Heart of Flame

by Janine Ashbless

  Then Rafiq went down on his knees before her. He did it so that he could kiss her breasts and take their sweet points in his mouth and breathe the scent of her skin as she quivered against him. He did it so he could bury his face in the cleft of her breasts and groan with desire even as he licked the salt off her skin. He did it so that he could unfasten her sandals and draw out the drawstring knot that held up her shalwar trousers and let them fall to her feet, and so that he could mouth the warm, taut skin of her stomach and slip his hand up between her thighs and cup the hot softness of her sex—and feel her as slippery between his fingers as a ripe peach whose juice escapes at the first squeeze.

  Taqla nearly fell over. She locked her fingers in his hair as he kissed her, his tongue tracing paths below the declivity of her navel, and his hands doing things to her that no man had ever done. For a while she forgot to breathe, aware only of the pleasure of his touch and the burgeoning demand in her body and the hunger of his mouth.

  Then, still kneeling, he sat back and took both her hands, drawing her down slowly on top of him to straddle his thighs. He revisited her breasts again with his kisses as she settled, and then, once she was held in his embrace, kissed her mouth once more. It was strange to be sitting eye to eye with him, even a little taller. His thighs were slab hard under hers. She was still wearing her long travelling robe that draped over them both but it was open all the way down the front so that he could slip his hands under and hold her bare bottom, taking her weight to keep her balanced.

  “All right?” he whispered.

  She nodded. “Will you take your shirt off?” she asked tentatively, and he grinned.

  “You do it.”

  A certain amount of wriggling by both of them was needed to get his shirt off over his head, but Taqla thought it well worth the effort. She wanted to be able to see him. She wanted the brush of her bare breasts against his chest. She wanted the hard slats of muscle under her fingers, the dark flare of chest hair and the thump of his heart. Rafiq had muscled shoulders and lean hips and everything between was a delight. She was torn between feeling wanton and feeling self-conscious, and she blushed and squirmed on his lap as he laughed softly under his breath.

  “You’re wonderful,” he told her.

  “Am I?” His words didn’t make any sense to her, but at this moment nothing made sense. All her emotions seemed to have exploded out of her body and to be whirling around like pigeons. She felt wonderful certainly, but she also felt frightened and ravenous and foolish. She wanted both to run away and to throw him down, to slam his fingers inside her and to faint. She needed him to catch all these desires and pin their thrashing wings and put them back inside her. She needed him to make sense of the chaos.

  “Do you want me, Taqla?” he asked, the laughter fading from his expression, the darkness welling in his eyes.

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. Then he reached to his waistband and released his own clothes with a tug. The loose cloth fell away and he freed himself from the folds. Taqla couldn’t help but look and blush, as she saw for the first time the full proud length standing between his thighs. He was hot and velvety, as hard as marble and aching with eagerness, and when she dared to slip her fingers around his girth, he had to bite his lip. “This is the first time,” he promised, the edge of a growl in his throat. “But not the last.”

  He lifted her bodily to nuzzle her breasts once more and then let her slide down his torso, impaling her wetness. He was too much for her inexperienced body. She made a noise of protest and tried to slow it down, clinging to his shoulders. Sweat sprang out on her skin. Rafiq slipped one hand under her rear to hold her up then the other hand between them, his thumb easing her with caresses as he opened her and entered her. She thought she would never be able to do it, never take that merciless thickness, never take that whole unyielding length. But she did. He moved his hips beneath her and a finger’s width at a time she surrendered to him. Sometimes he lifted her and slid out, only to conquer more ground on his return. She started to make noises, plaintive at first and then hungry, she hauled down on his shoulders and he braced himself, his muscles standing out. She began to pant as the fear gave way to pleasure and the pleasure gave way to need. She closed her eyes and rubbed herself against him, and he licked her straining throat as the ecstasy burst open within her like a long-stoppered flask shattering at last, flooding her with a joy so keen that it made her cry out. Then she collapsed.

  “Rafiq,” she whimpered, shocked at herself.

  “Shush. It’s good. Oh, it’s good.”

  He held her for a while, both arms wrapped around her shaking body. Then he gently tipped her over to lay her upon her back on his robe, and his own bulk pressed her into the desert earth. Taqla laced her legs about his hips as he began to move upon her. She’d been wet before; she was wetter now. She was made for him, a perfect fit, and every motion he made molded her to his increasingly urgent desire. His eyes grew shadowed, his breath shallower, his thrusts sharper, but still she beat him to his crisis, unfurling inside and entering into her own Paradise quite suddenly, straining beneath him as she felt each thrust all the way to her core. His teeth flashed and in the end he took her hard—harder perhaps than he’d intended—but Taqla, despite her cries, had no complaints at all.

  Groaning her name as he filled her, he shuddered to his climax.

  It did not stop there.

  It was late in the day by the time they finished. Rafiq rose first, left Taqla wrapped in his robe and wandered about for a while gathering dry thorns for a fire. He cooked the food he’d brought over the flames and they shared a frugal meal as the sun set. After that he undressed completely, and in the flickering light of the fire, using hands and mouth and body, he laid bare her many secret treasures like a man unlocking drawer after drawer of a box of precious jewels. He kissed her in places she’d never imagined being kissed, and wrung from her noises she had not realized herself capable of making. She surprised him too, with the depth and endurance of her need for him. And after they were both sated, he rolled on his back and pulled her on top of him, full length, so that he could run his fingertips through her hair and stroke them down her back.

  “Aren’t I heavy?” she whispered, her cheek upon his breastbone.

  Rafiq only chuckled.

  Taqla woke in the warm compass of Rafiq’s arms, her head against his chest and his heartbeat slow in her ear. For a long time she lay there, basking in a happiness as rare and fragile as body heat under the desert sky at night. This is it, she told herself. I will never be happier than this moment. Then she wriggled from his embrace and he half-woke.

  “You all right?” he mumbled, reaching for her. His body was warm and firm and every inch of her skin wanted to press itself to him.

  “Yes. Go back to sleep.”

  He turned his face to the cloak upon which they lay and his breathing deepened. As she slid out from under the saddle blanket they’d been using for cover, she glimpsed the smooth muscle of his upper arm and the bare skin of his back, and her insides clenched with desire.

  She took up her discarded clothing and dressed quickly, and though she draped the headscarf about her shoulders she didn’t bother to veil her face. Then she climbed to the top of a dirt rise and found a slope facing east to watch the dawn, seated in the cold sand. Slowly the gold light washed across the desert before her, turning the shadows blue and highlighting her dark hair in a fugitive halo of chestnut brown. The landscape was beautiful, but so empty and lonely. She sat on her own for a long time.

  Her headscarf sported a little brown spot where Rafiq had blotted his bloody lip. Funny, she thought, not smiling. It wasn’t a Dimashq custom, but she knew that among some of the desert tribes a maiden’s last-worn veil was used to soak and preserve the evidence of her torn virginity, and then as a married woman she would wear a new veil of different design. Well, she’d had no maidenhead to wipe up last night. Rafiq’s blood was only a substitute.

  The trouble with a
new dawn is that you can see everything clearly, she realized.

  Shortly after the sun’s disk cleared the horizon, Rafiq made his appearance, toiling over the crest of the rise. He walked up wordlessly behind her and sat at her back, embracing her thighs with his, wrapping his arms about her body. He pressed his face to her hair to breathe its scent then kissed her temple and her ear and her cheek lingeringly. She shivered as his cool fingers caressed her. Her nipples thrilled to the brush of his hand and she lifted her chin, letting his mouth nuzzle her throat. The wave of arousal that washed over her left her dizzy. Just his touch, the scent of his skin, the whisper of his smile—these were enough to overwhelm her. It was terrifying that anyone should have such power.

  Rafiq took her face in his hand to turn it to him, but when his thumb found the wet tracks on her cheek, he grew still.

  “What’s wrong?” he murmured. “Did you think that my love would’ve grown old with the night?”

  She shook her head slightly, but it was more a shiver than an answer.

  “Is it that I’ve dishonored you?”

  She was on surer ground here, and found her voice. “I have no family to dishonor—do with me as you like.”

  “Well.” He tightened his arms around her. “When this is all over, we will find the first judge we can and have marriage papers drawn up, I promise. I love you, Taqla.”

  She couldn’t stop the warm, painful blossom in her breast, or keep the tremble from her voice as she admonished him, “No one marries for love.”

  “I will,” he whispered, his lips warm on the whorls of her ear. “Or if you think that belittling, I will marry you for your wisdom and your courage—and your habit of saving my skin. There’s no woman on earth who would make me a better wife, Taqla.”

  Marriage for a man was easy, easy, easy, she thought bitterly. They walked in and out of it as if it were a bathhouse. As for her, it was as if she were standing on the lip of a precipice. She took a deep breath and stepped off with the words, “Don’t you think that that’s going to cause trouble with Ahleme?”

  The tiniest quiver went through Rafiq’s frame. He didn’t resist as she slid out of his arms and stood to face him. One look at his face told her what she’d guessed—that it hadn’t previously even crossed his mind what a proposal to her would mean. It was almost funny in a horrible way, a part of her thought.

  “Her father is the Amir of Dimashq, after all,” Taqla continued, her voice coming out cold and hard even though inside she felt a burning heat. “I don’t think he’ll take it too well to have his daughter as your second wife.”

  “You have a point.” Rafiq’s eyes betrayed the furious working of his mind as he tried to unscramble the ramifications.

  “So perhaps it would be better to marry her first and me second?” She hated the cold voice, but she didn’t seem able to stop it.

  Rafiq had gone pale. He knew he was somehow in the middle of a fight, and he had no idea which way he was facing or where to find solid ground to stand on. “That would be sensible,” he said, his lips barely moving, his eyes fixed on hers.

  “So I must bear living in the shadow of the most beautiful woman in Al-Sham?”

  “Oh,” he said, and then to himself, “Oh no.”

  “And look at it from Ahleme’s point of view. Here she is, the loveliest woman in the land, and straight after taking her to bed you contract with a woman older and plainer. Won’t she take that as an insult?”

  “She’ll have to put up with it,” he snapped, “if that’s what I want.” The moment the words were out of his mouth he knew he’d made a mistake. That was quite visible, but she had no mercy on him. Her eyes flashed.

  “Oh? That’s how it’s going to be with your wives, is it?” Taqla could feel her limbs trembling. “We put up with your every whim? However many of us there are you decide to marry?”

  “Oh shit.” Rafiq scrambled to his feet too, his brows knotted. “Look, it’s obvious—if I’m to be grand vizier or amir someday, then of course I will have more than one wife! What else do you expect? It doesn’t make any difference to how I feel about you.”

  “So generous,” she said through bared teeth.

  “What have I done wrong? Taqla, I swear to God that if I become amir, you will be my vizier, and to hell with tradition.”

  “I see. And what if I don’t want to be what you tell me to be? What if I don’t want to be wife number two, or even number one?”

  “Then what is it that you want?” he cried. “Do you want me to leave this girl to the djinni—is that it?”

  Yes! her most selfish inner voice cried, but “No,” she snapped. “Don’t be a fool.”

  His temper was rising to match hers. “Do you want me to give up on the hope of ruling Dimashq? Do you? Tell me! Because right now I have no idea what it is you do want from me, you crazy witch.”

  “That’s what you think of me, is it?”

  He shut his eyes, grinding his teeth. “Taqla—”

  “The crazy witch you tumbled in the sand?”

  “Shit—”

  “What I want,” she said from the depths of her bitterness, her voice ragged, “is for all this to be over and done with. I want to be home. I want you to rescue your beautiful girl and get the hell out of my life. I want you to be gone.” She pulled the silver ring off her finger and flung it to the ground at his feet. “Go on—take the Horse. I don’t need it, and you don’t need me anymore. Take it,” she snarled, “and get out!”

  Rafiq stood, his mouth set in a grim line and his chin high. His eyes burned with fury. For a moment she thought he was going to say something more, but he shook his head once, bent to snatch up the ring and stalked off without a word.

  Taqla slithered to her knees. She stared at the barren hillside until she heard the drumming of the Horse’s hooves, and as that sound faded away, she crumpled slowly and the first gasp of pain squeezed from her throat.

  Chapter Twenty

  In which djinn go to war.

  It was fortunate that riding the Horse Most Swift demanded the utmost concentration because it left no room in Rafiq’s head for other thoughts. He took all his anger and shoved it down into his belly where it burned like hot coals, and he left it to smolder there as he rode east, the sun first rising in his eyes and then moving over his shoulder as the day wore on. He stopped only a few times, mostly to drink, once in a tiny village where the inhabitants shut themselves in their stone huts and he left a silver dirham for the loaves of bread he stole from a windowsill. The miles turned to hundreds beneath the Horse’s silver hooves. He kept as much speed up as possible even when the land rose to barren hills and then rugged mountains where he had to pick his route more carefully. Always the tug in his gut drew him eastward.

  Night caught him on a mountainside. Only then, as he huddled in his aba in the lee of a rock, did he allow himself to dwell on thoughts of Taqla and let the heat rise from his belly to his mind, but once he’d started that he couldn’t stop. Perhaps it was the only thing that stopped him freezing to death. He was hurt and furious, and every conversation they’d ever had echoed round and round in his head until his skull ached. Every sharp glance she’d given him, every admonishment, the cracked spite in her voice at the end—they all came back painted in the hues of injustice and pain.

  What a fool you were for loving a witch, he told himself bitterly. They weren’t like other women. Their hearts were dead, even if they weren’t all hewn from stone. Hadn’t he seen that from the start? Every overture he’d ever made to her had been repulsed, and she’d never made any secret of her cold contempt for him. Even if she had succumbed briefly to lust, it hadn’t changed her fundamental antagonism. After slaking her desire, she had pushed him away once more, despising his protestations of love. Rafiq clenched his fists in his armpits and shivered. How do you thaw a river of ice? How do you touch a heart barricaded behind a mountain of rock? She’d heard his confession but tossed it back in his face. He’d offered her marriage and riches
, honor and devotion, and he didn’t know what else he could possibly promise her—but it wasn’t good enough. Nothing was enough for her. He’d allowed himself to love her, against all his better judgment, and it was like throwing himself against a stone wall. He could beat himself to death on that obdurate surface and she would never let him in.

  Scrunched against the bare rock, his feet and hands and rear numb with the mountain chill, Rafiq didn’t manage any sleep that night and little in the way of rest, though after a while he was too exhausted to rage anymore and simply fell into a nauseated stupor. It was, he recognized, one of the worst nights of his life, worse even than that one in the Abu Bahr when they’d had to endure the suffocating sandstorm, because at least there he’d had Taqla to hold—

  He caught the thought and thrust it aside with an angry grimace. Of course he regretted the loss of her warm, smooth body, he allowed grudgingly. She’d been a more than adequate bedmate. Not skilled, of course, but passionate and fluid and trusting. And serious in a way that he’d found deeply touching. He remembered the feel of her body straining beneath his, the look in her eyes as she’d yielded to him, the cries she’d made as pleasure broke upon her.

  For a moment the pain under Rafiq’s breastbone robbed him of the ability to breathe.

  She’d spurned him. That was all there was to it. He wouldn’t think about her again.

  In the morning, by the time he’d uncoiled his aching limbs and staggered out to the Horse, Rafiq had taken the fierce coals of his anger and buried them under a mountain of ice.

  That day the Horse galloped over snow as well as rock, and passed no human habitation. Rafiq was riding over terrain that no mortal animal could possibly cope with now, unless it was those mountain sheep that he once glimpsed picking their way up a sheer crag. The Horse sprang from rock to rock as lightly as if it were cantering over firm sand, and only the rattle of dislodged stones in deep ravines let Rafiq know how closely he was dancing with death.