It waved at her from the top of a ridge, a soft silver hand catching the sunlight with a syncopated rhythm of glimmer under the bright sun, a liquid mirror. The breath hissed between her teeth as she groped for the binoculars against her chest.
“Something?”
The truck slowed, and she nodded once as she fitted the glasses to her eyes. “Something large and metallic. Moving in the wind.”
Latif Abd al Razzaq pulled the four-wheel drive off the road and stopped, and Jalia combed the ridge with the binoculars to find it again.
“There,” she said. It was a chunk of aluminum, perhaps, silver but not necessarily with the glitter of newly ripped-apart metal, not necessarily part of a plane that has crashed taking two young and vital human beings to a wasteful death.
“I can’t tell what it is.”
But he had already turned off the engine and now stepped out on the grey-and-brown mountainside. Jalia scrambled to follow.
A familiar sense of dread dragged at her. In the past few days there had been a half dozen times when she had seen something that might have marked wreckage from a downed plane, and each time her heart beat a frantic, anxious message in her temples, weighted down her stomach so that she felt old.
She clambered after him across the rugged, half breathtaking, half terrifying landscape, towards the ridge of rock overlooking a crevasse. Behind it the mountainside rose sheer and raw, making her dizzy.
If the plane had crashed here and gone over the edge…how far down was the floor of the crevasse behind that ridge?
The last few yards were difficult, and she was panting with fear and exertion as she approached the edge. Above her, Latif reached the object she had seen and knelt down to examine it.
“A cargo door,” he said as she came up, and her hand flew to her mouth.
“Oh, God!” It lay broken and torn where it had been caught on a sharp rock and prevented from falling over the edge. A thin strip of torn shiny metal attached to a hinge waved in the air. “Was there—is it part of Bari’s plane?”
A sudden breeze caught the glittering aluminum, and her heart fluttered in time with it. Jalia dropped flat on her stomach and peered over the rocky ridge.
“No, it is too big. Part of a commercial or military aircraft, lost in flight. It has been here for a long time,” Latif said.
“Oh, thank God! Are you sure?” Her constricted lungs opened again, her heart calmed. She believed him, but still she put the binoculars to her eyes and peered over the ridge to get a view of the bottom.
She wasn’t sure what hope there could be, if the plane had come down anywhere in the mountains. But she hated to imagine it pitching down into terrain like this.
“There’s a valley!” she cried. Nestling down among the crags was a wide green oval, thriving with life. She took the glasses from her eyes and peered down, half disbelieving.
“From the road you’d never guess it was there!” At either end of the valley two thrusting formations of rock created a kind of optical illusion when she looked up, seeming much closer together than they were.
“Look at those two peaks at either end! From this angle, don’t they look like falcons or hawks or something? What a beautiful place.”
“Royal falcons,” he said. “They are called the Shahins.”
She became aware of a sense of peace surrounding her. In the far distance Mount Shir presided over all, a brooding presence, dangerous and protective at the same time, the powerful mother-father of the lands that pressed against her like suckling infants.
Jalia lifted her head and gazed up at the rich blue sky. Suddenly she understood that her defensive attitude towards this country had prevented her truly seeing it.
Now, for once, she allowed herself to see what she was looking at, to feel the air that surrounded her. It was so fresh, so pure. And it seemed charged with energy, as if the great mountain were a generator.
“This really is a wonderful place,” she murmured and, turning to share it with Latif, she smiled at him. “I’m beginning to understand why my mother and father never lost their hope of returning home.”
She gazed down at the valley again. There weren’t words to describe the calm and beauty that lay over the scene.
“I can see goats! And farms—how can it be so green after such a long drought, I wonder? So many trees. Do you know the name of the valley?” she demanded, thinking she would not be surprised to hear him say Shangri-La.
“We call it Sey-Shahin,” he said. “Three Falcons.”
She turned to look into his face, her eyebrows climbing with surprised enquiry.
“Yes, this is my home,” said Latif Abd al Razzaq Shahin. “Outsiders give us, and the valley, the name Marzuqi.”
“Marzuqi,” Jalia repeated softly. The Blessed. She could see how the valley had achieved the name. It looked fertile and protected, and as old as time.
“It’s so green,” she said, feeling how inadequate the word was to describe what she saw and felt.
“The drought did not affect us so badly here, so when the rains came, the fields recovered quickly.”
Jalia glanced around. “Can we go down? Where is the road?”
The valley looked at first glance to be completely surrounded by impenetrable, unyielding rock. But Latif pointed across the valley to where a grey line emerged from a dark circle like an egg under the feet of the falcon-shaped rock, and slanted slowly down to the valley floor.
“That is the tunnel. The road has been badly damaged by the heavy rains since the drought ended. At the moment the way in and out is on foot, or by mule.”
“My God, how will people manage?”
A pebble was dislodged under her elbow and went over the edge to bounce down and down. She watched it with a curious feeling that the movement had significance.
“We are used to it. The road is only a few years old, and was badly made. Ghasib finally forced the tunnel through because every time he sent his administrators to the valley they lost their way in the passes. Some say that Genghis Khan had the same difficulty.”
Jalia laughed and clapped her hands together in delight. “So this is the valley that was never conquered?”
“Even Islam came to Sey-Shahin very late. There are many ancient rituals among our people that exist nowhere else in the world. Western scholars sometimes wish to come here to study what they call ‘living tradition’—hoping to find a mirror of the past in the present practices of the Marzuqi people.”
She frowned in thought. “I remember someone in the department coming on a field trip here a few years ago with very high hopes. But I don’t think—”
She stopped because of his expression. “What happened? Do you know?”
“Possibly he got lost in the passes,” Latif said guilelessly, and Jalia erupted in a burst of laughter, then clapped her hands over her mouth and sat gazing up at him, her eyes alight.
His eyes met hers in shared amusement, and she felt a treacherous prickle along her spine that said it was not only the land her prejudices had prevented her seeing clearly.
“The only experienced guides in this area are Sey-Shahini tribesmen. Sometimes a bribe is high enough, and someone slips through. That encourages others to think that such bribes work. Guides used to make a living in summer from failing to find the valley.”
She was laughing, though God alone knew why. Being an academic herself, she ought to have regretted the thwarting of scholarship.
But the valley looked so enchanting that something in her did not want to think of its people being analysed and “published.”
Her blood was stronger than her academic loyalties, maybe. Certainly as she gazed down at the flourishing little valley, her heart was drawn there.
“Suppose I wanted to—”
The expression on Latif’s face struck her a blow that left her breathless, and choked the words in her throat. He was looking at her as if that was exactly the question he wanted to hear.
A chasm opened in front of
her, without warning, dangerous and deep, as Jalia understood that she had been mistaken in his feelings all this time. Latif Abd al Razzaq might be angry, he might be impatient, but it wasn’t dislike that was motivating him.
He wanted her. It was there in the fierce emerald eyes, in the set of his jaw, in the way his hand gripped the rock he leaned against—as if he held it to prevent himself from reaching for her. Every muscle and ligament now shouted the truth that she should have heard weeks ago—had heard, perhaps, and had run from.
But blindly. Like a terrified fool in the dark she had run straight into danger, straight into the falcon’s nest.
Suddenly she saw it—the whole process by which he had brought her here, out into the starkly beautiful land of her ancestors, to the heart of his own existence, to a state of mind where she could no longer deny the land’s deep and abiding hold over her heart and blood. It was a trap, baited with the simplest psychological techniques.
This was what her parents had hoped for—that the country would somehow get to her. That the land and the people would convince her where words could not.
What a fool she had been, playing with so potent a danger as a man like Latif Abd al Razzaq. Her first instinct had been right—to run. She should never have come back to Bagestan, ring or no ring. What good would a ring do if her own heart betrayed her?
The silence extended while he watched the play of emotion on her stern, beautiful face.
“What did you want to say?”
“Nothing,” said Jalia. “We’d better get going.”
She was under threat. She knew it. Back in the little truck she watched Latif’s profile surreptitiously, and reminded herself that she didn’t go for the dark, eagle-eyed look.
And yet…oh, how his masculinity emanated from him, reaching out and touching her with an aura that said, I am a man. You are a woman.
She might not go for his type, but from the beginning she had instinctively felt that there was something about Latif that spelled danger for her. She should have done anything rather than let herself get into this vehicle with him and head off into a country of stark beauty with no time limit and no destination.
But she knew it too late.
They got lost in the passes. Jalia looked around her as they drove over the rough stony road. My God, and well they might! she thought. The road itself was sometimes hardly discernible to an untrained eye; could she be sure of following it even five miles?
If she tried to get away from Latif up here she’d be the Woman Who Never Returned. They’d find her skeleton in twenty-five years…
She was stuck with him. Because she knew without asking that he would not turn around and take her back home. And she was afraid to ask, for fear of what the asking would tell him.
She was watching him, hardly aware of her own focus, in a state near panic. He was so attractive, so vital, like a healthy wild animal. His blood seemed to pulse with life just under his skin.
And he was getting under hers. He always had, if only she’d had the wit to realize it. This was why she’d run home after the Coronation. It was why she was wearing Michael’s engagement ring right now.
Not because of some nameless threat from her parents, but because she was on a precipice with Latif Abd al Razzaq, as surely as the pebble she had knocked over the ridge to the valley.
Seven
Night closed in quickly in the mountains. As darkness fell Jalia sat by their campfire on a plateau, watching the sunset.
In the broad rugged pass they were travelling through, the villages were few and far between. Below, a boy followed a couple of skinny goats along a sloping path, his lazy switch urging them home. In the little village on the edge of the valley, a white cloth hung on a line, flapping in the breeze. Smoke trickled up from a hearth fire.
She wondered who was tending that fire, and whether that woman’s life was anything like her own.
It was Sey-Shahin Valley again, but from a different vantage point, for the road had twisted away from the valley for the past few days as it fought its way through the passes.
Last night they had stayed in a small village clinging to a rugged slope. It was the last village they had seen.
Today they had travelled a whole day through bleak, empty passes, in a large erratic circle around the base of one giant falcon-shaped peak.
The road had finally led down into the tunnel hewn through the living rock. An hour ago they had emerged onto a narrow plateau, with the valley spread out below them.
To one side, a tiny waterfall showed where a mountain stream tentatively flowed again after the years of drought. There they had found a level, lightly wooded spot to pitch their tent.
The haunting sound of goats’ bells and a distant muezzin mingled on the clear air. The sun was going down in flames behind the mountains, and in the long, lonely shadows all around her lay a starkly beautiful landscape dominated by the two rocky sentinels, one towering above her, one on the opposite side of the green valley.
Over all brooded the ever-present, distant white peak now bathed in liquid gold, Mount Shir.
Jalia wished it were not so beautiful. Out here, face-to-face with the land, she found that it pulled at her heart with a feeling that was almost pain. From the beginning of the adventure this yearning for the might-have-been had been aching in her, just beyond the reach of consciousness.
Since her first view of Sey-Shahin Valley, though, she had been sharply aware of it: if Ghasib had never betrayed her grandfather, this would have been her country. She would have been familiar with these crags and passes, with the magical green valleys, with the handsome and courageous people who lived here, where life held such different values than those she had grown up among.
And where she might have thrilled with delight when Latif Abd al Razzaq took command of every situation and of her, looked at her with possessive eyes, told her what a man could do to make his wife love him….
The memory of that conversation in the car on the day of Noor’s disappearance had been called up again since her moment of enlightenment overlooking his valley home, and now, with the birds in the valley singing the sun down, the air crisp and clear all around, and water set for boiling in the fire she tended, it summoned up in her a fierce longing.
What Latif had spoken of was part of the mountain warrior’s code in the land that should have been the land of her birth—bravery in battle, generosity to friends, hospitality to strangers, and for your wife…virile lovemaking.
At the time, sitting in the car beside him, feeling so attacked by his disapproval, she had been sure Latif had said what he had merely to be provocative. But after that strange silent exchange on the crag overlooking the valley, something had changed between them.
Now her imagination kept revisiting earlier moments, reassessing what she had seen and felt from him. And now, when it was too late to do her any good, the truth of that conversation in the car seemed so wildly obvious she could hardly believe she’d missed it—Latif had spoken the way he did because he was attracted to her. Because, in spite of his denial, he had imagined teaching her—what had he said?—a man’s power over a woman. Even then.
And the attraction had not lessened with proximity. What a fool she had been to come with him on this fruitless search! Instead of saving Noor, she had put herself in danger.
She could feel the intensity of his desire, as if the air thickened around them, whenever he approached, and it was getting more powerful and impossible to ignore by the hour.
She could feel it now, when he was out there in the shadows somewhere, hunting. It was over her like a cloak, a blanket of sexual heat, stroking her hair, kissing her skin with a hunger unlike anything she had dreamed possible.
How had she not understood it from the beginning? How had she been so blind?
Need burned like honey in her muscles as she remembered his eyes, his deep voice, making her stretch slowly and lift the heavy fall of hair from the back of her neck while an unfamiliar sensuou
sness warmed her, and she heard his voice again in her head.
Who is your fiancé, that you do not understand a man’s power over a woman?
She raised her head, and Latif was there, standing in the black shadows on the other side of the fire, watching her with a face like a brigand’s, the face of a man who sees what he wants and means to take it.
Jalia’s eyes widened as she stared up at him, double flames leaping in her half entranced, half frightened gaze, her hands frozen in her own hair, sensual need making all her movements languid with unconscious erotic temptation.
He could take her now—the truth was there in her eyes. For one night he could make her his.
This night.
Latif’s gaze licked around her with flame hotter than the fire. His lips parted for a moment, then closed resolutely. She saw how passionately full his mouth was, and how iron control held it firm. If a man like him ever let go…
If the mountain beneath her cracked from side to side…
Without a word he turned away and bent to drive a notched stake at one side of the fire with neat blows from his axe. Then a second, on the other side. He set a third, thinner stick to rest on the notches. On it was a small animal carcass, neatly skinned. The flesh began to hiss and blacken as the fire licked it.
Later they lay side by side in their sleeping bags with the night all around them. Overhead the stars gleamed against the lush black fabric of the sky, dense and rich, and so far away.
She was bone tired, she was well fed, but still she couldn’t sleep. Jalia lay gazing up at the stars, wondering which of the thousands of sparkles she saw were still alive, and which had died before the earth gave birth to life, yet still sent their light through the void to thrill her.
She felt Latif stir beside her, and turned her gaze. He was lying on his back, his hands crossed under his head. She saw starlight reflected in his eyes. He couldn’t sleep either, and she knew why.
The Ice Maiden's Sheikh Page 5