“I could almost eat it raw!” she cried.
“You might have to.”
The raft was being carried at an angle away from the sandy part of the beach towards the rocks. Bari jumped out, landed in waist-deep water and, waving her to stay aboard, dragged the painter over his shoulder. His arm and back muscles rippled as he guided the little raft into the long shadow of a rugged outcrop of black rock that thrust up out of the smooth white sand, the sea splashing gently against it.
Noor watched in helpless fascination as he strode up the sloping beach, the water level dropping to reveal his slim waist, his muscled hips, strong thighs. The white cloth of his shalwar, stained dark by the water, clung to him, outlining every rippling fold of well-toned muscle. The inside of her own thighs unexpectedly melted at the sudden sense-memory of the firmness of his body against her in those pleasure-drugged minutes when her legs had clung to him and he moved inside her.
It had been painful and an utter delight all at once, as her body now insistently reminded her. The slap of the waves against the raft, its gentle rise and fall, the erotic swelling that lifted the raft and let it sink, all conspired to bring back her first experience of that primal motion, that fundamental rhythm underlying all creation.
Though she hadn’t achieved the peak under the thrust of his body, the pain of lost virginity hadn’t stopped her hunger for him, for more, more, more. His mouth and his hands had been what sent her over the edge into swooping pleasure, but it wasn’t mouth and hands she remembered now. It was him deep inside her, pushing her towards some magical truth that had eluded her then but still magnetically beckoned and promised. The mere touch of him had given her a deep satisfaction, even without the soaring pleasure, and it was that which, to her horror, she was suddenly yearning and aching for.
The completion. The sense of connection at the deepest level. The oneness of it.
He was despising you all the time, Noor reminded herself fiercely. It was an act to trick you. He was prostituting himself for his grandfather’s money.
The life raft ran aground, and she climbed out of it with a slight stagger. The waves bubbled and frothed against her shins, warm and inviting.
“We must carry it ashore. Take that side,” Bari commanded, as if he expected to be obeyed, and Noor just couldn’t think of a way to rebel that wouldn’t end with her having to obey. When they had carried the raft above the high-tide mark and into the lee of the rock, he nodded approvingly, as if to a child.
“Very good.”
He searched inside for the flashlight, and Noor turned away from the sight of him to watch the sun set underneath a perfect spectrum of colours: blood-red at the horizon, then glowing orange, golden yellow, soft green blending to blue, then through deeper and deeper blues to indigo and finally, overhead, to dark amethyst.
Underneath the sky the water reflected the sparkling, deep velvet blackness, the surface glowing with dancing touches of red and gold.
“Princess!” The voice broke in to her reverie and she looked up to see the mocking grin she so hated.
“I thought so!” Bari said, grinning. “But there’s no princess on this island, Princess. The title’s temporarily suspended. Everybody pulls their own weight here.”
Noor glared at him. “I was just watching the sunset for a moment!” She didn’t add, as a way of keeping my eyes off your butt. It would be a cold day in hell before she said anything like that.
“Uh-huh,” Bari said, as if he didn’t believe a word of it. “Well, sunset is the last thing you have time for, Princess. If you want to eat, you’re going to have to work for it.”
“I don’t think it’s so urgent we can’t take a moment to get our bearings!”
“The sun’s setting fast. Get your bearings in the morning. You can start by collecting stones to circle the fire. Then gut the fish.”
“And what will you be doing while I do all that?” Noor enquired gently.
“Gathering firewood, Princess,” he informed her, as if he’d been hoping she would ask. “Unless you were serious about eating your dinner raw.”
He lifted his hand and dropped it again, and with a tiny chunk of sound, a knife embedded itself in the sand at her feet.
In the gathering darkness, Noor collected stones and laid them in a circle to contain their fire. Then she stood and looked around. In among the trees the beam of Bari’s flashlight flicked up and down.
Strange places could be frightening at the best of times. She shivered, and felt how naked and unprotected she was with only the homemade sarong to cover her. She was glad he meant to make a fire.
If she had never gutted a fish before, at least she had seen it done often enough to make a reasonable stab at the process. Bari was probably hoping she would balk at the task, and she was determined to disappoint him. So Noor took a deep breath, picked up the knife, and with a little moue slit the still-graceful silver-grey body and cleaned it. She was laying the fish on a palm leaf when Bari returned with his arms full.
“Good girl, Princess!” he applauded, eyeing her preparations.
Noor gritted her teeth. “Good boy, Sheikh!” she said.
His eyelids drooped.
“Who started it?” she demanded, preempting any complaint.
Bari laughed. Noor went down to the sea to rinse her hands. When she returned, Bari had laid a fire and was carefully lighting it. At his command, she went to get the bag of water and the little plastic cup out of the raft. She picked up the foil sheet and dragged it around her shoulders, then opened another and laid it down as a picnic blanket—but there the comparison ended. There was nothing else to set out, no other preparation she could make. They had no utensils, no plates, no salt, nothing.
Noor wrapped the thin foil around her against the increasing chill, and held the feeling of panic at bay. They were lucky, she told herself firmly. Bari had been right—they were a thousand times safer on dry land than lost at sea on a tiny raft.
The last rays of the sun faded and darkness swept over them, broken only by the flickering blaze of their tiny campfire. In the darkness the silence was intense. The rushing of the sea, the crackling of the burning wood, the cry of an unknown bird or animal in the deeper shadows of the trees, against that backdrop of silence, only told them of their aloneness.
Eight
Late in the night Bari lay awake, listening to his bride’s soft breathing beside him as if it were the wind of his soul. Overhead, beyond the swathe of wedding veil that protected them, moon and stars glowed too brightly in the purple-black sky. At his feet, the sea slapped and shushed, its deep, living black painted with thick gold light. There was no horizon; he was caught in a web of spangled blackness that had neither beginning nor end.
Emotionally, too, he was caught in a web.
No, Noor, I don’t love you.
That his grandfather should try to dictate Bari’s choice of wife was one thing. He was an old man. Of course he expected to rule his family’s fortunes in the old way, the way of generations before him. And of course nostalgia had a strong hold on his imagination.
The timing of the demand, however, was a cause almost for outrage. It was evidence of how badly Jabir al Khalid was losing his grip that his first act, in the face of the monumental difficulties and the dedicated work that would necessarily follow the astonishing achievement of the Return, had been to track down the family of his old friend Faruq Durrani in the hopes of arranging a marriage for his grandson.
Marriage was the last thing on Bari’s agenda. What time had he for the courtship and wooing that a woman had a right to expect, even in an arranged marriage? He had urgent tasks ahead of him, both as Cup Companion to a Sultan endeavouring to make an effective transition to a new order, and as the heir to the neglected family interests in Bagestan.
But his grandfather had insisted, even when Faruq Durrani’s most eligible granddaughter proved to be a foreigner, born and raised in the West, into wealth and privilege without responsibility, who was very
unlikely to be suited to joining Bari in his life’s work.
And doubtless, Bari had pointed out to his grandfather with as much patience as he could muster, a woman who would be impatient with any attempt to arrange a marriage. As a Westerner, she would feel it her right to fall in love with a man of her own choosing, to be courted “for herself.”
The old man had understood that modern concept. He had ordered that there should be no conventional overtures for an arranged marriage—no, Bari would have to woo and win the girl.
All that was bad enough, but much worse was to come. Before Bari could refuse this mad request outright, Jabir al Khalid delivered his ultimatum.
The blackmail had shocked them all. It told Bari that his grandfather was well aware that times had changed. He knew that his word was no longer law. He was not powerful in the way of his father and his father’s fathers. So he was making up for the lack of moral power with threat—marry this woman or watch the family estates fall into further disrepair as cousins vie to win the prize. Never set foot on al Khalid property except as a guest of someone who cares nothing for its heritage.
The old man also knew—no one better—that his grandson had always dreamed of returning to Bagestan when it was liberated. Bari had worked with Ashraf Durrani throughout his determined, dangerous bid to restore the al Jawadis to the throne, and he intended and expected to stay and help to rebuild the country and his own family’s heritage when that bid was successful.
But when the joy of the people was still ringing in their ears, when Bari might have expected congratulations from his grandfather, who had wanted nothing more than to see the al Jawadis restored to their throne, when the cup of opportunity he had worked for all his life was within his grasp…this was the agenda that his grandfather had set him: not to embark on the great task that he had spent his life preparing for, not to begin the restoration of derelict family properties, not to start on the rehabilitation of the tragically mismanaged farms and land—but to court and marry a spoiled Westerner with no sense of duty.
The first time he set eyes on Princess Noor al Jawadi Durrani, Bari had realized that fate was laughing at him. His fears of what she might be were nothing compared to the reality of the beautiful, capricious woman he saw at the coronation. A magnificently spoiled woman with a sulky, sensual mouth, who had discovered that she was a princess in Bagestan and was taking the title to heart.
Her sexual magnetism had reached him even across the expanse of the Great Hall of the Old Palace—him and a dozen other men. It sparked out from her, wild and undisciplined, like a new star in the heavens not sure of its own brilliance.
She smiled on all, and he saw men drawn to her without volition, like moths to the brightest light. Why will ten moths all be drawn to the only lantern in a caravanserai, when each could have the exclusive light of one of numerous lesser candles?
So it was with Noor.
In spite of his furious inner rejection of all his grandfather’s interference, he could not help the jealous possessiveness that had invaded his spirit at that moment.
If she was to be his, then she would be all his.
For the first time in his life, Bari understood the instinct that had driven his forefathers to cloister and veil their women. He had not wanted her, did not choose her—but she was his. Those other men’s eyes, caressing her, the smiles they received, he could hardly bear. They stole what was his—he felt the instinct of his blood rise up and tell him it was so.
He had found his reaction incomprehensible—some primitive instinct in his blood he had never before encountered engulfed him, and all for a woman he didn’t know and half despised!
But wanted. Her dress was designed for maximum erotic impact—with glittering jewels clinging to her neck and breasts and clouds of green tulle cloaking and revealing her soft skin in tantalizing unpredictability.
If he had been worried about his ability to woo her, however, the worry was short-lived. She might be a Westerner in her contempt for arranged marriage, but love was no more on her agenda than on his. She was flattered by his interest, she preened herself in the intensity of his focus on her—but it hadn’t taken him long to discover that she felt nothing.
He had attractions enough to win her. He was rich, his blood was noble, he was a Cup Companion and he socialized with the rich and famous from her world and his own.
Those were the traits she admired in him.
So he had showed her his family’s wealth and position, instead of his hopes and dreams, as he might have done with a different woman. He had introduced her to celebrities and princes instead of his inner self. He had showered her with gifts instead of the undelivered kisses that burned him like live coals and acid.
For that was the worst torment of all—his desire for her. There was no rhyme or reason to it, and no reasoning, either, could change it.
He kept the other men away from her. She had not guarded her virginity all this time for him to lose the prize at the end. One look was usually enough, from Bari al Khalid. But if it was not—well, he knew how to enlighten a man’s wilful ignorance.
He had known that she was sexually aware of him. Had known that she feared her own weakness, if he decided to press her. He had laid his plans as carefully as Prince Ashraf had in his bid for the throne of Bagestan. Noor had only one shield against him—the shield of only-with-my-husband. Well, then, he would remove that shield—he would build her to a pitch of desire, then propose and make love to her at once.
She would not say no to him sexually once he had stripped her of her shield, and equally she would not say no to marriage once he had deflowered her.
She would be caught in a trap she had made herself.
It had never once occurred to him that, having been so neatly caught, she would execute an eleventh-hour escape. How could he have dreamed that, having accepted and agreed, their bargain sealed with lovemaking, she would change her mind and bolt?
At first he didn’t know how to credit the reason she gave him for her flight. Why would she, who had shown no sign of love for him, no interest in his feelings, run when she learned that his grandfather had ordered him to marry her? Why should she balk at the thought of an arranged marriage, who had so ruthlessly “arranged” her own?
But now he saw the truth with chilling clarity. She had fled the wedding because she wanted everything, this woman who gave nothing, and she had learned at the last moment that she was not getting quite everything. How dared she assume that, in addition to everything else, she had his love—love she hadn’t tried to return, hadn’t even troubled to ask for, but nevertheless expected as her due?
It was not her due. No more than wealth and an easy life was universal admiration her due. It behooves those to whom life has been generous to cultivate humility in the face of their good fortune. He had learned that from an early age. It was the hallmark of a Cup Companion to offer service in exchange for such good fortune as noble birth and inherited wealth.
Noor stirred and sighed beside him, and he turned to watch her again. Under the foil sheet they shared she was wrapped in the white silk that she had cut from the skirts of her wedding dress. Above her head her wedding veil protected her from insects. He shook his head. Her wedding finery had made the same journey as his own hopes. They, too, had been abased.
Her eyelashes cast long shadows on her moon-whitened cheeks, giving her the fragile delicacy of a moon creature. The old romances talked of the jinn, a race of creatures made of fire, as humans were made of earth. Just now, with the pale glow playing over her flawless skin, it seemed as if the moonlight came from within. If Allah was moved to make creatures from earth and fire, Bari found himself thinking, then surely he must also have created some from moonlight. And such a being would look like this—her skin translucent, as though her light reflected on the heavens. As if the moon were her reflection.
Did the moon have a heart? Or was its pale light symbolic of cool heartlessness?
He had to marry her. What
ever her reasons for running from the wedding, he had to find the way back. That was the price of everything he had worked towards, all that he had dreamed for his family. That was the price of fulfilling his father’s deathbed request—go home, my son, and rebuild what we lost.
He had given his father his word, at the impressionable age of fifteen, and the promise had thereafter consumed his life.
But there was another dream, too.
He wanted a partner in life. A woman to share its joys and sorrows with him. A woman capable of the giving and the sacrifice that marriage and family demanded. Not a woman of the careless selfishness Noor exhibited.
Once he had hoped that, in spite of everything, Noor had a heart and it was not out of his reach. That she would learn to love him, and he her. That whatever its beginnings, with time they could forge the kind of marriage that would be a strength to them both.
Her flight had awakened him from a blind and brazen foolishness. What if she had no heart to reach? Or what if he was not the one to touch it? Either way, there was misery in store, not just for him, but for any children they might have. For his mother and sisters, who would suffer, too.
Unless Noor had more heart than she had shown so far, one of his dreams he must give up. Either the dream of fulfilling his promise to his father and his duty to the family, or the dream of a good marriage. He knew he could have only one. He must betray either his heritage, or his own heart. He had to choose.
Bari looked out at the jewel-spangled darkness that surrounded them. Noble birth and wealth and beauty were useless commodities here on this deserted island. Only the real inner qualities of the person mattered now…and here, too, would they not be revealed?
His eyes narrowed, staring out, as if the future might lie concealed in the blackness of the night. The true heart is revealed in adversity. It was a proverb in his family, which had been recited many times during the decades of suffering when Ghasib remained in power.
Noor was dreaming. He watched a frown chase across her brow, then the whisper of a smile drawing at one cheek. Unexpectedly his heart kicked, and his body leaped with hunger. If he reached for her now, if he drew her into the hungry embrace of his body and arms, if she awoke to his kiss and his desire—could she reject him?
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