The Fierce and Tender Sheikh (8 page)

S
uhaila was a tiny, vivid woman, dressed in the most gorgeous silks, her expressive hands and arms crusted with a rich display of jewels and the gold bracelets Shakira remembered, her long braided hair a rebellious black, and her black eyes bright with humour, mischief, wisdom and defiance.

“Ah, you are like me,” she said to Shakira. “The eyes, of course—there you are like Safa. But you are small and thin, like me, and you have no breasts. And your chin—” she put out a firm hand to stroke her granddaughter's cheek “—these things you have from me. Your breasts will grow now that you are eating, but you will always be a small woman. And you are a fighter, one sees that in your face. I was a fighter, too. Beware, Granddaughter, because it doesn't always lead to happiness. How old are you?”

“I—twenty-one, I think.” Her birth date had been lost long ago in the camps, but she had learned her real statistics from the records in the Sultan's dossier.

“Mahlouf was a fool to go back to Bagestan when he did,”
the old woman said. “I told him so, but if there is any way to stop a young man being a fool, I never learned it. Even if he had not been Prince Safa's son, the fact that his mother was abroad recording songs of the resistance would have put him in danger.”

Shakira smiled shyly, entranced by her grandmother's fire and strength. “They played
Aina al Warda
for me,” she said.
Where is the Rose?
Suhaila's voice asked so urgently, so plaintively, that Shakira, in company with many other Bagestanis, wept every time she heard it. “It's very beautiful. The Sultan said the whole resistance movement was fired by the way you sang that song.”

In fact, she loved her grandmother's singing so much that she had played little else since learning how to work the CD player in her sitting room.

Suhaila laughed, but she was clearly pleased.
“Mash'Allah!
And did you inherit my voice?” asked “Bagestan's Nightingale.”

“I don't know. I wasn't allowed to sing.”

The old woman fixed her with a thoughtful look, then nodded. “Ghasib had his spies looking for you, of course, and he knew whose granddaughter you were. If a child in Arif Bahrami's family had been heard to have a voice…”

Shakira blinked, remembering a day when the family had been visiting a public garden. It had been a beautiful day, cool after an overnight rain, and the roses had been in bloom. Hani had felt his heart lighten, not knowing why, but the next moment a blow from his stepmother on the back of his head had shocked him out of whatever dream he had inhabited.

Don't sing!
she had hissed at him.

“Is that why?” Shakira asked now. It had seemed so unreasonable that Hani's heart had nearly burst with the injustice. One of the many incomprehensible embargoes on the child's behaviour. Like being a boy instead of a girl.

Her grandmother lifted her hands, and a hundred gold bracelets tinkled on her arms, just as they had in memory.
“What other reason? Bahrami was a great loyalist. He knew how far Ghasib's paranoia extended.”

With a shock of shifting images, Shakira's past reconfigured itself. “I thought it was because she hated me,” she murmured. “She always seemed so angry.”

“Perhaps she was always afraid.” Suhaila nodded. “Well, then, perhaps you have a voice. One day we will see. Other things are more important right now.”

“Grandmother—” How her heart beat with the word! “Grandmother, will you tell me about you and my grandfather? And my father and mother? Will you tell me everything?”

The great singer laughed, and stroked her cheek again. “That is why I am here, child.” She settled herself on the divan, amongst an array of fat cushions, as if she were a Sultan herself. “Today I will tell you about your handsome grandfather, Prince Safa. Sit there.”

She was so regal it would have been impossible to disobey, but of course Shakira had no such thought anyway. With stars in her eyes she sank down at her grandmother's knee.

“My father, your great-grandfather, was a very educated and forward-looking man, a brother of a Johari tribal chief. One of his brothers was Cup Companion to the Crown Prince.

“When I was a girl there was war in Europe, and the armies of the West invaded countries around Bagestan, to keep the oil for themselves. My father said that it was a warning for the future. No one could predict with certainty what would happen, except that the world was changing, and that his daughters as well as his sons must be educated for a profession.
Mash'Allah
I was blessed with the voice of a
bulbul,
and my father gave his permission for me to sing in public, and to have a career. Many in the family thought this shocking, as if I had become a woman of the streets, but my father never failed me. He said that only fools buried their heads.

“I was already becoming a well-known singer when Prince Safa came to one of my concerts. He was a wild young man,
a wealthy prince who owned racehorses and drove a sports car. And he dated beautiful women, foreign actresses and a European princess.

“But when he saw me he fell in love. He said he had never loved in his life before, and I believed him, because I, too, had fallen in love. He was so generous, and such a handsome man! Prince Safa was commander of one of his father's horse regiments, though he did not take his duties seriously, and the uniform was the most becoming of the whole army. Oh, he was very dashing, with a black moustache and black eyes that looked straight to the heart of a woman! Anyone who saw him mounted on that devil of a black horse lost her heart.”

Shakira sighed and, led by her grandmother's voice, lost herself in imagining.

“Well, we were in love, but although I sang in public I was nevertheless a member of an important family. And I was very closely chaperoned. Only marriage was possible between us, but Safa knew that the Sultan would forbid it. He wanted Safa to marry his cousin. So, young and foolish, we married privately.

“Safa's grandfather was an old man, in the last years of his reign then—Hafzuddin was still Crown Prince—and he was outraged when Safa took me to the palace and introduced me as his wife.

“He said that I must give up my public singing at once and live within the harem like his own wives. But I was young, and full of new ideas about women's freedom, and a firebrand—and I had never been spoken to by my father in the way the Sultan spoke to me. I, too, was angry.” The old woman smiled. “And I had just been offered a contract for a tour of Bagestan, Parvan, Barakat, Kaljukistan, and Joharistan. It was an important step in my career, and I was determined to go.

“We fought it out, the old man and I, and everyone was horrified that I dared to speak to the Sultan in such a way, that I defied him so openly.

“Safa did not confront his grandfather with me. All his
training was against such a thing. He remained silent. He wanted me to give in, to sing only in the palace for the rest of my life.
Sing to me,
he said.
I will be your concert hall. I will love you enough for a hundred thousand others.

“But I could not. And so—it was a very short-lived thing, our marriage. I left the palace in the car that took me on the first stage of my tour. Safa would not come with me. At his grandfather's insistence, he divorced me as I left. I can hear his voice now.
I divorce thee.
Later he said that he had only said it to bring me to my senses. But I was headstrong! If he could divorce me…so be it! And so I went.”

It had all happened nearly a half century before, but it was closer to Shakira's heart than her own breath.

“Oh, Grandmother!” she whispered sadly.

“Perhaps I should have considered longer. But I was young and beautiful and with a rare voice, and they told me I could ask for the world and get it. You, Granddaughter, have learned the value of family and love in one way, through having none. I had everything—a close, loving family, a caring father—and their love had never made any demands. Now a prince was in love with me and I thought that his love asked too high a price. It
was
too high, but perhaps I should have paid it.” She sighed heavily, then turned and stroked Shakira's cheek, her damp eyes smiling. “But it is strange, is it not?—whatever I had chosen then, you and I would probably still be sitting here today. You see, Granddaughter, how our small personal choices may mean nothing when politics and war enter our lives.”

“What happened then?”

“On the tour I learned that I was pregnant. Our marriage had been kept secret, and apart from our families, only a few very close friends knew. The public would have been unforgiving even if they had known I was married and had been divorced for the sake of my career. If they imagined that I had taken a lover and become pregnant outside marriage, my career would be ruined overnight.

“I would have gone back, to try again with Safa, because I missed him so much more than I had imagined, and anyway, a child changes everything. But the tour was enormously popular. My manager did not want me to give up in the middle. He offered to marry me, to pretend the child was his own. He was older than I was, much older. I didn't know it then, but Majdi, too, loved me. In his way.

“I sent a message to the palace, to Safa, telling him the position. I said I would wait two weeks for his answer, and I told Majdi that if Safa did not come in two weeks, I would marry him.

“Safa did not come. He did not send a message. No answer of any kind. Even at the last moment I was looking down the street, hoping for a car, a horse…I knew then that Safa had not really loved me, and I had made the right choice. I married Majdi and named my son Mahlouf. That is your father. I wrote to Safa, a very bitter letter, to tell him that his son had the al Jawadi eyes, even if not the name.

“He came to see us then. He was in a terrible rage. He had never received my message. Majdi had destroyed my letter and only pretended to send it.”

“Oh!” Shakira's eyes were burning, her throat tight. “What happened? You couldn't…”

The old woman shook her head. “It was too late then. There was no way back. I was another man's wife. There would have been a terrible scandal if I had divorced Majdi to marry Prince Safa. And with a child—who would have believed that we had been married before? People would have said that the prince had been my lover and my husband had divorced me because my child was not his own—it would have been an impossible position.

“We were never together again, but we loved each other till the end,” said Suhaila, and the expressive dark eyes were suddenly liquid with tears. “The day that Safa was assassinated, my heart was pierced with the same bullet.”

T
he central bazaar of Medinat al Bostan was a nest of alleyways behind the main square, not far from the great Shah Jawad Mosque, and as he walked along its central passage, Sharif Azad al Dauleh could see, through the arch at the top, the sun glowing from the magnificent golden dome and the high, exquisitely fashioned minarets that surrounded it.

All around him women and shopkeepers were haggling over price and quality, as they had done in this spot for probably thousands of years. The bazaar was a bustle of humanity, as usual on Thursday afternoon, when all the world came out to shop in preparation for Juma. Since the restoration of the mosque as a place of worship, Fridays in the capital had an air of jubilation. Under Ghasib the ancient twelfth-century mosque had been converted into a museum, and worship had been displaced to a small nearby mosque with none of the architectural magnificence that had made the Shah Jawad Mosque a World Heritage Site.

No longer. Tourists were still allowed to visit the holy place, but not on Friday at the noon prayer. Then it was filled to overflowing with worshippers from all over the city who came to worship in Bagestan's holiest shrine.

He had been absent a month. He always missed the city, the most beautiful city in the world. Coming to the palace now by way of the bazaar was his manner of greeting his old friend. The smell that was a mixture of spices, sugar, perfume,
ancient stone, and incense was profoundly evocative, and the sight of the golden-domed mosque through the archway was one of his earliest childhood memories.

He was tired, and very glad to be back, though he had failed completely in the central mission that had taken him away.

He would be seeing Princess Shakira again. He had thought about her often during his absence, wondering what was happening in her life, her heart, what transitions were taking place. Although she had a huge family, in a curious way he felt responsible for her. He had plucked her from the hell of an empty life, a life without a future, and had taken her to her rightful home. It was not an everyday experience, he told himself, and no wonder if he felt an ongoing interest in the outcome, even if Shakira herself had by now forgotten his part in the proceedings entirely.

What kind of woman had she become?

Vibrant and honest, he was sure. He remembered her way of clambering up and down balconies and wondered if she had turned palace protocol upside down with her engaging, direct ways.

Probably she would prove to be a beautiful woman, in the end. Her grandmother's beauty had captured a prince, after all, and she was still a beauty nearly fifty years later. And Rabia, her great-grandmother, if the portrait in the Sultan's Antechamber didn't lie, had been another.

Not that she needed her forebears' beauty. Her face had been with him constantly. She was haunting, even when she had been starved to the bone.

The past month must have made a big difference, and he was both sorry to have missed the transition and deeply interested to see what kind of woman the Princess was making of herself.

Ahead of him, suddenly, a street urchin came milling out of a vegetable stall, the proprietor shouting and clutching at his grubby kaftan. The boy, cursing and kicking, grabbed a basket as he struggled. A cascade of purple-black aubergines
spilled down, bouncing and rolling across the passage as shoppers danced out of the way.

“Let me go, camel-stuffer!”

At the sound of the voice, Sharif's eyebrows shot up, and he turned to watch the fracas with frowning interest.

A box of fat tomatoes went over next. Shoppers in the narrow alley created a small jam as they stopped to watch, or tried to gather the tumbling fruit. After a short struggle, Hani slipped out of the shopkeeper's hold and dived into the little crowd. Twisting like a fish among reeds, he was through and gone in a moment.

 

On Friday evenings the Sultan and Sultana regularly hosted a family meal in their apartments, to which family members and Cup Companions had a standing invitation.

Today, the traditional
sofreh
was spread on the ground in the private courtyard. The cloth was covered with a tantalizing variety of food, including huge platters heaped with flavoured rice. Nearby the tumbling fountain cooled the air.

It was a smaller group than usual: the Sultan and several of his Cup Companions were away consulting with tribal leaders. Shakira saw Sharif the moment he stepped out of the shaded cloister to stride across the grass towards the picnic, and her heart leapt straight for her throat.

“Sharif!” she cried, and all the lies she had told herself about not caring were burnt up by the bright flame of her joy at seeing him again. She watched every step of his approach, her eyes getting bigger and darker with every footfall, revealing an unconscious longing that drew him like a net.

“Hello, Princess,” he said quietly, a smile drawing up the corners of his mouth as he looked at her. She had gained weight, and her head had lost the skull-like look. The high cheekbones and square jaw were now covered with healthy flesh, and her chin was softly rounded. Her cheeks, he saw,
would always be hollow, giving her face a regal elegance. The black smudges had gone from under her eyes. Her expertly cut hair had grown, and dark curls clustered over her head and neck, revealing a small widow's peak and well-shaped ears. Now for the first time the adult Shakira would have been recognizable in that childhood photograph.

She was wearing white, against which her mocha skin gave off a deeply attractive warmth. She wore no makeup, no jewellery. She seemed still halfway between the boy she had been and the woman she would be. But she had travelled far enough along the path for him to know that he was right: she was going to be a beautiful woman. A stunningly individual beauty, too, he thought.

“It's been a good month, I see.”

She gazed up, smiling with the pleasure of seeing approval in his eyes. He was very tall, standing over her. He wore a black kaftan that made his eyes very dark, with a green keffiyeh tossed back over his shoulders. Wind caught the robe suddenly, pressing against him, but he stood easily against it, and it seemed to her that his strength would be equal to anything.

“You said a week, but you never came back,” she said, in her direct way, as he sat beside her.

“I had much more troublesome work than we had imagined, Princess. I'm sorry.” He took a piece of hot
naan
bread from the nearest basket.

Shakira sighed.

“I thought—I thought—sometimes I thought you were dead.”

The remembered pain burned in her eyes. Sharif was shaken to his roots. He tossed down the bread and gripped her wrist.

“
Ya Allah,
why didn't you ask the Sultan?” he said, though his impatience was directed at himself. He might have guessed this.

“I don't know,” she murmured. She didn't know how to explain the misery of trying not to miss him, of thinking him dead because it was easier than thinking he had just gone away.

He knew why. Because she was too used to loss to challenge it. Either he was dead or he didn't care about her, and life goes on. He shook his head with remorse. He knew her better than anyone, he was suddenly very sure of that, and he should have been more careful. He had thought he would become unimportant in her life, but he should have known that one more loss would touch that wounded place in her. He should have known that, by his actions in lifting her so abruptly from her former life, he had made himself her rudder in the unknown sea he had brought her to. He should have respected that.

He was suddenly filled with regret that he had not been here to be that rudder.

“Was it important, the reason that took you away?” she asked.

“Very important,” he said. “I had more than one job to do, but one of them was…”

He paused. She gazed at him.

“I was searching for your brother, Princess.”

Shakira's eyes went wide and dark at a stroke.

“I'm very sorry to have to tell you that I found nothing. Not one lead.”

“You—oh, Sharif, you were looking for my brother? Did the Sul—did Ash ask you to do it?”

“I asked for the task. I thought it was very important to you—and I seemed to be the best person for the job. I wish I had been successful, Shakira. But it is very possible that not all avenues have been exhausted yet.”

“Nothing? You found nothing?” she said with a desperate appeal that tore his heart to ribbons.

“I'm more sorry than I can say, Princess.”

Her eyes burned with tears. “I wish you had told me, that day you left.”

“Yes.” He didn't remind her that she had spurned his at
tempt at explanation. “We thought you might think too much about it, if you knew. Your first priority was to settle here.”

But she was too honest to accept this glossing over of the truth. “Yes, but you were going to tell me, and I wouldn't listen. I was so angry, Sharif! But afterwards…”

She smiled up into his eyes, and he felt his heart give an involuntary kick. Yes, she was going to be a very beautiful woman.

“I'm glad you're home again,” she confided, with a complete lack of feminine guile.

They sat silent for a long moment, and then he mentioned Suhaila.

“My grandmother! Oh, yes!” Shakira said quickly. “She is living in the palace now.” She looked around. “She is there, beside Dana.”

He obediently looked. Her grandmother and the Sultana were both dressed gorgeously, Dana in turquoise and purple, Suha in red and gold, and Shakira was suddenly conscious of her own very plain
shalwar kamees,
all white with only a little embroidery around the neck and sleeves. For the first time she wondered what it would be like to dress in something really beautiful. Something feminine. She wondered what Sharif would think if she did.

“I am sure that makes you very happy.”

“Yes,” she said softly. “Everybody loves her. Did you hear? People learned that Suha was here, and they started crowding into the square, shouting her name and demanding to see her. There were thousands of people, and they were shouting for the Sultan, too. Finally we all went out onto the balcony, and Grandmother sang
Aina al Warda
. She changed the last line. Instead of
where is the Rose
she sang,
here is the Rose
.” Shakira closed her eyes, remembering the moment. “It was so exciting! The crowd was cheering and crying. Did you see it? I thought about you. I wondered if you were there.”

He suddenly realized that what had softened the intense little face was the wiping away of some of the cynicism that had
once protected her. He was swept with a feeling of gratitude that it should be so, that her innocence could be restored like this. Gratitude that was closer to joy than anything he had experienced for a long time. Joy—and yet, he realized abruptly, his eyes were burning with unshed tears.

“I was many miles away, but I watched it on television.”

“Did you? We watched it, too, afterwards. No one knew the TV people were there till we saw it on the news. Did you see me?” she asked with naive pleasure. “I was standing beside Dana.”

Sharif looked at her gravely. “Yes, I saw you. We all saw you.”

“That was another strange thing, to see myself like that,” she confided. “Until you showed me that photograph, I'd never seen even a picture of myself. Well, except on my camp documents,” she amended.

He looked at her for a long moment, considering, then spoke softly, for her ears alone.

“Millions of other people saw you, too, Princess. You will have to be on your guard now.”

Her eyes widened with shock, surprise, disbelief. She shifted, uncomfortable under his gaze without knowing why. What was he trying to say? He couldn't
know
. Nobody knew.

“Be careful, Princess.”

Neither of them noticed the approach of Suhaila and the Sultana until both women were sitting down beside them.

“Someone who insists on meeting you instantly, Sharif,” Dana said with a smile. “Suhaila, this is Sharif ibn Bassam Azad al Dauleh, who found and rescued Shakira. And I'm sure you know, Sharif, that Bagestan's Nightingale is Shakira's grandmother.”

The wonderful eyes, still young and vital in the lined face, were wet with tears as the great singer took Sharif's hand in both of hers and thanked him for what he had done.

“Allah must have willed it so, and I thank Him every night that Ashraf chose you for the job, for I don't see how any
one else could have succeeded. An impossible labour! But you did it.”

Sharif clasped a fist to his breast.

“Shakira talks about you, you know—‘He told me my name,' she says. What gift could one human being give another better than her history, her family, her true self, all in one lost word? You gave my granddaughter her life. And you also gave me…the most precious thing anyone has ever given me.” She put her hand on Shakira's cheek, and stroked it lovingly, so that Shakira's heart nearly burst. “You gave me back my lost life. The love I threw aside has been returned to me.”