Felaheen a-3

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  "Oh," said Alexandre, "and I'm sorry . . ."

  Isabeau raised her eyebrows.

  "About . . ." He shuffled his feet, apparently unable to get beyond that word. "About your husband. It was a messy campaign. A just one, obviously, but messy and I'm glad it's over." He clicked his heels and gave her a salute, the smartness of which was utterly at odds with the state of his fingernails, which were bitten to the quick.

  Once sitting, with her case pushed into the space behind her seat and a capuchin from a cart that had passed by on the platform outside, Isabeau ripped the flap on her new envelope, then glanced round. The carriage was almost empty despite this being the first turbani de luxe to run for years. Outside, the concourse was crowded, but with people arriving, not departing. Nasrani tourists, Nefzaoua up from Kibili to visit recently remembered family, farmers from the High Tell, pickpockets. Few wanted to leave a city when so much was about to happen.

  Twenty-four hours of mourning for the old Emir, then seven days of celebration for the new. Isabeau supposed that made sense if she didn't think about it too hard.

  Shaking out her envelope's contents, she saw two rings slide out and clatter across the table, along with something on a dull-metal chain. The small, official-looking booklet which followed landed without a sound and Isabeau wouldn't have known the envelope contained a letter of condolence if habit hadn't made her check inside.

  It seemed her husband had died in a police operation, somewhere unspecified, south of Garaa Tebourt while rescuing his superior officer. Isabeau liked that touch. As if any man she married wouldn't frag all the officers and NCOs first opportunity he got, then head off down some wadi for Tripolitana. As if she'd marry any man . . .

  They were returning his ring, his police tags and a photograph they'd found in his wallet of her wedding day. The face was Isabeau's although the body belonged to someone else; someone marginally thinner than she'd ever been with less full breasts. The man could have been anyone.

  Isabeau was impressed to see they'd had a modern ceremony. She wore white and her husband was in uniform, their priest had a simple jellaba, his beard recently barbered and not at all wild. The room in which they stood was panelled in dark oak and had a photograph of the old Emir on the wall behind. It might have been more useful if someone had thought to write the exact location on the back.

  The official-looking leaflet was a pension book made out to Madame DuPuis. At the bottom of the first page a space had been left blank for her signature. A footnote told her she could collect money monthly from any branch of the Imperial Ottoman Bank or arrange to have her widow's pension paid direct by filling in a form on the last page.

  As for the letter, this offered Isabeau the condolences of the state, commiserated with her over all she'd lost and hoped that her future from henceforth would be happier. It was signed with an illegible scribble, although the first letter looked like an A . . .

  CHAPTER 53

  Saturday 26th March

  "Well," said Raf, breath jagged and a grin on his face.

  "Well what?"

  Outside Zara's bedroom window, crowds were already gathering beyond the gates of the Bardo and Raf could hear the growl of early traffic and clattering as impromptu market stalls were erected.

  The police would be along later to take them down but trade would continue all day, stalls going up as soon as the old ones were broken down. Food sellers, hawkers of rice-paper rose petals and purveyors of cheap plastic flags, Raf had even seen his face on the side of a balloon.

  The woman lying beside him had already made her opinion plain on all of that. As indeed she had on many other things. It had been the kind of discussion that, in later years, would raise smiles and get described, only half-ironically, as full and frank. At the moment they both still felt slightly vulnerable.

  "Come on then," Zara demanded. "Well what?"

  "Oh, I don't know . . ." Raf wrapped one arm round Zara's shoulders and pulled her on top of him. "How about, Well, what do you plan to do with your day?"

  She laughed, kissed him back.

  So Raf slid down slightly on the bed and took Zara's nipple in his mouth, sucking comfort from her breast. She watched him as he did so, seeing only the top of his head and feeling his uncertainty.

  "Are you all right?"

  When Raf didn't answer, Zara stayed where she was and closed her eyes. They had another hour before they needed to leave and if that wasn't long enough then the wretched ceremony could wait.

  Last night had been difficult. Difficult and different. Zara so nervous her whole body shook. And Raf . . . ? She took him to her room, something she'd done with no other man and stripped to her thong in front of him, only losing her nerve at the last minute. Having sent him to the bathroom, she killed the light and hid under the covers.

  Except that when he came back, all Raf seemed to want to do was lie in the darkness and let the moment wash over him. Something impossible for Zara.

  "This is not fair," she'd said suddenly.

  And thinking he knew what Zara meant, Raf nodded agreement and in that second's movement shut down his night vision until everything in her room became outlines and shadow.

  "It is now."

  "No, I mean this."

  And he knew then that Zara meant their lying in the dark, so much unspoken between them.

  "There's something I need to tell you . . ." Raf said tentatively.

  "Let me guess," she said. "I'm not the first. In fact you've fucked your way through an entire phone book of my friends. You have three children, well, that you know about . . . You're only after my millions . . ."

  "This is serious," said Raf.

  "So was I," Zara answered. And pulled Raf to her and kissed him as her hand slid under his rib cage and then both her hands locked behind his back, so that Raf's full weight rested on her trapped arm.

  She felt him go hard.

  "You're naked," said Raf, the fingers of his right hand tracing the crease of her buttocks, just to make sure he hadn't got that wrong.

  He hadn't known, Zara realized. She'd been safely tucked under a quilt by the time he returned to the room.

  There'd been one night, months before, when she'd talked and he'd listened, although she couldn't remember it and he could; but then, if Raf was to be believed, he remembered everything, which was maybe not a good place to be.

  "It's important," said Raf, holding her face between his hands. "And it concerns who I am. What I am . . ."

  "You're you," said Zara. "That's enough."

  "No," said Raf sadly, "it isn't. It's not anything like enough."

  Zara wanted to know why, so Raf told her. Or rather he didn't. He told her a fairy story instead. "Once," said Raf, his fingers caressing the side of her face, "there was a son of Lilith . . ."

  Raf took it as read that Zara knew Lilith's story. Adam's first wife, mother to vampyres and djinn. A woman expelled from Eden for fucking the snake.

  "He was older than he looked because, although his days were as your days, his nights were often longer, one of them so long that fir trees grew and houses were built while he slept. Someone who loved him grew old and stopped loving him, seeing her own life and increasing age reflected in the puzzlement in his eyes every time he woke from the cold sleep . . ."

  If Zara thought it was odd that Raf told her a folktale she kept this thought to herself. Remembering stories Hani had told her. Small girl's stories. Of the kind easily dismissed.

  "He slept the cold sleep because that was the easiest way not to die. Until one day he awoke and Lilith had died and her friends had forgotten him or no longer cared if he escaped. So he did what sons of Lilith do, moved to a strange country to live undetected as a human for seven years. For if a vampyre or djinn can live undetected for seven years he will become as human."

  "So Hani told me," said Zara.

  "She did?"

  "She's told everybody," Zara said. "It's in a book, the original story. About how a son of Lilith can bec
ome as human. But the children will be born sons of Lilith."

  "Sons of Lilith, daughters of Lilith," said Raf. "In my case it's called germ line manipulation. Whatever I am my children will become."

  "And what are you?"

  Raf thought about it. "I'm not sure," he said finally. "I get voices. I see in the dark. There are three extra ribs on either side of my rib cage. My eyes hurt in the daylight. My memory is too distressingly perfect for my mind to manage . . ."

  "All of this is your mother's responsibility?"

  "Or Emir Moncef's," said Raf, "but it gets messier." He felt the girl go still and shifted gently away from her, giving Zara space. "I've opened the bags . . . Secret files," he added, when he realized she didn't quite understand. "It's like reading the technical specifications for a new type of car. One that might not work."

  "What's the worst?"

  "Immortality. Or if not immortality, then longevity. How long I don't know but longer than is now normal."

  "You knew this when you refused to marry me?"

  "Some of it," said Raf. He stopped himself. "More than some," he said but the anger was directed at himself. "What I wasn't told as a child I overheard. It's relatively easy to code for heightened hearing. Less easy to understand the implications if one's own hearing is normal and the subject is three rooms away."

  "I'm sorry," Zara said. Her hand moved up to touch his face and came away wet. She believed him implicitly.

  "So am I," said Raf.

  Later, when he hung over her in the darkness, both of them drunk with longing, Raf bent forward and kissed Zara lightly on the forehead. There was something else he hadn't mentioned. If he understood it right, then immortality was sexually transmitted; the act of being pregnant infected both mother and embryo.

  The second time they made love began slow and ended up hard and fast. It started with Zara swinging herself on top of Raf and straddling his hips, her face only inches from his. Outside their window, the city was expectant for what would come the next day. Guards stood at the gates of the Bardo and patrolled the streets around the palace complex. Major Gide and Raf having agreed this as a matter of protocol only. Done because it was expected.

  "Remember the boat?" Zara said.

  As if he could forget. Water so blue it was almost purple. The scent of rosemary and thyme carried on a warm wind across a bay. And then the return trip. Hani safely asleep and Zara bringing him a beer as he sulked outside and time and the ocean slid past.

  "What boat?" Raf demanded.

  Leaning forward, Zara put her mouth over his and bit, hard enough to draw blood. "That boat," she said.

  They kissed and, slowly and rather clumsily, Zara reached down to position Raf against her. To Zara he was a shadow against white sheets, a watchful silent silhouette; for Raf she was lit clear as daylight . . . He could see her mouth twisting, eyes open and fixed on nothing, her breasts swaying forward with each rock of her hips, impossibly beautiful.

  Reaching up with open hands, Raf felt warm flesh overflow his fingers and tried not to be offended when Zara absentmindedly lifted his hands away and went back to her rocking. After she'd ridden him in silence long enough for Raf to fade out his vision and lose himself in the rhythm, Zara took his hand and positioned it on her abdomen so that Raf's thumb reached between swollen lips.

  "There," she said, "keep it there." And went back to her darkness and a burst of half cries and swallowed words. There was no sharing this time. And angry was the only way to describe the abruptness with which Zara shuddered to a halt, her hand still holding his own hard against her smooth mons.

  Smooth, because she lacked all body hair.

  Zara had given him the list once. One night in another palace; the time she'd cried herself to sleep and woken to swallow him as she knelt on white marble tiles in the middle of a sunlit floor, three days before he prosecuted her father for murder. A fact neither one had ever mentioned. The list was relatively short and went no body hair, no labia minor or hood or tip to her clitoris . . . But, as she'd pointed out, a full Pharaonic would have been infinitely worse.

  According to a doctor in New York (the one Zara saw at seventeen, the week after she arrived at Columbia), a rewarding sex life was perfectly possible. It might just take more effort than for some other women. And she stood, the doctor said, a better chance than many of those whose scar tissue was mental rather than physical.

  The tiny vibrator the woman gave Zara went unused. Ditto a collection of glass dilators from small to medium. Zara found one article on female genital mutilation, attended one meeting at which she said nothing, then went back to writing law essays. And lying in the darkness as she said this, that time in El Iskandryia, Raf had been unable to work out from the flatness of Zara's voice if she regarded this as common sense or cowardice . . .

  "My turn." Raf rolled the two of them over, so Zara lay underneath and he was between her legs. Widening her knees, Raf withdrew until the tightness at the entrance to her sex was about to release him, only to slam back, watching Zara's chin go up in shock or surrender.

  Her hands rose and fell, arms crooked at the elbow as fingers fluttered batlike in darkness. Tied to some plea forever unsaid. On her breath were white wine, hashish and the faintest trace of capers. Tastes that Raf took from her lips. And then her legs locked over his and her hips began to grind against him.

  They came together with that blinding luck those new to each other sometimes get and slept, still locked in each other's arms.

  CHAPTER 54

  Saturday 26th March

  "Take a guess," said Hani, nudging Murad Pasha and nodding to where Zara and Raf stood beside a wall, holding hands. A half dozen of Major Gide's handpicked guards stood impassive against the opposite wall of the decorated alcove, carefully not noticing. "Go on, guess what they've been doing . . ."

  Murad blushed.

  "How do I look?" said Hani. She twirled on marble tiles, her silk dress spinning out like the cloak of a dervish. The dress was meant to go with knee-length socks but Hani had refused. Not just refused but refused totally. Sitting naked and dripping on the edge of her bath, unwilling even to let Donna dry her until the old woman agreed that white socks were out.

  And Donna, still furious at being dragged from El Iskandryia to Tunis, had threatened to fetch Khartoum but even that failed to move Hani. In the end they settled on short white socks rather than the black tights Hani had wanted.

  "How do you look?" Murad considered the question. She was dressed in white silk. Around her neck was a single row of black pearls, fastened at the back with a clasp made from jade and gold. Her ears were now properly pierced and a tiny drop-pearl hung from each lobe. On her feet were silver pumps.

  "Anachronistic," he said finally.

  Hani punched him.

  Not hard. Just enough to deaden his arm.

  "The correct answer," she said, "is like a princess."

  They were waiting near the entrance to a salon de comeras, hidden from the crowd by an elegant carved screen. Admission to the ceremony was by order of precedence and some people, mostly nasrani lucky to be there at all, had been sitting for over an hour as more upscale arrivals filed in to be shown their places.

  It had given the new Emir great pleasure to make sure that the Marquis de St. Cloud was one of those forced to wait in the cheap seats. Sitting much closer to the front, looking slightly bemused, were Micki Vanhoffer and Carl Senior, dressed for what could only be a night in Las Vegas.

  Outside, Rue Jardin Bardo was lined ten deep with people waiting for the Emir's Bugatti coupé Napoleon to sweep past, only to be hidden on arrival by veils of silk as it disgorged its occupants, a colonel from the engineers, his young wife and their two children. Decoys insisted upon by Major Gide, who'd gratefully accepted the new Emir's suggestion that she remain his head of security.

  The actual players in the spectacle about to unfold in front of TV5, C3N and one other, randomly selected, camera crew had been the first to arrive, spirit
ed into the salon via a back route.

  "You ready?" Raf asked Zara.

  She nodded. Not entirely convincingly.

  Outside in the audience were Hamzah Effendi, Madame Rahina and the brother Zara had tracked down to a squat on the edge of Kharmous, half brother really. Hamzah's bastard. Once a factory and later an illegal club, he'd soundproofed his squat with cardboard and spray painted it gunmetal grey. The floor had been earth, friable and damp but he'd doped it with liquid plastic, tipping the can straight onto the ground.

  "What are you thinking?" Raf asked.

  "About Avatar. You know, back when he was a kid, was it right to take him home with me–or was I just being a spoilt brat . . . ?"

  "Ah," Raf smiled. "The what-if factor."

  Zara stared.

  "For every action we take," said Raf, "there's probably a better one."

  "Does that apply to this?"

  "Which this?" Raf demanded. "Us this or this this?" The sweep of his hand took in the coughing and restless shuffle of feet beyond the screen.

  "Both," said Zara.

  In a different world Raf might have answered that there was nothing he'd do differently where Zara was concerned, not even his jilting her which put Zara across the front of Iskandryia Today and nearly cost him his life. He loved her and had no certainty that any other course of action would have led him to where he stood; but Murad turned and caught Raf's eye and the words went unsaid.

  Checking his watch, Raf listened to something in his earbead and nodded.

  Three, two, one . . .

  On cue, an unaccompanied voice rose in the salon outside. Maaloof al andalusi, the music Ifriqiya made famous. Frail and strong, haunted and ancient. The words a lament for those who had gone before and a greeting for those who were to come after.

  Near the far end of the suddenly silenced room, Khartoum raised his head and hung a note on the air so unearthly that Hani shivered. The poem that echoed off the salon's high roof came from Rumi, the great Sufi sage but the intonation was Khartoum's own.