“Oh, well, it can’t be that thrilling. Just green stuff amid the sand, right? No architecture.”
“No domes,” he confirmed with a tired smile, his head still back, his eyes still shut. His thumb resumed that rhythmic stroking, back and forth. It wasn’t about pleasure. He was comforting her. Or maybe he was comforting himself.
Something was definitely wrong.
* * *
Little more than an hour later they landed a mile or so from a moderate-sized village she’d seen from above. A small clean car waited for them, and once the bags had been transferred, she and Dakan piled into the back seat.
Once again, within the confines of a vehicle, Dakan took her hand.
Two men sat in the front, and as one started driving toward the village, the other chattered away in such a fast, excited cadence that Nira only managed to catch a stray word here and there, but as they drove into the town, down the narrow streets bordered by squat clay-brick buildings, her excitement turned into something else. She realized how hard she’d begun to squeeze Dakan’s hand only when he covered their clasped hands and rubbed.
The car rolled into what she could only assume was the market, which was a smaller version of the one Dakan had dragged her from on that first day they’d met.
“He says we’re going to the big building on the left, and that we’ll probably have a bit of a wait to meet with the healer.”
“What language is he speaking?”
“It’s Arabic, just a local dialect. You’ll develop an ear for it by the end of the day. Listen for words you understand, and use them as guideposts to work out what the sounds would be normally.”
Right. She couldn’t even come up with words usually, figuring out what words these words sounded like? Pretty much the same skill.
Outside a squat, dusty-looking building the car stopped and their guide saw them inside.
“You wanted to see what would be familiar to people,” he said, and she could feel the jerk smirking behind her as he spoke.
“Yes, I do want to see...”
The chattering man opened the door for them into a room choked with people. It couldn’t have been more than four meters on any side, and there were only half as many chairs as were needed. People stood to wait, sat on the floor, sat together in one chair...
What could she do with this? She wanted to provide seating for anyone who had to wait at the hospital, not leave them to stand or sit on the floor.
Maybe low bench-style padded seats and creative use of the decor to build in places someone could perch...aside from chairs and couches.
Their talkative guide clapped his hands, getting everyone’s attention, and then announced Dakan.
“That’s not necessary,” Dakan said, just a little too late. Immediately people began rising from the floor and their chairs, an offer of seats coming from all around the room.
“We’re going to have to sit,” Dakan murmured behind her, “They’re offering hospitality. It’d be rude not to accept.”
Nira nodded and though it felt wrong she followed Dakan to a single wide, armless chair and then squeezed onto it with him. She made her thanks, then met the kind gaze of an elderly woman to her left and smiled while Dakan began speaking to people to the right, telling them all the good things he’d heard about this healer. Probably lying to charm them—she knew he didn’t really want to include the healers with the doctors, but he made a good show of it. It was a common political skill.
But Nira had become so attuned to Dakan and his ways in the time they had known each other that she saw the stiff formality in the way he addressed these people. Even though they might not notice that his usual charm wasn’t up to snuff, she could even feel where their bodies touched that the usually relaxed Dakan had gone rigid.
He claimed to like people, but the prospect of speaking to all these people made him feel uncomfortable.
When there was a break in Dakan’s conversation, the woman to her left spoke and it took Nira a moment to work out what she’d said. He was right, once she found her guideposts it became almost clear.
Was she a princess?
“No. I’m an architect,” she said, speaking as slowly as she always did, with lots of pauses to try and recall words. But those nerves she normally felt when trying to speak the language weren’t there. Their dialect was different, so if she made a mistake or pronounced something in a way that sounded silly or childlike, they probably wouldn’t notice.
“The Prince hired me to design a new big healing facility for the capital. He brought me here so I could see a good one.”
The woman smiled and nodded, and it presented Nira with the perfect opportunity. She fetched her sketchbook and a pencil and asked, “Would you mind giving me your advice?”
When the woman nodded and gestured for Nira to continue, she asked, “If you were designing a new room to wait in, what would you do differently?”
Informal polling method, to be sure, but effective. Once the woman answered, another woman a short distance away added to what was said. Before long, she was getting suggestions faster than her pencil could keep up with them.
* * *
They waited a good hour before Dakan got to go back with the healer, though it didn’t seem like it with all the conversation happening around him.
Once Nira had asked for opinions and started taking notes—taking the people seriously—everyone wanted to give their ideas. He spent part of the time translating for her as they spoke too fast for her to understand much.
It started out being about the waiting room, then went from there to other aspects of the treatment. People weren’t as averse to the idea of Western medicine as his father and that barely used hospital made it seem. Infections were a big worry to them.
Before he even got back to speak with the man he’d come to see, he had made a note to text Zahir that he was right about the blending, at least for now. If nothing else, it’d help the people migrate to the new system to have the healers they were used to there as well. He just wasn’t convinced that their father wouldn’t wrestle control back to the healers no matter how it started out.
Once Dakan fixed a problem, he liked it to stay fixed. That rarely happened in medicine, but with physical ailments there was always something tangible that could be done. There were defined steps to take—do this, if it doesn’t work or the situation’s too advanced for this, do that. Escalating plans of attack to defeat a physical foe—an ailment, disease, or injury, and people usually didn’t fight treatment.
Emotions were harder to fix, the emotional landscape like constantly shifting sand.
He should probably stop thinking of the hospital as something that would fix their problems. He couldn’t guess what people—like Father—might do with it once they got it set up.
When the healer summoned him back, Dakan whispered in Nira’s ear, “Will you be all right by yourself?”
She nodded and smiled over her shoulder at him, a peculiarly happy expression for someone talking about work. And chairs.
“If you need me, shout my name and I’ll come.” He kept his voice low, took his bag and rose, leaving Nira to fend for herself with the people in the waiting room.
Over the next half an hour he discussed ideas to incorporate doctors into the current system without overriding the healers and about building a new country-owned facility to take the place of the current building, allowing more room for treatment and patients and those who came with them.
By the time he returned to the waiting room he actually felt pretty positive about the whole thing.
He spotted Nira right where he’d left her, and she gestured him over as soon as their eyes met. With his much lighter bag on his shoulder, he approached and crouched down to listen as she began to gesture to a mother with her sick child beside her. The little girl, no
more than five, lay limply against her mother’s shoulder, her face flushed and her eyes showing the splotchy redness of recent tears.
An ear infection, Nira told him. Something they hadn’t been able to shake.
Normally, he would’ve passed by, not inviting himself to minister to someone else’s patient, but he couldn’t turn down a direct plea for help. Especially when he had the antibiotics that would help.
Over the next quarter-hour he examined the child, administered a loading dose of antibiotics, spoke to the healer about irrigating the ear, and went over the importance of taking all the antibiotics just as he detailed.
It was routine, so routine that he could’ve done it in his sleep, but it still made him feel good. Useful. Helpful. And something else...an emotion he couldn’t quite put his finger on and didn’t want to examine.
By the time they left the building he was actually looking forward to the next facility visit, even if it would be more of the same.
“That was something to see,” Nira said, cutting into his thoughts. “You’re good with kids.”
Their guide had gone to fetch the car, which left him a moment to let his guard down with her.
“I told you emergency medicine was Zahir’s territory, and that mine was the land of the simple family doctor.” He could say that to her, but it wasn’t an accurate test. “Keep in mind, though, that was my second patient. It’s probably easy to be good with kids when you only see one patient every few weeks.”
“Your territory?” Nira said. “That’s the second time you’ve used that word with reference to what you or Zahir do. You say it like that, it sounds like these old dogs our neighbor had when I was little. I can’t even hear that word any more without hearing it in Mr. Benjamin’s voice: ‘Don’t mind Chester—he’s just marking his territory.’ You talk about your territory and I immediately get the mental image of you and Zahir running all over, peeing on everything.”
He laughed so loudly, so suddenly that he scared people walking out of the healer’s building. It was probably against royal protocol, laughing and treating patients in public. He pulled his gaze to the sky, then the horizon, looking for neutral ground, but the smile stayed on his face.
“Sorry. Sometimes I say things and everybody regrets it.”
“I don’t regret it. I’m just glad you said it in English.” He laughed again, and their car pulled up so he opened the door for her. “Get in.”
They climbed in and once they’d settled she turned to look at him again then reached up to adjust the hang of his keffiyeh, pushing back the white material that had fallen forward to conceal his face from her. “Did your talk with him go well?”
“It did, actually. And that sort of public meeting you held with the waiting room gave me a few more ideas. I’m going to run them by Zahir, but I think we’ve worked out some programs that will make things much better.”
“Did he want to work with you?”
Dakan nodded. “Zahir was right, so long as it doesn’t get corrupted and out of balance. Having both will be better.”
CHAPTER NINE
THE MOMENT THEY stepped through the penthouse door that evening, Dakan pulled off the robe and keffiyeh. If he got to be here with her for a couple of days, he’d do it as freely as he could, squeak every ounce of pleasure out of their time together, no room for the negatives that crept in when he was alone.
Once he told Nira about Prince Jibril, the peace he felt with her would come to an end. That idea ate at him, made him want to keep her close for as long as he could. Made him spend all day ignoring the ticking clock because he didn’t like how it made him feel.
He hadn’t been thinking about a long thing between them anyway. But he wasn’t ready for it to end yet.
“Do you need Tahira to clean your robes for tomorrow?” Nira asked, eyeing his exceedingly rumpled casual outfit he’d been wearing beneath. “Looks more comfortable than your usual suit.”
Hearing her name, the housekeeper appeared, informed them that dinner was nearly ready, and spirited away the discarded clothing to launder.
Dakan flopped onto the couch and leaned back, closing his eyes.
Tomorrow. He’d tell her tomorrow. Tonight he’d enjoy the bubble of peace in this place.
“You look like you’ve just run a marathon,” she said from very close by a short time later. “Or maybe like you’re very drunk.”
“Sleepy,” he murmured, then opened his eyes to baggy green shorts and a T-shirt.
It wasn’t revealing at all, but after spending so much time with her, and only seeing only her hands and face, the display of shapely tanned legs and the braless wonderland that was her chest... “You’re the one dressed for bed.”
“Yep,” she said, sitting beside him, crawling under his arm and settling her cheek against his chest. “I need to ask you a question.”
It was all very innocent, but it still made his mind race. She tucked her feet up under her and got comfortable.
“Ask away.”
“You’ve been different today. I noticed it right away, and I thought at first maybe it was because you were sleepy, but it stayed with you all day. You’re different when you’re with people than you are with me. Actually, you’re different with your patients too. Not just little kids, I don’t think. I noticed it with the man at the hospital, but I didn’t really put it together until I got to know you better.”
He let his hand cup her shoulder, holding her there against him as they relaxed. “Different how?” He knew he behaved differently at different times, but he’d thought of the difference as upholding expectations—something everyone did.
“Stiff.”
“With who?”
“Just with people you’re interacting with. You even kind of do it here, not with me but with Tahira. You just suddenly stop being Dakan and become Prince Dakan. And then when you were with the little girl today you were Dr. Dakan, I guess. But he’s more like regular Dakan than Prince Dakan. And when you were holding her and talking to her mother? It was really split. Your face changed, your voice changed—you were Prince Dakan from the neck up. The rest of your body was Regular Dakan, just a man comforting a child in distress. Like you carried and rocked sick children all the time.”
“Prince Dakan is stiff? So I had a stiff head and a relaxed body?”
“Yes. You had a stiff head and voice and a relaxed body—what I could tell with the robes on. You hold your shoulders differently. I haven’t seen that split personality thing happen before, but it definitely happened today.” She tilted her head to look at him, then reached up and combed her fingers through his hair, which felt too nice to stop her from doing it, even if this cozy couch cuddle shouldn’t be happening. “I thought you liked helping people have better lives.”
“I do,” he said quickly, and then paused to remember what he had been thinking at the time, but it was too much to think about when her fingers slid through his hair, soothing away the tension he’d carried today. “It was different today.”
“Different how?”
“I feel obligated to be a certain way when I’m here, and I’m used to being another way when I treat patients—which I’ve only ever done in England. Here I’ve only ever been what was expected, or I tried to be within limits. I guess I don’t know how to be both at once.”
“Maybe you’re just over-thinking it. Who says you have to be a certain way?”
“Everyone since I was small.”
“I think, as a man, people will forgive you being a rascal more than they would a princess. You can rely on your cheeky charm with the masses, not just with people you speak with privately, or in other countries. You don’t think they’d like the real Dakan?”
“I’m sure they would, but liking and respecting or following someone, feeling confident in their ability to lead your coun
try? That’s two different things. And I have to be ready to be...what I desperately don’t want to be.”
“Which is what?”
“Heir, should something happen to Zahir. People need to have confidence in me, just in case. When they don’t, that leads to succession instability. The Al Rahal line is very old. We survived different empires as a sometimes puppet kingdom until the Ottomans began to branch into the area and our king made a stand to avoid being swallowed up again. Which is what the race is about tomorrow.” He caught her wrist to pull her hand back to his chest. “You remember the story about the Lego house and the trebuchet?”
“How could I forget?”
“The part of that I didn’t tell you was that it was my idea. Sort of. My actual idea was to use these old battle axes and chop it up. Zahir upped the game and went for the trebuchet.”
“And got into trouble for it.”
“We would’ve gotten into trouble for the axes too, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as amazing as the trebuchet.”
“So he made getting in trouble worth it?”
“He just did it better. I’m not saying that because I’m looking for sympathy. I know my limitations, and I think it works out well this way. There are things he’s better at, and things I’m better at. So we have a wide range of stuff covered.”
“Territory?” Nira mouthed the word up at him.
He squeezed her, groaning, “Would the word ‘claim’ make you happier?”
“Yes. It sounds like an old-fashioned gold prospector in a gold rush somewhere. I like it.”
“Noted.”
“But you’re saying that being a prince is something that Zahir is better at?”
Challenging the Doctor Sheikh Page 10