The Fierce and Tender Sheikh (9 page)

Sharif placed his fist on his heart and bowed.

Suddenly the entire family seemed to realize who had come among them at last, and they all got to their feet, and moved down to where the others sat, and surrounded him, calling their approval and gratitude.

“How did you manage it, Excellency? Especially when she really only looks like Ash when she's in her imp mode!”

“Or when she's angry. How did you get her to lose her temper, Sharif?” someone asked in dry humour, because Shakira was never slow to say what she meant.

Sharif only laughed.

“The palace hasn't been the same since she arrived! I don't know how we got along without her before,” Dana said. “We're all very much in your debt.”

There was a chorus of agreement. Shakira sat listening, her heart swelling with this unfamiliar happiness. In all her life before, no one had said so many wonderful things about her. She hadn't felt so loved since those distant memories of her mother and father.

And it was somehow even more satisfying because Sharif was there, sharing it with her. He had brought her to this place, and she was glad that he knew she was loved.

 

“Every month?” Shakira cried in shock. “Every month for three days? Are you
sure?
”

Noor smiled at her in the mirror. “You really didn't know? You never had a period before?”

With the resilience of youth, Shakira had recovered quickly, and she felt, and knew she looked, a hundred times healthier. But no one had thought to warn her that with a return to health her delayed puberty would kick in.

“I remember once bleeding when I was about—thirteen, I think. I thought it was a…punishment.”

Noor frowned. “A punishment for what?”

Shakira looked away. “I thought I was going to die. But it never came back and I just…forgot about it.”

“Thought you were going to
die?
” Noor repeated in horror.

“When people bleed from the inside they usually die,” Shakira said matter-of-factly. “It means internal injuries.”

“But—didn't you ask anyone about it?”

Shakira only shrugged.

Of course she had known that women had periods, but she had simply never considered that information relative to herself. No woman had discussed it in her presence because she had been a boy, and what she had learned from the men had been a kind of masculine paranoia. Women who were bleeding were dangerously moody and couldn't be touched sexually. Women lied about bleeding when they weren't, to punish their husbands and avoid sex. Women who had stopped bleeding were going to bring another child into a life of misery.

It wasn't something you'd go halfway to meet.

“I just never made the connection till now. I guess I would have, if the bleeding had continued, but it didn't.”

“Probably because you were half starved. Your body couldn't afford the luxury. I've heard it happens with anorexics, and I guess effectively, you were one. Now that you're get
ting proper nutrition, your body is starting to function properly. That's
so
good, Shakira, because if it never happened, you know, you wouldn't be able to have babies.”

Babies.
Shakira stood staring into her own eyes in the mirror. Was it possible? Would she—
could
she have babies one day? Who would be their father?

S
he stopped in front of a sweets stall, to watch with a child's fascination as a woman arranged tiny squares of a confection on a tray. As Sharif watched, the sweets-maker smiled at the urchin in front of her, and offered one of the bright lime squares on the end of her spatula.

Shakira accepted the sugared morsel with a smile as wide as if she
had
been the hungry urchin the woman thought her, and popped it into her mouth. Then, with an abruptness that caught him off guard, she turned her head and looked straight at him. Sharif stiffened and dropped his attention to the antique silver lamp on the stall beside him. Shakira chewed the morsel and swallowed, thanked the woman very politely, turned and continued on her way.

She hadn't recognized him, God be thanked. After a moment he took up the trail again, at a safer distance. Ahead, she turned into the main section of the bazaar, and he walked a little faster, for it would be easy to lose her there.

The alley they had been in debouched into the main street
of the bazaar near the arched entrance that framed the mosque. The sun on the golden dome was blinding, seen from the shadowed bazaar, and he stood for a moment frowningly trying to discover which way she had gone.

“Are you following me?” demanded a voice at his elbow. Sharif shook his head ruefully. She hadn't gone anywhere. Oldest trick in the book, and he should have known Hani was wily enough for anything.

He looked down at her. He was now at his leisure to appreciate the artistic smudges of dirt on her face; and the grubby white djellaba and crocheted multi-coloured cap were a neat touch, for it was an outfit no different than what most of the bazaar beggar children wore.

“Hello, Hani,” he said.

She caught her breath, then laughed a little. “You are always giving me my name!”

Even so, if anyone looked closely, she could no longer seriously pass for a boy. Her face had filled out, and was softer and more rounded. Her mouth had relaxed into a more feminine fullness. The loose kaftan did not completely disguise the new small curve of breasts. And the curls clustering all around the rim of the cap were too neat, too glossy…too female. With her big dark eyes and wide mouth, she looked like a picture book Aladdin, smudged cheeks and all.

He stood gazing down at her for a long moment of silence. He was aware of a faint breeze. It disturbed the dark curl that fell over the centre of her brow.

“Is it your name?” he challenged softly.

She flung her head up and stared into his eyes with a look so defiantly female that he wanted to shake her. How did she imagine she was safe in this ridiculous boy's disguise?

“Sometimes.”

“Only sometimes?”

Before, he had always laughed whenever she had reverted to Hani behaviour. She had felt that Sharif alone understood.
She responded to his challenge now in Hani fashion, with a sudden descent into aggression.

“Why are you following me? What business is it of yours what I do?”

“It's someone's business to keep you out of trouble,” he told her.

“Not yours!”

“Who else knows you are here?”

“Why does it have to be anyone's business but my own?”

“You know why. Because you are taking a ridiculous and unnecessary risk.”

“Why shouldn't I?” she flared suddenly.

“There are several good reasons,” he replied calmly. “Some you know, and some you don't. The ones you know should be enough to convince you. Why don't they?”

It wasn't that the arguments weren't convincing. It was that she couldn't explain to anyone the need she had, to be Hani sometimes.

She had yearned so long to be Shakira that she could hardly herself understand why the transition was sometimes so difficult. She had been Hani for so much of her life, and that part of herself and her life, it seemed, would not simply be banished in the way she wished and her family expected. Hani, she was learning, was a part of who Shakira was. There were things about being Hani that she had enjoyed. Pitting her wits against the world to wrest what she needed from it had given life an edge quite different from what she now experienced in the palace, where anything she wanted was given to her almost before she knew she wanted it.

She could not have put this into words. But she could not resist it, either.

Someone brushed by with a muttered complaint. They were causing a problem with traffic flow, standing here, and he took her arm and led her towards the entrance and the beautiful golden dome.

He smiled, trying to disconnect her hostility.

“Where did you get that costume?”

She shrugged. “I traded for it with one of the boys here. How did you know I was here?”

“Last Thursday I saw you by chance. Today I followed you from the palace. And yesterday. You are taking too much risk, Shakira, and it has to stop. If your own safety doesn't warrant it, think of your family.”

“Leave me alone! Mind your own business, Sharif! If I'm doing something wrong, I've got family to advise me!”

He almost laughed. “You've just admitted that they don't know what you're doing. Shall I tell Ash about it, so he can advise you?”

“Are you threatening me?”

“You can't have it both ways!” he snapped, suddenly losing his grip. “You don't want me giving you advice, but unless I tell someone, who else is there?”

“I know what I'm doing! I don't need advice.”

“No, you don't, and yes, you do.”

She glared at him, torn between rage at being treated as if she had a secret vice, and embarrassment at having one.

“Leave me alone, goat molester!” she cried in what he recognized as the camp
patois,
and he realized suddenly that she reverted to it whenever she felt cornered.

“No, nor camels, either,” he said, his eyes glinting in a way that secretly made her flinch. All the more reason to stand up to the threat.

“Who would ever guess you were so civilized?” she said rudely.

“And to think I once thought you had a way with insult. Can't you do better than that?”

“With an interesting subject, I might!”

He smiled a slow, dangerous smile, and Shakira tensed for action. “If you were really the boy you're pretending to be, I would teach you something about the dangers of insulting
those who are bigger than you are. Be careful—if you're too good in your role I might forget.”

She snorted. “Do you think I don't know what it's like to be kicked around by bullies? Go ahead and try, but I warn you, I haven't forgotten
everything
I learned in the camps.”

“You haven't forgotten any of it, by what I see!” Sharif snapped, annoyed to find that he had lost his temper. “What are you doing here, you little fool? Yearning for the hell you couldn't wait to leave? Wishing I had left you there?”

It was just what her own guilt was constantly telling her, and to hear it from another—from Sharif Azad al Dauleh, of all people—was more than she could bear.

“Maybe you should have!” she cried. “Maybe I'm not good enough! What am I? I'm nothing! I'm not worth bothering about! And who asked you? Not me!”

Then, with a sudden sob, she was at the heart of the matter.

“First they made me forget Shakira to become Hani, and now I have to forget Hani to become Shakira! Always I have to forget who I am! But I am a human being! I am everything that I am! My life and my history—I can't pretend I have not been who I was! Who I still am!”

He glanced around. Her raised voice was drawing the interested glances of two men struggling with a cart full of gold-embroidered velvet, and a woman who had stopped to ask them where their stall was.

“I understand,” he said softly. “But sometimes things that are not pleasant must be said, and listened to. You are not in the camp now, isolated and alone. What you do has impact on more than yourself, Shakira, and there could—”

“Leave me alone!” Shakira cried, and turned and fled back into the bazaar.

 

As though the incident had been some kind of trigger, Shakira was suddenly Angry. With a capital
A
. Her anger bubbled up ten times a day, without warning, without reason, leaving
her shaken and disturbed, and everyone else cowering. Any innocent comment might set it off. Any slightest suggestion seemed to be an attempt to curb her, to make her into someone she was not, to make her conform.

She reacted accordingly. The anger tore through her like a whirlwind. She couldn't control her rages any more than she could have told the storm to still.

Sometimes, when she was in a rage, she blamed Sharif for all this. It was because he had tried to make her deny Hani, as she had once been forced to deny Shakira. He had followed her, threatened her. He had put her in the wrong for being herself, just the way her stepmother had. He thought because he had rescued her that he owned her. He thought he could tell her what to do.

And it didn't help that she now couldn't seem to escape his presence. Given the size of the ancient palace, it was nothing short of miraculous the way she kept running into Sharif. He was just around the corner when she turned it, or just down the corridor when she entered it, or crossing the courtyard as she looked down. It was as if fate itself was determined that they should meet.

He was never afraid of her rages. Whether she was raging at someone else, or at him, he simply looked at her, so that she suddenly became aware of what she was doing. Sometimes it enraged her even further. Sometimes she was abashed.

“I told you to stop following me around!” she cried, finding him in the courtyard when she came down one morning.

Sharif frowned. “Princess, even members of the royal family—your cousin might say
especially
members of the royal family—have a duty to speak to other people with respect.”

“I call it a lack of respect for you to follow me. So if you didn't, you wouldn't get treated with a lack of respect!”

He stood looking at her with that grave expression, and her anger damped a little, and she was ashamed. He was a Cup
Companion, a noble man on his own merits, and he had found her and saved her from a life of torment.

Then she recovered. “It makes me angry when every time I look up, you're there.”

“But then, everything makes you angry at the moment, doesn't it, Princess?”

She wished she could jump on him, and bite and punch him, the way she had the guards at the camp when they harassed her. She gazed at him, confused, bewildered, in turmoil.

“Princess, you are still going to the bazaar as Hani,” he said.

She put up a shoulder. “So what if I am?”

“Your cousin has enemies, Shakira. Be careful that you do not offer them ammunition. Is that how you wish to repay his kindness and care?”