by Неизвестный
“I know you are not here for the reason you have given. Do not be the innocent tool of villains, Desi. If
someone wants to know about this project, it is because they want to steal our history from us, one way
or the other. Tell me who asked you to use your connection with our family in this way.”
She felt as if he had slapped her. She had to open her mouth twice before she could speak.
“What do you imagine you’re talking about?” she cried. “No one asked me to visit the dig! No one
asked me to come here!”
“This is not the truth, Desi! Tell me their names! Such information can be invaluable to us.”
“I am not anyone’s tool, innocent or otherwise!” she cried indignantly. “Do you imagine I could be so
stupid? Or maybe you think I’m the cheat myself? Is that what you think?”
“Why are you here?”
“I told you why!”
He was silent, watching the guarded look come into her eyes. The lie was in her tone; even she could
hear it. But she had to glare back at him with the best outrage she could muster.
“I am not anybody’s tool,” she insisted, hating the expression on his face, hating the lie she was living.
How she wished she could throw the truth at his head.
He said, “I will take you to my father, if you insist, Desi. But I tell you now that you will not learn where
the site is, even though you see it with your own eyes—the desert does not tell the uninitiated where
they are. You will learn no village name. Do you still wish to make the journey?”
“Of course I do!” she cried. “And I couldn’t care less about knowing the compass coordinates! You can
blindfold me if you want to. That’s not why I want to visit the site. I told you—I had no idea how
important it was till you told me the other day. I thought it was just another site. I had no idea I was
asking for such a big favour.”
“My father could not say no.”
“Well, I’m sorry. I wish I’d known.”
“And now that you do?”
With every fibre of her being she wanted to say, forget it! I don’t want anything from you or your father.
But she couldn’t. She said lamely, “Well, aren’t we nearly halfway there now?”
He nodded without speaking.
“Salah, I swear to you I am not here to steal any secrets for anybody.”
He looked at her as if there was nothing in the world he wanted more than to believe her. But when he
said, “Good,” she knew he was still doubting.
“You always did judge me,” she reminded him bitterly.
“Not without cause.”
“Then, as now, the cause was all in your own head.”
He laughed, seemed about to say something, then changed his mind.
For one powerful, compelling moment Desi had the conviction that she should confide everything to
Salah—should just tell him Samiha doesn’t want to marry you, she’s in love with someone else.
She half opened her mouth and closed it again. If she were wrong, she would not be the one to suffer.
Or at least, not more than was already on the cards.
Thirteen
T hat day was spent crossing the bleakest imaginable desert, emptier than she could ever have
dreamed. For miles they saw nothing but sand and rock. No animals, no trees, not even any scrub.
The sun was scorching. The landcruiser was air-conditioned, but that did not stop the sun coming
through the windows, and setting her skin on fire. Desi had always loved heat, but this was something
else. There was no shade anywhere, it was hour after hour of burning sand, till her eyes grew hypnotized
and her brain tranced.
She would not protest or complain, because she suspected he was waiting for just that. Nor did she want
to give him any excuse for turning back. It’ll be hell on wheels, Desi, Sami had said, but even she could
not have foreseen this.
Desi lifted the bottle of water to her lips for the fiftieth time that day, and took a long swig. She’d never
drunk so much water in her life.
“I suppose if we ran out of gas or water out here, we’d be dead in an hour,” she observed mildly.
“It would take longer than that. But we will not run out,” Salah said.
At noon they stopped only briefly to eat and drink. Salah, wearing his desert robe and the headscarf she
had learned to call keffiyeh, got out to stretch, but Desi remained in the vehicle. To step outside in this
heat would be tantamount to suicide, or at the very least, instant second degree burn. She had put on
shorts and a t-shirt in the nomad camp this morning, and now she was sorry. But it was too much effort
to think of changing into something with sleeves.
After only fifteen minutes they were on their way again.
In late afternoon Salah pointed through the windscreen. “We’ll camp there,” he said.
Desi frowned and shaded her eyes till she saw it: a large outcrop of sand-coloured stone ahead. She
would not have seen it if he hadn’t pointed it out. The best way to see anything out here was by the
shadow it cast, and there was no shadow.
“Will there be some shade? Why can’t I see a shadow?” She was desperate to be out of the sun.
“On the other side. The sun is behind us now.”
“Are we heading east?” Desi frowned and looked at the sun. They were. She hadn’t noticed him change
direction. “Why?”
Salah glanced at her ruefully. “I’m sorry. I overshot. We should have reached it an hour ago.”
“Thus the great desert navigator whose ancestors survived to produce him!”
“As long as the mistakes are not fatal, of course, one survives.”
“You can’t imagine how comforting.”
At least they could laugh.
Ten minutes later—how deceiving distances were when you had no real landmarks!—they reached it.
The mound was much bigger than she had imagined, a small hill, the size of a substantial building. And
Salah slowed the Land Cruiser and pulled around to the other side, Desi gasped in relief.
“An oasis!” she cried. “A real, true blue oasis!”
“At this season the water will be brackish.”
Two dozen palm trees surrounded a large pool of water in the rock’s welcome shadow.
“Heaven is a relative construct, I see,” Desi said.
Salah pulled the vehicle up underneath a rock overhang and Desi tumbled out.
Even in the shade it was boiling hot. She gasped. “Wow! How right you were about travelling in this
heat! Is it all going to be like this?”
“No,” he said, opening the back and beginning to unload supplies. When Desi moved to help him he
waved her away. “Leave it to me for now. You are too hot. Go and sit in the shade.”
He was right there, and she could assume he was more used to this heat than she. She sank down on a
rock and watched him heave out the tent.
“I think I’ve drunk four litres of water today! Do we have enough?”
“We have plenty. When did you last take a salt tablet?”
She told him, and he nodded approval.
She knew she must be sweating, but she’d never have known it by her skin. In such dry air, sweat
seemed to evaporate before you saw it.
“I suppose this is as good as a detox cure,” Desi mused.
When Salah had unloaded the equipment and supplies, he slammed the tailgate and turned to look into
the sun.
With his eyes narrowed, his chiselled face outlined by sun and shadow, he looked fiercely handsome, a<
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face from another century. Desi felt lightheaded, almost drunk, with his beauty.
“You’re the image of the desert,” she said dreamily.
Salah flicked her a glance. “You need food,” he said.
He bent to pick up the roll that was the tent, and carried it to a flat spot among the trees. Desi set down
her bottle, dusted her hands on her butt, and moved to help him.
An hour later the tent was up, the sleeping bags unrolled, and Desi was watching the sun go down to
glory over the desert as she scooped up the last morsel of lamb and aubergine stew.
“Does this place have a name?” she asked dreamily.
“It is called Halimah’s Rest.”
“Halimah? Didn’t you tell me she was a great queen or something?”
“Yes. After her husband’s death, she held the throne for her son against all comers for years.”
“What was she doing out here in the middle of nowhere?”
“Queen Halimah and her army got lost during a battle. A local Bedouin boy led her to this oasis. The
army camped here and refreshed themselves and went on to win the battle the next day. Later Halimah
commanded that the pool be banked with brick and a well dug, to the great benefit of the Bedouin. You
can still see the remnants of the brick walls.”
“Who was she fighting with?”
“Adil ibn Bilah, her dead husband’s nephew, who wanted to take the throne from her.”
“He didn’t succeed?”
“No. He was killed, and Halimah made an example of his generals. No one challenged her rule for some
time afterwards.”
The sun was all but gone now. Salah got up and moved among the trees, collecting palm leaves and
bark. Desi sat and watched the desert change from gold to red and then to purple.
The desert went on forever. A sense of unreality settled over her. What stories the sand whispered to the
secret ear!
“This is so weird,” she murmured, after a long silence.
“What?” Salah began laying a fire with what he had collected.
“I feel as though I’ve plugged into a mindset that’s been sitting here forever. As if time is nothing, only
the desert exists.”
“The desert has many effects on the mind. You’ve never been in the desert before?”
“I’ve done a couple of photo shoots in the more obvious places. Golden beaches and palm trees. Once
we went out to an old battlefield and I posed by burnt-out tanks. That was horrible. But never right out
in the middle of nowhere, never where the desert could really get to you. Never anywhere I felt like this.”
“There is more than one sort of mirage,” Salah said, setting a match to the fire.
“Meaning?”
“People see what they want to see in the desert.”
“And what do I want to see?”
“That in the desert time is transcended, perhaps. That time does not matter.”
She went still with the truth of it. There was silence between them, and then, as if driven, he went on.
“If there is only the desert and eternity, how can ten years matter? Do you yearn for that time of
innocence, Desi? I, too. We drive across the desert together, and I know that, if only we had been more
thabet—what word is it?—stead…steady…”
“Stea—” Her throat closed. She cleared it. “Steadfast.”
Darkness was settling around them as the first stars appeared. Thick, roiling smoke curled up from under
the stacked leaves, and then a puff of yellow flame.
“Steadfast, yes. We might still be here together, but how different it would be. You would be my wife.
Our children would sleeping in the tent. Do you feel their ghosts, Desi, as I do?”
Baba, baba, I want a drink!
Her heart convulsed at the nearness of the dream. Desi opened her mouth to breathe.
“What is there in that moment that still traps us, after so many years?” he pressed. “A few weeks out of a
lifetime. Why is it so close?”
The question hung on the air like smoke, symbol of the fire that lurked beneath.
Desi moved her head. Something burned her eyes and the back of her throat. “I don’t know.” The desert
at night was like nothing she had ever experienced, and yet there was something about the campfire, the
stars and his nearness that brought those island feelings close. Love—the memory of love! she corrected
herself—tore at her heart.
A moment later he was beside her on the blanket, his voice hoarse and low.
“Here there is no time, Desi. You feel it. I feel it. Time has disappeared. Here we can be what we were.
Let us make love once more as the innocent children we were. Let us remember the love we felt, just
once; let us make love as if ten years had not passed, as if you had come to me then.”
Her heart was caught between melting and breaking. A sob burned her throat. “What do you want,
Salah?”
She felt the approach of heat, and then his hand was on her breast, cupping it tenderly.
“Do you remember the first time I touched you, Desi? How my hand trembled. Let me touch you like
that again.”
Slowly he drew the loose shirt down her arms and tossed it to one side. Under her t-shirt she was naked,
the heat was too much for a bra, and he knew it. Gently he pushed her down onto the blanket, his hand
slipping up under the thin cotton to find the silky curve of her breast and encircle it as if coming home.
“The first time I touched you like this, Desi, how my blood leapt! The magic of your soft breast, the way
your flesh answered me—” he stroked his palm over the shivered, hungry tip that responded to his
urgency with aching need, then pushed the cloth up and bent his head.
The firelight shadowed his chiselled face, showed her the tortured passion in his eyes, so that she could
almost believe he was again the boy he had been, passionate, loving, accepting, burning with need of
her. She melted at the thought, body and soul, and as his lips gently encircled her flesh, she whispered
his name, as she had so long ago.
Salah.
Her voice held the surprise of awakening passion, as if he heard it down the years and she were still a
virgin, and he closed his eyes as the power of it struck him a blow straight to the heart.
As they had then, his hands became urgent, his tenderness struggling with the need that moved in them
both. He pushed the t-shirt over her head and off, and his eyes devoured the beauty of her perfect
breasts, her skin’s creamy smoothness caressed by the flickering blaze that stroked her even as his hands
did. Then he was jealous, primitively jealous of the fire’s adoration of her, and moved over her, so that
she lay in his shadow, as he urged off the shorts that had no right to touch her legs…
But starlight, too, adored her, glowing on her white forehead, her dampened lips. He bent to take
possession there, too, his mouth hungry and urgent.
The hunger of years rose to her lips, and she opened her mouth tenderly, willingly, hungrily, and as
innocent now as then, for in the desert time disappears. Her hands wrapped him, fingers clenching on his
shoulder, his head, clasping the rich black curls in the newness of that passion she had learned only with
him. Each move of his mouth and tongue and lips was answered by hers, and his blood pounded through
him and he struggled against the urgent need to take her, consume her, be one with her, now.
He shrugged out of his clothes, and then stretched out beside her, naked and glea
ming in firelight. Her
hands stroked the length of his chest and flank, and in the darkness and flickering shadow the honing of
maturity and even his battle scar somehow were lost, so that his body was as fresh and perfect as at
seventeen.
His fingers caressed her cheek, her temple, stroked the silky hair back from her brow as he gazed into
eyes that reflected the night sky and all eternity. Stars glinted in her gaze as she smiled fearlessly,
trustingly into his face, in a way no woman had done again. It touched him to the depths of his soul, and
he gathered her wildly up in his arms, clumsy, inexperienced, like the boy he had been, and crushed her
to him, drowned her mouth with his own, drank in the sweetness of her like wine.
His hands were strong, holding her as if he could never let her go, as they pressed her back, her
shoulder, her head, desperate to bring her closer and closer, till she was part of him. She melted with
yearning, with fulfilment, with need, crying her joy to the night air, to the desert that saw all, knew all.
His mouth drank and drank of the nectar of their kiss. Her body was pressed so tightly against him they
were one flesh, and the hands that wrapped and caressed her sent sensation like honey through her, and
in her response he felt the honey return and pour into his own flesh.
Still it was not enough for either; the last, the final union was still to come, and she began to plead with
him as she had so long ago, soft murmurings in his ear that resonated in his heart, please, Salah, please,
please, as she pressed closer and closer, as her body moulded to his and his to her.
He drew away a little then, unable to wait longer, for what they needed was to sink into each other, and
remember who they had been.
He drew away, and his flesh fitted to hers with the hungry knowing of the key for the lock, and pushed
inside, and they cried out together in surprise and completion, one voice that drenched their nerve ends
with sweetness. And then they were locked together, gazing into each other’s star-filled eyes, unmoving
with the surprise of passion.
He stroked her face, her hair, she touched his full lips with a questing fingertip, and that moment of
wonder and surprise was the same as it had been ten long years ago, that moment of feeling the pulse of
