City of Jasmine

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

I shook my head as if to clear it. “I’m afraid the desert air seems to have damaged my hearing. I thought I heard you suggest going back to Daoud.”

  He sighed, and for the first time in our little adventure, he looked defeated. The posing and posturing was gone, and the expression in his eyes was solemn. “Evie, we’re a good forty miles from Palmyra and we’ve no water. We’re in a part of the desert I’m not particularly familiar with. We’ve got Countess Thurzó running off with the Cross, we’ve got Herr Doktor skulking around for God only knows what reason, we’ve got Daoud, who will, I hope you realise, be after our heads once he finds us missing.”

  “All the more reason to move quickly,” I said.

  He opened his mouth then snapped it shut again. He lowered his head a moment, and when he lifted it, his mask of insouciance was firmly back in place. He drew himself up as if steeling himself for an ordeal.

  “Come on, then,” he said briskly. “First one to water gets the cleanest drink.”

  As we walked, we speculated on the whereabouts of Countess Thurzó and the Cross. “She ought to be in Damascus by now enjoying a hot bath and a nice meal,” I said, feeling my stomach rumble at the thought of a nice savoury steak.

  “Perhaps,” he said, drawing out the word slowly.

  I stared at him. “What are you thinking? Why on earth would she hang around the desert when she has the Cross?”

  He shrugged, his expression evasive. “I don’t know. She could have a buyer here in the Badiyat ash-Sham.”

  I considered this. It was vaguely possible, I supposed. There was money in some of the desert tribes. Some of them, like Daoud’s people, were poor as church mice. Others were rumoured to be quite prosperous—usually through charging enormous fees to safely escort trading caravans and travellers through the desert.

  “But who?” I asked.

  He stroked his thick grimy beard. “I can think of a few Bedouin who would be absolutely delighted to hang one of Saladin’s trophies on the walls of a city house and who have the funds to pay through the nose for it.”

  “City house?”

  “The richest Bedu have houses in Damascus. Some of them split their time between the city and the desert. Best of both worlds, really.”

  “Like Jane Digby,” I mused. The lady’s romantic amours had scandalised Europe for the better part of the nineteenth century. A daughter of one of England’s oldest families, she had taken to the Continent when she fell pregnant with her lover’s child, and a series of mésalliances had followed. She’d had a string of noteworthy lovers, from rebel lords to crowned heads, but the most notorious had been her Bedouin prince, her last husband and by all accounts the love of her life. She’d happily spent almost thirty years dividing her time between their Damascene mansion and his desert tribe. In the city life was not terribly dissimilar to the one she’d known back in England with social calls and entertaining and shopping taking up much of her time, but the rest was wild desert raids and modest warfare, where she was often to be found riding her Arabian mount and handling a rifle as competently as any man. I was just imagining myself astride a horse, leading a charge with rifle blazing, when Gabriel’s voice cut into my reverie.

  “You’d hate it.”

  “I beg your pardon?” I blinked rapidly. “Hate what?”

  “Life as a Bedouin woman. Even if you did marry a prince. You’re far too uppity to take to life under a veil.”

  “How on earth—” I bit off the question. “I was thinking no such thing.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, don’t lie. I can read you as clearly as the morning newspaper. You were thinking how dashing it would be to live that life, swanning about Damascus half the time and leading desert raids the rest.”

  “It does sound tempting,” I admitted.

  “And you would hate it,” he repeated. “It seems like adventure but it’s an endless cycle of sun and barren land and camels—as repetitive as life in an English village if you think about it. Only rather more tribal skirmishes and fewer village fêtes. Now, if you’re quite through wool-gathering, we were in the middle of a discussion. I’d very much like some food and water, and you look so exhausted, I’m beginning to wonder if it mightn’t be a very great kindness just to shoot you here.” I stared at him, aghast, and instantly his expression softened. “Never mind. It’s all right, Evie. We’ll manage.”

  “Not if you keep underestimating me, you great ass,” I said, giving him a hard shove. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the packets of bread and dates I had managed to secure. From inside my shirt I took the small goatskin full of water and waved it at him. “Now, we have food. We have water. And we have a plan—we are moving on towards Palmyra. There are people there and at least a dozen oases between here and there. If we’re lucky we’ll stumble on one. If not, the desert is crawling with Bedouin and some of them are bound to be friendlier than Daoud, particularly if we offer to pay them. When we get to Palmyra, we’re going to eat until we can’t hold another bite and we’re going to drink our own body weight in water. Then we’re going to bathe because, my God, you smell like something three days past death, and then we are going to organise an expedition to get that Cross back. What we are not going to do is go back, not for one single minute.”

  His jaw went slack and he opened his mouth to speak, but I stepped forward, poking him hard in the chest. “I mean it, Gabriel. I spent the whole of our blessedly short marriage doing what you wanted. I said ‘Yes, Gabriel’ and ‘No, Gabriel’ and you despised me for it, and well you should have. I wasn’t myself with you. I was so desperately afraid of losing you that I acted like some sort of jellyfish. Do you know what sort of wife I was, Gabriel? I was invertebrate. I had no backbone with you. And you needed my backbone and so did I. You needed someone to bring you down to earth and make you act like a responsible grown-up for once. It was the worst mistake I ever made, rolling over and letting you walk all over me with your great filthy boots. I let you have your way about everything and where did it get me? Standing on the deck of a steamer in Shanghai watching you walk away without a care in the world while I broke my heart over you. Well, I’m not that girl. I never was, I was just too in love with you and too frightened of losing you to show you who I really was. Here I am, Gabriel—the girl you should have married but didn’t. I smoke cigars and I barnstorm and I wear red lipstick and I do as I damned well please. And when this is all over and I have that Cross, I am going to divorce you and we won’t ever have to see each other again. But at least you’ll know what you were missing. Now, point me in the direction of Palmyra because that is where we’re going.”

  Without a word, he reached out and pulled me into his arms, and before I could take a breath his mouth was on mine. It wasn’t gentle and it wasn’t sweet, and if he’d ever kissed me like that before, just once, we wouldn’t have been headed for divorce court. When he set me on my feet again I pulled back my arm and slapped him for the third time in a week.

  He rubbed his hairy chin. “We really must give some thought to breaking you of the habit of physical violence.”

  “Why on earth did you do that?” I demanded.

  His expression was dazed, but not from the slap. He shook his head slowly. “The same reason you slapped me. I simply didn’t have a choice. Palmyra, you said? This way.”

  He turned and began to walk. And somehow, for all my fine speech and taking the bull by the horns, I had an unwelcome suspicion that Gabriel had somehow found the upper hand again.

  Eleven

  We had only walked an hour or so before the sun began to rise, and for a moment, as that long yellow light gilded the entire world, it felt like a promise that everything was going to be all right. I lifted my wind-roughened face to the golden warmth. Soon it would be hot, searing everything below including us, but for the moment, I could worship it. I closed my eyes and sniffed deeply, smelling the few
scrubby plants that managed to survive. There was something that smelled like sage, and for a moment, I thought of all my favourite dishes—crisp potatoes and new bread and roast goose with sage stuffing.

  “Good God, if your stomach roars any louder they’ll be able to track us by the sound of it,” Gabriel said irritably.

  I stuffed a date into my mouth and didn’t answer. It was just like him to ruin a perfectly lovely moment.

  I ate another date and sulked while Gabriel drank and rested. He looked awful—pale under the ruddy sunburn he had acquired and his cheeks were so obscured by overgrown beard even a pirate crew would have thought him disreputable.

  He opened one eye and looked at me quizzically. “Admiring the view?”

  “Actually I was thinking how frightful you look.”

  “Clearly you haven’t got a mirror.”

  I opened my mouth to let him have it, but nothing came out. He cocked his head. “No response to that? Come on, Evie. I miss scrapping with you.”

  I didn’t bother to answer. I merely sat, my eyes fixed upon the horizon. Gabriel noticed the direction of my gaze and swiveled his head. In the distance, a cloud of dust and sand was coming and just before the cloud was a party of darkly robed horsemen brandishing rifles. Bedouin.

  “Not again,” he muttered.

  I sighed and stood, brushing off my hands. Gabriel stood at my side and together we waited. There was no point in running simply because there was nowhere to run to in that vast nothingness.

  “I’m really beginning to despise this desert,” I told him.

  He didn’t respond. Instead, he narrowed his eyes at our approaching company and then turned to me with an equally casual tone. “There’s a good chance this isn’t going to end well, my dear. If it doesn’t, don’t bother burying me. Just take the tin box out of my pocket and send a postcard to my mother, will you?”

  “Your mother already thinks you’re dead,” I reminded him.

  “Yes, well I never liked her much. Maybe this shock will kill her.”

  “Gabriel Wilberforce Starke,” I began, but there was no time for more. The horsemen were upon us, and I stared openmouthed at the first of them to reach us.

  “Good day, Frau Starke! Herr Rowan,” cried Herr Doktor Schickfuss. “How pleased I am to have found you.”

  He was followed by Daoud and his compatriots and I rolled my eyes at the sight of them. “Honestly. Over 200,000 square miles of desert and it’s him again,” I muttered to Gabriel.

  Daoud was smiling broadly, as was Herr Doktor, and it seemed silly to make a fuss just because we’d been caught a second time. I moved forward with a sigh and put up my wrists to be tied.

  Gabriel had other plans. Or perhaps his reluctance was just an excuse. He lashed out with his fists and two of Daoud’s men were prone on the desert floor before they knew what happened. It occurred to me once again that Gabriel might not be terribly skilled as a criminal genius. He entirely missed Daoud leading his horse around behind and turned a fraction of a second too late. One swift kick to the jaw from Daoud’s boot and a second to his cheekbone and Gabriel went down, his eyes rolling back in his head as he hit the ground hard enough to shake it. Herr Doktor’s eyes rounded and he made some guttural exclamation as he smiled. He seemed to be enjoying himself thoroughly.

  “It is like the earthquake when he falls! Boom!” he said with a nod towards Gabriel’s prostrate form.

  I shrugged and held up my wrists as Daoud bound them, a little less gently than the time before, and hauled me up onto his horse behind him. Gabriel was trussed like a Christmas goose and draped over the back of another horse, his head lolling as we moved out.

  Daoud turned his head and flicked Gabriel a malicious glance. “I like him better that way.”

  “So do I,” I replied. “But you’re wasting your time. We already told you we don’t have the Cross. Countess Thurzó does and she’s well gone, probably already in Damascus by now.” Of course, she could be absolutely anywhere in Syria at that point, but short of torture, I wasn’t going to give Daoud a single piece of helpful information.

  Daoud shrugged. “I know precisely where to find the countess—and the Cross, when I want them. Unfortunately, the Cross, as you must know, is incomplete, and I believe you know the whereabouts of the heart of the relic.”

  “But I don’t!” I told him. “I promise. I’ll swear on anything you like.”

  He merely smiled. “Come. We have much to talk of, Madame Starke.” But apparently not just yet. He touched his horse’s flanks and we were off again, racing across the desert and into the lowering curtain of purple twilight.

  * * *

  Gabriel bounced around like a sack of turnips, but the journey didn’t seem to do him much harm. He came to when they cut him off his horse and he rubbed his jaw, cursing at Daoud and giving me hateful looks into the bargain.

  “That bruise is turning a spectacular shade of violet.” I nodded towards his cheekbone. “I have a dancing frock just that colour.”

  He said something obscene that I didn’t quite catch but went peacefully enough as they herded us into the same low black goat’s-hair tent we’d escaped from two hours before. “Home sweet home,” I murmured.

  “I swear to God, Evie, one more word, and I will tell Daoud to use your bones for a toothpick,” Gabriel vowed.

  I would have responded, but Daoud turned to us after giving instructions. “We will rest here today,” he said with a courteous little bow. “First, we will eat together, for the custom of desert hospitality must not be forgotten.”

  Within moments we were seated on the same cheap Turkish rug, eating precisely the same food as the previous meal. In fact, I suspected it was exactly the same dinner, warmed over and served again.

  I scooped up a greasy handful of vegetable stew with a bit of flatbread and crammed it into my mouth like a farmhand. It wasn’t very good, but it was hot and filling and I was making up for lost time.

  While I ate, I took stock of the gentlemen. Gabriel, with his unkempt hair and assortment of bruises, looked a mess, but Daoud had a sort of careless elegance in his robes, and the little German was almost as tidy as a Thurzó. His complexion had pinked up under the desert sun and wind, but his eyes were bright and his white beard was neatly clipped with a tremendous pair of moustaches waxed to little curls at the end.

  “I admire your moustaches, Doktor,” I told him.

  Gabriel made a faint gagging noise, but Herr Doktor smiled and simpered. “You should have seen them before the war,” he told me. “Nine inches on either side!”

  “Well, they’re much nicer than the kaiser’s,” I told him. He bowed at me, and I decided it was time to take the bull by the horns. “So what’s your interest in all this, Doktor?”

  His great white bushy brows rose. “My interest? The Cross, of course! Since the greatest of Holy Roman Emperors, Frederick Barbarossa, led the Third Crusade, it has been the holy quest of the Teuton to protect the most precious relics of Christendom.”

  “Didn’t he die in a Turkish river?” Gabriel asked pleasantly. “Drowned in his own armour, if I recall. He never even made it to the Holy Land, much less led the Third Crusade.”

  The old gentleman flushed a dark red and lifted his finger to wag it at Gabriel. Before he could get going, I poured a little oil on the troubled waters.

  “But the Third Crusade would never have happened if the great Barbarossa hadn’t pushed Richard the Lionheart to go,” I said quickly. “Everyone knows that.”

  Gabriel snorted but said nothing more. His jaw must have been screaming in order for him to give up so easily, but the little German settled back, mollified.

  “Excellent,” I murmured. “No point in fighting the Third Crusade all over again.”

  “Particularly as we all know Salah al-Dln won,” Daoud added s
moothly.

  Herr Doktor threw him a pained look, but Daoud went on munching contently. “Tell me, Daoud,” I said, keeping my voice pleasant, “how did you and Herr Doktor come to work together?”

  Daoud shrugged. “There are two groups of people who seek treasure, madame—brigands and archaeologists, and both will pay dearly for what they want. When the Thurzós moved so quickly to accept my proposal, naturally I wondered which other archaeologists might be willing to do the same, and for an even greater sum of money.”

  “That’s rather brilliant,” I told him in perfect honesty.

  He quirked a smile at me. “As I said, a Cartesian brain.”

  “And you, Herr Doktor,” I said, turning to his partner. “You have the funds to secure such a find?”

  “I will.” He and Daoud exchanged the complacent glances of a pair of intriguers who both think they’ve gotten the better of a bargain.

  Suddenly, I was struck with an idea. “Daoud, did you approach any of the other archaeologists first?”

  He shrugged. “Only Miss Green, but she does not have money.”

  Gabriel growled. “Gethsemane knows, then?”

  “Not what the relic is,” Daoud corrected. “Only that I have the means of acquiring something very special and very expensive. But she does not have the money, so I do not talk to her. I turn instead to Herr Doktor.”

  Schickfuss was beaming happily, his cheeks glistening with grease. “My museum will pay much for this. It will go far towards improving the spirits of my saddened homeland,” he said, a faint shadow in his eyes.

  “Your homeland bloody well can’t afford it,” Gabriel said with a merry laugh. “How do you intend to pay Daoud? With cobblestones pried up from the Unter den Linden?”

  Daoud looked at Schickfuss curiously, but the little German was staring at Gabriel, his eyes popping. “How dare you speak so slightingly of my homeland?” He rose, clapping his hand to his belt, where I noticed for the first time a small knife marked with the Teutonic cross of the old empire. He ranted on, but Gabriel merely chewed his food, and I hurried to settle the old fellow.