The Fierce and Tender Sheikh

by Alexandra Sellers

  She could not have put this into words. But she could not resist it, either.

  Someone brushed by with a muttered complaint. They were causing a problem with traffic flow, standing here, and he took her arm and led her towards the entrance and the beautiful golden dome.

  He smiled, trying to disconnect her hostility.

  “Where did you get that costume?”

  She shrugged. “I traded for it with one of the boys here. How did you know I was here?”

  “Last Thursday I saw you by chance. Today I followed you from the palace. And yesterday. You are taking too much risk, Shakira, and it has to stop. If your own safety doesn’t warrant it, think of your family.”

  “Leave me alone! Mind your own business, Sharif! If I’m doing something wrong, I’ve got family to advise me!”

  He almost laughed. “You’ve just admitted that they don’t know what you’re doing. Shall I tell Ash about it, so he can advise you?”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “You can’t have it both ways!” he snapped, suddenly losing his grip. “You don’t want me giving you advice, but unless I tell someone, who else is there?”

  “I know what I’m doing! I don’t need advice.”

  “No, you don’t, and yes, you do.”

  She glared at him, torn between rage at being treated as if she had a secret vice, and embarrassment at having one.

  “Leave me alone, goat molester!” she cried in what he recognized as the camp patois, and he realized suddenly that she reverted to it whenever she felt cornered.

  “No, nor camels, either,” he said, his eyes glinting in a way that secretly made her flinch. All the more reason to stand up to the threat.

  “Who would ever guess you were so civilized?” she said rudely.

  “And to think I once thought you had a way with insult. Can’t you do better than that?”

  “With an interesting subject, I might!”

  He smiled a slow, dangerous smile, and Shakira tensed for action. “If you were really the boy you’re pretending to be, I would teach you something about the dangers of insulting those who are bigger than you are. Be careful—if you’re too good in your role I might forget.”

  She snorted. “Do you think I don’t know what it’s like to be kicked around by bullies? Go ahead and try, but I warn you, I haven’t forgotten everything I learned in the camps.”

  “You haven’t forgotten any of it, by what I see!” Sharif snapped, annoyed to find that he had lost his temper. “What are you doing here, you little fool? Yearning for the hell you couldn’t wait to leave? Wishing I had left you there?”

  It was just what her own guilt was constantly telling her, and to hear it from another—from Sharif Azad al Dauleh, of all people—was more than she could bear.

  “Maybe you should have!” she cried. “Maybe I’m not good enough! What am I? I’m nothing! I’m not worth bothering about! And who asked you? Not me!”

  Then, with a sudden sob, she was at the heart of the matter.

  “First they made me forget Shakira to become Hani, and now I have to forget Hani to become Shakira! Always I have to forget who I am! But I am a human being! I am everything that I am! My life and my history—I can’t pretend I have not been who I was! Who I still am!”

  He glanced around. Her raised voice was drawing the interested glances of two men struggling with a cart full of gold-embroidered velvet, and a woman who had stopped to ask them where their stall was.

  “I understand,” he said softly. “But sometimes things that are not pleasant must be said, and listened to. You are not in the camp now, isolated and alone. What you do has impact on more than yourself, Shakira, and there could—”

  “Leave me alone!” Shakira cried, and turned and fled back into the bazaar.

  As though the incident had been some kind of trigger, Shakira was suddenly Angry. With a capital A. Her anger bubbled up ten times a day, without warning, without reason, leaving her shaken and disturbed, and everyone else cowering. Any innocent comment might set it off. Any slightest suggestion seemed to be an attempt to curb her, to make her into someone she was not, to make her conform.

  She reacted accordingly. The anger tore through her like a whirlwind. She couldn’t control her rages any more than she could have told the storm to still.

  Sometimes, when she was in a rage, she blamed Sharif for all this. It was because he had tried to make her deny Hani, as she had once been forced to deny Shakira. He had followed her, threatened her. He had put her in the wrong for being herself, just the way her stepmother had. He thought because he had rescued her that he owned her. He thought he could tell her what to do.

  And it didn’t help that she now couldn’t seem to escape his presence. Given the size of the ancient palace, it was nothing short of miraculous the way she kept running into Sharif. He was just around the corner when she turned it, or just down the corridor when she entered it, or crossing the courtyard as she looked down. It was as if fate itself was determined that they should meet.

  He was never afraid of her rages. Whether she was raging at someone else, or at him, he simply looked at her, so that she suddenly became aware of what she was doing. Sometimes it enraged her even further. Sometimes she was abashed.

  “I told you to stop following me around!” she cried, finding him in the courtyard when she came down one morning.

  Sharif frowned. “Princess, even members of the royal family—your cousin might say especially members of the royal family—have a duty to speak to other people with respect.”

  “I call it a lack of respect for you to follow me. So if you didn’t, you wouldn’t get treated with a lack of respect!”

  He stood looking at her with that grave expression, and her anger damped a little, and she was ashamed. He was a Cup Companion, a noble man on his own merits, and he had found her and saved her from a life of torment.

  Then she recovered. “It makes me angry when every time I look up, you’re there.”

  “But then, everything makes you angry at the moment, doesn’t it, Princess?”

  She wished she could jump on him, and bite and punch him, the way she had the guards at the camp when they harassed her. She gazed at him, confused, bewildered, in turmoil.

  “Princess, you are still going to the bazaar as Hani,” he said.

  She put up a shoulder. “So what if I am?”

  “Your cousin has enemies, Shakira. Be careful that you do not offer them ammunition. Is that how you wish to repay his kindness and care?”

  Eleven

  Something that became a handy focus for her rage was the question of the Gulf Islands. Farida was still living in the palace, and growing more unhappy with every passing week. There was no news of her husband.

  But though the Princess raged and stormed, there was going to be no quick solution. It was a complex problem, as she found out when an exasperated Sultan thrust a thick dossier at her.

  “Read that, Cousin,” he ordered. “And then, and only then, will I listen to further argument on the subject!”

  Shakira already knew much of what she read at first. About a decade before, Ghasib had leased an island to a company called Mystery Resorts, who subsequently built an expensive hotel—the Gulf Eden Resort—on it. This had been a successful venture, so successful that the company had wanted to expand to the other islands in the chain, planning to offer exclusive isolated holidays on the beautiful islands.

  For that, they needed the islands empty. And two years ago, Ghasib had leased all the other islands in the chain to the company, with the contractual right to evacuate the inhabitants. His government had even helped in the evacuation—as Shakira already knew. Farida had told her there were Bagestani soldiers with the Mystery security men when Solomon’s Foot had been ruthlessly evacuated.

  All the homes had been destroyed.

  That had been about eighteen months ago, the time when Farida had come to the camp where she and Hani met. Later they had been moved to Bu
rry Hill together.

  So much she knew. The dossier went further. When the Sultan was restored to the throne, Shakira now learned, he immediately revoked the lease which Ghasib had granted for the islands, except for the land that housed the original Gulf Eden Resort. He had announced that the islanders would be brought home, and promised them help rebuilding their homes.

  But as the first few families had returned, Mystery Resorts had challenged Ash’s revocation of their lease. They argued that the contract had been signed by Ghasib effectively on behalf of the Bagestan nation, and the nation was required to fulfill it. The company had already applied for an injunction to prevent any resettlement by the islanders, and was now threatening the Sultan with a lawsuit.

  “Though it’s been carefully kept from public knowledge, Mystery Resorts is owned by the powerful multinational which also owns, among many others, the pharmaceutical giant Webson Attary,” she read in one briefing. “They may attempt to influence the decision of some of Bagestan’s trading partners in the coming trade negotiations. This could have serious implications for the economy.”

  On another front, the bid to convince the tribal council of mountain and desert tribes to allow the islanders to resettle on the mainland, temporarily or permanently, was running into fierce opposition.

  And a new player had entered the game. A conservation group was now declaring that the habitat of the Aswad turtle, a turtle unique to the Gulf Islands and on the endangered species list, was under serious threat. A research paper had criticized the islanders for their trade in turtle shells and other products and warned that the turtle was heading for extinction if the islanders were allowed to return. This group was agitating loudly in the Western media.

  “If you have a solution, Shakira, I’ll be glad to hear it,” the Sultan said, not unkindly, when she put the dossier back on his desk.

  “I don’t think you have anything to worry about. It’s a good sign, isn’t it? It’s healthy,” Dana said.

  Shakira stared. “Why do you say that? A good sign?”

  “It means you’re starting to feel more secure with us. Up till now you haven’t felt able to express your feelings about what happened to you, and you must have an awful lot stored up inside. You could hardly go through what you’ve gone through without feeling pretty furious at the world. And I think it has to come out. Now that you feel safer, you can let it out.”

  “I don’t see that!” Shakira cried, annoyed by this assessment.

  “And the more you trust us, the more it will feel safe to let it out.” Dana smiled. “You spent years of your childhood in mostly inhuman conditions, Shakira, at a time when other children were being loved and cherished. Of course you were angry at being treated like that. You’re human, you had a right to be treated with respect and dignity, and something in you knew it. And now you are telling the world about it.”

  “I did express it then!” Shakira cried, as if she had been accused of cowardice. “I was angry lots of times! People were afraid of me, you know!” She sounded as if it were something to be proud of, and in the camps it had been.

  “I can see why,” the Sultana admitted. “You’re pretty fierce when you’re fierce. Well, then, perhaps it needs to be expressed again. You’re also used to defending yourself against all comers. You were alone and defenceless and if you hadn’t learned that behaviour you wouldn’t have survived. It’s very stressful trying to learn new patterns of behaviour, I’m sure of that. And you won’t do that overnight.”

  “And I was not defenceless! I could look after myself very well.”

  Dana just kept smiling, with that warm approving glow in her dark eyes that Shakira found totally unnerving when she was in this mood.

  “Go easy on yourself, Shakira. You can’t change completely overnight, you know. Inside—” she reached over and put a finger against the princess’s heart “—inside there’s still a lot of Hani, you know. You can’t just toss him away. He needs to feel loved, too.”

  Shakira snorted. “Nobody loves Hani.”

  Dana laughed outright, but it was a gentle laugh. “Oh, yes. We all love Hani. We see him quite a lot, you know. Maybe more than you think. Ask anyone.”

  “Love him?” she whispered.

  “Everybody loves him. He’s funny, and sharp, and he doesn’t take anything from anybody. And he’s good—painfully good—at pointing it out when the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.”

  Shakira looked around, as if to make sure she was still in the same room. She swallowed, then straightened her shoulders. “Sharif doesn’t love Hani!” she burst out.

  “Oh, I think he does. In fact, just the other day he said—”

  “What? What did he say?”

  “Now, what was it—you were asking Bari and Noor about Solomon’s Foot, weren’t you? Farida’s island, where they were castaway. And he said, ‘When she learns to harness all that energy she’ll be formidable.’ And he was smiling as if you’d been worth every second of the trouble he took to find you.”

  Shakira was shaking, her anger lost in confusion. “I don’t understand,” she whispered.

  Dana looked into her eyes. “Shakira, Hani is the person who kept you alive all those years, till we found you. Of course we love him—and whatever he had to do and be to fight the good fight, we respect that. And thank him. And if he wants to rage around and tell the world what he thinks of the way you were treated all those years—well, he’s got that right, don’t you think?”

  Was it as simple as that? Shakira wondered later, walking in the beautiful courtyard where her soul, however disturbed, always found some peace. After two weeks of storms, the anger died. The day after her conversation with the Sultana, she woke up knowing it had passed.

  She still had a temper, of course, she was still her volatile self, but the overwhelming rages were gone, as suddenly as they had come.

  Shakira stood on her balcony watching the dawn. It was a beautiful time for the garden, when the pool was completely smooth and still, perfectly reflecting the cascading squinches of the dome.

  Across the garden, Sharif’s light told her that he was awake. Just like those first days after her arrival at the palace, when she had stood here waiting for him to appear.

  As she watched, the sun climbed up behind the dome to kiss the treetops with gold. The bulbul sang to the still-unawakened rose, and suddenly her own heart clenched with yearning—but for what she hardly knew.

  As if in answer to her question, Sharif appeared on his balcony, lighting a thin black cigar. He stood for a moment gazing across at her and, in the moment before he lifted his hand in greeting, some knowledge trembled on the border of consciousness—a terrible knowledge it must have been, for her heart was suddenly beating hard.

  Feeling surged up in her, and she knew suddenly that Sharif could explain the confusion she felt when she thought of him. If she was ever brave enough to ask.

  There was something else she could ask him, though, and her questions were long overdue.

  “What is it you want to know?” Sharif asked.

  “You said—you said, ‘Your cousin has enemies. Be careful you don’t offer them ammunition.’”

  He blew a cloud of smoke and looked down at her.

  “Tell me,” Shakira said urgently.

  The sun gleamed from her dark, thick lashes, and worry shaded her eyes, and he realized suddenly that there was nothing she could ask that he would not give her. And that he should have known it long ago.

  But that was not the question she had asked.

  “How much do you know about the Gulf Islands, Princess?” he began softly.

  She stared. “The Gulf Islands! What have the…” She took a deep breath and calmed down. “I read a dossier Ash gave me.”

  He nodded. “Then I suppose you got most of it. Did you learn about the environmental group?”

  She snorted, because it was scarcely believable. “Turtles! It’s ridiculous that people should be made homeless because of that, isn�
�t it?” she cried. “What do they know about being driven from your home in the middle of the night and then not being allowed to go back?”

  He was silent, and she looked up to find him gazing down at her, with a smile lurking behind his eyes.

  “Nothing,” he said softly.

  Her heart kicked a little, and she looked away to where the sunrise was turning the sky pink behind the shadowed dome.

  “The campaign is nevertheless serving to whip up a certain amount of world opinion against the resettlement of the island tribes,” Sharif went on, calmly. “And world opinion is something we can’t afford to lose on this issue. Especially now.”

  She was quick to pick up on his tone.

  “What’s happened?”

  “We have inside information that Mystery Resorts is about to launch their lawsuit. They intend to sue the Sultan and people of Bagestan for twenty-five billion dollars.”

  “Camel stuffers!” she cried, outraged, and then, incredulously, “Twenty-five billion?”

  He ground out his cigar in the earth under a potted plant. “That’s bigger than the entire gross national product of Bagestan.”

  “But I don’t understand it—they can’t build the resort now, can they? That would damage the ecosystem as much as…it doesn’t make sense!”

  Approval of her quickness glinted in the Cup Companion’s eyes.

  “You would think so. But it may be that they feel they can buy off the environmentalists by promising habitat protection for the turtles, or by big funding for some environmental issue elsewhere. So we imagine. Or it’s possible the group was deliberately funded to mount the turtle campaign by the company itself, in order to bring more pressure to bear on Ash.”