Today she had earned the food she had eaten, and this drink of water, and she felt the difference.
They were lying together in the shelter, with a foil sheet over them. Noor was restless and couldn’t sleep, but there was absolutely nothing she could do to amuse herself. The darkness was intense, she had discovered, when there was no city glow to lighten it.
She sighed unhappily. For the past three days, everything had fallen on her. Bari said his leg was improving daily, but he still couldn’t stand on it for longer than a few minutes at a time, so he wasn’t doing much in the way of work.
He could give her instruction and advice, though, and Noor was learning fast. She had learned to light a fire, though not without first wasting too much of the fuel in the little cigarette lighter. She had even caught a fish in the net Bari had made from her wedding veil and a pliant branch. With nothing but his verbal description to go by, she had found the right healing herb in the forest, and made a paste to put on his wounds.
Nearly every day new packets from the lost cargo washed up on the beach, and every day she invented new uses for frustratingly useless artefacts from a way of life which seemed increasingly distant and incomprehensible.
She had constructed a backgammon game for them. For counters, from the dozens of tiny fridge magnets she found in one package, she had chosen fifteen bearing a miniature Old Palace, and another fifteen of the Great Mosque. The board she created out of the cardboard box itself, outlined the points with Bari’s knife, and then stained alternate points with crushed berries.
She had brought Bari small bits of dried wood and instructed him to carve them into dice. In the evenings, when darkness descended, they lay by the fire, playing while the flame faded to glowing ash.
On an impulse she couldn’t resist, Noor had threaded the pearls from her wedding dress onto a piece of fishing line, and made a necklace, first for herself, and then for the little rag doll she had found, whom she had named Laqiya. Bari had admired them both with apparently equal approval.
This morning she had opened a huge box addressed to a boutique in the resort called Memor Arabia to find a half dozen replica beaten brass bowls and a couple of large replica hookahs, all wrapped in enough plastic bubble wrap to build a tent. The hookahs she had set aside with a snort of contempt. “What would anybody want with them?” she demanded indignantly. “What use would they be?”
Bari laughed. “It’s a good thing you don’t work in the tourism industry.”
“But what a waste! I mean, someone will take that home and put it on their mantelpiece and it’ll collect dust for three months and then be given to charity, and someone else will take it home and put it on their coffee table, and that’s its story. It’s excellent quality—I bet it’s a functioning hookah—but who’s ever going to smoke it? And look at all the materials that have gone into it! This is real brass tubing. It could have been…”
With a little indrawn breath, Noor fell silent. And a couple of hours later, she had extracted the tubing from several hookahs and mounted it over the fire, supported by stones at each end. On the little platform thus created she put a replica beaten brass bowl from the same shop, and so boiled water for the first time.
“Coffee!” she sang as she stirred the powder into the steaming water. Her ladle was the plastic cup from the emergency kit, and she carefully decanted several measures of the hot coffee into another brass bowl and offered it to Bari, before doing the same for herself.
“Isn’t that heaven?” she demanded as the scent teased her nostrils and she waited for the liquid to cool. “I feel as though I grew the stuff and ground it myself!”
Maybe it was the coffee that stopped her sleeping now, she reflected. After so long with no caffeine, it might have had an effect on her that it didn’t use to have. She was utterly exhausted by the day’s work, so what other explanation could there be?
She wished she could snuggle up against Bari, but although they slept close under the same foil sheet, he never offered to actually hold her. Sometimes when she awoke, it was to discover that she had wormed her way into his embrace in her sleep, but she had never done it in cold blood.
His breathing told her he was awake, too. Her pride had taken a bad beating when she’d discovered his true opinion of her, and although their relationship had now improved out of all recognition, she was still nervous of what his reaction would be if she asked him to hold her. She had asked him once before and been harshly repulsed, and the humiliation was ever fresh.
In the darkness she felt him fold his arms under his head. “Can’t sleep?” he murmured softly.
“No. Isn’t it ridiculous? Every muscle is screaming for a rest, too.” Belatedly she remembered that he had even more reason to complain. “What about you? Is it pain that’s keeping you awake?”
He grunted without answering, and she supposed he felt it was unmanly to admit to suffering.
“Do you think your leg is healing properly?”
He didn’t answer, and Noor felt a shiver of dread. What would she do if he suffered complications? What if the wound became infected? The mess of herbs he had asked her to apply to the wound had looked positively toxic, and she didn’t have even first aid training, let alone any medical qualifications.
“If we ever get out of this, I’m going to take a first aid course,” she vowed fervently. “And I’m going to get some kind of practical training in something, too.”
Bari was silent for so long she wondered if he’d fallen asleep. But then, in an odd voice, he asked, “What sort of practical training?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll have to look around. Plumbing, maybe!” She laughed a little. “Something useful. You know, Bari, it’s like—here we are on a desert island, and only certain skills count. And only certain things are useful, and the useless things are just so much garbage clogging up our campsite—and the island. And it’s what you said—there’s no room for anyone who doesn’t pull their weight, and if we don’t cooperate, we die. But you know what I’ve just realized?”
“What?”
“The whole world is a desert island. It’s no different than what we’ve got right here. It’s just—easier to overlook the truth out there.”
There was another long pause, but this time she knew he had heard.
“I see,” he said softly.
“So when we get back—will we ever get back?—I want to start doing something useful. Something like engineering, or medicine, or…I wonder if it’s too late to start. Do you think I’m being silly?”
“No,” he said softly. “Why would I think it silly to want to make a contribution to the world?”
Noor laughed in sudden recognition. “That’s what it is, isn’t it? I hadn’t thought of it just like that!” She laughed again. “Ya Allah, I’ve become a do-gooder! Do you think I’ll turn into a poor-little-rich-girl who runs around orphanages wringing her hands?”
Bari laughed, too. “Not unless you want to.”
“Well, I don’t. I want to do something practical.”
“From the evidence of the past few days, you might consider becoming an inventor,” he offered, only half joking.
Noor was silent, absorbing that. “I think that’s the biggest compliment I’ve ever had,” she said softly.
And it was in that strangely sweet moment that she realized she did love him, after all. Had she loved him from that first moment? Had her own self-absorption simply hidden the truth from her? Or was it only since she had come to the island that her heart had opened enough to let love in? She couldn’t say when the seed had been planted, but the full-blown plant was unmistakable.
She had a terrible, powerful urge to tell him so, but fear stopped her. He had pretended to love her when in his heart he felt contempt. And his reasons for marrying her hadn’t changed: he still wanted to please his grandfather. He wanted to inherit the family estates.
If she told him of her love, would he pretend to love her again? She was almost certain that he li
ked her better now, but what if he didn’t?
Noor was feeling desperately confused all at once, and she shifted restlessly. “Oh, what I’d give for a portable DVD player and a good movie!” She cried out her frustration in the darkness.
“Is that what you normally do when you can’t sleep?”
“I don’t have much trouble sleeping usually, but when I do, yes, I get up and watch a movie. Or read. Or write e-mails to my friends. That’s the problem with technology—where is it when you really need it?” She laughed, her heart stretched with pain and confusion, when she wanted to weep. “I wonder what primitive cultures do for insomnia?”
“The same, only without the technology,” he suggested. “Would you like me to tell you a story?”
Noor gave a little grunt of surprise. “My father always used to tell me stories! I’d almost forgotten. Does your story have jinns and fairies and giant rocs?”
“Of course.” Her heart beat with sudden urgency as she felt him lift an arm and offer to slide it under her head. Wordlessly Noor slipped up to rest on his bare shoulder as his arm drew her in against him.
“Is your leg comfortable?”
“It’s fine,” Bari said mildly. “Now be quiet and listen.”
Thirteen
“Once upon a time, there was a king who had an exceedingly beautiful daughter, named Zarsana. The girl was so beautiful, and so sweet natured, that everyone said she could hardly be human. Among themselves the servants called her the Fairy Princess. She was the joy of both her father and her mother.
“One day, the King said to the Queen, ‘Although it will pain us to lose her, it is time that our daughter was married. We must find her a suitable husband. In our pleasure in her company we have already delayed too long.’
“The next day, the King visited his daughter in her rooms in the palace, and told her his thoughts. But Princess Zarsana smiled at her father and said, ‘Why should I leave you and my mother when we are so happy as we are? Do not seek to change things, but let us remain together.’
“Her father insisted that it was the fate of every young woman to marry, and at last the Princess said, ‘I will marry only a man who has visited the City of Gold.’
“Her father was astonished, for he had never heard of the City of Gold. He tried to dissuade his daughter, but the Princess was adamant. At last the King went away and consulted with his viziers.
“None of the viziers, not even the Grand Vizier, had ever heard of the Golden City. But as ignorance never holds back an expert, they consulted together and advised the King.
“‘You must invite all the eligible princes of the world to visit, and ask which of them has seen the City of Gold,’ they advised. ‘Whoever says he has made such a trip shall marry the Princess.’
“But when the King invited all the princes of the world and asked each of them in turn if he had visited the City of Gold, none had even heard of the place. And they all returned to their homes none the wiser regarding the reason of the visit.
“Then the viziers said, ‘Your Cup Companions are all men of the highest nobility. Ask them whether any has succeeded in visiting the Golden City, and whoever says he has shall marry your daughter.’
“So the King ordered a feast, to which he summoned his Cup Companions. When they had eaten and drunk, recited poetry and discussed philosophy and love in the usual way, the King spoke.
“‘Which of you has visited the City of Gold? For whoever has done so shall marry my daughter, Zarsana, and I will make him Crown Prince.’
“Of course all the Cup Companions wished very much for such a fate, for Zarsana’s beauty and good nature were well-known, and whoever was Crown Prince would inherit the kingdom in the course of time. But each had to confess that he had never even heard of such a place as the Golden City.
“When the King summoned his viziers again, they scratched their heads. ‘No other man can be sufficiently noble to marry the Princess, even if he has seen the Golden City,’ they agreed. ‘The Princess must give up her determination to marry such a man.’ And they had no more advice to offer.
“So the King paid a visit to the Princess again, and explained the difficulty. ‘No one has even heard of the City of Gold. How is such a man to be found? You must give up your determination and let me choose a husband for you.’
“But the girl refused.
“‘Let a proclamation be made in the streets,’ advised Princess Zarsana. ‘Say that I will marry that man, whatever his birth or rank, who has visited the Golden City.’
“The worried King did as his daughter had instructed, and messengers were sent out into the city to announce that whoever had seen the City of Gold should travel to the palace, where he would marry the Princess Zarsana and be made Crown Prince.
“The announcement caused great excitement in the kingdom, and the news was passed from lip to lip, but not even the oldest of the King’s subjects had ever heard of such a place as the Golden City.
“At last the news came to the ears of a handsome young man named Salik, the son of a silk merchant who had died leaving his son enormously rich. Salik had squandered all his father’s wealth on gambling and vice, and now he was very miserable. His false friends had abandoned him when they saw that all his money was gone, and he was too ashamed to approach any of his father’s old friends in his present state.
“When he heard the proclamation, Salik said to himself, ‘Since no one knows of this city, who will be able to challenge me if I say I have seen it? This is the way to mend my fortunes, for I can sink no lower than I already am.’ So he went to the palace and said to the guards, ‘I am the man the King seeks. I have visited the City of Gold and seen it with my own eyes.’
“Salik was taken before the King, to whom he repeated the false claim. The King in turn sent him to the Princess. Princess Zarsana said to Salik, ‘Have you seen the Golden City?’ ‘Yes,’ replied Salik. ‘While I was on my travels in search of knowledge, I reached the City of Gold.’ ‘And by what route did you travel there?’ she asked.
“Salik was undaunted. ‘From my home in this city I travelled for many days, till I came to the great city of Isfahan. From there I made my way through the Dasht-i Kavir, and after great struggles found my way to Zanzibar. From there I went to Bokhara, and thence to Samarkand. From Samarkand through the mountains, I made my way to the shores of the sea. I entered the City of Gold, which is as beautiful as paradise. There I studied for many months, and at last made my way home.’
“The Princess smiled. ‘What you tell me is wonderful, and it is clear that you have indeed seen the Golden City. Tell me again how you travelled there.’
“Feeling pleased with his success, Salik began to embroider.
“‘From here I journeyed with great difficulties to Isfahan, and from there I joined a caravan through the Dasht-i Kavir. In Zanzibar I left the caravan and travelled with a friend to Samarkand, and what adventures we met with along the way I shall entertain you with at a later date. In Bokhara I met a wise man, who gave me advice and directed my footsteps through the mountains to the Golden City.’
“The Princess ordered her servants to throw Salik out into the street, and when her father came to ask after him, she chided him for not realizing that the young man was a rogue. ‘Do not be impatient, Father,’ she advised. ‘For this may take time.’ So the King ordered that the crier should walk the streets of the city every day, making the announcement that any man who had visited the City of Gold would marry the Princess.
“But as for Salik, he was in very low spirits. He was now in a much worse case than before, for not only had he lied and been found out, earning everyone’s contempt, but at his first sight of her he had fallen deeply in love with the Princess. And he had failed to win her.
“The young man wandered for some time, bewailing his fate and regretting the Princess. At last he decided that, as he could not live without her as his wife, he must do what was necessary to win her. He made up his mind to go through the world,
searching for the City of Gold until he found it, or died in the attempt.
“So Salik set out on his journey, and travelled until he reached the forest of Aghaz, which was home to wild animals and robbers, and which seemed to extend before the traveller, however fast he moved. Salik journeyed through the forest, and at length came to a tree under which a very ancient dervish was living. The hermit welcomed him and served him with food and drink, and asked where he was going. Salik told the dervish of his quest, but the dervish could not tell him anything of the City of Gold. He sent Salik to his older brother, who was also a hermit, in far distant mountains.
“But the sage of the mountain also had not heard of the Golden City. He in his turn advised Salik to travel to the seashore, and thence to a far distant island in the ocean, named Jariza. Jariza was ruled by a rich foreign king, Ashabi, who was known for his foreign travels, and who might know of the City of Gold.
“So Salik proceeded to the seashore, where he obtained passage to Jariza with a merchant ship. But when the ship had almost reached its destination, a black storm blew up, and the ship, lashed by winds and waves as high as mountains, broke up. Salik and the merchant were tossed into the sea, and Salik was immediately swallowed whole by a giant fish.
“Soon after, the fish was captured by fishermen, and because it was so big, they took it as a wonder to the King of their country. In the King’s presence the giant fish was cut open, and to everyone’s amazement, a handsome young man emerged.
“At the King’s enquiry, Salik introduced himself and explained his mission. ‘And now,’ he finished, ‘I am on my way to the court of King Ashabi of the island kingdom of Jariza, for he is a great traveller and seafarer, and he may know of the City of Gold.’
“The King laughed in amazement and said, ‘I am Ashabi, and this island is Jariza,’ and everyone was astonished at this outcome of the fishermen’s gift.
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