Clio, a woman never speaks to a man in such a tone of voice as this that you use to me. Women have sharp tongues, men have strong bodies. We respect each other by not using our strengths against the other.”
“Are you threatening me?” she demanded.
“I only explain to you how men and women get along in a civilized country,” he told her, and though now she was sure he was laughing at her, she couldn’t stop the fury that buzzed in her.
“Well, that isn’t how it is here!” she exploded. “And maybe you haven’t noticed that, civilized or not, you aren’t in the desert now!”
His lips were twitching. “I do know. We are going to hit the boat behind us, and this is a thing that would never happen in the desert.”
Two
Clio whirled, diving instinctively for the wheel. She put the engine in gear, barely in time, and drew away from the small yacht moored at the next dock. What a racket there would have been from the anguished owner if she had collided with that expanse of perfectly polished whiteness!
It wasn’t like her to forget herself like that when she was in charge of a boat. Clio had had water safety drummed into her with her earliest memories. It just showed what a negative effect he had on her.
But the sudden change of focus had the effect of calming her wild emotions. As she guided the boat over the sparkling lake, she understood that he had been deliberately baiting her, and was annoyed with herself for reacting so violently. She needed better control than that if she was going to get through the summer in one piece.
Jalal gazed at the scene around him. “This is the first time I have seen such a landscape.” He had an expression of such deep appreciation on his face that Clio had to resist softening. She loved this land. “It is beautiful.”
She certainly would always think so. “But I guess you feel more at home in the desert,” she suggested. She had not liked what she saw of the desert when she was in the Emirates. No wonder if an environment like that produced violent men.
“I am at home nowhere.”
She stared at him. “Really? Why?”
He shook his head. “My grandfather Selim never meant me to follow in his own footsteps. When I was a little boy he told me always that something great was in store for me. I learned to feel that where I was born was not my true home. I belonged somewhere else, but I did not know where. Then my mother took me to the capital….”
“Zara told me that the palace organized your education from an early age,” she said, interested in his story in spite of herself. He had a deep, pleasant voice. He engaged her interest against her will.
“Yes, but I did not know it then. Curious things happened, but I was too young to demand an explanation. Only when I approached university, and my mother gave me a list of courses to follow in my studies. Then some suspicion I had felt became clearer. I demanded to know who controlled my life, and why. But she would tell me nothing.”
“And did you take the recommended degree?”
He laughed lightly at himself. He never told his story to strangers, and he did not understand why he was telling Clio. She had made it clear she was no friend.
“I never knew! I tore up the list, like a hothead. I said, now I am a man, I choose for myself!”
“And then?”
He shook his head, shrugging. “I graduated, I enlisted in the armed forces—and then again I felt the invisible hand of my protector. They put me into officer training. I rose more quickly than individual merit could deserve…still my mother was mute.”
She could hear the memory of frustration in his voice.
“But you did eventually find out.” Clio wondered if this story was designed to disarm her hostility by justifying his treatment of her sister. Well, let him hope. He would find out soon enough that what she said, she meant.
“Yes, I found out. It was on the day the princes came of age according to their father’s will. The Kingdom of Barakat would be no more, and in its place there would be three Emirates. There was a great coronation ceremony, televised for all the country to see. Television sets were put in the squares of the villages—a spectacle for the people, to reassure them of the power, the mystery, the majesty of their new princes.”
She was half-smiling without being aware of it, falling under his spell.
“I watched in my mother’s house. Never will I forget the moment when the camera rested on the faces of the princes, one after the other, coming last to Prince Rafi.
“Of course I knew we were alike—whenever his picture was in the paper everyone who knew me commented. But what is a photograph? True resemblance requires more than the face. That day…that day I saw Prince Rafi move, and speak, and smile, as if…as if I looked in a mirror instead of a television set.”
She murmured something.
“And then it fell into place. The mystery of my life— I knew it had some connection with my resemblance to Prince Rafi. I knew that the old man I had called my father was not my father.
“‘Who am I?’ I cried to my mother, trembling, jumping to my feet. ‘Who is Prince Rafi to me?”’
“Did she tell you?”
He nodded. “My mother could no longer refuse, in spite of the shame of what she confessed. She was disappointed that the great future that they had promised for me for so many years had not arrived on this momentous day. ‘He is your uncle,’ she told me. ‘The half brother of your father, the great Prince Aziz. You could be standing there today instead of them.”’
Jalal paused, a man hovering between present and past. “Of course I knew—every citizen knew—who Prince Aziz was, although it was over twenty-five years since he and his brother had so tragically died. Singers sang the song of King Daud’s great heartbreak.”
His eyes rested on her, but he hardly saw her. He was looking at the past.
“And this noble prince, this hero dead so young…was my father.”
Clio breathed deeply. She had been holding her breath without knowing it. “What a terrible shock it must have been.”
It would be something, a discovery like that. In a young man it might motivate…seeing where her thoughts were leading her, Clio mentally braked.
He nodded. “I was a lost man. As if I stood alone in a desert after a sandstorm. Every familiar landmark obliterated. All that I had known and believed about myself was false. I was someone else—the illegitimate son of a dead prince, grandson of the old king…how could this be? Why had I not been told?”
“What a terrible shock it must have been.”
“A shock, yes. But very soon I felt a great rage. If they did not wish to recognize me because of the illegitimacy of my birth, why had they taken me from my ordinary life, for what had they educated me…? Why had I never met my grandfather, the king, and my grandmother, his most beloved wife, in all those years when my future was being directed—and to what purpose was it all? My grandfather
