. “Safa bought it and gave it to me when Mahlouf was born. He did not want Mahlouf’s future to be dependent on Majdi’s generosity. Majdi did not like the idea much, but we spent our summers there before the coup.

  “Mahlouf was determined to return to Bagestan when he grew up, to live in the home that his father had given him. Probably the house was all the clue Ghasib’s spies needed to discover who Mahlouf really was. And they bided their time.”

  “Be prepared for it not to be as you remembered it,” Sharif advised her now, as the car passed through the little village. He had visited the village during his search for her brother. “The house will have suffered, too.”

  Perhaps that was why she had waited before coming here. Sometimes she had thought that she could never bear to come and see the remains of the dream that had sustained her through so much. But unless her brother appeared, which seemed less and less likely as time passed, the house belonged to her now. And she would have to decide what to do about it.

  They turned into a side street that ran uphill for a short stretch and then stopped. On the right, by a long, high, once-white wall, they stopped. Shakira got out and stood in front of a weather-beaten door. So far nothing seemed in the least familiar.

  “Are you sure this is it?” she asked foolishly.

  He understood. “It’s not surprising if you don’t recognize the exterior, Shakira. You were only six when you left.”

  The door was locked, but Sharif had come prepared. He produced a crowbar from the car. “When I was here, the villagers told me one of Ghasib’s generals had been living here until he ran foul of his boss and was imprisoned or executed. The family fled, and the house has been empty for years. No one dared to come in.”

  He put a finger on the bell. “But we will make sure.”

  He kept his finger on the bell for several seconds. They couldn’t hear the bell ringing, and there was no sound of footsteps, so after a couple of minutes Sharif began to tap the crowbar into the jamb against the lock. It gave, and a moment later the door swung open onto a shadowed vestibule.

  Shakira slowly lifted a foot and stepped inside.

  She wasn’t sure what made her look up; to find the source of the shadowy light, perhaps. High overhead was a stained glass dome with a delicate blue pattern that was just visible against the dead leaves and other debris that clogged it.

  “Oh, it is the right place!” she whispered, for she had stood and craned her neck to see that beauty overhead before. It was closer now, because she was taller, and some of the pieces of the mosaic were broken and missing, but she knew it.

  Ahead was another door, this time unlocked. She opened it and peered down the gloomy corridor behind. Sharif following behind her, the Princess began to trace the corridor. Sloping down from street level, it zigged and zagged.

  “It’s typical of houses of the period. It’s so that the women and children cannot be seen from the street,” Sharif said when she wondered at it.

  After about fifty feet the corridor opened onto desolation. The pool and garden of her memory were there in outline and shape, she saw at once, but the fierce wind of neglect, and worse, had blasted them. The courtyard was a spread of ruin. Stagnant water, fallen brick, cracked paving, faded tiles and, over all, a thick layer of dead leaves, twigs, rubble and torn paper, through which were sticking up the skeletons of the trees that had once shaded and blessed the space.

  Enclosing the courtyard on two sides were delicate arched windows and doors, several broken, with the intricate stained glass frame inserts showing the effects of neglect and the battering of the elements. The walls that surrounded and surmounted them were covered by panels of stone and plaster that had once been decorated with a breathtaking richness of design. Now it was faded, chipped, and broken.

  But still the ghost of what had been was strong.

  She stood for several minutes staring at it, measuring it against the garden of her memory. “Something so beautiful. Why did they let this happen?” she whispered, but Sharif only shook his head. He had no more answer than she.

  He held out his hand, and she gratefully took it. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said, casting an eye at the roofing and the walls. “Structurally the place looks sound, and most of what is needed is cosmetic. With the right artisans, it could be fully restored.”

  “I’m glad you’re with me,” she said softly. His eyes darkened, and he looked as though he was about to speak, but changed his mind.

  They went into the house then, and walked through room after room where once artists had painted dazzling scenes on the walls. Scenes of lovers’ meetings, of the chase, of the forest, scenes from the lives of heroes and kings taken from the great national myth of Bagestan.

  All were in more or less disrepair. Windows and doors had been left open to the elements at some time, and some of the furniture was damaged and waterlogged.

  And yet, the house was beautiful. Even the trace of what it had been was enough to make the breath catch in her throat. Domed ceilings cascaded down in an ever increasing spread of squinches like a frozen chord of music, painted with perfect delicacy. As in parts of the palace, glass doors framed with mosaics of stained glass slid upwards to create an opening onto the courtyard, so that a wall the entire length of a room could disappear upwards and leave the room open-sided.

  “It is a beautiful house,” Sharif murmured as they stood in one such opening and gazed out at the courtyard. “No wonder you never forgot this.”

  “Look!” she cried suddenly, for on one of the trees at the far end of the courtyard, nearest the once-beautiful talar and its exquisite domed ceiling, something pink clung to the end of a blasted branch. Shakira began to pick her way through the debris, walking by the edge of the clogged reflecting pool where once, the pattern of the tiles visible under the choke of leaves told her, a path had been.

  “That’s me,” she whispered when they had reached the tree. A rosebud, against all the odds, was alive, on one green twig. “That’s me, the last flower of a tree that…that…” She shut her eyes tight, for the memory of those last days with her brother was very strong here.

  “Oh, where is my brother? Why can’t we find him? Did I dream it?”

  But again Sharif was helpless and had no answer for her.

  She remembered something suddenly, and went back inside, moving through the rooms until she came to a door she knew. Her heart leapt in her throat as she opened it, and she stood on the threshold, staring in.

  Her father’s massive wooden desk was still there, where it had always been, looking different only because she was taller now. Bismillah arrahman arraheem. She heard the murmur of his voice in the rustle of leaves in the wind that gusted through the broken window.

  “Man antom?” growled a voice in the guttural country dialect. Who are you?

  Shakira gasped and whirled. Behind her, in the doorway, Sharif was looking down at an old man. The man was stocky but thin-faced, with thick, stiff grey hair, dark eyes and a wide mouth.

  “The owner of the house has come to inspect it,” Sharif said firmly. “Who are you?”

  “The owner? What owner? Everyone is dead,” said the old man.

  Shakira gasped as the voice and face together stirred some latent memory to life. “Mister Gulab!” she cried, the name seeming to come out of her mouth without any participation from her brain.

  He came closer and peered into the room past Sharif.

  “Who is it?”

  “I am Shakira, Mister Gulab! Do you remember me? Shakira al Nadim, the daughter of Mahlouf and Saira.” It still gave her a thrill to pronounce the names. “You
were—you worked in my mother’s rose garden, didn’t you?”

  The old man stared at her under his bushy white eyebrows, his head thrust forward. Then his arms went up in amazement.

  “Ya Allah! Shakira! Khanum Shakira!” the old man cried. “You are alive? Alhamdolillah! God be praised, for He willed it so! So long it has been! And now you are a woman! And what of your brother?” He turned to Sharif. “Is this Mazin, who also, God be thanked, escaped the murderous villains who killed your family?”

  “The other servants fled,” Gulab explained a little later, as he served them mint tea in tiny gold-rimmed glasses set in gold holders. “Here is the sugar. Drink it sweet, Khanum Shakira, for your heart has suffered much today, seeing the house the way it never was in the days of the old Sultan, peace be upon him. Do you recognize these glasses? They were your mother’s favourite set. I borrowed them many years ago, may she forgive me.”

  “They fled?” Shakira prompted, obediently dropping two cubes into her cup. She looked around at the gardener’s room, and remembered that this was not the first time she had drunk mint tea here. Strange how the memories that had so defiantly refused to arise in her before were now coming back, as if they existed in the air itself and her mind merely picked them up.

  Gulab sat down on a cushion and picked up his own tea. “They were frightened, and besides, there was no one to pay their wages. They fled that same night, though I argued that you and Mazin needed someone to cook and look after you.”

  “He was there, then!” Shakira cried. “Sometimes I thought it was just my imagination.”

  The dark eyes rested on her. “He was a brave boy, your brother. I told him that there was danger, for who knew when Ghasib’s men might come to check for just such a possibility, that some had escaped the assassination?”

  “You knew that it wasn’t an accident?”

  “We knew that your father, Mahlouf, was the grandson of the Sultan,” he said simply. “It was a secret, but we knew.”

  “Gulab,” she said, after a little reminiscence, “do you know what happened the night I—I was taken away? Do you know what happened to Mazin?”

  The grizzled old head nodded. “I had sent a message to…certain people,” he said, still retaining the caution he had learned in the Ghasib years, “telling them the situation. Someone came after dark. It was a dangerous mission and they could not risk being seen by some in the village. Arif Bahrami and his wife came themselves. They meant to take the boy, who would be most at risk from Ghasib. Their younger son had died and they hoped they could put Mazin in his place. But when they saw Mazin, they said it would not work. He was too old. He was the same age as their older son, and someone would notice if they suddenly had another boy that age. They wondered about taking you, and giving you their son’s name.”

  Shakira stared, her heart thumping wildly at the explanation. “Is that why I had to be a boy! Oh, why didn’t they ever explain?”

  “Mazin was very brave. He told them to take you, and he would find a way by himself. Bahrami warned him not to stay in the house—to hide in the mountains or the desert, if necessary, because they had information that the secret police already knew that a child had escaped.

  “The next night Mazin took a pack with food and water and said goodbye to me. That was the last I saw him. He was twelve years old, and very brave. Perhaps he was strong enough to survive. It will be as God willed it.”

  Tears streamed down Shakira’s cheeks as he spoke. Into the mountains alone. Oh, Mazin.

  Fourteen

  “Will you welcome, please—Princess Shakira Warda Jawad al Nadim, and Sheikh Sharif ibn Bassam Azad al Dauleh!”

  The applause was polite but not enthusiastic. A spotlight began playing on the carpet just beyond the entrance to the studio, and she knew it was for her. Her heart was beating much louder than the hundreds of clapping hands. She glanced uncertainly up into Sharif’s face. He leaned down and said into her ear, “There’s nobody out there Hani can’t handle with one arm in a sling!”

  She snorted with laughter, hastily stifled it, and stepped out into the spot with her head flung up, eyes sparkling, her mouth curving impishly. Sharif followed close behind. The hungry eyes of the cameras glowered at her from several places on the set, near and far, as the chat show hostess came to meet them.

  “Well, Princess,” she said when they were all seated and the applause had died down. “In the space of a few months, you’ve been swept from the lowest depths to the absolute pinnacle. You were in a refugee camp in the middle of the Australian desert, an orphan, hungry, and pretending to be a boy. Now you’re a princess in one of the most popular Middle Eastern royal families of modern times. You live in a palace, you wear amazing jewels, you travel in a private jet with bodyguards. If you wanted to, you could forget hunger and deprivation ever existed. But you have chosen not to forget.”

  The hostess smiled at her, but Shakira was remembering, and did not smile back. “It is not a choice,” she corrected gravely. “I couldn’t forget. I can never forget. I had no home, no name, and no family, and I thought I would never have such things. Now I have everything, but how can I forget what it was like to have nothing? How could I forget the ones who are still there, and still have nothing?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t forget,” she said again.

  “We’ll talk about the ones who are still there in a moment. But now, tell us what it was like to live in a refugee camp for so many years. It must be dreadful to live under conditions where there are food shortages and even a lack of basic hygiene.”

  “The worst is not the lack of water and food, or the filth and squalor,” Shakira told her earnestly. “The worst is having no name, no history. The worst is when the people talk to you as if you are nothing because you have nothing. When a big evil has been done to you, but instead of helping you they make you a prisoner, and treat you as if you are the one who has done the evil. That is the worst. Because they make you, too, think that you are nothing.”

  “We have some library film of one of the camps you were in,” said the hostess gravely, and the audience sat in silence as the footage flashed on the monitor. “Do you recognize this?”

  Shakira swallowed hard as first the bleak landscape of makeshift tents and then the familiar shape of a building appeared. She had seen the film before, of course—Gazi al Hamzeh had made sure there would be no surprises tonight. But still it was hard.

  “Yes, this is the first camp I was in, in Parvan. At first it was not so bad, but after the invasion the Kaljuks used to bomb and strafe us. But they never hit the kitchen building—that’s it there—till right at the end, just before the camp was closed. We all used to run there when the planes came, so when they finally hit it, they killed a lot of people. They killed my stepmother and my stepbrothers and sisters.”

  A murmur ran through the audience. The camp film clip ended.

  “And after that, you were completely alone? How old were you?”

  “I don’t know. About twelve.” Shakira’s shoulders moved as if she shrugged off a troublesome feeling.

  “And you moved to different camps, all alone, and that’s when you pretended to be a boy.”

  “Yes. It was dangerous to be alone, and a girl. Everyone knows that you have no one to protect you,” Shakira admitted reluctantly.

  “And you lived as a boy for…what? Nine years?”

  The Princess shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t remember for sure. It is better not to count birthdays.”

  “Princess, you’ve told us what was the worst about your life in those camps. What else do you remember?”

  “The politicians who visit and make promises and tell lies,” she answered, and the audience clapped their approval.

  The hostess smiled. “And after that?”

  “Water,” said Shakira. “Not in the last camp, not in Australia, but in the others, we had sometimes terrible shortages of clean water. Then you dream of water, night after night. You dream that they have br
ought in a herd of elephants blowing water over each other’s backs. You dream that someone has dug a well…you dream that the babies are not dying anymore.”

  She turned to gaze out at the studio audience. “To wear jewels, to live in a palace—these things are very pleasant. But to have fresh water to drink, that is the—” On a sudden impulse, Shakira pulled off the clasp bracelet she was wearing, and held it out on her palm. Under the studio lights rubies and diamonds sparkled and glowed, and Camera Two greedily closed on it. “Do you think you would not trade that for a sip of pure water in such a place?”

  Once more the studio rang with applause. Sitting in the audience, Gazi al Hamzeh leaned to his wife. “She’s a natural.”

  “The man sitting beside you now,” the hostess said, “Sheikh Sharif Azad al Dauleh, is the man who hunted for you through a number of those camps, and finally found you.”

  A smile transformed the small, frowning face. “Yes, then Sharif came. That was a day!”

  “Tell us about that, Princess.”

  “Nothing could be more wonderful than when he came to me and said, I know your name, and you have a family, and I am going to take you home. That is the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me in my life.”

  She suddenly turned to Sharif with a tearful, tremulous smile, and his eyes blazed so fiercely with his uncontrolled response that the audience drew a collective breath. Shakira’s own eyes widened, and she seemed trapped by his gaze.

  In the audience Gazi let out a slow breath. “Wow.”

  “I told you so,” Anna murmured with a grin.

  “It must have been quite a moment for you, too, Your Excellency,” the hostess continued after that pregnant moment in which most of the audience seemed to understand much more than had been said.

  The black eyes flicked from Shakira’s face to the hostess’s. “Yes, it was a moment for me, too,” he agreed, and everyone heard the understatement.

  “But the Princess was masquerading as a boy at the time. How did you know you had found the Princess?”