‘Oh!’ she said, as they topped a dune and the wonder of the sight before her eyes drew the breathless exclamation.
Khalifa stopped the car so she could take in the great lake spreading from the bottom of the dunes.
‘I can’t believe it,’ she finally said.
He smiled and said, ‘Nor should you. It is a mirage.’
‘No, it can’t be, it’s too real!’
‘Unfortunately it is. It’s often here and there are various explanations for it. Some say it’s a reflection of the water in the oasis bounced back somehow from the sky but the oasis is surrounded by palms and very little of the water is visible so it seems unlikely. Science tells us it’s caused by the deflection of light rays but to me it always has a kind of magic about it, and a lesson for us poor humans as well.’
‘That things aren’t always what they seem?’ Liz guessed, and he nodded, then smiled and touched her baby bump.
‘You’d be a prime example of that,’ he said quietly, then he put the car into gear and drove down the dune, while Liz watched the water disappear and sand take its place once again.
They drove on in silence, Liz relaxed enough to find herself nodding off, so she let the back of the seat down and slept properly for a while, waking only when Khalifa stopped the car.
‘This is the village closest to where I lived when I was in the desert,’ he explained as she sat up and looked around. ‘It has a clinic, and the clinic sister will have rounded up all the women from far and near to come and listen to you. She will also do the translating.’
Liz left her study of the village to turn towards him.
‘If there is a woman in every village who can translate, why did you need to come?’
Khalifa looked at her and smiled.
‘This may sound very pompous to you, but my presence means they will take you and what you tell them more seriously. And while you are talking to the women, I am not discussing camel prices with the men but explaining all the same things to them. It is important to them that they know what the women know, for how else can they make decisions together with their families?’
Liz nodded.
‘Now, the clinic sister here is English. She came to teach first then trained as a nurse in Al Jabaya when she saw the need for nurses in the Endless Desert. She is married to the headman of the village and they have four children.’
‘Then she probably knows far more about what I’m going to talk about than I do,’ Liz told him.
‘Possibly,’ he conceded, ‘but we add gravity to things she tells the women. The visit is not wasted for that reason.’
Liz found herself shaking her head again—there was so much to learn about this country and its culture, a lifetime wouldn’t suffice.
Not that she’d have a lifetime here, a voice in her head reminded her, making her feel a little sad and sorry for herself. Although when a woman, all in black but with greying blonde hair peeking from beneath her head-covering came bounding out of a house to greet them, she forgot about everything but the job she’d come to do.
‘Good heavens, you’re pregnant. What on earth is Khalifa thinking to be dragging you around the desert in your condition?’
‘I wanted to come,’ Liz assured her. ‘After all, what’s the use of having a special-care unit at the new hospital if no one wants to use it? I’m Liz, by the way.’
‘Jane,’ the other woman said, holding out her hand and shaking Liz’s before turning to Khalifa to berate him in person.
‘Just make sure she rests after lunch,’ was all he said, as he dumped the crib and the other gear at the front door, then he kissed Jane’s cheek and departed, heading for wherever the men must have gathered.
Jane led Liz inside the house.
‘The women are in here,’ she said, and as Liz’s eyes adjusted to the gloom she saw a couple of dozen women crammed into the room, all of them already settled on the floor, the coffee pot in the centre of the room burbling on a tiny, portable, gas ring.
The session went well, aided, no doubt, by Jane’s understanding of everything Liz was saying. It ended with a lunch of salad and fruit. Then, as Jane showed Liz into a room where she could rest, she dropped the bombshell that put all thought of sleep from Liz’s head.
‘I’m surprised that Khalifa’s letting you do this, given how he hid his first wife away throughout her pregnancy.’
By the time Liz had caught the subtext of the words, Jane was gone and she couldn’t protest that she wasn’t Khalifa’s wife and neither was it his baby she carried.
How could Jane have got that idea?
And, worse, who else might think it?
It was only as she was drifting off to sleep that she remembered Khalifa’s words in the car when they’d been setting off—something about her pregnancy protecting him from men offering their sisters or daughters as brides?
Had he guessed people might assume the baby was his?
Was he using her?
CHAPTER NINE
REFRESHED from her sleep, Liz was able to take more notice of the landscape as they drove deeper into the desert. She’d set aside her silly suspicions about this journey with Khalifa, putting them down to tiredness and the added problems the attraction caused her body.
Now, looking around, she realised the scenery was changing.
‘It’s still sand and dunes, but it’s different somehow,’ she said, when she’d tried and failed to pin down the difference.
His smile lit up his face.
‘I call this the real desert,’ he said. ‘It’s rare a stranger notices it because the differences are subtle. The dunes are slightly higher, the red of the sand is deeper in colour, and the wind carves shapes along the top of the hills so now you see a dog, and in a minute it might be a crocodile.’
‘You’re right. Look there—a prancing horse!’ Liz didn’t try to hide her delight, and she watched, bemused, as the shape of the horse turned into a big swirl of a wave.
‘Is the sand shifting so that the shapes change?’ she asked, twisting in her seat to see what had happened to the wave.
‘No, it’s partly because we’re moving, and partly because the sand is so pure down here—so uncontaminated by pollution of any kind—it reflects light in strange ways, giving the impression of shapes.’
‘A different kind of mirage,’ Liz whispered, looking all around her, trying to find other shifting shapes. ‘No wonder the people believe in djinns and sand sprites when they see these transformations every day. How else would they explain them?’
Khalifa heard the wonder in her voice, and his heart hurt, for he’d never known a stranger even to see the shapes, let alone understand how his people felt about them. He wanted to stop the car and sit and hold her while they watched the dune shapes change in the shifting sunlight.
He wanted to stop the car and hold her.
He wanted to hold her.
That was the sum of it.
And this time it wasn’t just his attraction to her prompting his thinking. It was something different, something deeper, something he didn’t understand.
He didn’t stop the car, driving on, driving just a little faster, hoping that once he was out of the car the feeling wouldn’t be as strong.
‘Damn it all, they must have moved on.’
Had she heard the frustration in his voice that she turned from her study of the landscape to look at him?
‘Problems?’
None that he could tell her about!
‘Not really,’ he replied. ‘I understood the next group was camped down there.’ He pointed to where he’d expected them to be. ‘Can you see the well?’
To his surprise Liz laughed.
‘I’d like to say yes, but what I’m looking at will probably turn into an animal of some kind, then back into a sand dune. You have wells? Out here in the middle of the desert, there’s water?’
The laugh had made his heart hurt even more, but he covered his confusion with practicality.
&n
bsp; ‘There’s water everywhere under the desert. At the oases it has come to the top, but out here we dig wells. In fact, most of the wells are centuries old, dug by the nomadic tribes so long ago that no one remembers when. The nomads are happier camping near wells, because at most of the oases there are villages, and to the nomads villages represent civilisation.’
She was frowning now, and that hurt him too, although he knew it was just puzzlement on her part.
Or he hoped it was.
‘But are there many nomadic people still living in the desert?’ she asked.
‘Not as many as when I was a boy, but still up to ten roaming tribes.’
She nodded and he knew she considered everything he said and that her interest wasn’t superficial. It was empathy.
‘Oh, now I see the well,’ she cried, then turned back to him. ‘But what do we do next, now we know they’re not there?’
He drew up beside the well and now he stopped the car, but not to hold her. Instead he stepped out and dropped the bucket that stood on the rim, hearing it splash into the water. He wound up a pail full of the fresh, clean liquid, filled a beaker that was hung on the frame, filled it and carried it around to where she’d just alighted from the car.
‘Try it,’ he said, then watched with pleasure as she drank, tentatively at first then deeply, sighing with satisfaction at the end.
‘Beautiful,’ she said.
‘But not as beautiful as you,’ he murmured, taking the beaker and draining the last drops, then, with his lips still wet, he kissed her.
Liz was sure she didn’t mean to kiss him back. She’d decided very firmly that kissing was off limits where this man was concerned. Probably, in her condition, where any man was concerned! But she was definitely kissing him back, leaning into him, tasting the water on his lips, tasting him, wanting more while her head rambled on about not kissing men.
Now her breasts were aching from the kiss, and she had to move so they could push against him, seeking relief, although his body heat made them ache even more, ache for his touch, for some release from the tension a simple kiss was causing in her body.
Except there was nothing simple about this kiss. If anything, it was the most complex kiss Liz had ever experienced, for it seemed to be saying things as well as asking things and she didn’t understand any of it, except the need to keep on kissing Khalifa whoever, His Highness of Al Tinine…
The revving of an engine shattered the moment.
A vehicle approaching?
Out here in the desert?
She broke away from Khalifa, or maybe he broke away from her, although his hand stayed on her back, steadying her as yet another large, dusty vehicle approached them, driving not on the half-made road they’d been following, but rolling down a sand dune.
‘Saif!’ Khalifa muttered, dropping his hand from Liz’s back and leaving a patch of skin that felt suddenly cold.
He walked away from her to meet the approaching vehicle, while Liz dipped the beaker into the bucket of water and sipped the clear, pure liquid once again, trying not to think of the kiss, and definitely not think of the reactions it had produced in her body. She focussed on the now—on what was happening—on why Saif had suddenly materialised, here in the middle of the desert.
She watched the two men talking, the low murmur of voices easily carrying across the silence of the desert, not that she could understand a word that was being said.
Khalifa’s head was bent towards Saif, and Liz could study him, trying to make out why this man, of all the men she’d met at different times in her life, should affect her the way he did.
It wasn’t that he had power—she’d barely been aware of that before they’d arrived in his country. And she knew plenty of men with money, so it wasn’t the jet or the palace. It was just something about the man—something more than physical attraction, she was sure of it.
He was walking back towards her. Saif was already back in his vehicle, preparing to drive off.
‘Is there a problem?’ Liz asked Khalifa as he approached, while just looking at him walk towards her made her heart beat faster.
The smile he offered by way of answer sent her pulse into a further frenzy and she reached out to hold the top of the well in case her knees became too unreliable to hold her up.
‘No problem, but Saif assumed we’d come here in search of the nomads. He tells me they’re camped at the next well. It’s some distance away, so we’ll go to the camp he’s set up for us and visit them in the morning.’
Liz studied him for a moment, trying hard to read his face but finding no clue about his feelings in it.
‘Are you suggesting we stop now because you’re worried I’ll get overtired?’ she asked, and the smile returned.
‘I’d like to use that as an excuse, but I’m suggesting we stop for my own selfish reasons. Saif brought out my favourite bird and I’d like her to fly before dusk. She can catch her dinner, if she’s not too out of practice.’
‘Your bird? A falcon?’
Liz breathed the words, unable to believe she was going to see a hunting bird in flight—unable to believe an already amazing day could get even more extraordinary.
‘Let’s go,’ Khalifa said, and he took her arm and led her to the car, opening the door for her then helping her in, something he’d done before, but this time it seemed…
More intimate?
No, she was imagining it—building on the kiss and the impact it had had on her body.
He was in the car himself now, starting the engine, his long, slim fingers relaxed on the steering-wheel.
Long slim fingers that had stroked her back—
Forget the kiss! Think of something else!
‘You said Saif had set up our camp. You sent him out to do this?’
Khalifa glanced her way and smiled again.
‘I didn’t send him,’ he said, a little stiff now. ‘I am more than capable of setting up a camp but he insisted on doing it, or maybe Rimmi gave him his orders. All he’d say was that he wanted us to be comfortable, and to be sure there was food you could eat. He doesn’t trust me as a cook. The bird was a surprise, something I hadn’t expected.’
‘But he knew it would please you? He knows you so well?’
He didn’t turn this time, all his concentration on getting the vehicle up the sand dune, but he nodded, then said, ‘Probably too well,’ in such a rueful voice Liz had to wonder what he’d meant.
It seemed they must have driven up and over and down at least forty more dunes before once again she saw, in the distance, a dark shadow on the ground. As they drew nearer it materialised into a tent, but a tent unlike any Liz had ever seen. It was broad and low-set, slung a mere five feet above the ground, the sides sloping down onto the sand, poles and ropes holding and anchoring it.
‘In the past, the tents were made from camel skins, the rugs woven from either camel or goat hair. These days the tents are made from factory-made fabric, but still keep the dark colouring of the originals, and the rug-weaving is still practised.’
He pulled the car up to one side of the tent and Liz saw, set out in front of it a brightly patterned rug and a stack of firewood, while a small fire was set beyond the rug. She could picture the scene from times gone by, with the men, backs to the tent, looking out past the fire into the darkness, looking out for trouble! Inside the tent she could make out two flat mattresses, not unlike the ones she’d been resting on earlier in the day. There was also a low table and, incongruously, a number of cool boxes, no doubt containing the dinner Saif didn’t trust Khalifa to cook.
She slipped out of the car and stretched, then looked around for her companion, finding him bent over a box in the shade of the tent. Moving closer, she could tell it was the kind of cage used to carry small cats or dogs, and as Khalifa slipped a heavy gauntlet onto his arm, she realised the bird he’d spoken of, his falcon, was in the cage.
‘May I come closer?’ she asked, uncertain just how falcons might take to strangers.
‘Of course,’ Khalifa told her. ‘She’s wearing her hood so you won’t frighten her.’
‘More likely she’ll frighten me,’ Liz joked, but Khalifa was concentrating on the cage, undoing the latches then putting his gauntleted hand close to the ground, murmuring to his bird, words Liz couldn’t understand.
The bird hopped out. She was far smaller than Liz had imagined, perhaps the size of an owl. She saw what Khalifa had meant by the hood, a little leather cap on the bird’s head. It was sitting on the glove now, and she could see strings coming from around its legs, the strings now clasped between Khalifa’s fingers.
‘She’s beautiful,’ Liz whispered, taking in the snowy breast of the bird and the dark bands of colour on her back and wing feathers. Khalifa was petting her, stroking her, talking soothingly, and it seemed to Liz the bird understood exactly what he was saying. He took the hood off her head and she turned to look at him, her eyes bright and inquisitive.
‘She looks like you,’ Liz told him, as she saw the two heads in profile, both imperious, haughty, aware of their power and the attraction of it.
Khalifa raised his eyebrows then spoke again to the bird, carrying her away from the tent, holding his arm up, then releasing the strings he’d held between his fingers.
Wide wings raised high, the bird seemed to stretch, then she lifted into the air, circling as she rose with what seemed like effortless ease until she grew so small it was hard to see her. Just a speck, circling and circling.
‘She must have fantastic eyesight if she can spot her prey from that height,’ Liz said.
Just as she spoke the bird dived, arrowing towards the ground before rising again, a smaller bird in its talons.
‘Oh!’
‘Do you find it cruel?’ Khalifa asked, correctly interpreting Liz’s exclamation.
‘Not cruel, because she has to eat—we all do. But it was unexpected, I suppose. I had no idea what she’d eat.’
The Sheikh and the Surrogate Mum Page 12