The Fierce and Tender Sheikh. Alexandra Sellers

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СКАЧАТЬ the profound darkness, his stomach aching with a hunger that was not for food. A light breeze was blowing from the mountains. The air was dry, with the desert dust and the astringent perfume of a plant whose name he didn’t know combining to create the familiar scent of desolation. Stars glittered in the black, new moon sky overhead, their alien configurations reminding him how far away from home he was. Along the distant highway now and then long fingers of light dragged a lone car through the darkness. The town lay fragmented on the distant horizon, a broken wineglass catching the starlight.

      Everything else was night. Behind him, the camp had a ghostly glow, throwing barbed wire shadows on the desert floor, but the rock where he sat hidden shrouded the thin figure.

      For the first time in a long time, Hani was thinking about the past. The stranger’s voice had stirred memories in him. Those strange memories he didn’t understand—of a handsome man, a smiling woman…other children. In those memories he had a different name.

      Your name is Hani. Forget that other name. You must forget.

      He had been obedient to the command. Mostly he had forgotten. In the dim and distant memory that was all that remained—or was it a dream?—life was a haze of gentle shade, cool fountains, and flowers.

      She had played in a beautiful courtyard by a reflecting pool, amid the luscious scent of roses carried from flower beds that surrounded it on all sides. In that pool the house was perfectly reflected, its beautiful fluted dome, its tiled pillars, the arched balconies. When the sun grew hot, there were fountains. Water droplets were carried on the breeze to fall against her face and hair.

      Now, in this water-starved world, he could still remember the feeling of delight.

      And then one day the fountain was silent. He remembered that, and her brother—was it her brother?—his face stretched and pale. There are only two of us now, he had said, holding her tight. I’ll look after you.

      Will we watch the fountains again? she had asked, and though her brother had not answered, she knew. They had stayed alone in the silent house, she didn’t know how long. One morning she had awakened to find herself in a strange place and her brother gone.

      You must be a boy now, they had told her. Your name is Hani. And when she protested that she already had a name, Forget your old name. That is all gone. Your brother is gone. We are your family now, we will look after you. See, here are your new brothers and sisters.

      And he had forgotten the name. He became Hani, a boy, without ever knowing why, and the old life faded. He had shared a bedroom with four others in a small, hot apartment that had no pool, no fountains, no rose beds. If he asked about such things, his stepmother first pretended not to hear, and then, if Hani persisted, grew angry.

      Who were the people he remembered? His heart said the tall man was his father, the smiling woman his mother, the other children his sisters and brothers, whose names he could, sometimes, almost remember.

      No. We are your family. Here are your sisters and brothers.

      Something about the stranger made him remember that life long since disappeared, that life that he had been forbidden to remember. The memory ached in him, as fresh as if the loss were the only one he had suffered, as if the dark years since had never blunted the edge of that grief with more and then more.

      The stranger’s voice had been like the voices he had heard long ago, like his father’s, summoning up another world.

      Don’t think about that, don’t say anything. You must forget….

      Was it a dream only? Had his childish, unhappy mind made it all up? And yet he remembered his father and mother smiling at him, remembered a cocoon of love.

      One day, when you are older, you must know the truth. But not now…

      And then it was too late. After the bomb, his stepmother had stared at Hani helplessly before she died, her eyes trying to convey the message that her torn, bleeding throat could not speak.

      Who were they, the people whose faces he remembered, the memory of whose love sometimes, in the bleakness of a loveless existence, had surged up from the depths of his heart to remind him of what was possible? Where was that home, that he could sometimes see so clearly in his mind’s eye, and why was it all suddenly so fresh before him now?

      In the nearest thing to a luxury hotel the town had, Sharif Azad al Dauleh stood on a darkened balcony, a phone to his ear, waiting to hear the Sultan’s voice. Although the desert air was cool, he was naked except for the towel around his hips. Above it the smoke-bronze skin, the long, straight back, the lean-muscled stomach, arms and chest gave him the look of a genie from a particularly beautiful lamp.

      “I offer you a mission,” the Sultan had said.

      The manservant had brought a tray of cool drinks as the Sultan bent over a document file and opened it. Tall glasses of juice had been poured out and set down, a dish of nuts arranged, invisible traces of nothing at all removed with the expert flick of a white cloth.

      On top of the thin sheaf of documents was the photograph of a young child, a girl. Ashraf slipped it off the pile and handed it to Sharif, then sat back, picked up his glass and drank.

      The Cup Companion examined the photograph. The child’s eyes gazed at him, trusting and happy, with the unmistakable, fine bone structure around the eyes that was the hallmark of the al Jawadi. Sharif knew that members of the royal family were still surfacing from every point on the globe, but this child he had never seen.

      “My cousin, Princess Shakira,” Sultan Ashraf had murmured.

      Sharif waited.

      “She is the daughter of my cousin Mahlouf. Uncle Safa’s son.”

      Sharif’s thick eyelashes flicked with surprise. Among the first of the royal family to be assassinated by Ghasib after the coup, it was Prince Safa whose death had prompted the old Sultan to command all his heirs to take assumed names and go into hiding. This was the first Sharif had heard that Prince Safa had left descendants, but anything was possible.

      “Safa had a child by his first wife—the singer Suhaila.”

      “I had no idea that Safa had been married to Bagestan’s Nightingale!”

      “Few did. It was an ill-fated, short-lived marriage, when he was very young. She left him while she was still pregnant. In later years, although a connection was kept up, the public was not aware that Prince Safa was Mahlouf’s father. But the files of Ghasib’s secret police prove that they knew. Mahlouf, with his wife and family, died in a traffic accident in the late eighties. We now learn that it was no accident.”

      A muscle tightened in Sharif’s jaw as he glanced at the document Ashraf handed him. By its markings, it had been culled from the files of the dictator’s secret police. Mechanically he noted the code name of the agent who had masterminded the assassination.

      “We have this man, Lord,” he said in grim satisfaction.

      “So I have been informed. But that isn’t the issue here. A child escaped. We had always believed that the whole family was killed in the accident. But these files suggest that we were wrong, and that Mahlouf’s youngest daughter, Shakira, was not in the car. The secret police got wind of this rumour, but apparently never managed to trace her.

      “We’ve now received independent confirmation of СКАЧАТЬ