Song of the Nile

by Fielding, Hannah

  Restlessly she went to her bathroom to shower. Hot water needled her skin, running in rivulets down the breasts he had stroked so tenderly. Tremors curled like a snake across her stomach and down her thighs, reminding her of his fingers’ warm touch, and she trembled, missing him … needing him … wanting him.

  Phares hadn’t deflowered her, but he had taken away her innocence; he had kept his word; he had shown her ‘the sun at midnight in a dark sky without stars’ and she knew that she would never be the same again, never be able to look at her nakedness without thinking of his kisses and the ecstasy of his touch.

  Still, she needed to remember one thing: she was not the only woman in his life.

  The things he had said to her, about dying for her, burning for her: they had all been said to other women in order to make weak fools of them, Aida was sure of that. The way he kissed, the way he touched, proved Phares was a practised seducer. He had used her to assuage the fire that Hind the gypsy dancer had lit in him, she told herself stormily. That, with the wine and the hashish he had no doubt inhaled from the hubble-bubble, the desert air, the romantic moonlight, her own need to touch and be touched … as well as an overwhelming desire for him … all of these things had contributed to what had finally happened.

  Then there were those rumours about Isis Geratly and Nairy Paplosian. Although when Aida faced him with the gossip about Isis, Phares had brushed it away as mere fabrication, she knew that there is no smoke without fire. But Isis was not the one Aida feared the most: her real rival was surely Nairy, Phares’s beautiful Armenian mistress, the woman he really loved, but who would never be accepted into his prim circle. Aida remembered her father telling her that many Egyptian men entered into a marriage of convenience and kept a mistress on the side. The wife was often only too pleased to rid herself of what she considered a degrading act, the only use of which was to have children. Sexual pleasure was regarded as the province of men. Ayoub and Eleanor had of course been modern in their thinking, and Aida could never accept any sort of marriage of convenience. For her, fidelity was one of the most important bases for marriage and she expected her husband to be as faithful and devoted to her as she would be to him. Could Phares be that kind of husband?

  Stepping out of the shower, Aida was drawn to the mirror and she stood staring at herself, at the passionate flare to her nostrils, the kiss-bruised look of her lips, the darkly glowing pleading in her eyes beneath the tumbling hair that Phares had run his hands through so hungrily. He was right: she was a woman who needed a husband and children. Alone for too long, she now recognised a long-buried yearning for a family of her own. Maybe she had been a fool to resist his proposal. She could still feel his skin against her own, his hands on her body, the long, hard length of him pressing against her, the power of his burning passion she had not been able to resist in the dense black shadows and silvery shafts of moonlight that had enveloped their night of romance.

  It had been a sensual captivation which had nothing to do with the heart, she told herself. Not once had Phares uttered the word love, it had all been about longing and desire and pleasure. She had responded to the carnality with a wild abandon that brought the shamed blood rushing to her cheeks.

  Something so savagely sensual bore no relation to love.

  Phares had aroused her to an animal sensuality. It would be beneath her to give in to such lowly instincts; she would not allow him to make of her an odalisque, with no freedom or will of her own, a simple extension of the great Phares Pharaony – a mere heap of curves and limbs to be caressed.

  Had she really promised to think about marrying him?

  Aida closed the shutters and climbed into bed. Restlessly, she twisted and turned between the sheets in the wide double bed, flagellating herself with all the might-have-beens, her thoughts lingering longest on the bond she felt with this man, the like of which she had never felt with anyone else. And when they were not bickering defensively with each other, she recognised the warm companionship and mutual understanding that had been there all those years ago.

  The temptation to become Phares’s wife, to be totally his, possessed by him, to sleep and wake up in his arms every morning of her life was overwhelming. She had never given it much thought, but now she knew. She could never marry someone that didn’t excite her in the way he did, and she doubted very much that person existed.

  Still, there remained the eternal thorn in Aida’s side … Kamel Pharaony, the man who had surely played some part in her father’s death. How could she marry his son? How could she live in the same house as the one person she blamed not only for bringing about Ayoub’s demise, but sullying the reputation of an honourable man who all his life had been known for his integrity? So, Phares had promised to help her clear her father’s name? How could he when the culprit was his own flesh and blood?

  Yet if she held fast to her rejection of him for that reason, which meant so much to her, she must sacrifice all the joy and peace and fulfilment she had felt in Phares’s arms last night and again this morning. Either way, it was a ruinous choice that would leave her incomplete.

  Demons continued to gnaw at Aida like rats in a corn vat until, finally exhausted, she closed her eyes with half a sigh and sank into oblivion.

  * * *

  The Jeep turned swiftly out of the gateway of El Amal hospital with a small, derisive touch of the horn, Phares’s way of saying goodnight to the ghaffir guarding the gates. It had been a busy day. One of the factories in Luxor had caught fire and fifteen men and women had been brought to the hospital suffering shock and burns. All the staff had been working flat out for the past five hours, dealing with the emergency in addition to their routine work. Phares had performed two scheduled operations – and one including the division of the obturator nerve to enable a spastic child to walk – before rolling up his sleeves and helping on the wards. Only once he was satisfied all that needed to be done was completed, and that his presence wasn’t required anymore, did he call it a day.

  He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the sweat from his face. It was a hot and humid night. He glanced at the Rolex on his wrist: almost midnight. He would have liked to go home to shower, but he still had some work to take care of. Nothing to do with the hospital, this was private. He sighed wearily.

  Night and silence had descended over the land. To his right, the moon made a shimmering pathway across the Nile; to the left, the fields gave up their fragranced sweetness. As he drove swiftly, heading for his cottage a mile away from Luxor, the lights of a few private villas glimpsed through the sycamore trees went out one by one. Luxor was going to sleep. The water and the land were bathed in soft silver moonlight, the peaks of the distant desert hills no longer stood out against the dark night sky.

  For the first time since he set foot in the hospital that morning, Phares allowed himself to think of Aida and the night of passion they had shared. All day he had fought against that memory, and now wondered why he wanted so badly to marry her. With his natural aversion to emotional dependency, was he the right kind of man for her? Could he give her the sort of unconditional love she wanted? He had made some impulsive declarations on the felucca that now surprised him. Dammit, she put fire in his blood, making him feel things over which he had no control.

  The potent pleasure he had felt at her enjoyment had been a rude awakening. He had never felt that way about any woman before. Up until now, for Phares sex had just been an exchange of caresses between two consenting people, the only purpose of which was mutual pleasure. And although what had occurred between Aida and him had been little more than heavy petting, the intensity of his release had been so much greater than anything he had experienced before. The power of his craving for her disturbed him now. Wasn’t he better off just accepting the Aida of the present, enjoying a relationship with her and letting this marriage project remain in the past?

  Give it up, he told himself as he pressed his foot on the accelerator. Do the sensible thing and marry Isis. Let go of t
his new complication in your life.

  Excitement vied with apprehension, but to be controlled by his emotions rather than his intellect was a new experience for Phares, one he did not like. Particularly where Aida was concerned. She’d always exercised some strange, maddening power over him, even when they were younger and he had just seen her as an impudent, headstrong young girl.

  He played back the various conversations they’d had since Aida’s return. Most were disastrous – she acted as though she hated him. Still, in his arms she’d lost control and despite her obvious innocence become the most generous lover he’d ever had, giving herself completely, without a shadow of inhibition. This was no mere girlish infatuation … but what exactly did Aida feel for him?

  She was an interesting study. He could never reconcile her personality – passionate, ardent, fierce towards her enemies – with her delicate features and rose-petal skin. Aida’s blue eyes were surely never meant to hold those mysterious flashes of fire and light; that sensitive mouth was never intended to give utterance to the wild, reckless, sometimes harsh words in which so many of her thoughts were clothed.

  Indeed, Phares saw more keenly than ever the fiery soul that dwelt within that appealingly feminine exterior. Physically, Aida was astonishingly strong; he found her mentally alive, alert, vivid, almost startlingly so. Violent in her likes and dislikes, she gave the impression that she could be a splendid friend and an equally wholehearted adversary. Her will was indomitable, except when she was in his arms; her temper hot, and her heart …

  It was there that the mystery lay.

  Such a mystery only added to the complication of his feelings for Aida. He couldn’t claim it was love, yet it went far beyond ordinary desire. He wanted nothing less than her complete surrender.

  His problem was how to get her to want him enough to be his wife. Had she actually said she was happy about his proposal? No, she hadn’t. Many words had streamed out of her, but she hadn’t really said anything at all when he got right down to it. Was she truly refusing him because of what had happened eight years ago, or because she just didn’t trust him? Both, probably …

  His frown deepened. And then there was his promise to her. For eight years the truth about who had framed Ayoub El Masri had remained unknown. It had always troubled him that Aida had suspected his own father and had left Egypt without seeing Phares. He’d never had the chance to convince her that she was wrong about Kamel. Now things would change.

  He parked the Jeep in a lane close by and walked to the cottage. The shadows were deep over the garden, although it was a clear moonlit night and he could see for miles. The atmosphere was heavy without the slightest breath or sound; the trees themselves slumbered in the starry silence. Even the croaking of the frogs had stilled; it was as though the whole world slept.

  He made his way quickly there through the dark shadows, and without turning on the light, went to a locked cupboard in the back room he sometimes used as a bedroom. He pulled a set of keys out of his pocket and unlocked the cupboard. A shaft of moonlight fell on to a large safe that took up the whole length and breadth of the cupboard. Phares dialled the combination and with a click, the door swung back to reveal the most beautiful head of Ramses II. The details of the piece were exquisitely rendered. It was as if life had been breathed into it by the sculptor’s hand.

  Phares stroked the object pensively, then, pulling a towel from a nearby shelf, he wrapped the pharaoh’s head in it, locked the safe and cupboard and quickly returned to the car. Without wasting any time, he exchanged his day clothes for a dark kaftan, throwing a scarf over his shoulders. He headed back towards Luxor and then on to the new road that had been built during the war across the desert from Luxor to the Red Sea.

  This was not the first time he had taken this road at night to reach his destination. He had used various methods in the past, all equally charming and necessary for his purpose: floating swiftly in a felucca under a strong breeze down the Nile, as he had done the day before with Aida; riding slowly upon his horse Antar; driving up the old highway in a more or less comfortable horse trap. This time Phares had intended to ride his horse, but he had been delayed at the hospital and would miss this month’s meeting if he didn’t use the Jeep.

  As he drove, he felt his heart thumping hard against his ribcage. However dangerous, he loved these nights of adventure riding through the dunes. Every time he made this journey, whether by car or on horseback, he felt at one with the desert as he passed these ancient temples, imagining their secret world of pomp and pageantry, but which were now just echoes of his ancient history. The moon’s silver sheen glittered over the white dust that lay so thick upon the road. Now and then, bats dipped down through the air and darted off again, shrieking, but otherwise the great stillness of night was everywhere, not to be broken until he reached the rickety bridge that led to the opposite bank of the Nile.

  Phares stopped the Jeep and tied the scarf around his head in a makeshift turban before crossing the bridge and taking the road beside the river. It wasn’t long before he came to Kurna, a typical village of mud huts, a few low, whitewashed houses, a miniature minaret set on a tiny white cupola’d mosque, and the inevitable grove of palm trees planted for their pleasant shade. A few shadowy robed figures passed in the night, sometimes with dancing lanterns in their hands. Unlike Luxor, Kurna was not asleep tonight; the yellow gleam of lights shone through unglazed windows. The Jeep glided as silently as possible on the soft dusty sand covering the road, yet those keen-eared peasants, more akin to the Bedouins of the desert than to the fellahin who worked in the fields, seemed to know as if by some sixth sense that a stranger was moving through their village at night, and they came in ones and twos to their doors to look at him, or peered quizzically out of windows. Although they appeared eerie in the unreal world created by a full moon, it didn’t bother Phares, he was used to it. Had he been on his horse, they would still never have spoken to him, merely watching with curious eyes. Once or twice his horse had set a couple of dogs barking half-heartedly, which had brought someone to the door, and at those times he muttered a greeting which seemed to put them at ease, but he never stopped.

  Leaving Kurna, the road branched off towards the west and he soon found himself in a dry sunburnt gorge where no vegetation could grow, where the soil was either rocky stone or arid sand and the only living things were snakes and scorpions. This was the famous Valley of the Tombs of the Kings, where the royal dead of the long-vanished Thebes had been laid to rest.

  As the Jeep moved slowly through the narrow canyon, on each side the ragged cliffs, pink in daytime but silver under the moon, loomed high overhead like sentinels as if to guard the way into this once sacred place. All along the gorge stretched the tall silhouette of the ridge. Its isolation and lack of living green growth showed how suitable the place was for the melancholy purpose to which it had been appropriated – the hiding of the mummies of the kings of Egypt. The scene was unutterably desolate – wild, bleak and forbidding a valley as that of the shadow of death, which it really was – and yet for Phares there was a certain grandeur about its dreariness that made him dream, and his heart filled with pride at being a descendant of such a great civilisation.

  The narrowing track between two jutting cliffs was bumpy, littered with fallen boulders, loose quartz and flints. Gaunt hills culminated in a single, square-shaped peak whose sloping sides were debris-covered. Here was the Place of Truth, dominated by this thrusting mountain called Al Qurn, the Horn, which bore down on the sixty-three royal tombs hidden under the pale scree of these valley walls, their square black entrances cut into the rock, giving no hint of the riches within. Phares shivered, feeling the weight of a dynasty of souls, of the mortals who believed themselves to be gods, whose tombs had been plundered with little respect for the sanctity of the place.

  He scanned the deserted canyon as he drove along the track, and let out a breath when his eyes picked out what he was looking for.

  Three men. One was mou
nted on an elegant white stallion; the other two had racing dromedaries, trained for speed and endurance by the Bedouins and worth their weight in gold to a smuggler. Able to cover seventy miles in a single night, castrated camels like these were taught never to utter a cry: highly useful for a rider needing to go undetected.

  He stopped the Jeep at the bottom of a high cliff and got out, whilst the first man dismounted and strode hastily over the sand towards him, his blue garment over which he wore a vast burnous flapping against his brown legs, his rascally proud face and shining eyes alert like those of a hawk. Very tall and slim, his broad square shoulders gave an impression of forcefulness and endurance, his powerful frame rather like that of the camels, Phares thought. Carrying a long-barrelled rifle and a curved dagger wedged into his belt, his head was swathed in a scarf, his flowing robes criss-crossed with bandoliers of bullets.

  All around, the sands lay silver and serene, broken into patches of black where the boulders cast their shadows. In the cloudless sky the big white moon hung motionless, as though arrested by the strange scene beneath.

  ‘Salam aleykom,’ the Bedouin greeted Phares when he reached the Jeep.

  ‘Wa aleykom el salam,’ Phares replied.

  ‘The Bedouin are strong like the desert, soft like the sand, moving like the wind and forever free.’

  Phares met the large striking eyes of the Bedouin, which were perfect luminous orbs of a green colour, the whites so pronounced as to give almost supernatural depth to the jet-black pupils. ‘They are the emperors of the desert and no one can touch them,’ he replied.

  The two men looked at each other in silence for a few long moments.

  ‘El Sahara ghadara, the desert is treacherous, especially at night. Have you lost your way?’ the Bedouin asked at length.

  ‘Yes, I am trying to get to the town of Luxor on the other side of the Nile and I seem to be going round in circles.’