The Sultan's Heir

by Alexandra Sellers

  There were large wooden wardrobes and chests of intricate design smelling of camphor and spice. The blinds were latticed dark-green-painted wood, enhancing the green of the plants, creating a feeling of being utterly surrounded by cooling greenery.

  It was like something out of a dream. The room was romantic and sensual, from the soft heat-scented breeze to the lush tapestries, from the perfect silence and the green growth on both sides to the low, inviting divan bed with its spread of cushions.

  They stood a few feet apart, not looking at each other. So easy. It would be so easy….

  “I wonder where my bags are?” Rosalind murmured, with a glance around her. And a corner of Najib’s mouth moved, as though he were grateful for the introduction of ordinary things into the charged atmosphere.

  “They will have been unpacked.” Najib moved to one of the wardrobes and opened a door to reveal clothes hanging neatly. “Ah, no, these are mine.”

  He closed the door and moved to another wardrobe, and Rosalind saw her clothes, all neatly on hangers and shelves, as he opened the door.

  “Are we sharing a room?” she asked, feeling an enormous lump in her throat.

  “We must do so, Rosalind,” Najib said apologetically. She wished he wouldn’t say her name in that caressing way if he didn’t mean it. “I am sure you know that to have rumours getting out via the servants would undermine all that we have been at such pains to build. Here, more than anywhere, they must believe that we are married and that Samir is our son.”

  “Yes,” Rosalind managed. Her voice came out hoarse and, to her own deep irritation, she coughed.

  Perhaps because of that, he went on explaining the obvious. “The story of our reunion was carried in the papers here, and the servants have certainly read it.”

  She nodded.

  “Of course I will sleep on one of the divans, or perhaps on the roof.”

  Rosalind’s eyes fell. “Of course,” she said.

  So this was her answer. She wasn’t going to get a chance to drink before her wandering in the desert. Worse, she was going to have to contend with all the intimacy of a pretence in front of the staff.

  “I am sorry for the necessity,” he said.

  “Najib, since you’re doing all this as a favour to me, I don’t think you need to apologize,” Rosalind said flatly, thinking that it was going to kill her.

  He bent his head in acknowledgement, and she knew she had annoyed him. But what did he want her to say? Tell him it was fine? It wasn’t fine; it was going to be close to unbearable. How could she pretend it would be easy?

  She didn’t understand him. He was physically attracted to her, she knew that much, so what was the point of pretending to something when they could so easily make it real?

  The little bay faced west. In the comparative cool of the evening she awoke from her nap and stretched luxuriously, then got up and slipped on a loose cotton beach dress and a pair of sandals. A servant showed her the way, and Rosalind went through the garden and outside, down towards the beach.

  The scenery was even more starkly breathtaking when bathed in the golden light of sunset. The rocks came alive, rough, alien, not gentled by the mosses as in England, but fierce and primitive. A twisted bush, brown, burnt and bristly, clung to the side of the wall of rock above her head.

  It had a powerful appeal, but she wondered if you ever came to terms with such a landscape. To be always at war with the Earth around you, having to wrest even life-giving water from her unwilling breast. In England nature was so generous, it was no wonder that the old Celtic rites of worship had been celebrations of bounty and sexuality.

  Had the ancient pagan Arabs, too, considered the earth female? If so, it must have coloured their attitude to the feminine in ways almost incomprehensible to the peoples who inhabited green valleys. The Quran and the Hadith made it obvious that Mohammad had been bringing his message to a culture that was deeply anti-woman, to men who practised female circumcision and exposed infant girls, and part of his message had been an attempt to shift that culture towards respecting and honouring women equally with men.

  Looking at this land, she could dimly understand why the men of the culture had been resisting that part of the message for the past 1400 years. Any child might well end up angry with a Mother who was so harsh, so stingy with her nourishing….

  In many areas, he had managed to stop the most extreme abuses, but in general, humans seemed to have taken Mohammad’s message as their guide about as much as they had taken the earlier injunction to “love one another”—now and then, when it suited them, they followed it.

  Send us a Messenger, Lord, and by golly, if we like what he says, we’ll obey him…

  She climbed up the side of the finger where there were the signs of a footpath in the earth, and reached the top with a deep breath of wonderment.

  It was as rugged as anything she had ever seen, but oh, it was beautiful! Land and sea lay spread out in a panorama of green and sapphire and dusky rose, the sunset intensifying all the colours to a richness that hurt. A warm wind brushed her hair and throat, played a little with the long skirt of her dress.

  Najib and Sam were sitting on a rock at the tip of the finger of land, high over the bay, contemplating the molten sun as it plunged into the sea. Najib’s strong arm stretched behind Sam’s back, his hand resting on the rock beside him, offering him protection. She stood for a moment watching them. How trustingly Sam leaned into that sheltering niche!

  She moved up on Sam’s other side, and smiled down into their upturned faces as they turned to her. “Hello.”

  “Hello. You slept well?”

  “Like a baby.” She sank down beside Sam, and felt with regret how Najib moved his arm away. “What a fabulous sunset.”

  “God is taking the sun, Mommy,” Sam explained excitedly.

  She looked down with a smile. “Is he?”

  He nodded vigorously, eager to pass on what he had just learned.

  “Where is he taking it?”

  “Other little children need it now,” he said in a solemn voice.

  Her lips stretched into an involuntary smile, and over Sam’s head she met Najib’s glance. “I see,” she said.

  “All the little children need the sun, so God moves it around the whole world,” Sam expounded, eyes wide with wonder, his little arms stretching out to infinity across the jewel sea, embracing all of creation with a quiver of excitement. “He’s going to bring it back tomorrow.”

  The subject of their discussion was sinking into the sea with surprising speed, while night rose up from behind them to cover the sky with sudden deep blue and stars.

  Of course, she remembered, no twilight here.

  “We don’t see many sunsets in Kensington,” Rosalind told Najib with a smile, “and certainly none like this, a bucket of melted gold just dropping straight down behind the horizon.”

  “It is a very different kind of beauty, an English sunset,” he agreed.

  Night softened the world. Sam nestled against her side with a sigh of deep satisfaction, and his mother’s arm wrapped him safe.

  He snuggled there, quietly listening to the soft conversation of his mother and Najib—his daddy for a little while, they had said—in the warm darkness. His heart swelled almost to bursting. Wordlessly, feeling the presence of good all around him, knowing he wanted it to be this way forever, his child’s heart sent up a plea. And because it was carried on the wings of innocence, it was gathered up and delivered before the Throne….

  Let him be my daddy for always, whispered the little heart.

  Tendrils of love and longing reached out to embrace all three in a delicate net of connectedness, and Sam, feeling the wrap of those loving bonds with the child’s perception his parents had lost, heard the yes in his heart, and was satisfied.

  Eleven

  He was glad this was not destined to last long, the staff treating them like a honeymooning couple, thrilled by the story of love lost, love regained. Najib sat wa
tching Rosalind in the soft lamplight, against the backdrop of flowers, the night sky above them as black as magic.

  She ate the foods of his homeland with every sign of sensual pleasure. With too many signs of sensual pleasure for his peace of mind, knowing that he would have to go back to the bedroom with her, and would have to struggle to keep his hands off her, keep his mouth from seeking hers….

  On the surface she did not seem at all like Maysa. He wondered if she had told Jamshid, as Maysa had told him, that before him she had been a virgin. Had Rosalind, too, wept and pleaded for Jamshid to marry her, to save her from the disgrace of her pregnancy? In the West, no disgrace these days attended such an event. Single mothers were no longer shamed there, as they were still in the East.

  But still such a plea might have worked on Jamshid.

  Or perhaps it was merely that he had been too besotted with love to recognize that she did not return his love. Perhaps Jamshid had himself jumped to the conclusion that her pregnancy was his responsibility, perhaps he had insisted on marriage without any urging.

  He had always been impulsive, right from his youth.

  After the meeting in Cornwall between Rosalind and Ashraf, where she had sworn the boy was not Jamshid’s son, they had sat into the small hours, trying to make sense of her story.

  Not knowing who was the father, had she simply taken the easy course and married Jamshid? In that case, what could have convinced her, in the end, that Jamshid was not the father of Sam? The boy looked enough like Jamshid’s grandfather…but then, she had not known that Hafzuddin was Jamshid’s grandfather.

  Had she, like Maysa, simply pretended to a man about to go to war that she was pregnant, in the hopes of gain?

  Now he pondered another possible solution they had tossed around at that meeting: suppose that she had not lied as much as that. Suppose she had married him in good faith, had had the miscarriage almost immediately, before Jamshid was killed? That she had then taken another lover while he was away, and been made pregnant again immediately by this other man? If Jamshid had returned from the war, would she have pretended to him that the child was his, lying about his birthday by a few weeks?

  When Jamshid was killed, of course she thought the family knew of her and her pregnancy. Under such circumstances, she might have felt compelled to brazen it out….

  Yes, it made sense out of much of the mystery. And when his grandfather rejected her claims…what had happened then?

  The one thing this didn’t explain was her blank refusal to have Sam DNA tested.

  Who had been the one to set her and the baby up in that expensive apartment? That certainly needed some explanation in all this. Their search had turned up no second marriage for Rosalind, and also no source of the income that would be necessary to buy such a place.

  So his rival was a rich man…Najib caught himself up short. He had no rival. He was not in contention. A man would have to be a fool to walk into a relationship with a woman who had already proven herself so unworthy.

  And yet…this didn’t explain why she was now insisting that Sam was not Jamshid’s son. Had she simply realized, in the intervening five years, how stupid and unfair such a deception would be? Or was it possible she had learned about Jamshid’s background before he, Najib, had visited her?

  There could have been only one source for such information.

  Was she already Ghasib’s pawn? He might have discovered Jamshid’s identity any time during the past five years, though they suspected that he knew only recently. Suppose Ghasib had believed, as he surely would, that the boy was Prince Kamil’s son? He might have given her the very choice that Najib had outlined.

  Then it wasn’t sexual treachery she was guilty of…but something much more dangerous to them all.

  It certainly made sense of her cash payment for the luxurious apartment, and her supporting herself on such a small income.

  Suppose she had got in touch with Ghasib after his, Najib’s, first visit, telling him of this new development. Had the dictator seen this as a way to get someone inside the al Jawadi camp? Was she going to betray them all, in the hopes of having her son designated Ghasib’s successor? Or even, as the price of his life?

  Whatever they suspected, they could not risk leaving the boy in Ghasib’s way if they were wrong. They had to protect her and her son—but they also had to limit the potential damage of bringing her inside.

  And she was here, under his eye. Totally cut off. He could make sure that she made no contact with anyone…but at what price to himself, he could not guess.

  He closed his eyes, his thoughts inexorably pulled back to that night when, sore from the heat of the last, terrible battle, they had heard the news of the Kaljuk withdrawal. It was over. He vaguely remembered Prince Omar shoving him into his private helicopter and telling him to take twenty-four hours leave. He and several of his men, desperate with fatigue, had got aboard, and had flown home to the sanity and peace of Barakat.

  He hadn’t thought of sending any message. He had arrived unannounced, with a week’s battle dirt on him, his clothes bloodied and torn, letting himself in quietly because it was late and he didn’t want to wake Maysa in her condition….

  She had never been pregnant at all, she had subsequently confessed. Knowing he was going to war, she had taken a calculated risk, that was all. She would have easy living while he was away, and if he was killed in the fighting, she would gain. If he came home, well, she would worry about that when it happened….

  He had been very young. And any man could be taken in…once. But if he walked into a relationship with Rosalind now, not knowing how she was lying, but knowing that she did…

  If he had thought about it for a month, Naj realized, he would never have guessed that Rosalind was a woman like Maysa. They seemed as different as two women could possibly be. When he had learned the truth of Maysa, he realized that it had been there in her eyes all along. He had believed he would recognize it when he met it in another woman. But Rosalind’s gaze was clear. He could see no evidence of guile in her face.

  Because she makes you half blind, he told himself ruthlessly. She had a deep, feminine magnetism that was more than physical, and it drew him almost irresistibly. She was hauntingly beautiful. Her skin seemed to radiate light, or heat…the glow of feminine mystery.

  And the boy, too. When he believed him to be Jamshid’s son, he had felt the bonds of blood linking them, and that had led to real affection. Now he had been told otherwise, but those bonds had not loosened. There was some part of him that remained convinced of his blood relationship to the boy.

  Why was she lying, and what was the lie?

  He was aware of a consuming thirst for the indefinable thing Rosalind had in such abundance, a thirst that seemed to have been lying by his heart unrecognized all his life. He had been reasonably satisfied. Now he had discovered the elixir of life, and his own long-standing thirst for it, and in the same moment knew that he could not taste it.

  It was an annoyance, but that was all it was. He wasn’t going to let it get to him. Hunger and thirst, whether physical or spiritual, was something you could ride out. That was a lesson you learned on the battlefield.

  Rosalind saw the wariness in his eyes, and sighed. Whatever his reasons for resisting the attraction, she was pretty sure she was looking at heartache if she tried to break through that resistance. His eyes were not the eyes of a man who has permanence on his mind. They weren’t even the eyes of a man who is comfortable with a sexual attraction.

  She tasted the erotically delicious food cooked by the well-meaning staff and wished that everything they were pretending were true. That Najib had come back to her after five lost years, loving her, the father of her son, and that they would go back to the bedroom and be true lovers on such a magical night….

  “Oh, the stars are beautiful!” The words came out of her without her volition.

  His jaw tightened. “Yes,” he said. Then, as if on the heels of a thought, he asked, “Did
Kamil—did Jamshid buy your apartment for you?”

  He watched dispassionately as her eyelids dropped to hide her eyes from him and self-consciousness stained her cheeks.

  Rosalind swallowed. “No.”

  “You inherited the money, perhaps?” Their search showed that the place had been bought in Rosalind’s name, no mortgage, four and a half years ago.

  Rosalind set her fork down. She had never thought of being asked this question, and she had no answer ready to explain how an ordinary woman had been able to afford so wildly expensive an apartment….

  “No,” she said, because next he would ask from whom. She didn’t think of the easiest course, to tell him it was none of his business, until too late. “It’s not really mine.”

  What did this mean? The most likely explanation was that it had been put in her name, but she had signed it away in a document that could be held over her head, keeping her obedient. He could imagine Ghasib involved in a thing like that. If she betrayed him, she would find herself instantly homeless.

  That argued that Ghasib had been consulted before she agreed to come here. That would mean Ghasib was hoping she would learn something of substance from him, Najib…and that she was willing to betray him. He looked at her, and his heart twisted with grief. His jaw tensed against the desire to rail at her.

  The lamplight made her too beautiful. He pushed his chair back from the table. “Shall we walk?” he said.

  Rosalind had only been toying with the remains of the delicious dessert, and she obediently dropped her spoon and got to her feet before the servant could appear from the darkness to hold her chair.

  Naj led her through the house out into the walled garden. He sensed the approving smiles of the staff following them, and slipped his arm around her back as he ushered her out, feeling as he did so how much he wanted to be her protector. But if she was collaborating with Ghasib, no one could protect her.