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

‘I am very happy to meet you at last. We have heard so much about you! It is kind of you to come to visit us.’

He did not sound in the least like a man who suspected her of conspiring to steal priceless objects, and Desi flicked a glance at Salah.

‘It’s very kind of you to let me come,’ she said, and under the warm intensity of his gaze, she managed to find a smile.

Her hand had collected a certain amount of dirt during the handshake, and she absently dusted it down on her khaki shorts. Dr. al Khouri frowned, looking at his own hand.

‘Too much dirt in this job!’ he said, dusting his hands. ‘I must go out now and make my round before they down tools for the night. Perhaps you will like to come with me, Desi. You have come a long way, and I know you will be eager to see the site as soon as possible.’

She nodded agreement. It was long past time to get away from Salah. Salah seemed to agree.

‘I will check on the sleeping arrangements,’ he said. Their eyes caught for a moment, and she sent him a cold warning with her eyes. Then she saw that he did not need it: he had no more interest in their continuing to share a bed than she did. Well, he’d had his closure, of course, she reminded herself bitterly.

If only she could feel closure. But for Desi it was all still boiling up inside her, rage and heartbreak and a deep, abiding sense of betrayal.

A moment later she was out in the late sunshine, listening as Dr. al Khouri began to explain the site. He spoke as if she were the student she was pretending to be, and in spite of everything Desi began to be intrigued.

‘Look at this,’ Khaled al Khouri told her, as they paused by a worker who was carefully excavating a massive slab embedded in the hardened soil, on which she could make out, faintly, an etched image. ‘This piece is our pride and joy.’

Desi peered at it. ‘Is that a woman?’

‘Not a woman,’ he said, with the air of a man used to correcting students. ‘All we can say with certainty at the moment is that this is a female figure. In fact, she is probably our goddess. We believe this lady might have been the tutelary deity of the whole civilisation.’

She bent down to see more clearly. The figure showed the hint of a tiara in the intricately curled hair that fell down over her shoulders above wide-spaced breasts, a curving waist encircled by some kind of string or thong, broad hips and a prominent nest of pubic hair. One hand was at her side, the other held up in what might be a gesture of greeting, palm towards the viewer. She was standing on an animal that Desi could not distinguish.

Excitement bubbled up as she recognized her little goddess.

‘Who is she?’ she demanded.

‘We think, the deity of this temple.’ The archaeologist waved his hand at the long shape marked out in the earth with stakes and string. ‘We don’t know her name yet.’

‘Is she a fertility goddess? A love goddess?’

‘We think so.’

‘Inanna?’

He lifted an eyebrow at her, in a gesture so like Salah her heart kicked a protest. ‘Possibly, but if so it’s an unusual depiction of her that would be specific to this people, and she might have had another name. What made you think of her?’

Desi laughed. ‘She’s the only ancient love goddess I know!’ she confessed. ‘I bought a little statue from some nomads a couple of days ago. I think it’s the same woman…female figure!’

Dr. al Khouri shook his head, sighing. ‘You bought her from nomads?’

‘Yes, for twenty dirhams. She’s in the truck.’

‘Then tomorrow you will show her to me. This, we suspect—’ he waved his arm to take in the entire site ‘—was her particular city. Perhaps the people came here on pilgrimages.’

‘The goddess of love was the chief god?’ Desi asked, amazed.

‘Yes, and such worship left its mark on later generations. In antiquity, Barakat has had many ruling women, and even after Islam, we often allowed queens to rule us. You have heard of the great Queen Halimah?’

‘Yes.’

‘Her path was of course paved by the goddesses and queens of antiquity, who still exist in the psyche of Barakat.’

‘Oh!’ Desi said in surprise.

‘Your own little goddess probably came from this area, but not this particular site. The flooding brought many things to the surface all along the valley. We have seen evidence for at least two more large settlements not far away.

‘That is why it is so critical to keep this secret for as long as possible. We can never hope to police every potential site in the valley, and if we lose too many of them…but we start with the largest, hoping that it is also the most important.’

‘Salah says looters aren’t the worst threat, though,’ she said, remembering. He had said it only a day or two ago, Desi realized in distant surprise. She seemed to have lived a lifetime since then. Then she had felt alive, that was why it seemed so long ago.

‘That is true.’

The archaeologist guided her over a narrow bridge of land between two square holes, smiling and nodding at the diggers below, who were starting to call to each other about the happy prospect of downing tools and cold beer.

‘Looters take what they find for their own enrichment. But the others, the fools who cannot bear to know that once the feminine was worshipped as fervently as the masculine is today, the idiots who must force the past to match their ideals as well as the present—they are a different kind of danger. They want to destroy the evidence.

‘Whatever we find here, Desi, it is the heritage of the whole world. It is our collective history. These madmen—they want to forget that all of Mohammad’s line comes through a woman. Fatima. Without his daughter, there would be no sharifs at all, no descendants of the prophet. But still they want to wipe the feminine out of the world.’

‘And you thought I might be helping these people?’ she asked in quiet bitterness.

He stared at her. ‘Help them? What intelligent person would help such lunatics?’

‘Salah said you suspected I wanted to come here because—’

‘Oh!’ he said, in a different tone. His eyes moved to her face. ‘My wife said that if we wanted Salah to be happy, I had to let you visit, in spite of Salah’s objections. And I had to pretend to suspect your motives, too. I am only an archaeologist, I don’t really understand these things. But you will know—is my son happy now?’

Her heart was suddenly beating in hard, heavy thuds. ‘How would I know?’ Desi protested. ‘Isn’t he going to marry Sami?’

He shrugged. ‘My wife says not.’

Desi took a deep breath and sighed it out. Promise me you’ll tell Uncle Khaled only if you’re absolutely certain he’ll be all right with it, Sami had said. And here was Sami’s chance. This at least she could accomplish. This at least she could pull from the wreckage. No happiness for herself, that wasn’t possible now, but…

She said, ‘Dr. al Khouri—’

‘But you must call me Khaled!’

‘Khaled, I have something to tell you, and something to ask you, from Sami.’

‘Ah, yes, my niece is your friend! My wife said. Let us sit here, then.’ He guided her to a bench beside a table under a canopy, where they had a view over the whole dig. ‘Now. What has to be said that my niece could not say to me herself?’

Desi stared out over the scene, watching long shadows move and dance as the workers moved out of the field and headed towards the tents.

‘It’s about…the marriage.’ Her voice grated on the word. ‘Sami asked me to tell you that she—doesn’t want to marry Salah. She’s already engaged to a man she loves, but her brothers wanted to choose her husband. It was they who chose Salah. She’s told them she doesn’t agree, but they…’

‘Do you speak of Walid and Arif?’ the scientist interrupted in amazement.

Desi nodded. ‘She asked me to beg you to overrule Walid and send your permission for her to marry the man she loves. Otherwise she’s afraid Walid will do something…really stupid.’

Khaled al Khouri’s eyebrows went up as he inhaled all this, and when she stopped speaking he sighed explosively.

‘Well, they are fools, these young nephews of mine! If they do not control themselves, they will soon be among the madmen who come to destroy history for the sake of their convictions. What is his name, Samiha’s fiancé?’

‘Farid Durrani al Muntazer. His family is originally from Bagestan, but he’s Canadian.’

‘Madthe?’ Khaled threw back his head and laughed a loud, boisterous laugh. ‘Well, they are worse than fools. They are ridiculous! This boy is a member of the royal family of Bagestan!’

Desi stared. ‘What?’

‘This is one of the names the al Jawadi took decades ago when they went into exile. Why does he not tell them so? It is no secret anymore. They are on the throne now, as the world knows.’

The Silk Revolution. Desi, like everyone else she knew, had been thrilled when handsome Sultan Ashraf had been restored to the throne of Bagestan. And Farid was related to him?

She smiled, and her heart lightened a little with happiness for her friend.

‘I don’t think Walid rejected him on his merits. It was the principle of the thing.’

‘Well, I will give her my formal permission, it is the only way with such young men as this. But I will also have something to say to them.’

He stood and lifted a rope barrier for her. ‘And now you have done your duty, Desi. Come and look at the lady’s temple before the sun goes.’

Salah stood in the doorway of the mess tent, a cup of coffee in his hand, watching from a distance. The grace with which she moved up the long buried slope of that ancient temple where his distant ancestors had once worshipped love. In the shimmer of heat he seemed to see her through millennia. As if she belonged there, the high priestess of the religion of love.

Once he had worshipped at that shrine, had drunk from the honeyed chalice. Then with his own hand he had smashed it to fragments.

All the pieces of his life had come apart a few hours ago, and no new image had yet formed. He seemed to himself to be still staggering under the blow. All his landmarks were gone, blown down by the whirlwind of the horror of what he had done.

But the answer was here. He gazed at the lithe beauty of her as she talked earnestly to his father. She lifted her arm to point into the distance, and a last ray of the setting sun caught her suddenly, haloing her figure with flames of red gold, imprinting the shape on his heart, where it matched some shape already there…

The answer would be found here.

‘Everyone eats in the food tent,’ Salah told her a little later, leading her across the moonshadowed desert towards the trailer where she would sleep. ‘Supper will be ready in half an hour. Or someone can bring you a tray here.’

Desi heaved a breath. Everything was suddenly catching up with her, and she knew she couldn’t sit through a meal with the bunch of cheerful, enthusiastic volunteers she had seen in her tour of the site, especially as it seemed all the starstruck girls were going to want her autograph. She would feel stronger in the morning. Right now she felt she would burst if the least demand were made on her. She desperately needed to be by herself.

‘I’m not hungry. If I can have a glass of water I’ll go to bed now.’

‘There’s water in the trailer. Desi, I—’

‘No,’ she said, flinging up a hand, her voice cracking with emotion. ‘Please. There’s nothing to say.’

‘There is everything to say,’ Salah said. ‘Do you think we can leave it where it is?’

She couldn’t take any more. Not tonight. Not ever. ‘I’ll say good night, Salah.’

But his hand closed on her arm, heat burning through her skin to war with the coldness in her heart.

‘Walk with me,’ he said. ‘Deezee!’

Even now, even after what she had learned, his voice roughing up her name had power over her, like a cat’s tongue on a sensitive spot. The knowledge filled her with distant fury. That nickname in his mouth was like blasphemy now. Bitter hurt welled up in her, choking her so that she could not speak to resist.

‘Come with me.’

And she turned and went with him out beyond the cluster of caravans and trailers, into the empty desert.

A full moon was climbing up the sky. The giant rocks threw heavy black shadows onto the sand, making a landscape unlike anything she had ever seen before, strange and otherworldly.

‘Desi, I was blind. Blind and a fool.’

She closed her eyes as a sense of waste and devastation flooded her. She shook her head.

‘Too late,’ she choked. ‘Too little, too late.’

‘Don’t say it!’ he commanded. ‘It can’t be too late, Desi. I won’t let it be too late! We are still young, we have so much life in front of us.’

‘Are you young? I’m old. I feel a hundred years old. I’m tired and life has passed me by. And I don’t want to talk about this. Is that all you wanted to say?’

He stopped and turned to face her. Moonlight carved his face like rock.

‘What are you saying? Do you think we can just walk away from this? You loved me once. Love is still possible. That I know. When we make love, you tell me so in everything but words. Desi, I—’

She felt exhausted, bruised. ‘I think our watches must be out of sync, Salah.’ She glanced down at her wrist in the milky gloom. ‘Yeah, by, let’s see—about ten years.’

‘A mistake destroyed those ten years,’ he insisted. ‘A stupid, ignorant mistake. And if we don’t mend it now, it will destroy the rest of our lives. We have to find our way through this.’

‘The only mistake that would destroy the rest of my life would be to listen to you.’

‘You know it is not true. You would not be so hurt now if you did not…Please. Let us not go on in this terrible error. Look into your heart, Desi, and hear me.’

Like a wounded animal goaded beyond its endurance, she rounded on him.

‘Look! You wanted closure, am I right? That’s what you wanted! Now you’ve had closure. You’re going to get married, I think you said. Well, off you go, and good luck to you!’

‘Do you think I can marry Sami now?’ he almost shouted.

‘But it doesn’t matter who you marry, does it?’ she reminded him harshly. ‘What happened to “the best love comes after marriage”?’

‘How can I marry another woman now in the hopes of learning to love her?’

‘I have no idea. But then I never understood the principle in the first place.’

‘Desi, I made a mistake. That mistake has ruined our lives for ten years.’

‘You’re a powerful Cup Companion who lives in a palace. I don’t wake up for less than ten thousand dollars. I don’t think we can call this ruination.’

‘You speak of the world. I speak of the heart.’

‘Do you?’ Desi gave vent to a snort of bitter laughter. ‘That’s a good one!’

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