The Sultan's Heir

by Alexandra Sellers

  Thirteen

  After that he gave in to it. It was impossible to do anything else. Between the tempting food, the primitive heat, the greenery, the cooling fountains, the sea, the child’s steadily deepening trust of him, and Rosalind’s languid, hungry smiles and languid, delicious body, he was a lost man and knew it.

  Every morning and evening they swam in the cove. He taught Samir not to fear salt in his eyes or on his lips, or water in his nose, and watched his transformation into dolphin with deep pleasure. Or they put on masks and snorkels and, Najib and Rosalind carrying Sam between them on a sling, swam over coral beds to watch the fish feeding. Sam and Rosalind both were left amazed and wondering by the colour and variety and beauty of the underwater world.

  There were goldfish in one of the reflecting pools, too, and Sam could spend hours lying on his tummy, watching and playing with them while his mother, sitting nearby, read some of the books from the shelves in the study.

  Newspapers came in by helicopter a couple of times a week, and usually there was a bag for Najib, too. But Rosalind didn’t bother much with the papers. She was taking a holiday from the real world. She did not want to know about politics or war or even whether she and Najib were a subject for the gossip writers.

  Although she found the scenery compelling, Najib advised her against taking walks inland. The heat was too strong, and it would be very easy to lose her direction in such unfamiliar terrain. In the evenings, when Sam was in bed, he took her along the line of the shore, which in one direction could be traversed for almost a mile before one of the fingers of rock made it impassable. Along one side of the finger they could walk on the beach to the end of the tip jutting out into the sea, but around the other side the face was a sheer cliff down into the water.

  High at the very fingertip of this mound was a cave. Inside, in the soft rock, someone had carved niches to create sleeping platforms. There was no way of knowing how long ago the humans who had done this had lived—thousands or merely hundreds of years ago. Yet there was a feeling in the place, as if of connection over a huge distance in time, to someone not so very unlike herself.

  The cave had probably been chosen because it mostly faced east, getting the rays of the rising sun and avoiding the heat of the afternoon. But just outside there was a flat platform, probably once used for fire, where they could sit and watch the sunset, and feel their kinship with those other humans who had probably worshipped the sun as a powerful, dangerous father.

  Once they made love there, high over the pounding waves, as the light turned from golden to orange to red, and then the night had enveloped them.

  Rosalind had never been so happy, not since long-ago days of childhood, when her parents had taken her for carefree holidays on the Mediterranean and it had seemed to her that she would never have anything to trouble her.

  Logic warned her this, too, was destined not to last. But what was the point of worrying about the future in such a magical present? Najib never said he loved her, but it was there in his eyes as he touched her, in his body when the pleasure was too much for them both. It was in his deep caring for Sam, that masculine mix of strength and tenderness that entranced the boy as well as his mother.

  And if he sometimes seemed tortured when he turned to her, if it seemed that he wished he could resist the powerful chemistry they shared, but could not—well, what was that but a promise that, in the end, love would triumph?

  “Look, Mommy!”

  There was a narrow strip of beach in the neighbouring cove that, protected by a rock overhang, was in shadow as soon as the sun passed midheaven. Rosalind sometimes took Sam there with his bucket and spade during the afternoon. There was a large bowl-shaped rock shelf just underwater, and another shelf above, and in the heat of the afternoon it was pleasant in the shade, lying on the sand or sitting on the rock shelf with her feet in the water, while Sam played. When she got hot she would slip down into the bowl and let the cooling sea wash her.

  Usually she took a book, not from the library, but one of the paperbacks she had asked the staff to bring her from town on a supply run in the helicopter.

  At the moment she was reading a thriller. She wasn’t enjoying it very much; it was violent and unpleasant, but the writer wrote compellingly and she couldn’t seem to stop reading it. She put it down as Sam called, and looked to see his latest sand creation.

  “A boat!” he called. It didn’t look much like a boat, unless it was a steamship that was sinking, with only two pail-shaped funnels still showing above the waves. Sam came up to where she was sitting on the beach and pointed out over the water, and Rosalind turned.

  It was a boat, all right, a motor launch coming into view well outside the cove. Two men stood at the stern fishing, and waved as they saw her. Rosalind and Sam waved back. And just as she realized that the men were pointing something at them that glinted in the sun, the sound of a gunshot cracked the air, echoing loud off the cliffs around them.

  She screamed. Screamed and grabbed Sam in the same breath, throwing him flat on the sand and piling on top of him, to protect him with her own body.

  She craned to see behind her. The men had lowered their weapons and were looking away from them, over the water to the west. Sam was just starting to cry from surprise and shock.

  “Sam, we have to get up and run,” she said. “We have to run away from the bad men in the boat,” she said urgently. “You hang on tight, Mommy will carry you. All right? Go!” she cried, and surged onto her feet, her back still to the boat to shield him, grabbed him under the arms, dragged him up, felt him cling to her like a monkey, and started running.

  But it was far, far too late for that. With hideous, terrified astonishment, Rosalind saw that two other men were coming at them from higher up the beach, and there was no mistaking the lethal weapons they were carrying as they ran down towards her.

  When they saw her, one veered in her direction, but he didn’t raise his rifle, and, not wasting any breath on screaming, Rosalind clutched Sam tight and just kept on running. The gunman was shouting in Parvani, “Get down!”

  Sam was too shocked now to make a noise. Rosalind ran up the beach into the blinding sunshine, trying to avoid the cutting rocks, towards the top of the finger. It was one way back to the house, over the finger and down, but she knew she would be dangerously silhouetted at the top.

  As she crested the rise, she crouched over and, still running, bent as low as she could to the ground.

  On the other side of the finger, Najib was running towards them at full tilt. “Get down, Rosalind, get flat!” he shouted, and she obediently dropped down, pressing Sam down and spreading herself over him again. She was panting, her heart beating so hard it seemed ready to explode. Sam was crying, the choked, fitful wail of sheer terror.

  “It’s…uh uh…all…uh…right, dar…uh…ling,” she panted when she could. “Najib…is…”

  And he was there, crouching over them in his white djellaba, and she saw without surprise that he had an automatic in his hand. He put his hand on her head, signalling her to keep low. Then he found Sam’s shoulder and grasped it.

  “Sam, it’s all right,” he said. “I’ve got you safe.”

  “There were two men right on the beach,” she warned him. “They have Uzis, I think.”

  He remained crouched there, looking into the distance behind her, and on all fours, spread low with Sam under her, Rosalind slowly slithered around so that she could see. She gasped.

  “Who are they?” she cried.

  There were now two boats in the water, much closer to shore than before. Both were motor launches, but there the resemblance ended. One was dark green and bristling with aerials and antennae, carrying several armed men. Three of them were levelling automatic rifles at the occupants of the white boat. In the white boat stood the two men she had first seen, their arms up over their heads, hands empty.

  The green boat was slowly coming up alongside the white one, and as the gap closed, two of the armed men bo
arded. As she watched they handcuffed the occupants of the white boat, and then forced them, none too gently, into the second boat.

  A man on the beach was talking into his radio; the other was now standing only yards away from Naj and Rosalind and Sam, legs apart, his gun in the ready position, his eyes combing the landscape.

  Sam struggled, and she drew him up into her arms, and they sat silently watching.

  One of the men who had boarded the white boat started the engine, and it scudded out into a turn to follow as the green one, its prisoners below, gunned its motor and set off. A moment later both boats disappeared from sight behind the angle of rock, then reappeared beyond the next cove, heading up the coast towards Daryashar.

  Silence fell. The two men left on the beach approached them, still watchful.

  “Let’s get you into the house,” Najib said, and bent to pick up Sam.

  Her body was running with chills. She had never been so frightened in all her life, and she was bursting with questions.

  So was Sam. “Were they bad men, Daddy?” he asked.

  Whatever he was actually feeling, Najib was completely calm outwardly. He reached out his free arm and wrapped Rosalind in against his side as they walked.

  “Well, we don’t know, Sam. We’ll ask them.”

  “Were the other men bad men, too?”

  “No, the other men are soldiers. They came to protect you.”

  Sam babbled as the shock wore off and excitement started to take over. Najib held him firmly and spoke calmly all the way back to the house, and Rosalind felt how soothing his voice and presence were. He was calming her, too.

  Outside the gate, their escort sketched a salute and turned away into the rocky landscape.

  As the shock wore off, her feet suddenly started to sting. They were crossing the central courtyard when the housekeeper, Rima, came out behind and cried in horrified Arabic, pointing at the floor, “Who was wounded?”

  Rosalind looked down and discovered that she had left a trail of blood over the tiles. Her feet had been cut on the rocks.

  “Mommy’s feet are bleeding!” Sam cried, with every evidence of satisfaction, and Najib and Rosalind both laughed. Rima rushed over, exclaiming, and nothing Rosalind could say would convince her that it was not important and she would wash the blood off in the shower.

  No, Rima insisted, appealing to Najib’s authority, Rosalind must allow her feet to be dressed, they must be properly tended against infection.

  Eventually it was all over, her cut feet neatly cleaned and bandaged. She heard the helicopter come and go. But it wasn’t till Sam had eaten his dinner, relived the excitement over and over, and at last gone to sleep that Rosalind had time to talk to Najib, and then he wasn’t around. She went looking, and found him in the study, alternately answering the phones and talking on the radio.

  She sat down and waited for him to be free.

  “Have they been questioned?” she asked, when he hung up the phone again and turned to her.

  “Yes. They say they are journalists, paparazzi. They have papers and the cameras to prove it. They wanted no more than to steal a few pictures in advance of the wedding.”

  Rosalind shook her head. “They fired a gun at us.”

  Najib frowned, his hand going instinctively to the phone. “How many shots did you hear?”

  “One.”

  He relaxed. “The military boat fired across their bows.”

  “Oh,” she said, and heaved a long, exhausted sigh. “Oh, thank God! Do you think they really are paparazzi?”

  “My men say that they were badly frightened and put up no resistance to being boarded. The film has been developed, a dozen or so pictures of you and Sam on the beach. The boat has been taken apart and there is nothing on it, no surveillance equipment, no weapons of any description. They rented it for the day from a local man in Daryashar who is now screaming for its return. He has no known connections to any political group.”

  “Your men?” she repeated.

  Najib hesitated. “The men detailed to guard you are secret service agents attached to the Palace Guard. They come under my purview.”

  “I didn’t know we were being guarded here.”

  He looked at her. “But I told you that was precisely why we wished you to come to East Barakat.”

  She shrugged. “I thought this place was far enough out of the way, and no one knew we were here….”

  He shook his head, his jaw tight. “Where did you get your professional training?” he said, cutting across her.

  She was completely thrown by the change of subject. “My professional—do you mean, where did I take my language degree?”

  “My men say you reacted with the instincts of a trained agent, Rosalind,” he said impatiently, as if she were being wilfully naive. “Where did you learn these skills?”

  “A trained agent?” she repeated incredulously. “What do you mean?”

  He looked at her. “You protected Sam like a trained bodyguard, Rosalind,” he explained.

  “And that’s enough to make you suspicious?” she demanded hotly. “Your men are too far removed from ordinary life! Try ‘determined mother’! What do you imagine any mother would do if someone started shooting at her child?” She was getting angrier as she spoke. She couldn’t believe this! In spite of everything he was still in doubt about her motives! Their intimacy counted for exactly nothing.

  He sat unmoved. His doubting silence infuriated her. Rosalind flung herself to her feet, staring across the desk at him.

  “You imagine that because I instinctively protect my child I’ve been in one of Ghasib’s terrorist training camps, is that it? Get a life!”

  She whirled and stormed out.

  Najib watched her go. He sat there for a long moment, ignoring the phone that had started to ring. He pulled open a drawer and drew out a photograph, from one of the photographers’ films that had been developed.

  In it, Rosalind was standing on the beach, looking towards the camera, her arm up in signal.

  She had been expecting someone. Who?

  The episode unsettled them, introducing the snake into their paradise. She couldn’t escape from the knowledge that he had doubted her.

  In one way she could hardly blame him. On the surface her story didn’t fit reality. Yet in her heart Rosalind was disappointed. He didn’t believe her, and that meant he didn’t trust her.

  He made such passionate love to her at night that until now she had hoped, or believed, that it was more than physical attraction. But if a remark from a secret service agent could pitch him into such doubt, what did it say about his feelings for her?

  As for her own feelings for Najib, Rosalind was no longer in any doubt. She was falling deeply in love, heart, mind, body and spirit. She was learning to trust him at the deepest levels of her being.

  Sexually he was so giving, she could trust him so deeply. She could not have given herself up to the pleasure he gave her without trusting him. She found it bewildering to learn that he could make love to her at night, yet still harbour suspicions about her in the day….

  He joined her for dinner as usual. It was her favourite time of day—when the heat of day was over, the night soft and scented all around them, she and Najib talking together.

  But tonight there was a constraint between them. They did not talk so easily about little things. At night they often discussed incidents from Sam’s day, the things he had said or done, and he laughed with her so warmly that she imagined he was becoming attached to Sam, too.

  But tonight that was overshadowed by what had happened on the beach. Any mention of Sam brought up images too harrowing to contemplate.

  When Najib’s gaze rested on her tonight, there was a frown in his eyes, as if he wanted to pierce her soul and learn what was there. But she had already given him access to her soul. He knew what was there. How was it he did not recognize this? Apart from one secret that was not her own, there was nothing she would not share with him.

&
nbsp; The discovery that he did not understand this was depressing. It said that she had been building castles in air. That her dreams had no foundation.

  It tormented her, but he was tormented, too, tonight. Usually after dinner they walked for a while in the garden, but tonight there was a mutual silent understanding that they would not do so.

  Rosalind went to the bedroom alone, feeling restless and unsettled. Today’s events had brought home to her the truth of what she was doing and why. Up till now it had seemed more of a game. From the moment Najib al Makhtoum had first knocked on her door, she seemed to have been divorced from her real life.

  But all those armed men had been real. Too real. They brought home to her what, she saw now, she had never really accepted in her heart before—that Najib and others really believed Sam’s life might be in acute and immediate danger. They had obviously been under surveillance the whole time. Every time she and Sam had been outside the house, they had been watched.

  He had said the danger would be over in a few weeks, and she had allowed that to lull her into thinking the danger might not be so real.

  Now it suddenly seemed she had to reassess everything. But she didn’t know what new interpretation to put on the facts.

  It grew late and later, and still he did not come. She began to think he meant to sleep in another room. Rosalind tried to read, but the thriller she was in the middle of was filled with such dark motives and actions that, rather than taking her mind off her problems, it was unsettling her even more. What she needed was a nice love story, but the pile of new paperbacks had been moved from the room. The staff all seemed to have the idea that books belonged in the study, and she hadn’t got around yet to asking them to leave her books in the bedroom.

  She put the thriller down and just lay thinking for a while in the lamplight, but she still wasn’t in any shape to fall asleep after the day’s excitement, and finally she got up to go foraging for her books.

  The house was in darkness, but probably if she put on a light a servant would appear from somewhere. She didn’t want to disturb anyone; she knew her way. The courtyard was just lighted enough by the stars. She crossed the small courtyard and into the hallway that led to the larger one, and felt her way along the wall in semi-darkness.