“Marzuqi carpets!” she exclaimed in English. She hadn’t made the connection before, but anyone with an interest in Eastern carpets would have recognized the distinctive colour and design at once.
Marzuqi carpets were extremely sought after, very expensive, and hard to come by, and Princess Muna had treasured the one she owned all of Jalia’s life. But Jalia had simply not made the connection until it was right before her eyes.
“My honoured mother, the Princess Muna, hath of such carpets as these one carpet which she treasures greatly,” she told them. “They are carpets among the most beautiful carpets in the world.”
Of course this pleased them, but like a fool Jalia hadn’t thought of the consequences. She was immediately presented with a silk carpet just finished, the result of at least a year’s work on the part of one of the women, she knew: far too costly a gift.
She was sure that the carpet had been made to order for some client, yet it would be impossible to refuse without offence.
With a sinking heart totally at variance with her delight in the carpet, Jalia examined the intricate design, the beautifully woven pattern a mix of several intensities of the blue, accented with black, white, pink and green.
“This is a sacred pattern, Lady,” she was told. “It is designed to draw Truth into the space. These are secrets handed down to us from our mothers since The Days Before the Law of Men.”
The Days Before the Law of Men. It was a strange phrase, one she had never heard before, and yet it had the ring of common usage. She bent over the gorgeous carpet, listening while they explained how the meaning of the signs and markings had a deep mystery that could not be explained in words.
Afterwards, they folded the carpet up and tied it for her. Jalia made her thanks, but tried to protest that the client for whom this carpet had been intended would be angry.
“But it has been made for Lord Latif, against the day when he would appear!” they exclaimed. “Razan is the valley’s best weaver—who else to weave a carpet for your husband? We are honoured to give it to you. You will take it to the city, so that there you and Lord Latif will be always reminded of your true home.”
Jalia didn’t understand why that brought tears to her eyes. The valley was not her home, and it never could be. She had gone too far away from such roots. But still, some part of her yearned for the might-have-been.
After lunch, some of the men escorted Latif and Jalia back up the slowly mending road to their truck, loaded it with the carpet and fresh supplies, and waved them on their way.
As they drove, Jalia did not wait long before broaching the chief subject of concern that the women had raised with her: a problem that threatened their livelihood and the future of the entire valley.
“They’ve got two problems,” she explained. “The first is, the exporter of their carpets, with whom they have a contract to sell everything they produce, has started having cheap, production-line copies made in Kaljukistan, and is trying to pass them off as genuine.
“He says the women aren’t producing fast enough to fulfill demand, but the truth is, he wants cheap carpets to sell to people who can’t afford the genuine thing.
“But he’s got a problem—he can’t achieve the colour with chemical dyes, and you know the colour is half the beauty of a Marzuqi carpet. So now he’s trying to force them to give him the secret of that wonderful purple-blue dye. It really beggars belief. It’s just ruthless profiteering without any—”
Latif interrupted. “But this could be a good thing for the women. Tastes change. Maybe they should profit from the demand for their designs while they can.”
Jalia turned to stare at him. “Latif—handwoven Marzuqi carpets have been hot in the West for the past hundred years at least. That’s not going to change as long as they keep it small and exclusive. It will certainly change if the market gets flooded with cheap copies and it becomes the latest craze.”
“They aren’t going to lose their skill in making carpets. All they have to do is find new designs.”
She couldn’t believe it. She had been so certain of being able to enlist his help.
“I thought these were your people, Latif,” she cried. “They need help!”
“Do they?”
“In the last contract the exporter tied them up without their realizing it. They can’t sell to anyone but him, but he’s not obliged to buy what they produce if there’s no market.
“He’s saying the carpets are too expensive, and take too long to make. He says there’s no market beyond the carpets already ordered. Those carpets will all be finished within six months.
“After that—the prices they are being offered are less than half of what they now get, which is already obscenely exploitative. And the agent wants to bring in a designer, so that instead of creating their own variations on their designs as they go, the women just execute a preexisting design. That’s supposed to make the work go faster.
“The women all hate the idea. Each carpet is unique, an individual work of art. With a preset design they’ll be just technicians. They’ll have no creative input at all.”
“What help do they want?”
“Isn’t it obvious? They want to break the contract with the exporter, and they want to prevent him flooding the market with cheap imitations. But after three years of drought no one has the money for a lawyer. And anyway, they don’t know how to get one.”
Latif shook his head. “It’s not going to be as easy to stop him as you think. I was told of many problems this morning. This one will have to take its place on the list.”
“Oh, the men’s issues come first, do they?” She sat up straighter, outraged.
“I’ll do what I can, Jalia. It just won’t happen instantly.”
Suddenly she was furious. How dare he care so little for his own people? The women had talked to her about their concerns till her head was ringing, and she had been so sure of his interest!
“I suppose there’s no point telling you about all the plans and ideas those women and I talked over? With your head so full of priority masculine stuff?”
“I am sure they asked you to pass such things on to me, thinking as they did that you had agreed to be my wife.”
She ignored the thread of steely anger. “They did. But then, they thought you were their Shahin as well as their husbands’.”
“No, that is not what they think. What they think is that I love you and that I will give my wife anything she asks. That is why they appealed to you.”
“But they were wrong,” she suggested.
His eyes flicked away from the perilous road for one burning moment. “They were right. But you are not my wife. Ask me as my wife and I will do what you ask.”
“That’s outrageous!” she snapped. “Why don’t you do it for them? They are your people!”
“They are your people, too, Jalia. All Bagestanis are your people. And what are you doing for them? Do not preach to me, when you yourself will turn your back on me and on your country to live abroad as soon as we return!”
“Are you going to punish the Marzuqi women because I won’t do what you want?”
“Look at it another way. You have the power to help these women by marrying me.”
Electricity shivered her skin as his hand left the wheel and he clasped the back of her head, turning her to face him.
“Marry me, Jalia!” he said urgently. “Don’t you see it? You are my woman. My home calls to you, my people touch your heart! This tells you something, if you are listening.”
She broke from his hold and turned away.
“Answer me!”
“I’ve already answered you, Latif. I’m English, for God’s sake! I can’t do it.”
The road hung over a precipice so sheer and stony her heart leaped into her mouth.
“Can’t? What does that mean—can’t?” he demanded, as a magnificent panorama opened out before them. The road now passed through a three-sided cavity in the side of the mountain. The fourth side was
open onto vastness.
“Do you really expect someone born and raised in a city like London to be able to make this kind of transition? I can’t just take up a completely new way of life! I’d go mad after a month!”
Far, far below, a ribbon of river wound its way along a rugged chasm of green trees and rust-red rock.
Jalia gasped hoarsely. She’d never seen anything so powerfully moving as this country, with its alternating rugged mountains and green valleys. But this vista staggered her with its lonely magnificence.
“You can!” he growled.
“My whole life is elsewhere, Latif.”
“Don’t talk like a Westerner who understands nothing but money. Your heart is here—how can your life be elsewhere?”
“My God, will you watch the road? Do you know how steep this drop is?”
“I know this road as I know your heart—better than you do yourself.”
“I know my mind extremely well. That is what counts.”
“Do not be such a fool.”
“What’s your definition of fool? A woman who disagrees with you?”
Two angry emeralds blazed wrath at her.
“Last night you learned that you love me. Why can you not hold to this? It is weakness, what you do now!”
“Last night we made love, Latif. That’s all. Wonderful as it was, and I’m not denying that—”
“You insult me. Am I a technician, to be complimented so?”
“Oh, there’s no pleasing you!” she snapped.
“But yes, I am easy to please. You know the way.”
Thirteen
After the night in the valley, the relationship between her and Latif grew progressively more edgy. Their exchanges were barbed, and neither seemed able to say anything that didn’t have a double meaning.
At night, though everything in him said he was digging his grave deeper with every moment they spent in loving, he could not resist her. However harsh their daily conversation, however determined he became not to succumb this time, when night fell in the tent and her soft breathing filled the silence, his voice called to her of its own accord, and his hands, driven by unbearable hunger, reached for her, found her.
And for Jalia it was the same. Whatever he said in the day to anger or upset her, however resentful her heart when she climbed into her sleeping bag, at the first touch of Latif’s hands all resistance melted, and she turned into his embrace with a sigh of need that always blasted the last of his control.
His lovemaking was fierce but tender, as if he never forgot that he was making love to his wife, the mother of his children. The deep respect, the reverence, almost, in his body’s embrace meant that her whole being opened to him, and the trusting openness drove his passion to the wildest heights.
Then he called to her soul with terms of endearment he had never before used to any woman. Then he was like a man who has inherited a most precious jewel—touching it, stroking it, admiring its unmatchable beauty, and always his heart breaking a little with the knowledge that it could never be truly his own.
During the days, he punished her for that, for the way her beauty of soul and face and body remained remote and unattainable, for the fact that however deep his own knowledge that their love was the destiny of both of them, she could withhold a part of herself even in the depths of loving.
“You love me,” he would accuse her, as his body moved in hers, provoking her to a throaty song of gratitude. And yes, she would reply.
“You are mine—say it, Jalia! Tell me you are mine forever!” Latif, please don’t ask me that, she would say, driving him to a frenzy of passionate lovemaking, his body certain that the way to break down this last resistance was through pleasure that maddened her.
Sometimes his body was right. Sometimes he heard her say, yes, Latif, yes, whatever you want, oh, God, I’ve never felt anything like this….
Later, when the pleasure had faded, she always reneged. Then she would blame him for trying to hold her to promises extracted under duress.
“Duress?” he had rasped the first time she used the word. “Duress?”
“The duress of pleasure,” she said unapologetically. He laughed angrily, but she stuck to her guns. “It’s not fair to ask me to change my mind when I’m actually out of my mind. Of course I’ll say anything you want to hear, when I’m effectively drunk with sex.
“I’ve never felt before what I feel with you. I have no defences. So whatever you make me say in the heat of the moment, Latif, I reserve the right to retract it when I’m sane and sober again.”
Of course he was torn—between the satisfaction of knowing he gave her such unequalled pleasure, and the grief of that pleasure not carrying the conviction for her that it did for him, that through it they were united for all time.
Nowhere during the long journey did they hear news of a plane in trouble during the last big storm.
As they proceeded the task became really thankless, for as the mountains got steeper and more rugged, Jalia could no longer see very far from the road. They might be missing a wreckage that was only yards away behind a ridge or an outcrop.
And they could explore only so far on foot. The binoculars were virtually useless now, and though she still carried them around her neck, there was rarely any point in raising them to her eyes.
“When we reach Matar Filkoh airport, we’ll turn around and start back,” Jalia heard Latif say one day. “There is no real reason even to continue to the airport—if the plane had passed anywhere close, they’d have picked it up on radar. But we need to radio for news.”
Jalia heaved a sigh, and felt tears threaten. She knew in her heart Latif was right. They had covered all the territory they could by road. Either the plane had gone down in an area so remote that only search planes or climbers could hope to find it, or Noor and Bari hadn’t flown this way.
And she couldn’t be more glad to get out of this truck and away from Latif Abd al Razzaq Shahin if he were a real falcon daily tearing at the liver of her resolve. And yet…
“No!” she protested.
A wave of doubt and denial washed over her. What if the plane’s wreckage was just one crag further on? It wasn’t stretching hope too far that Noor and Bari could have survived a crash, might be waiting just beyond the next rise, praying for rescue.
Latif turned an emerald-chip gaze her way. “What are you saying?” he asked disbelievingly.
“We can’t just give up!”
His jaw tightened, and she understood how much he wanted this to be over. Well, whose fault was it that they couldn’t stand being in close confines together? Who had started the trouble?
“The road ends at the airport. After that it is little better than a trail leading to Joharistan.”
Joharistan was the tiny country whose name was practically synonymous with remote inaccessibility and tribal unrest.
But Jalia had become too guilt ridden, too sharply aware of how much her own stupidity must be to blame for Noor’s flight. She couldn’t give up till the last ditch. Her heart quailed at the thought of having to face her family without having some news to give them.
And if staying longer with Latif was her penance—well, it was a just one, wasn’t it?
“There must be something more we can do,” she said.
“Do you mean go on foot? What a futile exercise that would be.”
Latif waved his hand at the mountains beyond the windscreen. “Where would you go? What direction? You might only succeed in getting hurt yourself, and provoking another air search.”
Jalia gazed out the window at the rugged rock face above, and knew defeat.
“There must be something we can do!” she protested anyway.
“Not here.”
“I don’t believe you! You don’t like being with me. You want out of the situation, that’s all it is!”
Latif slammed on the brakes and turned to her, showing his teeth.
“Of course I want out of it!” he shouted, as if goaded past his
self-control at last. “Do you think I like the torment—every night believing that I have convinced you, and every morning learning that you are a woman who can be confused by my lovemaking, but never convinced by my love? Knowing all the day long that I will not be able to resist the compulsion to try again, learning to half accept that all I will have in the end is the memory of what one day you will remember as a wild affair, and I as the crossroads of my life? Of course I want out!
“You are my future, one way or the other, Jalia—either as the memory of what I could not make mine, or as my wife and the mother of my children. Do you think I don’t know that the longer I am with you now, not resisting what I should resist, the harder the memory of the loss will be? Do you think it makes me happy to feed on scraps, constantly hoping for a meal, knowing that after this, any other food will be tasteless to me?”
She gasped under the assault, while feeling charged through her like hot tears in her blood. Without another word he turned and put the vehicle in gear.
“I’m sorry,” she faltered. “I didn’t—”
He gestured once with an angry hand. “Do not tell me you—”
The truck’s wheels slid dangerously into the massive rain-ruts he had been avoiding, and in the next instant he was totally absorbed with preventing the truck from sliding backwards into a gully.
Jalia watched his hands on the wheel, hard and expert, and felt a thrill of remembered delight. Just so did he guide her body when it was at the edge of an abyss of soaring pleasure.
For a crazy moment she wished that he would stop struggling and let them go over the edge now, and relieve her of the daily torture of not knowing her own mind. Sometimes it did seem to her that only death would resolve the dilemma in her heart.
It was tearing her in two. At night, in his arms, she was secure in the conviction his loving closeness induced in her—that love could conquer all. Then she was filled with a divine certainty that her true future lay not in England, but here in the land of her forebears, side by side with this strong, loving man, struggling to make a new life for herself and him and the country.
The Ice Maiden's Sheikh Page 9
