Laura Kinsale (11 page)

“That is true,” he said, amused.

“They wear prettier gowns.”

“More revealing, anyway.” His mouth curled in a derisive smile. “One can at least get a look at the merchandise.”

“They are not silly, like the Bedouins’ harem.”

“I’m afraid I must take issue with you there,” he said. “Englishwomen are excessively silly.”

She should have kept silent, but his easy disdain goaded her into saying, “You did not think my mistress silly.”

“Ah, the old lioness. One among millions. Once I thought I could find—” He paused. His face hardened into dispassion. With cool venom, he said, “Once I was very young. Women make fools of us all, I fear.”

Zenia looked at him warily. “I do not believe any woman could make a fool of
el-Muhafeh.
How could a silly bore manage such a thing?”

“Oh, with the most perfect ease!” he said, a sudden savagery in his voice. “Deceit doesn’t require great cleverness—just a suitably virtuous expression.”

She moistened her lips. “Deceit is very bad,” she said. “But—perhaps—if a woman lied—she had some reason why she must.”

“Of course.” He smiled, but his eyes held a glitter of malevolence. ‘The most persuasive of reasons. She was entirely too frightened of what might happen to her if she said the truth.” He shrugged. “A misjudgment on her part, as it happened. She should have been frightened of me instead.”

“Did you beat her?” Zenia asked faintly.

He gave a cold laugh. “I killed her, wolf cub.”

Zenia turned her face, looking at him slantwise beneath her kuffiyah. He seemed to have no expression, no hint of human feeling in his blue eyes.

He smiled, his teeth set together. “Why do you suppose an evil demon drives me to the wilderness?”

She busied herself with the ends of the kuffiyah, folding them and refolding them, terrified and desperate not to show it. “Still,” she said, with a disinterested air, “I think the women of the English are the more comely.”

“Wellah,
think what you please. It’s hardly worth disputing about.” Arden rose, reflecting moodily that in a land where a man had the right to murder his own sister only because there was dishonorable talk about her, he should hardly be surprised the boy displayed no sign of horror. Glancing down, he saw Selim began to tuck the head scarf up to veil his face.

“No,” Arden ordered, catching his wrist, “I do not want you to cover yourself.”

“My lord,” the boy said, “I must!”

“Nonsense. Why? They will think something is amiss with your appearance.”

“Excellency—please hear me! I do not wish to marry!”

Arden flicked the pearl behind the boy’s ear. “Are you so handsome that only showing your face will instantly burden you with a wife?”

“But I’m certain I won’t want any of their daughters here—”

“God take you, Selim—if you have some broken-headed idea of an English bride, believe me that it is impossible! They will hold you in utter contempt in England.”

The boy flinched as if he had been struck. For a moment his lips trembled, his eyes made large and dark and feminine by the kohl. “Will they?” he whispered.

“Be at peace, little wolf,” Arden said gruffly. “And know that you are worth a thousand silly Englishwomen.”

Selim gave him a brief anguished look.

“It is true,” Arden said. He found difficulty in speaking. “Ten thousand.”

The boy bit his lip. He gazed up with such an expression that Arden felt embarrassed.

“Come. Let us go,” he said.

“But why must we go to the coffee-hall and—?”

“Hsst! Because I will it.”

Still Selim closed his hand entreatingly over Arden’s fingers. “My lord, you do not understand—I cannot—”

“Ya
Selim!” Arden gave the boy a hard cuff on the shoulder. “Be a man!”

Selim instantly cast down his eyes, hiding his face behind the fall of tangled hair.

“And don’t cry, damn you,” Arden commanded in English. “Or I’ll toss you down the nearest well, and you’ll never get your teeth on a plum pudding.”

This being one of the cub’s burning ambitions, the threat had its effect. With all the straight-backed arrogance of the condemned resolved to face his execution heroically, Selim rose, turning toward the door.

Once the boy gave in, he did not cower. Arden had grown to treasure his little wolf, so full of baleful predictions of disaster—so hell-born brave that Arden had not yet found the words worthy of telling him. He took a possessive pride in the youth who paced through the bustling marketplace of Hayil beside him, moving with that free, graceful stride, the gold-fringed kuffiyah sweeping back with each step, as if they walked in the open desert instead of in the shadow of castle walls eight feet thick.

Bin Dirra’s Shammar tribesmen awaited them in the wide market street, an escort of honor to the coffee-hall. For bringing Bin Dirra alive out of the red sands, the hospitality of his family and the Shammar tents had been pressed upon Haj Hasan and his little blood brother for weeks. At first, they had desperately needed the rest and recovery, but in the sweet welcome of the Bedu and the unchangeable cycle of nomadic days and nights Arden began to lose track of how long he had been in the desert at all. When he realized how he was drifting into the slow dream of the wilderness, he insisted gently that he must journey on. As he had departed the Shammar tents, eleven of the men had risen silently and come with him.

It was courtesy, for Bin Dirra’s leg was still too black and swollen for him to travel to Hayil himself, but there was rumor in the air. It was whisper only, but the Shammar had drifted along in the desert, pausing at every Bedu encampment, diligently inquiring the news. The emir Rashid had called no one to Hayil, and yet the sheiks were finding reasons to gather there, and their men with them.

The Queen of the Englezys, it was said, was come in concealment, seeking a husband and a prince, and urging an uprising against Egyptian domination in the desert.

Selim had cast Arden such an unholy glance when they heard the rumor that he was hard put to keep a grave face. In truth, he was glad of the stir that this absurd twisting of his casual words seemed to have caused, counting on it to eclipse any undue inquisitiveness in Hayil about Haj Hasan the Blue-Eyed Moor. If the desert was disturbed, so much the easier to steal away with a certain purebred mare.

Here in Hayil the prince Abdullah ibn Rashid ruled, nominally in tribute and subjection to the Saudis of ar-Riyadh, but power hung in a delicate balance. The houses of el-Rashid and el-Saud eyed one another with mistrust across the ten camel marches to ar-Riyadh in the south, and both brooded under the Egyptian yoke with a malevolence barely concealed. Though there were Egyptian soldiers in the streets, a garrison living in uneasy company with their vanquished foes, the Bedouin here looked to Rashid as the governor of their hearts and lives.

To such extent as the Bedu ever looked to any man as their governor, at any rate.

Arden’s troop of Shammar stalked before him into the emir’s coffee-hall, without pausing in the sudden change from brilliant whitewashed light to the darkness of a hundred murmuring voices and the bell-like ring of coffee mortars. The brilliant glare from the door shone on one massive column in a row of pillars that marched into the shadows. Light shafts fell from tiny windows high above. The Shammar went directly to a corner where slaves tended a multitude of huge coffeepots upon the fire, joining the guests seated on rugs or leaning against the wall.
“Salaam aleyk!”
was met amiably with,
“Aleyk es-salaam!”
as they wished one another peace.

“Please God, you are well?” someone asked ritually.

“The Lord be praised, it is so, good man!” came the proper answer—always the same, whether all a man’s camels had been raided and his women stripped and his sheep stolen.

“Behold my brother,” said one of the Shammar, nodding toward Arden, “Haj Hasan, the Father of Ten Shots.”

Arden slung his rifle off his shoulder as he sat down. He put his hand on the leather-wrapped cylinder of the gun. “God is great!” he murmured.

His reputation had preceded him. “The demon is bound there?” They leaned forward over the rifle with a wary fascination.

“To speak of it is dangerous,” he said.
“Wellah,
let us talk of benign things. Here is Selim el-Nasr, the son of my father. I’ve sworn by my beard to seek a bride for him from among the best blood of the Nejd.”

“No!”
Selim exclaimed loudly. “Life of Allah, I will
not
take a bride!”

A shocked silence fell. Arden glanced aside at him. The boy stared back defiantly, such hot anxiety in his eyes and color in his cheeks that Arden was struck anew with the bleak elvish beauty of him, the pure, hungry, exquisite perfection of his face beneath the Bedouin kohl and bright adornment.

A feeling of strangeness came over Arden; a feeling of alienness deeper than any he had ever felt, even in the wildest places or the tamest ballroom, an estrangement from all that surrounded him but this boy, this little savage with the great kohl-lined eyes, who looked up at him with appeal, and more. With a desperate, wordless adoration.

And suddenly Arden thought,
Oh my God.

The boy’s feelings were shining in his eyes. Arden turned his face away with a sensation of shock. But this was no time to lose his wits. Without answering, without a reproof or any sign that Selim’s outburst had disturbed him, Arden accepted a tiny cup of greenish brown coffee from the slave and sipped. “What is the news?” he asked mildly.

As if the boy’s eruption had never occurred, the Arabs began to talk again. Selim cast down his eyes, his mouth set in a moody curve. The boy held his head so low that nothing was visible of him but the top of his hair. The pearl and the turquoise beads dangled gaily.

His moment of protest was utterly ignored. As Arden sat beside him drinking, they were besieged with brides and rumors. The ibn-Aruks had four marriageable daughters, each more beautiful than the next. The Prince Rashid meant to unite the tribes and rise against the Egyptians. No, Rashid meant to fall upon the Saudis while they were weakened by the failure of their own rebellion last year. Ibn Shalaan’s youngest daughter was better looking and better bred than the Aruk girls, but he doted on her and wouldn’t let her marry until she was thirteen, though no doubt the proper bride price might make him reconsider. Rashid would not dare to attack ar-Riyadh, not while the Egyptians had their big cannon there, the guns of the Franjy infidels.

“But now the queen of the Englezys comes,” a scar-faced Bedouin said confidently. “God willing.”

“Ay,
wellah!”
everyone said in chorus. “The queen!”

“If the Saudis do not arrive first, by Allah,” someone said grimly. “The Harb say that they ride here even now with Egyptian soldiers, to check any plan Rashid brews.”

“God send that the queen brings her army with her, then.” An untidy beard gave the Bedui a piratical air. “The army of the Englezys!” he said reverently.

“What do we need with an army of infidels?” another man exclaimed.
“Billah,
are we not Bedu?”

“My wife’s sister is married to an uncle of the emir,” a handsome young nomad offered earnestly. “Her cousin is a lovely girl, they say, and ready to be wed.”

“The tribes are not in harmony. The Muteyr will not stay to fight the Saudis,” someone commented. “Already they fold their tents, even before the queen comes.”

“Aye, there is bad blood between Rashid and the Muteyr. They will not fight for him.”

“But they hate the Egyptians.”

“If the queen comes, God be praised, they will fight for her!”

“Will Rashid marry the queen, do you think?”
 

“Nay, she is a Christian!”

“No!” The chorus of denial on this point was vehement. “She is not Christian, or she would not come to help the Moslemin!”

A wizened old man wandered over and sat smoking silently next to the fire. In a pause, he reached to finger Selim’s pearl.
“Ay billah,”
he murmured. “If the young prince does not care for the virgins of Hayil, I have a cousin in Mogug who has a daughter... it is said, by God, that she is worth a string of pearls!”

Arden lowered his coffee and met the old man’s eyes. Hoots of derision arose about them. “Mogug!” the others shouted. “There is no such girl in that poor place!”

The ancient made a deprecating gesture and rose, withdrawing. “Allah send me peace! Perhaps it was at Aneyzah, then.”

Arden smiled at him. “When you remember, O my Father,
yallah,
hasten to come and tell me.”

The old man touched his forehead and ambled away. Arden accepted another thimbleful of coffee, playing the part of a courteous guest, but while he sat with the rest on the carpet-covered floor, his mind was distracted elsewhere.

He felt quite certain that he would receive a visit from the old man—it was with that purpose he had braided the pearl, the token designated in the intercepted letter to Abbas Pasha, behind Selim’s ear, and ruthlessly compelled the reluctant bridegroom through his paces. But it was the other revelation that forced itself into his reckoning, that made him stare so severely at a slave offering him more coffee that the servant moved away for fear of the
Mogreby’s
Evil Eye.