by Неизвестный
and every night he called your name. He begged your forgiveness. He told you he loved you.
“We knew who Desi was—the young sister of his friend Harry. We knew you were only fifteen or
sixteen. We discussed it many times during those terrible days, my husband and I, whether to get in
touch and ask you to come to him.” She shrugged. “We were afraid, and we did nothing.”
“I wanted to come to him,” Desi whispered. “But my agent said…”
But she had known. If only she had listened to her heart, and walked away from Leo and his “important
bookings”! Then there would have been no room for misunderstanding. Why had she been so weak?
Salah was right—it was Leo who had come between them. He had not come to her bed then, but he had
taken possession of her as surely as a lover.
Arwa sighed. “After these few weeks there was a big improvement. We brought him home. He was
happier then, he was recovering. And then one day I went into his room, and my son was gone. Someone
lay in the bed who looked like him, but it was not Salah. It was as if his inner self had died. I never
learned what had happened, Desi—but I think perhaps today I know.
“And for ten years I never saw my son himself again—until the day his father told him that Desirée
Drummond was coming to visit the dig. In that moment, I tell you, a mask was ripped away, and I saw
that inside the stranger we had known for ten years was still my son Salah, and that you had the power to
bring him back.
“Today I see that my son is alive again. His heart is breaking again, but at least it speaks to him. Salah
recovered physically a long time ago, Desi, but today, for the first time since that terrible war, his spirit
is alive.
“You ask how I know he loves you. That is how I know. Your presence has touched him as no one else
can do. He doubted your love at a time when he was ill and vulnerable, it is true. And that weakness has
led to misery for both of you. But if you love him—and why else have you come here?—you must find a
way to forgive him, don’t you think?”
Desirée gazed at her, torn between hope and grief. Was it true? Did his mother see something she herself
had not seen behind the cold mask of Salah’s face today? Could it be unhappiness, not coldness, that had
turned his face to stone?
Her heart was being torn to ribbons, but one thing at last was clear. She could admit it now. She loved
him. She did love him. And if he loved her…
What shook her most was the knowledge that the change she had seen in Salah, the thing that had turned
him into the harsh, closed man she had hardly recognized at the airport was—herself. His conviction that
she did not love him.
That was so much to absorb that she wasn’t sure it would ever sink in completely.
Eighteen
“W ill you walk with me, Desi?” Salah said.
It was sunset, and the air was cooling quickly. She looked up into his face and nodded once, then looked
away again.
The setting sun coloured the great outcrops of rock all across the desert deep pink and gold as they
walked out into the deserted ancient city. It was easy to feel the pull of another age, feel that she had
almost slipped in among the people who had worshipped the feminine principle.
Easy to feel the female power that was deep in the fabric of the temple under her feet burn up through
her.
They climbed the brick steps of the exposed remains of the great temple, and as her feet pressed into the
ancient brick, built by hands dead five thousand years, Desi was flooded by a sense of otherness, a
different way of being. A feeling of uninhibited joy embedded in the brick seemed to lift a burden from
her.
She yearned to know these people. Who were they? How did they worship the divine they revered as
Goddess?
Desi said, “I asked your father this afternon—he’s agreed to take me on as a volunteer next season.
There’s something about this place. I want to be in on the discoveries. I want to know about her.”
He thought of how it would be, to know she was here, day after day, if she were not his, and his heart
clenched, but he could not protest.
Salah said softly, “You are the representative of the Goddess on earth, Desi, do you know that? She has
to come to the world in disguise now, to hide her true face in a masculine world. So she manifests as a
supermodel or a cinema star. This is the secret way the world now worships the feminine.
“I was wrong, ten years ago. It is not demeaning. They try to demean it, but in a woman like you, this
female power comes forth unsullied.
“When they admire you and yearn for you, Desi, it is my father’s lost Goddess that they seek. You keep
her alive in the world. If she were not always alive in the world, the world would have been destroyed
by human stupidity long ago. I see that now.”
There was no answer she could find to that. But he did not seem to expect one. They stood and watched
in silence until the sun had disappeared and stars spangled the blackness.
“Listen, Desi,” he began urgently, as night settled around them, shrouding the sound of voices from the
tents. “Please listen. I want to tell you how it was with me. Maybe if I tell you, your hurt will be less. I
want to tell you.”
“I’m listening, Salah,” she said quietly.
“In the hospital you were there with me day and night. You were so much with me that finally it was as
if I was thinking your thoughts. Then I learned with certainty that you did love me. It was fear that had
made you deny it. And for the first time, Desi, I understood those fears. I thought of the savages in
Kaljukistan and understood why my outburst had made you think I was like them. You knew so little of
me, of my people.
“But I was not like them. I never could be. I never admired such men, openly or secretly.”
“I know you couldn’t,” she whispered.
“And I knew, I knew, that our love could overcome everything. My jealous stupidity, your fear. We
loved each other so much, we had touched a deep well that most people never reach. I knew it would be
forever. I knew I had to get better, go and find you, and make it happen.
“From that moment, I began to recover. They brought me home.
“I was writing you a letter. I could write only a little at a time, but I was filled with confidence. In the
letter I told you what I had learned, what I knew. I asked you to come.
“Then, before it was finished—so close, it was almost done! What demon interfered at that moment,
Desi?—they brought me some mail, letters that had been following me for weeks, from home to Parvan,
to the hospital and back home again.
“There was a letter from Sami, weeks old. From before I was wounded.”
Sami, excited by her friend’s success, had enclosed pictures cut from a magazine of Desi in her new life.
He looked at the pictures and into another world. Desi was a different woman—polished, glossy, her
hair perfection, diamonds at her ears and around her neck, her dress tight and short, her heels impossibly
high. But worst of all was the smile, a smile he didn’t recognize. It was wide, but it didn’t reach her eyes.
“I went cold, Desi. I started to shiver. My heart stopped with the fear that my feeling was wrong, that it
was too late for us. The longer I looked at the pictures the more I was afraid. M
y certainty crumbled. I
thought, she belongs to this other world now, she will laugh at my letter.”
But still, he would have sent the letter. It was better to be laughed at than not to try.
The last photo showed her with a man with a fake tan and a stitched-on smile, hovering over her with
predatory possessiveness. Underneath, there was a caption. He still remembered it word for word.
“‘Leo J. Patrick with his latest discovery, the stunning Desirée. He’s calling her the find of his life.
Reliable sources suggest he’s not talking strictly business. Apparently it’s a May-December romance.’”
“I didn’t understand May-December until I asked. But I understood romance.” He closed his eyes at the
memory, opened them again. “It was worse than death, Desi. The pain carried all my confidence, all my
security away.”
Two days later her own card had come. It was stilted and awkward, and made nothing clear. With love,
your friend, Desi, it said.
“I had lost all my insight into your thoughts. I thought this was your way of saying we should be friends.
But I could not be friends with you, Desi. I wanted to be your lover, your husband, not your friend while
another man was your lover.”
He stood gazing out over the purple-shadowed desert.
“I don’t know what happened to me. I don’t know why I never questioned the truth of it. Fool that I was.
Did my illness make me crazy? I don’t know. I only know the pain was much worse than my physical
wounds, and that I wished the bullet had killed me.
“I wrote that letter. When it was sent I regretted it. And then I didn’t again.”
Desi’s heart was kicking in her breast, pumping hope and fear in equal measure through her system. She
couldn’t speak, couldn’t look at him. She bent her head, listening with every cell of her being.
When he recovered, he was to go to university abroad. His parents suggested Canada, but Salah rejected
the idea. He chose London instead. But London was not the place to escape from thoughts of Desi. Her
picture was in every magazine and newspaper, her name in too many gossip columns. One day he read
that she was engaged to Leo J. Patrick, a year later he heard of the breakup on television.
Even then a part of him had wanted to go to her, fight for another chance. But he had struggled against
the desire as foolish weakness, and won.
“I was a fool. So much worse than a fool. I killed it with my own hand. And now you hate me, and how
can I complain? It was not you, Desi. I see it now. It is myself I have been angry with all these years. I
was the one who killed our love.”
It was not true, of course. He had been living a lie. Nothing had killed his love. He had loved her from
that day to this, without ceasing for the space of a breath.
“Salah, I…” but she could not put anything into words.
“If you come to my country, Desi,” he said, “to work with my father, you must understand that I will be
here, too.”
“Yes?”
“And when I see you, Desi, I will try to make you love me again. No more now than ten years ago am I
capable of being your friend.”
“No?” she whispered.
“Desi, I love you,” said Salah. “Tell me I’m not too late. Tell me there is a way to make you love me
again.”
The moon was rising, fat and full-bellied, lighting the sand with her own particular glow. Her heart
climbed with it, up among the stars. Her eyes burned with unshed tears.
Below them in the compound, lamps were lit. The table in the dining tent was being laid with food. Men
and women came out of their tents, refreshed by the cool night air and the shower each was entitled to at
the end of the working day. Their voices rang back and forth in the darkness, cheerful and ordinary,
belying her feeling of mysterious communion with the distant ancestresses who had built this place.
He waited, gazing at the shadows below, listening to her soft breath, closer than his own heart, waiting
for her answer.
“It wasn’t all your fault, Salah,” she began softly, struggling for calm against the wild fluttering of her
heart. “For a long time I thought so. But I’m as much to blame as you are. So let’s not talk about fault
anymore. I’m tired of guilt and blame.”
He turned her to him, and gazed into her face. Moonlight both revealed and cloaked it in mystery, and
she was as haunting and elusive as the great feminine power that had once been worshipped here. He
would spend the rest of his life in pursuit of her mystery.
“Desi?” he said.
She said, learning it even as she spoke, “I’ve been realizing something. It was never my own dream, to
be a model. All the girls at school were so thrilled when I was ‘discovered’, when I started getting jobs,
they all fantasized about supermodel stardom, and it was great, but…it just had never been my particular
dream.
“When we fell in love, you and I, that was the dream I recognized. And I see now that I could have
changed everything that night, if I’d only admitted it to myself, if I’d said to you—it doesn’t matter
about that ad because we’re going to get married and it won’t happen again…none of it would have
happened. But I was caught in someone else’s dream.”
He said, “I attacked you. How could you answer but by resisting the attack? It is human nature.”
“You didn’t kill my love, Salah,” Desi breathed. “Sometimes I wished you had. It hurt so much. But I
know now I never stopped loving you. I was as wrong and weak as you were. But we were so young,
and it was so powerful. I suppose we ought to be grateful it didn’t kill us both outright.”
“Desi,” he said, in a voice suffocated with hope, “I love you. I will love you forever.”
“I love you, too, Salah. Forever. I know it now.”
Then his arms wrapped her in a fierce embrace, pulling her tight against him as he gazed hungrily down
into her face. “Say you will marry me!” he demanded. “Tell me!”
Moonlight spangled the tears on her lashes, but she smiled at him.
“How can I say no? After all, we’re already married in our hearts, aren’t we?”
“Yes, beloved,” he said, as his lips touched and tasted hers. “We are already married in our hearts.”
Epilogue
“M ission accomplished,” Desi said into the phone.
They had driven back to the palace in the morning, and Desi had called Sami to tell her the news.
“Oh, you magician!” Sami cried. “Thank you, thank you! How did you manage it, Des? Did you—what
did you do?”
“It was easy. I just had to agree to marry Salah in your place. No sacrifice too great.”
Sami screeched.
“I knew it! I knew he still loved you! I knew if he just saw you he’d… I’ve always thought it wasn’t
over for you two! That’s wonderful, Des! Do you love him? Have you loved each other all this time?
“Yes, and yes.”
“I am over the moon for you! And what about Farid?” Sami demanded anxiously. “Did you…did you
get a chance to ask Uncle Khaled?”
“He said something kind of interesting. Did you know your fiancé is related to the Sultan of Bagestan?”
“My fiancé?” Sami caught it instantly. “Has Uncle Khaled actually given his consent?”
“He’s going to tear a strip off Arif and Walid, too, as I understand it.”
“Oh, that’s wonde
rful, Des! Oh, thank you, thank you!” her voice caught, and for a moment she couldn’t
speak. “I am so—but I knew it would all come right, if you would just—I knew you and Salah would…”
“Sam! Are you telling me you were counting on—”
“Allah, I’m delirious with relief!” Sam sniffed loudly and laughed on a sob. “Are you as happy as I am,
Des? You sound…wait a minute! Des! What did you just say about Farid? He’s related to whom?”
He held the wife of his heart in his arms, and looked into her eyes, and nothing came between them. No
shadow of the past, no fear for the future clouded the perfect communion of that gaze.
Her hair lay spread over his arm and the pillow, where the lamplight kissed it tenderly. She smiled up
into his face, and he marvelled at the trusting openness, the vulnerable offering of the deepest parts of
the soul he saw in her eyes, not realizing that the look was reflected in his own gaze.
“Beloved,” he murmured, and bent to brush her perfect lips with a kiss. Gently, sweetly, as tenderly as
moonlight, his lips caressed her mouth, her cheek, her temple, her throat.
Melting followed every lightest touch, and she smiled and heaved a long, slow breath. She wrapped an
arm around him, drawing him close, and pressed her own mouth to his cheek, his strong throat, his
mouth.
“I love you so much, Salah,” she whispered. “Please love me.”
His body stirred and pushed against her, and she melted deep inside, in anticipation of his homecoming.
His hunger tightened his arms around her, his mouth grew more demanding, drinking deep of the
delights of those soft lips, that eager tongue.
He began to stroke her, but she did not want delay. She wanted union. She pressed up against him,
slipped impatiently under his body.
“Love me,” she said again. “I want to feel you inside.”
He could not resist such a command. Was this how the Goddess had treated her worshippers?
Demanding her pleasure of them?
He would always be a worshipper at this shrine.
He slipped into the cradle of her hips, lifted himself while she fitted up against him, and hungrily pushed