The Fierce and Tender Sheikh

by Alexandra Sellers

  She lifted it to her face, finding joy in the silkiness and the scent.

  “Smell,” she commanded him softly; and he bent his face to it, and the rose was between his mouth and her palm like a kiss.

  When he straightened again, neither knew whether a moment had passed, or a lifetime.

  “Princess, I came to say goodbye,” Sharif began.

  He saw it hit her, a lightning bolt cracking through her, and he cursed himself for his stupid clumsiness. Words had a different meaning for this child. When would he learn that?

  The big dark eyes, still circled with hollows of deprivation, fixed his face in incredulous denial.

  “Goodbye? Are you leaving?” she cried. She did not pronounce the word, but he could hear it. Me.

  “Only for a week or two, probably,” he supplied hastily. “But it might be longer. I can’t be sure.”

  She scarcely seemed to hear. “Why?”

  Should he have foreseen this? What had made him underestimate his impact on her life so grossly? He remembered the way she had pronounced that word family. Remembered her soul-deep joy. Now she was surrounded with family, and yet…

  He should have known. If he, whose heart was rarely touched by feelings of deep connection with another human creature, felt that the tendrils of this child’s essence had somehow reached into the deepest parts of his self, was it really so hard to understand that she, too, felt a bond?

  “Why?” she cried again.

  He hesitated. They had decided against telling her, but now—what was best?

  “It’s—I must go, Princess,” he said at last. “The Sultan has given me an assignment…to—”

  “Tell him no! Why does it have to be you?”

  “Princess, when the Sultan requests a thing, it is hearing and obeying,” he said awkwardly.

  “You can’t go!” she said, fiercely angry, because it would be weakness to be hurt, weakness to plead.

  Sharif pressed his lips together, more and more furious with himself. There were a dozen better ways he could have handled this.

  “You are with your family now, Shakira. You won’t miss me as much as you—”

  “Don’t—” she began fiercely, and then, abruptly, her feelings shut down. Miss him? Why should she miss him? She had her family, and even if she hadn’t, she didn’t need anyone! She could survive, she always had.

  His heart protested as he watched her face close against him. Her eyes lost all expression. She shrugged her thin shoulders up around her ears and forgot to lower them.

  “I don’t care if you go.” Her lively voice was dead, flat and dismissive. “I don’t need you. I have my family now,” she said, as if he hadn’t just said the same thing.

  “Shakira, we weren’t going to tell you why I’m going, but I think it’s best if I do. The Sultan—”

  “I don’t care!” It was true. Her heart had performed the old familiar function, though she was hardly aware of it, shutting its gates against the pain of loss. “Anyway, I won’t miss you, because my grandmother is coming to see me today,” she told him haughtily, hardly remembering how she had treasured up this joy to share with him. And now, instead of a shared joy, it was armour against him.

  Something in him urged him to break down the walls she had suddenly erected, but he would not obey the urge. He had to go, and she would forgive him when she learned the reason. But it was better if she did not know now.

  And it was true enough—she had her family.

  “Ah,” he said, smiling a little. “So today you meet the great Suhaila? That is excellent news.”

  “Yes!” she cried, still angry. “She’s a famous singer, Sharif! So you see I don’t care if you won’t be here, because I will be talking with my grandmother!”

  She tossed something down, turned and ran back up the tiled path. At the pillar beneath her own balcony, she leapt up and clung, and with hands, knees and feet, swarmed up till her fingers found a better hold in the sculpted stone. Then, lightly, agilely, without a backward glance, she went up and over the wall and was gone.

  He bent to pick up the discarded flower at his feet. Its hurt perfume scented the air strongly now: its heart had been crushed by those thin, agile fingers.

  Eight

  Suhaila was a tiny, vivid woman, dressed in the most gorgeous silks, her expressive hands and arms crusted with a rich display of jewels and the gold bracelets Shakira remembered, her long braided hair a rebellious black, and her black eyes bright with humour, mischief, wisdom and defiance.

  “Ah, you are like me,” she said to Shakira. “The eyes, of course—there you are like Safa. But you are small and thin, like me, and you have no breasts. And your chin—” she put out a firm hand to stroke her granddaughter’s cheek “—these things you have from me. Your breasts will grow now that you are eating, but you will always be a small woman. And you are a fighter, one sees that in your face. I was a fighter, too. Beware, Granddaughter, because it doesn’t always lead to happiness. How old are you?”

  “I—twenty-one, I think.” Her birth date had been lost long ago in the camps, but she had learned her real statistics from the records in the Sultan’s dossier.

  “Mahlouf was a fool to go back to Bagestan when he did,” the old woman said. “I told him so, but if there is any way to stop a young man being a fool, I never learned it. Even if he had not been Prince Safa’s son, the fact that his mother was abroad recording songs of the resistance would have put him in danger.”

  Shakira smiled shyly, entranced by her grandmother’s fire and strength. “They played Aina al Warda for me,” she said. Where is the Rose? Suhaila’s voice asked so urgently, so plaintively, that Shakira, in company with many other Bagestanis, wept every time she heard it. “It’s very beautiful. The Sultan said the whole resistance movement was fired by the way you sang that song.”

  In fact, she loved her grandmother’s singing so much that she had played little else since learning how to work the CD player in her sitting room.

  Suhaila laughed, but she was clearly pleased. “Mash’Allah! And did you inherit my voice?” asked “Bagestan’s Nightingale.”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t allowed to sing.”

  The old woman fixed her with a thoughtful look, then nodded. “Ghasib had his spies looking for you, of course, and he knew whose granddaughter you were. If a child in Arif Bahrami’s family had been heard to have a voice…”

  Shakira blinked, remembering a day when the family had been visiting a public garden. It had been a beautiful day, cool after an overnight rain, and the roses had been in bloom. Hani had felt his heart lighten, not knowing why, but the next moment a blow from his stepmother on the back of his head had shocked him out of whatever dream he had inhabited.

  Don’t sing! she had hissed at him.

  “Is that why?” Shakira asked now. It had seemed so unreasonable that Hani’s heart had nearly burst with the injustice. One of the many incomprehensible embargoes on the child’s behaviour. Like being a boy instead of a girl.

  Her grandmother lifted her hands, and a hundred gold bracelets tinkled on her arms, just as they had in memory. “What other reason? Bahrami was a great loyalist. He knew how far Ghasib’s paranoia extended.”

  With a shock of shifting images, Shakira’s past reconfigured itself. “I thought it was because she hated me,” she murmured. “She always seemed so angry.”

  “Perhaps she was always afraid.” Suhaila nodded. “Well, then, perhaps you have a voice. One day we will see. Other things are more important right now.”

  “Grandmother—” How her heart beat with the word! “Grandmother, will you tell me about you and my grandfather? And my father and mother? Will you tell me everything?”

  The great singer laughed, and stroked her cheek again. “That is why I am here, child.” She settled herself on the divan, amongst an array of fat cushions, as if she were a Sultan herself. “Today I will tell you about your handsome grandfather, Prince Safa. Sit there.”

 
She was so regal it would have been impossible to disobey, but of course Shakira had no such thought anyway. With stars in her eyes she sank down at her grandmother’s knee.

  “My father, your great-grandfather, was a very educated and forward-looking man, a brother of a Johari tribal chief. One of his brothers was Cup Companion to the Crown Prince.

  “When I was a girl there was war in Europe, and the armies of the West invaded countries around Bagestan, to keep the oil for themselves. My father said that it was a warning for the future. No one could predict with certainty what would happen, except that the world was changing, and that his daughters as well as his sons must be educated for a profession. Mash’Allah I was blessed with the voice of a bulbul, and my father gave his permission for me to sing in public, and to have a career. Many in the family thought this shocking, as if I had become a woman of the streets, but my father never failed me. He said that only fools buried their heads.

  “I was already becoming a well-known singer when Prince Safa came to one of my concerts. He was a wild young man, a wealthy prince who owned racehorses and drove a sports car. And he dated beautiful women, foreign actresses and a European princess.

  “But when he saw me he fell in love. He said he had never loved in his life before, and I believed him, because I, too, had fallen in love. He was so generous, and such a handsome man! Prince Safa was commander of one of his father’s horse regiments, though he did not take his duties seriously, and the uniform was the most becoming of the whole army. Oh, he was very dashing, with a black moustache and black eyes that looked straight to the heart of a woman! Anyone who saw him mounted on that devil of a black horse lost her heart.”

  Shakira sighed and, led by her grandmother’s voice, lost herself in imagining.

  “Well, we were in love, but although I sang in public I was nevertheless a member of an important family. And I was very closely chaperoned. Only marriage was possible between us, but Safa knew that the Sultan would forbid it. He wanted Safa to marry his cousin. So, young and foolish, we married privately.

  “Safa’s grandfather was an old man, in the last years of his reign then—Hafzuddin was still Crown Prince—and he was outraged when Safa took me to the palace and introduced me as his wife.

  “He said that I must give up my public singing at once and live within the harem like his own wives. But I was young, and full of new ideas about women’s freedom, and a firebrand—and I had never been spoken to by my father in the way the Sultan spoke to me. I, too, was angry.” The old woman smiled. “And I had just been offered a contract for a tour of Bagestan, Parvan, Barakat, Kaljukistan, and Joharistan. It was an important step in my career, and I was determined to go.

  “We fought it out, the old man and I, and everyone was horrified that I dared to speak to the Sultan in such a way, that I defied him so openly.

  “Safa did not confront his grandfather with me. All his training was against such a thing. He remained silent. He wanted me to give in, to sing only in the palace for the rest of my life. Sing to me, he said. I will be your concert hall. I will love you enough for a hundred thousand others.

  “But I could not. And so—it was a very short-lived thing, our marriage. I left the palace in the car that took me on the first stage of my tour. Safa would not come with me. At his grandfather’s insistence, he divorced me as I left. I can hear his voice now. I divorce thee. Later he said that he had only said it to bring me to my senses. But I was headstrong! If he could divorce me…so be it! And so I went.”

  It had all happened nearly a half century before, but it was closer to Shakira’s heart than her own breath.

  “Oh, Grandmother!” she whispered sadly.

  “Perhaps I should have considered longer. But I was young and beautiful and with a rare voice, and they told me I could ask for the world and get it. You, Granddaughter, have learned the value of family and love in one way, through having none. I had everything—a close, loving family, a caring father—and their love had never made any demands. Now a prince was in love with me and I thought that his love asked too high a price. It was too high, but perhaps I should have paid it.” She sighed heavily, then turned and stroked Shakira’s cheek, her damp eyes smiling. “But it is strange, is it not?—whatever I had chosen then, you and I would probably still be sitting here today. You see, Granddaughter, how our small personal choices may mean nothing when politics and war enter our lives.”

  “What happened then?”

  “On the tour I learned that I was pregnant. Our marriage had been kept secret, and apart from our families, only a few very close friends knew. The public would have been unforgiving even if they had known I was married and had been divorced for the sake of my career. If they imagined that I had taken a lover and become pregnant outside marriage, my career would be ruined overnight.

  “I would have gone back, to try again with Safa, because I missed him so much more than I had imagined, and anyway, a child changes everything. But the tour was enormously popular. My manager did not want me to give up in the middle. He offered to marry me, to pretend the child was his own. He was older than I was, much older. I didn’t know it then, but Majdi, too, loved me. In his way.

  “I sent a message to the palace, to Safa, telling him the position. I said I would wait two weeks for his answer, and I told Majdi that if Safa did not come in two weeks, I would marry him.

  “Safa did not come. He did not send a message. No answer of any kind. Even at the last moment I was looking down the street, hoping for a car, a horse…I knew then that Safa had not really loved me, and I had made the right choice. I married Majdi and named my son Mahlouf. That is your father. I wrote to Safa, a very bitter letter, to tell him that his son had the al Jawadi eyes, even if not the name.

  “He came to see us then. He was in a terrible rage. He had never received my message. Majdi had destroyed my letter and only pretended to send it.”

  “Oh!” Shakira’s eyes were burning, her throat tight. “What happened? You couldn’t…”

  The old woman shook her head. “It was too late then. There was no way back. I was another man’s wife. There would have been a terrible scandal if I had divorced Majdi to marry Prince Safa. And with a child—who would have believed that we had been married before? People would have said that the prince had been my lover and my husband had divorced me because my child was not his own—it would have been an impossible position.

  “We were never together again, but we loved each other till the end,” said Suhaila, and the expressive dark eyes were suddenly liquid with tears. “The day that Safa was assassinated, my heart was pierced with the same bullet.”

  Nine

  FIRST PUBLIC APPEARANCE OF LOST PRINCESS

  Princess Shakira appeared in public for the first time yesterday, on the balcony of the Jawad Palace, with the Sultan and other members of her family, when a spontaneous demonstration took place in Shah Jawad Square.

  The crowd, which some estimates put at 100,000, had gathered in response to persistent rumours that the popular singer Suha was staying at the palace. They were rewarded after several hours by the appearance of the singer, whom Bagestanis of all walks cherish for her stirring recordings of anti-Ghasib songs during the long exile.

  The crowd cheered itself hoarse when the singer was joined by the Sultan and Sultana and other members of the family. A boyish figure thought to be Princess Shakira was spotted standing beside the Sultana.

  A microphone was eventually rigged up and the crowd got what it wanted at last: with the Sultan at her side, the great Suha sang Aina al Warda, the signature song of the Bagestani resistance movement. Bagestanis are always an emotional people, but this time they outdid themselves, shouting and cheering and sobbing on each other’s shoulders, and refusing to disperse until the old singer had repeated the song three times.

  The central bazaar of Medinat al Bostan was a nest of alleyways behind the main square, not far from the great Shah Jawad Mosque, and as he walked along its central passa
ge, Sharif Azad al Dauleh could see, through the arch at the top, the sun glowing from the magnificent golden dome and the high, exquisitely fashioned minarets that surrounded it.

  All around him women and shopkeepers were haggling over price and quality, as they had done in this spot for probably thousands of years. The bazaar was a bustle of humanity, as usual on Thursday afternoon, when all the world came out to shop in preparation for Juma. Since the restoration of the mosque as a place of worship, Fridays in the capital had an air of jubilation. Under Ghasib the ancient twelfth-century mosque had been converted into a museum, and worship had been displaced to a small nearby mosque with none of the architectural magnificence that had made the Shah Jawad Mosque a World Heritage Site.

  No longer. Tourists were still allowed to visit the holy place, but not on Friday at the noon prayer. Then it was filled to overflowing with worshippers from all over the city who came to worship in Bagestan’s holiest shrine.

  He had been absent a month. He always missed the city, the most beautiful city in the world. Coming to the palace now by way of the bazaar was his manner of greeting his old friend. The smell that was a mixture of spices, sugar, perfume, ancient stone, and incense was profoundly evocative, and the sight of the golden-domed mosque through the archway was one of his earliest childhood memories.

  He was tired, and very glad to be back, though he had failed completely in the central mission that had taken him away.

  He would be seeing Princess Shakira again. He had thought about her often during his absence, wondering what was happening in her life, her heart, what transitions were taking place. Although she had a huge family, in a curious way he felt responsible for her. He had plucked her from the hell of an empty life, a life without a future, and had taken her to her rightful home. It was not an everyday experience, he told himself, and no wonder if he felt an ongoing interest in the outcome, even if Shakira herself had by now forgotten his part in the proceedings entirely.