City of Jasmine

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  Sheikh Hamid was just outside the tent, chatting with Rashid. He dismissed him as I emerged, and the boy trotted off, smiling at me over his shoulder.

  “He likes you,” Hamid told me with a grin. “But you must believe he would never bring dishonour to the wife of Djibril. He knows better.”

  “And I know better than to bat my lashes at a fifteen-year-old boy,” I retorted.

  Hamid laughed. “He is twenty, little sister.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “And he has two wives already. And three children with another on the way.”

  I shook my head to clear it. “It all seems so different out here,” I murmured.

  I don’t know if he caught the words or the wistful tone, but his eyes were warm with sympathy.

  “I understand, little sister. I felt the same when I went to England. All of it seemed impossible to me, so many people in so small a space! How does a man breathe?” he asked, not expecting an answer. “But it is good enough for Englishmen, I suppose.”

  I faced him, careful not to touch him. “I wanted to thank you for your hospitality, Hamid. You and your family have been very kind to take us in.”

  The smile deepened. “This is the Bedouin way, to care for the traveller. But even if it were not, what else could I do for my brother Djibril and his honoured wife?”

  I tipped my head. “I’m curious, Sheikh, why do you call him your brother?”

  “He is my milk brother. My mother nursed him when he was born in Damascus. We are connected, as truly as if our blood were linked.”

  I was still standing openmouthed when he walked away.

  The sun was just setting when I went to the little tent where they had put Herr Doktor. Outside, Gabriel was dumping the load of bloody bandages into the fire. His hair was tumbled and his jaw was darkened by the shadow of his beard, but his eyes were brilliant and he was whistling a bit of Palestrina. He was happy, I realised with a start, and this handsome, enigmatic man, cool in a crisis and in command of any situation, this was the man I had married. I wondered if perhaps, even for a moment, I could break through the wall he had put up against me.

  He looked up from the fire. “Doesn’t do to leave bloody things lying around,” he told me. “Attracts jackals.”

  I moved to stand next to him, but he edged away, sitting with his robes folded carefully beneath him. “Why wouldn’t Faiz help him?”

  Gabriel seemed to choose his words carefully. “The war has been finished less than a year, Evie. And Faiz and Schickfuss were on different sides. If Faiz had tended him and Herr Doktor died, there would have been repercussions, grim ones. Europeans in these lands love nothing better than having a good excuse to ride roughshod over the natives and the French are itching for any justification to take over.”

  “He helped you,” I pointed out.

  “Not the same thing at all. England was allied to these men in the war.”

  “And you’re a friend to them still. Hamid told me the story of how he came to call you ‘brother.’ You’ve been keeping a few secrets,” I told him. “You made fun of me, but it is like something out of Arabian Nights, the pale, starving baby suckled by the desert princess.”

  He rolled his eyes. “For your information, I was fat as a tick. My mother simply wanted a wet nurse because she was too vain to spoil her figure with nursing. I warned you about fairy tales,” he said, frowning. “Leave it alone, Evie. You won’t find what you’re looking for so just stop searching.”

  I went to sit next to him, careful to keep a little distance. “What are you really doing out here, Gabriel?”

  He shrugged and said nothing, stirring the burning rags into the fire with the toe of his boot.

  “I don’t know why you won’t tell me, but I think you’re here for a purpose—something more than just petty crime. Won’t you tell me what it is?”

  He turned, his eyes bright in the firelight. “Don’t you ever get tired of asking questions?”

  “No, I am tired of not getting answers.”

  “Perhaps your questions just aren’t very interesting,” he said in the same blandly bored tone I had come to hate.

  “Then I’ll try a different tack. Did you send Rashid to Damascus to look after me?” I held my breath, wondering for an impossible moment if he might have given way to some softer emotion where I was concerned.

  He leaned close, his eyes wide, his lips slightly parted. His voice was a soft, deliberate caress.

  “Actually, I sent him to spy on you. I followed you a few times myself, but I couldn’t always be there. Rashid was my eyes and ears.”

  He sat back with a malicious smile.

  “And just when I was beginning to think you might not be a complete bastard,” I said sweetly.

  He laughed, a genuine laugh this time, and something in him uncoiled. He eased back and I edged closer to him, watching the flames for a long time. It was peaceful, companionable even.

  “Unnerving, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “How easy it is. Like the old days.”

  “It’s nothing like the old days. To begin with, back then I didn’t know how to fly a plane and you weren’t dead.”

  He laughed again, but the joke was on me. It was like the old days, much more than I liked to remember. There had only been a handful of weeks before he had changed and the beautiful idyll was over, but every night before that had ended just like this—with the pair of us staring into a fire, dreaming.

  “I’ve almost got the knack of it now,” I said finally. “I can almost remember you without hating myself for being such a fool.”

  He shook his head. “You were never that, Evie. You were young and in love and that’s a recipe for blindness. You saw what you wanted to.”

  “I saw a man who had so much potential, so much strength. All you needed was a little polishing to be really great.”

  His lips curved in a mocking smile. “And look at me now.”

  “Yes, not so much polished as ground down to nothing. You should have had a hero’s death and lived on as nothing but a sweet memory instead of this,” I said, flicking a glance from his tousled hair to his scuffed boots. “I suppose when I go back to Damascus I’ll have a good wet weep over you.”

  “Don’t bother,” he said, his tone amused. “I assure you I’m not worth it.”

  “Oh, now you’re being flip again, but I mean it. It’s absolutely heart-wrenching to think of you like this, probably broke and rotting away out here. I’m beginning to think it’s only the grossest sort of fluke you even found that Cross,” I said, warming to my theme. “You won’t have a legacy at all, Gabriel, except as a footnote, an explorer who died before he did anything of real note.”

  “What a lovely picture you paint,” he said sounding marginally less amused.

  “Well, it’s true. You didn’t summit Masherbrum, after all. You almost did. You didn’t find the source of the Nile. You almost did. You didn’t find Machu Picchu. You almost did. It’s the story of your life, and no one ever remembers the folks who almost did things.”

  “Not true,” he returned brightly. “Plenty of folks remember Napoleon. He almost won Waterloo.”

  “That isn’t the same and you know it. He conquered Europe first. You never conquered anything.”

  “Not even you,” he said, his gaze fixed on the fire. “I have a fine catalogue of failures, my dear, and you have kept perfect account of them. But the greatest failure of my life is you.”

  He levered himself up off the ground and walked quietly away. I wrapped my arms around my knees and stared into the fire until my heart stopped jumping. He had always had that effect on me. My pulse always raced when he was near. It was more than a little unsettling that after five years apart, he could still do it with a flick of his eye.<
br />
  Fourteen

  I went later to look in on Herr Doktor and found him awake, his eyes dreamily unfocused, but his faculties sharp.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I have been better,” he said with a small smile. “There were wars, you know. Many of them, and I was a good Uhlan.”

  “Uhlans? Those are Prussian cavalry fellows, aren’t they?”

  “Were.” The word was simple but carried all the weight of the world with it.

  I settled myself next to him and poured out a tin cup of water. I held his head and he took a few sips. “I am sorry,” I told him.

  “For what? That the water tastes of camel? Pah. It is what happens in the desert, child.”

  “No. For the war. I mean, you started it, of course. One doesn’t like to be indelicate, but it was down to Germany getting all ruffled up. But I am sorry it happened. So many lives lost and for what? Germany’s crushed now, monarchies toppled like toy bricks, entire cities destroyed and millions of men who either never came home or will never be the same. It’s something we all ought to be sorry for, don’t you think?”

  His eyes were shrewd. “You are a rare woman, Frau Starke. Few victors ever think of how the weight of their victory burdens the conquered.”

  “It’s always been that way, hasn’t it? Here we are in the middle of a desert war in the same desert people have been fighting over for thousands of years. It’s madness.”

  “Then why do you not go home?” he asked simply.

  I started to answer, but he shook his head. “No, gnädige Frau. Do not give me the easy answer. Give me the real one.”

  I sighed. “I don’t know. Well, I do know, but I wish I didn’t. The truth is, I feel quite sorry for Gabriel.”

  His silvery white brows rose in little tufts. “A man seldom welcomes pity from the woman he loves.”

  “Loved,” I corrected. “It’s terribly complicated, but the short version is that I blame myself. Make no mistake,” I warned, “I blame Gabriel plenty, too, but I have to take at least half the responsibility for the way he’s turned out.”

  “And why is this?”

  “Because I let him leave me when I ought to have fought for him. I think it may have been his one chance at real happiness and I took it from him. He turned to a...well, let’s just say a life of bad choices, I suspect.”

  “How could you have anticipated such a thing?” he asked gently.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I was a child myself, really. But Gabriel was always so full of energy, so much larger than life. He seemed driven at times to do the things that were most impossible.” I shook myself briskly. “Now, why don’t you tell me exactly how much Miss Green is paying you to retrieve the Cross from us.”

  The smile faltered and in its place a sheepish flush brightened his cheeks. He spluttered and fumed a few minutes until I held up a hand. “That’s quite enough. You’re going to tug those stitches out if you aren’t very careful. You might as well tell me, you know. I’ve already figured it out, anyway.”

  “You have not,” he said, his jaw set mulishly. “This is a trick on an old man to make him tell things he ought not to—things you do not know.”

  “Feathers. I think Miss Green knows exactly what the treasure is, and I think she sent you to get it. I’ve had time to think out here, and I don’t believe she is concerned for Gabriel at all. I think she wants the Cross. She’s desperate for a great find, the sort that will establish her reputation once and for all.” His expression was stubborn, but I went on, supplying the broad strokes. “I think Daoud told her about the Cross, but she wasn’t able to offer him as much money as the Hungarians, and since Daoud is a mercenary soul, he chose to throw in his lot with them. Realising she’d been betrayed, Miss Green turned to her old flame to do the dirty work for her and sent you out after the Cross. Which,” I finished, “isn’t very nice at all. She’s rather more spry than you are. She ought to have come after the Cross herself like any modern and independent woman would. Her thinking is painfully Victorian.”

  Herr Doktor didn’t just splutter then. He positively howled his outrage. He was fussing at me in German so I understood about one word in fifty, but when he trotted out the word blamage, I held up my hand again.

  “That’s quite enough. Really, you will burst those stitches and I don’t know that I would trust Gabriel’s hands to be quite steady a second time. The fellows have been entertaining themselves for some time now and I suspect Gabriel is halfway to being tight.” I rose and dusted off my hands. “I’m leaving the water for you. Make sure you drink plenty. It wouldn’t do to get dehydrated out here. It would be a pity to leave you behind.”

  He was still shouting when I left him.

  * * *

  No sooner had I emerged from the tent than Gabriel strode up carrying a length of flatbread heaped with dried fruit, a few nuts and something that looked like an old shoe.

  “What is this?” I poked at it a little.

  “A sort of dried meat.”

  “It looks like leather,” I told him.

  “Tastes like it, too, but it will stop you being too hungry. What’s Herr Doktor fussed about?”

  I shrugged and nibbled a piece of the dried meat to avoid telling him. There seemed little point in going into the details of Herr Doktor’s thwarted romance with Gethsemane Green. The poor man had little enough dignity left as it was. There was no need to make him a laughingstock.

  “He isn’t our friend,” Gabriel said sharply.

  I jerked. “I do wish you wouldn’t do that. It’s rude to read another person’s thoughts.”

  “Hardly clairvoyance when what you’re thinking is writ large all over your face,” he returned with a bland smile. “You’ve just rowed with him about leaving us and discovered for yourself what I told you all along—that he is not to be trusted.”

  “You trusted him well enough when he turned up in the middle of nowhere with a car,” I pointed out.

  “No, I used him to get us the resources we needed.”

  I rolled my eyes heavenward. “If you were so successful, we would have been left with the car.”

  “Be glad we weren’t,” he said, his expression grim. “Apparently that’s what caught the eye of Daoud and his dangerous friends.”

  “How do you know?”

  He nodded his head towards the low fire where Sheikh Hamid and his men were gathered. “Rashid did a bit of sniffing around and met up with a cousin of his who told him that a band of Bedouin from the south had followed a car along the track from Palmyra.”

  “Daoud,” I murmured.

  “That means the good doctor was telling the truth. Daoud is still hanging about. And we have to assume he’s coming for us.”

  * * *

  In the morning, in the grey still hours before the sun has risen but after the black cloak of night had slipped off the edge of the world, Gabriel shoved me awake. “Drink this,” he ordered, pushing a cup of steaming liquid into my hands.

  I sniffed. “What is this?”

  “White coffee. Hot water flavoured with almonds and sweetened. Makes a nice change from their wretched habit of putting cardamom in the tea. Drink up and come with me. We’ve got a council of war on.”

  He was exaggerating only slightly. The men had gathered around the fire, stoking it just enough to boil their drinks and talking with serious expressions.

  “What’s the trouble?” I asked Gabriel.

  “Rashid met with his cousin again this morning. The cousin’s village is a little distance away, a few hours by camel. He said they’ve been disturbed for the last day by two aeroplanes flying overhead.”

  I shrugged. “Surely that can’t be so odd. This desert was crawling with planes during the war. The villagers must be used to it.”

 
He gave me a patient look. “The planes that flew over during the war were just as likely to drop bombs. These people are a trifle touchy about anything that flies and they’re quite happy to shoot at anything that does. These two were flying a little high for that. Their rifles didn’t have the range to touch them. But the curious thing is that they were flying search patterns.”

  “Search patterns?”

  “They’re looking for something out here,” he said, his jaw set.

  “The Cross,” I breathed. “What if that’s how Countess Thurzó has arranged to get the Cross out of the desert? It’s brilliant. She wouldn’t have to go to Damascus at all! She could head right to Turkey or Baghdad with the money already in her pocket.”

  Gabriel shook his head. “Baghdad is under British control, remember? We’ve been through this. She would have better odds with the French, I think.”

  “Except for one thing,” I reminded him. “French control is teetering. With Faisal declaring independence and the government slipping into Arab hands, the last place Countess Thurzó would want to be is Damascus. She’d want to go quietly, and what better way than by flying over the border into Mesopotamia or Turkey?”

  Gabriel rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Not exactly a subtle entrance, but you could be right. It is possible that the arrangements were already made and they’re hanging about because the countess is lost in the desert.”

  “Of course! If the planes are still flying, then the countess hasn’t made contact yet,” I told him, reasoning it out as I spoke. “That means she still has the Cross. We’ll get it yet,” I promised him.

  He sighed and put a hand to my shoulder. “Evie, it might be time to let it go. Hamid and his men can see us safely to the Damascus road—hell, they’ll take us all the way to the city if we want. Or they’ll escort us to Baghdad, which sounds a damn sight safer at this point.”

  I shrugged off his hand, stepping closer until we were toe-to-toe. “Have you forgot that my Aunt Dove is in Damascus? What sort of cad are you that you would leave a defenceless old woman in a city that could fall any day?”