The skittish animal shied and reared up suddenly, so high that Lorna was jerked out of the stirrups and
the saddle before she could save herself. She went flying to the sands, where she lay breathless, and shocked as the mare gave a shrill neigh and went galloping off.
Lorna staggered to her feet and clutched a hand to the sharp pain in her shoulder. She cried out after the horse, but her cries were lost in the wind and soon the frightened animal was lost in the dust haze, trailing its bridle and carrying away in the saddlebag the precious water and food Lorna had hoarded through the day.
She stood stricken, and then when the lightning flashed again she realized that she must reach the shelter of the rocks. There at least she would be out of the lashing force of the storm, for by now the wind was clutching at her cloak and sand grains were striking her face and her eyes.
Teeth clenched against the pain in her wrenched shoulder, she made doggedly for the shelter of the rocks and bushes. She felt too shaken, too hurt, even too angry for tears. Kasim's warning rang like a knell in her spinning brain. 'You have no real knowledge,' he had said, 'of how to fend for yourself in such a vast and dangerous place as the desert.'
The words seemed to mingle with the thunder and the wind. In the lightning she seemed to see again the flash of his eyes ... and then as she reached the scoop of sandy ground behind the rocks, everything whirled and she went suddenly as weak as a kitten. The winds roared, the skies darkened, and she fell into the darkness and felt the sand against her face .. .
Everything was in a fog when at last she opened her
eyes. The air was filled with the choking dust and there was a furnace taste in her mouth.
She remembered vaguely that she had collapsed to the sand, but now her shoulders rested against a boulder and someone was kneeling beside her . . . his face half covered by a shemagh of white linen, above which his eyes had a fierce glitter.
She was desperately thirsty, and her shoulder was throbbing with pain. Everything seemed like a nightmare, but the lip of the proffered water-bottle was real enough. She gulped gratefully at the water, and as her senses came back to her there came also the realization that the man's arm encircled her. She pulled away from him, her frightened eyes fixed on his cloth-veiled face.
`Quelle folie,' he muttered, and then the shemagh was pulled away to reveal strong, sun-bitten features that sent a thrill of wonderment through Lorna. The face was too well-remembered; his voice when he spoke had a savage edge to it.
`So you would brave a sandstorm to escape me, eh? As soon as I received word from Ahmed that you had taken a horse and galloped off, I set out after you from the Kaid's encampment. I know you are not quite a little fool. I knew you would make directly for the hills above Yraa, where you were staying at the Ras Jusuf.'
His eyes held hers, stern and brilliantly tawny. 'I might in my haste have passed these rocks had I not seen your shesh, caught and held by a thorn-bush.'
He gazed at her for the longest time; into her eyes that looked like bruised flowers. 'Foolish child,' he said. 'You might have known I would come looking
for you. You might have guessed I would find you.'
`I sometimes think you are Lucifer himself.. .' Then she gave a shudder of pain. 'NI . . . my shoulder seems to have something amiss with it. The lightning frightened my horse and I was thrown . . . oh, it does hurt !'
He took hold of her and felt around her shoulder as gently as possible. 'You have put out the bone,' he said. 'I can adjust it, petite, but to do so will hurt you.'
She looked at him through the fog of whirling sand, and because everything had gone so wrong for her, she said tiredly : 'Hurt me, Prince Kasim. You have done so before without letting it trouble your conscience.'
He held her, his face like a bronze mask, and then he took a cigarette-case from his robes and placed one between her lips. A match flared and he put it to the tip. 'A smoke will help the pain . . . are you ready?'
She took a deep pull on the cigarette and nodded. Her groan of pain was lost in the howling of the wind as with an expert movement of his hand the Shaikh jerked the dislocated bone back into its socket. She trembled with reaction and a cold sweat broke out on her forehead. A numbness followed the pain, which he said was caused by pressure upon a nerve. With lean, strong fingers he massaged her shoulder and arm until the life seeped back into them.
`Try moving it,' he murmured.
She obeyed. 'It aches, but I can tell the bone is back in place. Th-thank you.'
`You have nerve, Lorna.' He brushed the damp, sandy hair out of her eyes. 'Soon now the sandstorm will grow into a monster with many lashing tails and we might be buried beneath the sand. Does it frighten you that when this storm is done, we might lie for ever in each other's arms, with these rocks as our desert monument?'
She rested against the boulder and finished her cigarette. She saw that his black horse Caliph was firmly hobbled and tethered, and that it hung its head to avoid the cut of the flying sand. The wind whipped Lorna's hair, and she tried to ignore the touch of warm hands as they bound her white shesh about her face and neck.
`It was folly to run away and risk being caught in a sandstorm,' he said roughly.
`It was a greater folly to suppose I could get away from you.' She looked at him and heard the wailing of the wind. 'The desert takes care of its own, and you are as relentless as the desert.'
`You burn my heart,' he mocked. 'I find you like a snowflake lost in hell, and you have not a single kind word for me.'
`Since when, Prince Kasim, did you ever want kindness from me?' She looked at him with grave blue eyes. 'When did you ever give it?'
He frowned, and then turned his head so that his profile was outlined against the sand haze. 'There is no tendresse in a desert storm, eh? It is all danger, and we are very much alone in it.'
`How long will it last?'
`Who can tell? Le destin alone.'
`And when it is over?' She crushed out the end of her cigarette in the sand. 'One day you must let me go ... must I be completely humbled before you do so?'
Whatever his answer she never heard it, for in that moment there was a terrific roar and as the sand swirled about them, stinging and maddened by the wind, he wrapped her in the heavy folds of his cloak and drew the hood right over them, holding her close and hard against him.
She fought silently the fear of him that swept over her, and then she subsided and buried her face in his shoulder, lost with him beneath the driving, choking clouds of sand.
It was like a hurricane and Lorna heard the bushes being torn up and the smaller rocks flying in the wind. A demented wind, holding a shriek that tore at her nerves, that deafened and almost made her want to break into tears.
`It is all right.' The words were a comfort but every now and again he shifted their position, for the sand was piling up on them. Once when she gave a little moan of distress, he pressed his lips to her temple.
His lips were warm, rough with sand, and as her eyes closed there swept over her a feeling of weakness that had nothing to do with the storm. She lay helpless in his arms, crushed, breathless, smarting from the sand grains, yet she felt the oddest contentment stealing over her. The sand might bury them together. They might lie locked in an eternal embrace . . . like lovers in a myth.
`Lorna?' There was a note of urgency in the voice so close to her ear. 'Can you breathe . . . are you all right?'
`Kasim .' She spoke drowsily. 'I have the strangest
feeling..
`Come, you must not fall asleep !' He shook her and sand fell in upon them. Raging billows of sand, smothering them, grilling them alive in a furnace of choking dust and heat.
She forced open her eyes and found his face close to her own. Her lips parted, his lips crushed them and drew away. 'You must not fall asleep,' he said again, fiercely.
`Kasim . how long will it last?'
`I don't know, little one.' He held her within the protective arch of his chest, so clo
se that she felt his heart beating. 'Be brave.'
`I . . . I always try to be.'
`Yes, always you tilt your chin and look a man straight in the eye. Ah, such a wind ! A storm of the devil!'
`Your poor horse !'
`Yes.' He spoke sombrely. 'We must hope that the poor beast does not become crazed by the sand . . . he may break his tether.'
`We would be stranded.'
`Quite stranded.' The strong hands found the slimness of her under the cloak. She shuddered at her own depth of response to his touch.
`It is all right.' He spoke curtly. 'I am merely loosening your garments in order to help your circulation. I am not quite a monster of cruelty, if that is what you are thinking.'
She couldn't speak. She was helpless beneath the onslaught of feeling that swept her. She knew in this tortuous, stormy moment that she responded to his touch because she belonged to him. Heart, soul, and spirit she belonged to this man of the desert, and she had fled not from him but from the love she felt for him.
He had made her love him! He had invaded her heart and mastered her with the laugh of a tamer.
He had left a knife to her hand that first night in his tent . . . he might well have left her alone to see if she would try and escape him.
Loving him ... hating him for playing with her as a tamer might play with a young tigress, she fought the fascination that swept over her. 'Can you wonder that I think you a brute?' she gasped.
At once she felt the crush of his arms, and the next moment she realized that he was shielding her as a great cloud of sand struck at them, making it impossible for them to see or hear or even to think. They were deafened, smothered by a blinding wave of dust.
For seconds . . . minutes . . . hours they were lost in the whirlpool of sand, and then came a silence like a clap of doom, a thunderous stillness, and Lorna felt a rising panic as her breath seemed choked off.
With an oath, and using every ounce of his terrific strength, the Shaikh strained upwards until some of the sand began to shift. Again and yet again, until Lorna felt drops of perspiration fall from his face on to hers. Gasping and dizzy she tried to help him, and then his head and shoulders broke open the barrier of sand and the blessed air rushed in. He used his arms to cleave more space and pulled Lorna out into the open.
They lay gasping and gulping the air, the sand in their eyes, up their nostrils, and down their throats. All around them a strange stillness brooded ... a spellbound silence after the rage of the storm. A tremor ran through Lorna and all at once tears of reaction were streaming down her face and making grooves in the grit that clung to her skin.
Kasim rose to his feet and went to his horse. He spoke soothingly to the shivering animal and brushed off the sand that clung to the patches of sweat. His own face looked devilish, for sand had crusted in the lines beside his mouth and his eyes. 'Thank le bon Dieu we still have the horse,' he said. 'It would have been no picnic to be stranded in the desert with a bottle of water between us and many miles to cover to the encampment.'
Lorna blinked the tears from her lashes, still too dazed to grasp the full meaning of the words. Across the wastes of sand rustled a sharp night wind. All warmth had died out of the day. The heavens were dark, and over a high rim of sand came the howling of a jackal.
The Shaikh bent over Lorna with the water-bottle and urged her to drink. The water washed the grit from her teeth and eased her dry throat. He took a swallow himself and all the time he looked at her. 'I think we will rest here for the night and start back for the encampment early in the morning.'
`The encampment?' she echoed.
`Yes.' His voice took its knife edge again. 'You are coming back with me whether you want to or not.'
She pulled off her shesh, gritty with sand, and the
night wind ruffled her hair and soothed her eyes. `Why bother with me when I have spoiled your hunting and hawking with your friend the Kaid? I am but a woman . . . easily replaced.'
`Yes, you are but a woman.' He drew her to her feet and held her elbows in a firm grip. But I am not yet ready to let you go—not yet, my bit of ice. I have not yet known the pleasure of making you melt. Until then we stay together —Inshallah.'
`That expression is out of place !' She was on the defensive, still very shaken by her inward joy at being with him; of knowing he still wanted her. 'You obey only your own will, Prince Kasim.'
`You address me as if we were slave and master,' he mocked. 'Say my name without the preface.'
`The storm is over,' she said. 'If I said it then, it was out of fear.'
`Say it now . . . now when the wind is still and I am not fighting to keep both of us from being buried.' `Kasim
`It sounds a little strange on your English tongue.' He smiled and his arms closed around her. She was tense in them, fighting not to betray the delight that swept her. Man without a heart ! It made no sense that her heart should race at his touch.
`We must rest for a few hours,' he said, 'and you must keep warm. Our desert climate is a strange one, eh? So warm one minute, so cold the next . . . just like a woman.'
His warm breath stirred against her cheek. 'No— don't,' she said, afraid of what her reaction would be to his kiss.
`One day, my girl,' his laugh had a savage ring to it, `I shall wring a different cry from you. The English have a certain weakness, you know. They end by loving their enemies.'
`Love?' She was fighting him and her betraying heart. 'I don't know how you dare to use the word when it has no meaning for you.'
`If I ever loved you, mon ange, I would frighten you to death. Little icicle, you have no conception of what a fiery love is like between a man and a woman.'
`How would you know?' she fought back. 'You have never loved anyone.'
`I love only the desert, eh?'
Laughing, he released her and made for some tamarisk bushes that had been half torn out of the ground. They were woody stemmed and soon ignited into a cheerful blaze. After settling his horse for the night, the Shaikh came and settled himself beside the crackling fire. Lorna turned her head nervously when once again a jackal howled in the darkness beyond the circle of firelight.
`Don't be afraid.' A burning twig lit the handsome face as he applied it to his cigarette. 'The jackals won't come close while we have a fire.'
`They sound so—hungry.' She drew her cloak close around her. 'And the desert is so dark beyond the firelight.'
`The storm clouds have veiled the stars.' The end of his cigarette glowed and darkened. 'Come, rest against my knee and try to get some sleep.'
She felt weary and her eyes were sore from the
sand. It would be good to lie down, and after a slight hesitation she did as he suggested and rested against him. She was sleepy and yet acutely aware of their isolation. The tamarisk smoke mingled with that of his cigarette . . . his warmth began to steal into her.
Suddenly he glanced down and captured her gaze. `Are you not asleep yet?'
`It's all so strange . . . we might be the only two people alive in all the world.' She felt lost in his tawny eyes, so brooding and yet so vigilant in the glow of the fire.
`Adam and Eve.' A smile glimmered deep in his eyes. 'The desert has been called the Garden of Allah, and there is something of Eve in most women.'
`She was a temptress,' Lorna murmured.
`So?' He quirked an eyebrow and his gaze held hers. 'We are alone together under the veiled stars, and if you don't go to sleep very soon, I shall begin to think that you are tempting me to kiss you.'
She held her breath, for if he kissed her and she melted to his touch . . . she turned her face quickly away, as if to avoid his lips, and she heard him laugh softly, mockingly.
His shoulders rested against a boulder, and the heavy folds of his cloak made a tent around Lorna. The fire crackled, and in a while she gave way to the languor that crept over her. She drifted off to sleep, sheltered by the man she had fled from . . . only to find herself back in his arms again.
&n
bsp; CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE sandstorm had been so violent that it had wrought odd changes in the layout of the land. It was as if a giant had scattered the sandhills into a new pattern, and Lorna watched as Kasim took a keen look around him and she guessed he was judging the direction they should take from the rising sun.
She took a look at the hills behind them. In that direction lay Yraa and the place might have lain a thousand miles away for all she cared right now. She tilted her head and the sun seemed to catch in her hair. A thrill like no other ran through her as she felt a pair of tawny eyes upon her. 'Our way lies south,' he said sardonically.
His eyes had a burnished glint as she met them. What would be his reaction, she wondered, if she said that she wanted to go south, and wanted never again to look back towards the cool north? But it was something she must keep to herself. This complicated man of the desert liked a challenge, and while she challenged him she was sure for a while of a place in his life.
`You seem unsure of the terrain,' she said. 'What if we get lost?'
`I would always choose to be lost with you.' His smile was wicked. 'Your hair robs the sun—it is amazing that you look so fresh after the storm and a night spent in the desert.'
She swept her eyes over his unshaven face, and he fingered his jaws with a rueful grin. 'You might well look superior, you little madam. Any impudence from you and I shall—' He took a step towards her and she backed against his black horse, who jibbed and jangled his harness. She gave a half-laughing gasp, feeling a joy that ravished her as Kasim caught hold of her and bent her over his arm.
She was slim, pliant in her breeches and shirt, shuddering in his arms as he looked at her, his eyes desert gold beneath his tousled black hair.
`I could break you in half and discard the pieces,' he said in a soft, taunting voice. 'I could make you tame to my hand, if I wanted to.'
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