City of Jasmine

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  “Wouldn’t they want to stay in Damascus to find a buyer?” I questioned.

  “Not with you still on the loose.” He smiled thinly. “They would have to hedge their bets that you might just possibly survive to make your own way to Damascus. Far safer for them to head to Beirut and then Europe and get rid of the Cross there, most likely to an unscrupulous private buyer.”

  “Would they know how to find one?”

  He shrugged. “Probably. The countess mentioned the complexities of securing a buyer, but it’s rather easy for an archaeologist to find a collector who is avaricious without being terribly concerned with provenance. They won’t get as much for it, of course, as if they’d been able to put it up at auction and let the great museums fight it out at the bidding, but it would still be enough to make it worth their while—if they get out of the desert alive.”

  I blinked at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “I didn’t much like the look of their friends. Daoud’s nothing to write home about, but the others with them were from the south, renegade Bedouins who have been cast out of their own tribes for any variety of offences. They’ve got damned little to lose, and the Thurzós aren’t exactly hardened criminals. A bit of mutiny in the ranks wouldn’t surprise me at all.”

  “Do you think this is the first time they’ve turned their hand to serious crime?”

  “I should say so. Oh, I’ve no doubt they did a few unsavoury things in the war—most of us did. But they made several crucial mistakes for real criminals.”

  “You ought to know,” I muttered. He carried on as if I hadn’t spoken.

  “They didn’t inspect the Cross when they took it. They didn’t make sure you’d killed me. They didn’t even take your water away from you to ensure you’d die of thirst. Mark my words, this won’t end well for them unless they have bloody good beginners’ luck. They’re soft, and softness is a liability in this sort of game. If one intends to have any success as a criminal, one must harden oneself up. I don’t approve of bloodshed, but those two will have to learn to like it if they mean to make anything of themselves as villains.”

  He left me to meditate on that while he packed up our meagre gear. I slung my goatskin on my back and followed him out the mouth of the cave.

  The first shot at us went wide, chipping stone off the edge of the rock. Before the echoes had even died away, I was flung to the ground with Gabriel on top of me. A sharp pain throbbed in my back, and Gabriel’s dead weight did nothing to improve it.

  I shoved hard at his shoulder. “Gabriel, are you hit?”

  He lifted his head, shaking it slowly. “No. Now lie still.” He lifted himself onto his forearms, his face inches from mine, his blue eyes bright even in the dim light of the cave. He turned his head sharply and tossed a rock out the cave. Immediately a pair of shots answered, and he turned back to me.

  “Bloody buggering bollocking hell,” he muttered. He levered himself up and put out his hand. I reached for it and fell back, wincing. “Evie? What’s wrong?” He did not wait for a reply. He reached down and flipped me onto my stomach, yanking my shirt free from my trousers to bare my back.

  “Thank Christ,” he said. “It’s just a bruise. You landed on a rock.” He released me and I stuffed my shirttail back into my trousers.

  “How you manage to make that sound like my fault when you’re the one who threw me onto the ground—” I began.

  “For God’s sake, not now,” he ordered. “Get out your pistol and get to the back of the cave. You might like the option of using one of those last bullets on yourself if things go awry.”

  “Oh, don’t be so grim, Gabriel. There has to be something we can do.”

  “In case you missed the point, we have a villain out there ready and willing to make us very permanently dead. We have one small pistol of extremely dubious use.”

  “It’s maddening when you insist upon seeing the worst in a situation.”

  “What exactly do you suggest we do?”

  I shrugged. “You’re the criminal genius. I leave it to you to think of something. In the meantime, I’m going to finish the dried apricots. I rather like them, after all.”

  I sat on the floor of the cave and took the remaining apricots out of my pocket, lining them up on my leg. I ate them slowly, savouring each one. He finally threw up his hands and settled in next to me.

  “I presume you have formulated a plan?” I asked pleasantly.

  He sighed and reached for an apricot. “It isn’t much. But I think I ought to give myself up. If you keep very quiet and hide here, they might not realise we’re still together. I can try to engage them.”

  “Oh, you are an ass. That’s a daft plan. First, of course they know we’re together. If it is Herr Doktor, he saw us come into these hills together. You might persuade him I’ve done a runner for about two minutes but that won’t do either of us much good. And they’ll simply shoot you and take me, so I don’t know what you think that will accomplish. And if it’s the Thurzós, they don’t yet know you’re still alive.”

  “It would be a nasty surprise,” he said mildly. “But I prefer the tactic of evasion.”

  “How, exactly?”

  “I will keep an eye on the front, you go inspect those webby, dark corners of the cave and see if you can find a back way out.”

  “That plan does not much appeal to me,” I assured him. “I don’t like spiders and I’m even less enthusiastic about bats.”

  He gave a bored shrug. “You may change your mind when the water’s run out. You realise they don’t have to come up here. They only have to wait us out.”

  “Then we wait,” I said grimly. “Something will happen, I’m sure of it.”

  And so we waited. It was hours, but nothing happened apart from a few stray shots being fired at the mouth of the cave. I didn’t know if they did it to frighten us or to annoy us, but Gabriel retaliated by singing a selection of truly filthy songs in a variety of languages at the top of his voice.

  “For a man with such a keen appreciation of music, you are truly tone-deaf to your own talents,” I told him.

  He shrugged. “It’s not meant to be pretty. It’s meant to show them I’m not cowed.” He grinned again, and I stared at him.

  “I can’t make you out at all,” I told him finally. “I thought I understood you when I married you, but I was wrong. And now I find I know you even less.”

  He gave a light laugh. “Good God, Evie, you didn’t even know my middle name when we married. I don’t think two people have ever rushed into matrimony so swiftly or on such a flimsy basis as we did.”

  “I think we had reason enough, at least I did then,” I said in a still, small voice.

  “I suppose an appreciation of Elgar and some rather heated kissing is enough,” he answered with a shrug. “Certainly enough for marriage these days with everyone and their little dog getting hitched and unhitched in the blink of an eye.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” I told him. “We married each other because we were in love, desperately in love.”

  His eyes were cool and a tiny smile played about his lips.

  “Were we?”

  “Yes, we were, damn you! I loved you, and you loved me, too, or at least I thought you did. You made me believe it and even when we went to China and you changed and turned so cold and distant and pushed me away, I loved you then, too.”

  He rose slowly, and his expression was carefully neutral, giving nothing away.

  “I know I hurt you terribly, Evie. It was never my intention.”

  “Of course it wasn’t your intention,” I thundered at him as I rose to stand toe-to-toe. “If it had been your intention it would have made you a monster. But it doesn’t alter the fact that you did hurt me. I’ve pretended for years that it didn’t matter, that because I was the first one
to say the word divorce I could keep my pride and tell myself I left you. But we know the truth, don’t we, Gabriel? We both know if you’d given me the slightest indication that you still loved me—a word, a glance, anything—I’d have come crawling back to you, on my knees, over broken glass if you asked it. But you never did. And I may like to believe I’m a bigger person, that I could forgive you, but I’m not sure I ever did, not because you left me but because you took him away, too.”

  “Him?”

  “The man I fell in love with. I didn’t much care when you left,” I raged. “You were so strange and cold by then it was a relief to be done with you. But you wrecked my memories of that dashing, impossibly wonderful boy I fell in love with when you went. You might have at least left me that.”

  He swallowed hard, and when he spoke, his voice was flat and calm. “I had no idea.”

  “Yes, well, why should you?” I demanded. “It isn’t the sort of thing a man would think about, but that’s how a woman feels. I wondered for the longest time if I were half-mad, did you know that? I wondered if somehow I had made him up, the Gabriel Starke I married. But I didn’t. I married a sterling man and somehow I woke up a month later with a stranger I didn’t recognise. I don’t know why or how you changed, and it doesn’t matter anymore. It cannot matter. But you were wrong to take him from me, and I wanted you to know that.”

  He handed me a handkerchief and I wiped my eyes and blew my nose.

  I moved to hand the handkerchief back and he waved me off with a single elegant gesture. He had drawn himself up, his chin high, his expression inscrutable.

  “There are too many sins on my account to number,” he said softly, “but I think that must be the most terrible.”

  I said nothing and he cleared his throat, adopting his post of cool detachment again. “Now we know where we stand with one another, I am confident it won’t trouble you too much if something should go amiss with me. It’s almost dark and the shifting light will make it quite difficult for a marksman to hit us. I will go and have a squint outside and see how things stand. You really ought to have a look ’round the back for an exit. If we can creep out that way it will simplify matters immensely.”

  I nodded mutely, all the fight suddenly extinguished. I felt lighter, suddenly, as if a burden I’d been carrying for years had been plucked off my shoulders. It had been awful to tell him those things; jaggy, prickly, thorny things I had said in the hopes of hurting him. But it was heavenly to speak my mind. No matter what happened now, I had held him to account for what he had done, and the exchange left us both a little shaken. He was quiet when he gave me a few matches from his little tin box and turned away. I did not look at him as he made his way to the front of the cave. I struck one of the matches and groped my way to the back, feeling each crevice and niche for something more.

  Gabriel’s hunch had been right; there was more to the cave than met the eye and there were bats. I stepped carefully to avoid disturbing them, holding the match low and moving cautiously. It took ages to make my way around the twists and turns, but just when I was about to give up, the flame of the last match flickered and went out.

  “Blast,” I muttered, but as my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I realised there was a thin line of light just ahead. I pushed on, guided by the light, and found a slender opening. I was just about to push my way through it when a hand clamped onto my shoulder.

  I screamed and jumped backwards. A bat stirred overhead, and Gabriel put a finger to his lips. “Don’t wake them,” he warned. “I’ve a horror of the bloody things.”

  He held a match up, dazzling my eyes, but I could see he looked worse than when he’d set off.

  “Goodness, Gabriel, what happened to you? You look as if you’d fallen down a hill.”

  His clothes were dirtier than ever and a long bloody scratch marred one cheek, running from just below his eye and down into his beard. He put a hand to it.

  “I did,” he said quickly. “Fell right down. Made a bloody awful racket. I’m surprised you didn’t hear it.”

  “I couldn’t hear a thing. I was too busy finding this,” I told him in triumph, showing him the exit.

  “Well done,” he murmured.

  “And what about you? Were you shot at?”

  He shook his head, his manner distracted. “Not closely. The light was against the count and he missed his shot.”

  “The count! So it was the Thurzós after us?”

  “Just the count, as near as I could make out,” he said smoothly. He hesitated then hurried on, his lips very white in the dark mat of his beard. “I hate to be the bearer of news, but I should probably tell you—the count won’t be troubling us again.”

  The match went out just then, singeing his fingers. He swore and struck another, and by the time he had, his colour was normal again.

  “What do you mean he won’t be troubling us?”

  “I’m afraid the fellow is quite dead. He had a fall, bless him. It was a stupid thing, so ridiculous I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, but he slipped and landed quite the wrong way.”

  “The wrong way?” He put a finger to his neck and I felt my stomach turn to water. “He broke his neck?”

  “It’s rocky out there,” Gabriel said lamely. “These things happen in the desert.”

  I swallowed hard. “I’m sorry for the countess, but not for us. God only knows what he might have done. And I’m sorry you had to see it,” I said kindly. “I’m sure it wasn’t pleasant.”

  His eyes were oddly flat. “No, it wasn’t.”

  “Still,” I said briskly, “it’s an ill wind that blows no good for someone. We’ll make the best of it and get away while we can, shall we?”

  He blew out the match and followed me through the little opening, cursing when his shoulders stuck fast. It was only with a great deal of effort and a bit of lost skin that he wriggled free, but eventually we both emerged into the waning sunlight. The desert had never looked more beautiful. The fading light washed the rocks in colour—honey and primrose and velvety purple.

  I turned to Gabriel. “I’m sorry about what I said earlier. I was upset, you see. And I oughtn’t blame you for what went wrong between us. I daresay I was a fool for ever thinking you were someone you are not.”

  “I daresay you were,” he returned. But he smiled as he said it, and for just a moment, it was not painful to be with him.

  He turned his face to the north. “Come on, duck. We’ve a lot of walking to do.”

  Ten

  We walked the whole of that night, plodding on until all I knew was the ache of my own body and the chill wind that wrapped around us. Gabriel found another well, this one a mere trickle, and he forced me to drink the foul water, taking as much himself as he could stand. He unearthed a handful of palm dates from a sad, thin tree and handed them to me, bullying me into eating them even as I gagged on the sourness. He pushed me on, into the sands, telling me the whole time how bloody lucky I was that I hadn’t come in summer. He showed not a jot of sympathy; his entire mood was grim and relentless, pricking my temper to frequent outbursts and leaving me in such a state of annoyance that I charged ahead of him just to get away. I walked some twenty yards ahead, correcting my course when Gabriel shouted epithets about my sense of direction. At last the sun began to rise, the morning shadows stretching long over the cruel beauty of the desert, and the breeze began to die.

  I paused, letting the warm sunlight play over my face. Gabriel stood at my side, and after a moment he lifted his nose, sniffing.

  “What is it?” I asked sharply.

  “You don’t smell that? You always did have a monkey’s sense of smell. It’s horse sweat.”

  “You’re making that up,” I began, but no sooner had I started than a group of horsemen topped the small rise ahead of us. They were ga
rbed in black robes and riding smart Arabian horses with elaborate bridles and small heads. “Bedouin!” I breathed.

  I moved forward, but Gabriel grabbed my arm. “Not so fast. Bedu come in two varieties and these...”

  He didn’t bother to finish the thought. The rifles pointed directly at us told the story clearly enough. We put our hands into the air as they rode at us. They began firing a hundred feet away and circled us, shooting at the ground and grinning and shouting things in Arabic.

  “What are they saying?” I asked Gabriel. “I’m afraid my Arabic only goes so far as ordering in restaurants and shops.”

  “Allah is good, Allah is great, and we are their prisoners,” he said calmly.

  “Well, I suppose it could be worse,” I replied. “At least they might feed us.”

  Just then one of the Bedouin detached from the group. He wore one of the native headdresses, a sort of veil down his back with a small bit of it draped to conceal his face from the sand and wind. As he came near, he dropped the veil to reveal a wide smile. And a familiar one. “Daoud!” I said, starting forward. A shot at my feet stopped me in my tracks.

  Daoud bowed from the saddle and grinned from me to Gabriel. The blank expression he had worn the entire time I had been at the dig was nowhere in evidence. In its place was a look of sharp intelligence, and I realised the guise of simpleton had served him well. No doubt he had picked up quite a bit of information pretending to be a dullard.

  “Greetings.” He peered at Gabriel with narrowed eyes. “I think you have been concealing things.”

  “It’s a long story and we’re hungry,” Gabriel said pointedly.

  “Of course. You will come with us to be our honoured guests,” Daoud proclaimed.

  “That’s very kind of you,” I told him. “But if we’re guests why exactly were you shooting at us?”

  “Because you will be our guests whether you wish it or not. So long as you give us what we want, we will take very good care of you and there will be no problem.”