Jalia nodded.
Latif set something on the ground, then moved over to pour himself a cup of coffee. “Then there’s no news.”
“God, how I hate sitting here doing nothing more productive than fielding calls from the media. If only there was something to do!” she exploded. Part of the emptiness she felt was the letdown after the blizzard of wedding preparations, of course. But Jalia was also missing the hard, rewarding work of her university life.
Latif remained standing, resting his hips back against the table, gazing out over the courtyard. He swirled the coffee in his cup.
“Well, why not?”
Jalia looked up, and his eyes turned to her with a hooded expression she couldn’t fathom. “What do you mean, why not?” Suddenly her eye fell on the case he had set down by a column. She frowned in sudden dismay.
“Are you leaving?” How could he go when they were in such trouble? Bari was one of his closest friends!
He took another sip of coffee. “I’m going to drive up into the mountains to ask in the villages whether anyone saw or heard a plane coming down in the storm.”
She stared at him, the fog of a sleepless night abruptly clearing from her brain. “What a brilliant idea!” she breathed. “I wish I could do something useful like that!”
Latif shrugged as if she impressed him not at all. “Why don’t you?”
“It would take me a week to decipher the answers.” The mountain dialects of both Bagestani Arabic and Parvani, Bagestan’s two languages, were very different from what was spoken in the cities, and Jalia had trouble enough even in the city.
Latif said nothing, merely turned, set down his cup, and rang the bell. A servant came out and asked what he would eat. Latif shook his head.
“I don’t want food, thanks, Mansour,” he began in Arabic. “You have a son named Shafi.”
“God be thanked. Fifteen years old, a strong healthy boy. A very good son.”
“I am going into the mountains to help the search,” Latif explained. “I will need another pair of eyes. Would you allow Shafi to accompany and assist me? I may be gone several days.”
Mansour’s expression was pained as he clasped his fist to his chest. “Willingly, Lord! But alas, he is not at home! As you know, he—”
“Thank you, Mansour,” Latif interrupted him.
The servant turned to go, but Jalia called him back.
“I beg that thou be so good as to bring His Excellency some food wherewith to break his fast, if it please thee,” she said in her formal, antiquated Arabic. And to Latif, “You ought to eat something if you’re going on the road.”
Latif laughed aloud and turned to the servant. “An omelette, then, Mansour.”
Mansour bowed and went back inside. In the tree a bird sang entrancingly, but could not lighten the gloom and worry in Jalia’s heart.
“What are you going to do?” Jalia asked.
Latif pulled out a chair. “I have no specific plan,” he said, sitting down opposite her. He reached for the warmed bread left on her plate with a kind of intimate assumption of her permission, and tore a bite-sized piece off with long, strong fingers. “The mountain villages don’t get television and they don’t have phones. So the only way to—”
“I meant, who will you take with you to be the extra pair of eyes?”
He shrugged. “It’s not important.”
But of course it was. How could his search be effective if he had to watch the road the whole time?
“I’m not doing anything. I should have been going home tomorrow, but I can’t leave with Noor missing,” she offered hesitantly. “I could go with you, if you liked.”
Latif’s mouth tightened. “I expect to search until something definite turns up,” he said stiffly. “I may be away several days.”
“Where will you sleep at night?”
“Sometimes in village rest houses, sometimes under the stars. Whatever comes. It won’t be comfortable. And there may be fleas in the rest houses.”
Maybe it was his obvious reluctance that hardened the momentary impulse into determination. This was her chance to get away from the media, the phone and the helpless speculation and do something actively useful.
“Better fleas with a chance to help,” she said, who had never had a fleabite in her life, “than sitting with my mother and aunt, worrying uselessly.”
She could see that Latif didn’t like the idea, and of course she didn’t relish being with him, but what would that matter if they found Noor and Bari?
“Don’t you think you’ll do better with another pair of eyes?” she pressed.
His eyes rested on her face with an unreadable expression.
“She’s my cousin, Latif.”
“And he’s my friend. But conditions will be primitive.”
“What gave you the idea I expect to be pampered?”
“There’s a lot of ground between primitive and pampered, Princess.”
A glint in his eyes made her think he was deliberately baiting her as a way of resisting her suggestion, but his resistance only fuelled her determination. She stifled her irritation, always so quick to ignite in his presence.
“You won’t be able to look around for signs of the plane as you drive if you go alone. You’ll need your concentration for the road—especially those twisty, rugged mountain roads,” she argued. “And even supposing you did find them, how would you cope with…”
She trailed off. In a sudden moment of clarity, as if she had come out of a trance, or lifted her head out of water, the thought appeared in her head: Travel around the countryside with only Latif Abd al Razzaq for company? Are you crazy?
What demon had possessed her?
“Oh, never m—” she began. But she had come to her senses too late.
“No, you are right. Two will be much more effective than one. Thank you, I will be glad of your help. Pack something warm. It gets cold in the mountains at night,” said Latif Abd al Razzaq as the trap closed on her. “We will leave in an hour.”
“Do you have a plan in mind?” Jalia asked as the road began to climb and the mountains rose over them, dangerous and seductive, like Latif himself.
Jalia was lying in the bed she had made, though she had done her best to unmake it. She had rushed to tell her mother about the trip, hoping for a reprise of the old this is not the West, this is Bagestan, and we must not offend people by violating their customs argument. But when she had gently hinted that people might be shocked if she drove around with a man not related to her, her mother had only shrugged.
“Ghasib ran a secular government for over thirty years, and people here have more casual attitudes now. If you meet someone disapproving, just say Latif is your husband.”
“Thanks, Mother!” Jalia snapped. “And then they’ll put us in the same bed! I don’t think so!”
Her mother lifted her hands. “Then say he is your bodyguard. For goodness’ sake, Jalia, who would have guessed you would be so old-fashioned? Noor is missing. Your aunt is out of her mind with worry! If you have to put up with the company of a man you don’t like for a few days to help find your cousin, surely that’s a small price to pay?”
Which was quite true. Noor’s parents had been hugely kind to Jalia all her life, giving her fabulous holidays in Australia every year since she was a child. They had always treated her very kindly on those long childhood visits.
Of course she was grateful to them. Noor was like a sister to her—spoiled and exasperating, but nevertheless loving and loved.
And yet, it was with a feeling of somehow having been outmanoeuvred that Jalia had joined Latif and tossed her pack into the four-wheel drive.
“Plan?” Latif responded now. “My plan is to follow the advice of Mulla Nasruddin.”
The name was familiar: it signified a joke figure in folktales, but Jalia hadn’t paid much attention to the ancient stories since she was a teenager.
She frowned a question, and Latif explained,
“One day one
of his neighbours discovered the Mulla on his hands and knees under a street lamp near his house and stopped to ask what the problem was.
“‘I am looking for my house key, which I have dropped,’ said the Mulla.
“The helpful neighbour immediately dropped to his knees and joined the Mulla in the search. After some time, the key had not turned up.
“‘Where exactly were you when you dropped your key?’ the neighbour asked at last.
“‘Standing at my front door,’ said Mulla.
“The neighbour stared. ‘But in that case why are you searching here in the street, yards from your house?’
“Mulla Nasruddin drew himself up. ‘Have you not noticed,’ he said, ‘that this is where the light is?’”
One corner of Latif’s mouth curved up as he finished the tale, and Jalia laughed. He told the story well.
“But I’m not sure I get the point,” she confessed.
Latif flicked her a smile. “We don’t know where the plane went down. But we will look for it where we can look.”
Jalia laughed softly; they exchanged a look; and suddenly a powerful connection was flowing between them that was very different from the suppressed hostility she usually felt.
A jolt of awareness socked through her. For the first time she realized how deeply attractive a man Latif was—not just physically, with his black hair, his falcon’s looks and his smoothly muscled body, but mentally.
But what did that matter? She wasn’t attracted to him, and even if she were, nothing would induce her to turn her back on the life she had created for herself and come to Bagestan.
She knew without asking that Latif Abd al Razzaq was inextricably bound to Bagestan. He had worked and struggled for years to assist the Sultan to the throne.
So there was no need for her heart to start beating as if she had discovered danger.
The woman moved smilingly around her simple house, dressed in one of the most gorgeous outfits Jalia had ever seen anyone make mint tea in—a wine-red velvet skirt and long tunic trimmed around neck, hem and cuffs with gold braid and shimmering gold medallions, almost as elaborately beautiful as the bridesmaids’ outfits at Noor’s wedding.
Over her waist-length black hair a gauzy black scarf glinted with more medallions. Her arms were circled with dozens of bracelets; black, kohl-rimmed eyes breathed the power and mystery of the feminine.
The mountain tribeswomen were known for the luxury of their daily dress, and Jalia couldn’t help wondering what effect it would have on the psyche to get up every morning and dress in such finery. In front of the house a young girl, similarly dressed, expertly kept her veil in check as she pounded spice in a stone mortar. The sharp, pungent odour filled the air.
“It is well that the Sultan has come back,” the woman was saying, and either this village dialect was extremely pure, or her own ear was acclimatizing after a few days, because Jalia could understand her with little problem. “Please tell him that whenever he wishes to call he, too, will be an honoured guest in our house.”
She was laying out a huge meal for them, on the traditional cloth spread on the ground under a tree. Jalia was horrified by the amount of food being prepared for them, for these were obviously poor people. The woman’s husband, she had told them, gathered firewood and sold it in the village to eke out the living from their farm.
“But what will they eat tomorrow if we eat all their food today?” she demanded of Latif when the woman left them alone.
He lifted his eyebrows at her. “God will provide.”
“After three years of drought,” she pointed out dryly.
“You are too Western,” Latif said. “Do you think we have adopted Western generosity here—to give only what does not cost us? Here in the mountains, generosity is generosity. Do you not know the story of Anwar Beg?”
She sometimes felt with him that she was in a book.
“Tell me.”
“He had a magnificent horse, which a friend of his wished to buy. But however high the price, however hard he negotiated, Anwar Beg would not part with his prize beast, and at last the man was forced to give up.
“Then one day he heard that Anwar Beg had fallen on hard times, and hardly had food to put on the table. He said to himself, now he will have to sell that wonderful horse of his, and he went to Anwar Beg’s house.
“Anwar Beg invited him in, and his friend sat down and tried to open negotiations. But Anwar Beg stopped him. ‘You are my guest. First there is the matter of hospitality,’ he insisted.
“So the two men waited while the meal Anwar Beg ordered to be prepared for him was cooked and served. Scarcely containing his impatience, his friend ate the delicious meat stew that was brought, complimenting his host on the meal.
“‘Friend,’ said the man when the meal was finished, ‘I wish to make you an offer again on that magnificent horse which you have always refused to sell.’
“Anwar Beg shook his head. ‘Impossible,’ he said.
“‘But surely, with things with you as they now are,” the neighbour cried, ‘you must listen to reason! Sell me the horse! I will give you a good price for it so that you can provide for your family.’
“‘It is impossible,’ repeated Anwar Beg. ‘You came to me as a guest, and it was necessary to show you hospitality. Having no other food to offer you, I ordered that the horse be slaughtered to make the stew you have just eaten.’”
Jalia gazed at Latif a long time when the story was finished, and predominant among her feelings was guilt. “I could never live up to a standard like that,” she said quietly.
“Yes,” he contradicted her. “This story describes not what is, but what we strive towards. You have a more generous spirit than you know—it is in your eyes. And in your blood. The al Jawadi have a tradition of great generosity.
“Think of your grandfather’s generous treatment of the young orphan boy, Ghasib, who grew up to betray him. This is the blood you have inherited, Jalia, whether you know it or not. And when you stop being afraid, then you will find your generosity.”
He was always saying things like that, what she called his “gnomic utterances.”
“When I stop being afraid of what?” she asked, indignant.
“I cannot do all the work for you. Some things you must discover for yourself,” he said, and in his voice was an urgency that frightened her.
Six
Latif kept his eyes on the road. It was all he could do not to shout at her, so angry was he—at her wilful blindness, at fate, at himself.
Himself. Why should he blame her, or fate, when his trouble was of his own making? Fate had put her in his way; he had doubted fate’s wisdom, as fools do. He had been too cautious in embracing the way fate showed him, and now he could never embrace her as his wife….
“Princess Muna, Sheikh Ihsan,” Ashraf had said, “here is my trusted Cup Companion, my ally and support throughout our struggle. Latif Abd al Razzaq Shahin will aid you and your family….”
The rest of what the new Sultan said was lost in the clamour in Latif’s head. For, standing beside Princess Muna and her husband, watching him with a clear, level gaze, was the woman he had been waiting for since that moment his soul had been plucked from its nest beside her in the heavens and sent into the cruel, testing world.
A stern nobility, which must have told anyone who looked at her that she was of royal blood, was evident in the set of her mouth, the lift of her head.
In addition she had an unusual, harsh beauty, proud and unapproachable. Her eyes were coolly intelligent as she gazed at him, and he felt that only he could see through to the secret of a passionately generous heart.
All that he saw between one painful heartbeat and another.
The thick fair hair had seemed like a fall of honey against her cheek, the promise of sweetness so tangible he had to clench his fists not to wrap his hand in its silky strands, bend closer to inhale the odour, bury his mouth in the taste.
“…Jalia…” he heard thro
ugh the drumming of his heart, and with a fist at his breast, he bowed.
“Princess Jalia,” he said. His voice must have told her what he felt, how he took her name into himself, took her, possessed her self and her name forever by speaking two words that changed his life….
“I don’t use that title,” she had responded with chilly disdain, cutting through the haze that enveloped his brain with the frosted blade of hauteur. “My name is Jalia Shahbazi, Your Excellency.”
Like a man on a journey faced with an ice-topped mountain in his path, he had advised caution to his heart. She was hostile and guarded, and he couldn’t guess why.
Logic told him that nothing would be gained by a direct assault. He must give her time.
Weak, cowardly thought that it was, his heart had given it room, had considered it, had bowed to the dictates of logic when deep instinct told him that he must challenge her, that his own passion’s fire would melt the ice in which her heart was encased.
He had given her time, but time was not his to give. Within days she had fled back to the cold northern country of her birth.
She had given no warning of her departure. Merely the next time he had met her parents and asked for her, he learned that she had gone “home” that morning.
For the next few weeks, carrying out his duties for the Sultan, advising Jalia’s parents about their lost properties and treasures, helping them in their plans to return to Bagestan, he had called himself a fool. To be so blinded by a woman’s beauty, to be so challenged by a cold demeanour—it was no more than a fool’s obsession, a child seeing what it can’t have and wanting it because of that.
Angry with her for her coldness, angry with himself for his heat, telling himself his heart was not truly engaged—so he had passed the time until the day of her cousin’s wedding to his friend had approached, and Jalia had reluctantly returned to Bagestan.
And now she was wearing a ring. Another man’s ring.
The first time he had seen her he had been deafened by the thunder and rushing of his own blood. This time he had been blinded—by a haze of anguished fury that ripped at him. Broken heart? he remembered thinking dimly. Whoever felt so weak a torment had never known love: Latif’s heart had been set upon by wild dogs and torn to pieces. He would never put it together again.
The Ice Maiden's Sheikh Page 4
