The Fierce and Tender Sheikh

Three

Hani sat on a rock and gazed out over the barren plain in the profound darkness, his stomach aching with a hunger that was not for food. A light breeze was blowing from the mountains. The air was dry, with the desert dust and the astringent perfume of a plant whose name he didn’t know combining to create the familiar scent of desolation. Stars glittered in the black, new moon sky overhead, their alien configurations reminding him how far away from home he was. Along the distant highway now and then long fingers of light dragged a lone car through the darkness. The town lay fragmented on the distant horizon, a broken wineglass catching the starlight.

Everything else was night. Behind him, the camp had a ghostly glow, throwing barbed wire shadows on the desert floor, but the rock where he sat hidden shrouded the thin figure.

For the first time in a long time, Hani was thinking about the past. The stranger’s voice had stirred memories in him. Those strange memories he didn’t understand—of a handsome man, a smiling woman…other children. In those memories he had a different name.

Your name is Hani. Forget that other name. You must forget.

He had been obedient to the command. Mostly he had forgotten. In the dim and distant memory that was all that remained—or was it a dream?—life was a haze of gentle shade, cool fountains, and flowers.

She had played in a beautiful courtyard by a reflecting pool, amid the luscious scent of roses carried from flower beds that surrounded it on all sides. In that pool the house was perfectly reflected, its beautiful fluted dome, its tiled pillars, the arched balconies. When the sun grew hot, there were fountains. Water droplets were carried on the breeze to fall against her face and hair.

Now, in this water-starved world, he could still remember the feeling of delight.

And then one day the fountain was silent. He remembered that, and her brother—was it her brother?—his face stretched and pale. There are only two of us now, he had said, holding her tight. I’ll look after you.

Will we watch the fountains again? she had asked, and though her brother had not answered, she knew. They had stayed alone in the silent house, she didn’t know how long. One morning she had awakened to find herself in a strange place and her brother gone.

You must be a boy now, they had told her. Your name is Hani. And when she protested that she already had a name, Forget your old name. That is all gone. Your brother is gone. We are your family now, we will look after you. See, here are your new brothers and sisters.

And he had forgotten the name. He became Hani, a boy, without ever knowing why, and the old life faded. He had shared a bedroom with four others in a small, hot apartment that had no pool, no fountains, no rose beds. If he asked about such things, his stepmother first pretended not to hear, and then, if Hani persisted, grew angry.

Who were the people he remembered? His heart said the tall man was his father, the smiling woman his mother, the other children his sisters and brothers, whose names he could, sometimes, almost remember.

No. We are your family. Here are your sisters and brothers.

Something about the stranger made him remember that life long since disappeared, that life that he had been forbidden to remember. The memory ached in him, as fresh as if the loss were the only one he had suffered, as if the dark years since had never blunted the edge of that grief with more and then more.

The stranger’s voice had been like the voices he had heard long ago, like his father’s, summoning up another world.

Don’t think about that, don’t say anything. You must forget….

Was it a dream only? Had his childish, unhappy mind made it all up? And yet he remembered his father and mother smiling at him, remembered a cocoon of love.

One day, when you are older, you must know the truth. But not now…

And then it was too late. After the bomb, his stepmother had stared at Hani helplessly before she died, her eyes trying to convey the message that her torn, bleeding throat could not speak.

Who were they, the people whose faces he remembered, the memory of whose love sometimes, in the bleakness of a loveless existence, had surged up from the depths of his heart to remind him of what was possible? Where was that home, that he could sometimes see so clearly in his mind’s eye, and why was it all suddenly so fresh before him now?

In the nearest thing to a luxury hotel the town had, Sharif Azad al Dauleh stood on a darkened balcony, a phone to his ear, waiting to hear the Sultan’s voice. Although the desert air was cool, he was naked except for the towel around his hips. Above it the smoke-bronze skin, the long, straight back, the lean-muscled stomach, arms and chest gave him the look of a genie from a particularly beautiful lamp.

“I offer you a mission,” the Sultan had said.

The manservant had brought a tray of cool drinks as the Sultan bent over a document file and opened it. Tall glasses of juice had been poured out and set down, a dish of nuts arranged, invisible traces of nothing at all removed with the expert flick of a white cloth.

On top of the thin sheaf of documents was the photograph of a young child, a girl. Ashraf slipped it off the pile and handed it to Sharif, then sat back, picked up his glass and drank.

The Cup Companion examined the photograph. The child’s eyes gazed at him, trusting and happy, with the unmistakable, fine bone structure around the eyes that was the hallmark of the al Jawadi. Sharif knew that members of the royal family were still surfacing from every point on the globe, but this child he had never seen.

“My cousin, Princess Shakira,” Sultan Ashraf had murmured.

Sharif waited.

“She is the daughter of my cousin Mahlouf. Uncle Safa’s son.”

Sharif’s thick eyelashes flicked with surprise. Among the first of the royal family to be assassinated by Ghasib after the coup, it was Prince Safa whose death had prompted the old Sultan to command all his heirs to take assumed names and go into hiding. This was the first Sharif had heard that Prince Safa had left descendants, but anything was possible.

“Safa had a child by his first wife—the singer Suhaila.”

“I had no idea that Safa had been married to Bagestan’s Nightingale!”

“Few did. It was an ill-fated, short-lived marriage, when he was very young. She left him while she was still pregnant. In later years, although a connection was kept up, the public was not aware that Prince Safa was Mahlouf’s father. But the files of Ghasib’s secret police prove that they knew. Mahlouf, with his wife and family, died in a traffic accident in the late eighties. We now learn that it was no accident.”

A muscle tightened in Sharif’s jaw as he glanced at the document Ashraf handed him. By its markings, it had been culled from the files of the dictator’s secret police. Mechanically he noted the code name of the agent who had masterminded the assassination.

“We have this man, Lord,” he said in grim satisfaction.

“So I have been informed. But that isn’t the issue here. A child escaped. We had always believed that the whole family was killed in the accident. But these files suggest that we were wrong, and that Mahlouf’s youngest daughter, Shakira, was not in the car. The secret police got wind of this rumour, but apparently never managed to trace her.

“We’ve now received independent confirmation of the rumour, from someone who says Shakira was secretly adopted by the dissident activist Arif al Vafa Bahrami.”

“Barakullah!” Sharif sat up, blinking.

“Yes, he was even more loyal than we knew. But we have no further information. Bahrami escaped to England, and the family was there for years, waiting for their appeal for asylum to be heard, before Arif was assassinated in the street,” Ash said. “If the story is true, Shakira should have been with them. But there’s no record of a child with that name.”

“Would they have given her a different name?” Sharif suggested.

“Maybe.” The Sultan leaned back in his chair and sighed. “But there are compelling arguments against the idea, Sharif. After Arif Bahrami’s death the British Home Office ruled that his wife and children were no longer at risk and must return to Bagestan. There was an appeal. We’ve now received the transcript of that appeal from the British government. Arif’s wife made no mention of harbouring a descendant of the Sultan. Yet such information would surely have strengthened the family’s case for being allowed to stay.”

“The child would have gone straight onto Ghasib’s death list,” Sharif pointed out. “And not merely Princess Shakira—the whole family would have been in danger.” He paused and took a sip of juice, set down his glass. “What was the result of the appeal?”

“It failed. The family were deported from Britain.”

Sharif’s lips tightened into grimness.

“They were accepted by Parvan, however, and went there—not long before the Kaljuk invasion.”

The Sultan absently tidied the file, putting the photograph on top. He sat for a moment with his hands framing it, gazing down on his young cousin’s face.

“Records from Parvan show the name Bahrami in a refugee camp that was bombed during the Kaljuk War. Survivors apparently went to an Indonesian refugee camp, but after that records are chaotic. Someone who might be one of the Bahrami children appears among the records of orphans there, but that camp was closed down.”

He leaned back and rubbed his eyes.

“The inhabitants were then shipped to camps all over the world. The trail goes completely cold.”

Sharif picked up the photograph again. It showed a child four or five years old. Dark hair that tumbled down over her shoulders, glossy and curling. Rounded cheeks glowing with health and vitality, wide, thoughtful eyes, and a mischievous smile.

If ever he had a daughter, he thought irrelevantly, he would like her to look like this.

“How old is she now?” he asked.

“If the records we have are correct, twenty-one.”

“She has the al Jawadi look, all right.”

Ashraf nodded. “Yes.”

The Cup Companion, still gazing at the child’s face, was suddenly conscious of a powerful draw. He wondered what kind of woman she had grown into. If she had lived.

“You want me to find her?” he said.

“Yes. Or, more probably, some evidence of what her fate was. And yet, if there’s any hope… God knows how many camps you’ll have to visit. It’s a nearly hopeless task, Sharif. I know it.”

Sharif sat for a moment, accepting it with a slow nod. Then the two men got to their feet and embraced again. “Do your best. It may be impossible,” said the Sultan.

The mouth that some people thought cold had stretched in a quick smile. His hand had formed a fist at his heart.

“By my head and eyes, Lord,” Sheikh Sharif Azad al Dauleh had said. “If the Princess is alive, I’ll find her.”

“Sharif.”

“Lord.”

“What news?”

“Something’s come up here, Ash.”

“You’ve got a line on her?”

“Not the Princess,” Sharif said. “Lord, brace yourself for something strange. I’ve found someone else here. I thought—”

“Someone else?”

“A boy, about fourteen or fifteen.” Far out in the desert, a distant glow pinpointed the detention centre. “An orphan, I imagine—he’s attached himself to a family that’s obviously not his own. If he’s not an al Jawadi, Ash, then neither are you. Any idea who he might be?”

There was the silence of shock being absorbed. Then he heard the Sultan’s breath escape in a rush.

“Allah, how can I say? We know so little about some branches of the family, and yet…might someone have mistaken the name? Or could it be that two of Mahlouf’s children escaped?”

“The boy speaks English, which would fit what we know of the Bahramis’ history.” Sharif hesitated. “He would have been a babe in arms at the time of the assassination.”

In the shadows on the table behind him, the file on Princess Shakira lay open. Sharif turned and picked up the photograph. Somewhere along the line he had become committed to finding this child alive. To knowing the woman she had become. He didn’t want to accept that this delightful, elusive little spirit had been wiped from the earth without having the chance to flower.

It was nothing but sentiment, and he knew well that he would have despised it in others. He despised it in himself. Many members of the royal family had been assassinated during the years of Ghasib’s rule, and countless other innocents. Why should he want to pull this one out of the darkness that had descended on his country thirty years before?

If it was the boy who’d been saved…had he been looking for the wrong person all along?

“What does the boy himself say?” Ash’s voice brought him out of the reverie.

“I haven’t asked, Lord. He’s been deeply affected by what he’s been through.” The image of the boy’s face, so stamped with grief and suffering, rose in his mind. Apart from the al Jawadi characteristics the two shared, the contrast between Hani and the little girl in the photograph covered everything, Sharif reflected sadly—she was trusting, where the boy trusted none; she was happy, while the boy suffered; she was nourished, the boy starved; she believed, the boy had learned cynicism. And yet they were connected by that one thread, which seemed to overpower all the differences. The family resemblance dominated.

“I’d like your permission to bring him home without first trying to establish his background. To raise his hopes and then leave him in these conditions because he proves not to be what I think—”

“No, of course we can’t do that. Do whatever your judgement suggests, Sharif.”

When he hung up, the Cup Companion remained where he was, staring out over the desert. Smoke trailed up from the thin cigar in his hand, its shape twisting and scudding before his absent eyes.

Sharif Azad al Dauleh was variously said to be cold, cynical, selfish, too intelligent for his own good, but none of those accusations hit the mark. Sharif was highly intelligent, and proud of a noble lineage. He was also courageous and impatient of weakness or cowardice. Weaker men—and women—might well resent such a combination. But if his compassion was rarely roused, it was perhaps because he first had none for himself.

He had seen a great deal of human suffering during the weeks of his fruitless search. And only now did he feel the weight of helplessness that he had been unconsciously carrying with him.

Was it because the boy was so obviously an al Jawadi and Sharif’s loyalty was bred in the bone? Was it something in Hani himself? Or was this child—with his haunted eyes and his cynical understanding that he was destined to be one of the world’s dispossessed, a child who’d had nothing for so long he didn’t remember what something was—simply the last straw of weight Sharif’s spirit could bear?