qualified, and she had initially put his determination to question everything she said and did as a mere youthful desire to make his mark. So she hadn’t checked him—more for the sake of his pride than anything else. She had assumed that he would soon realise that here they worked as a team, not as individuals trying to score points off one another, but instead of recognising that he was at fault James had started to become even more vocal in his criticism of her.
Sam really regretted ever having mentioned to James in conversation how interested she was in the origins of the river that flowed into and through Dhurahn. Since she had James had continually made references to it that implied she was spending the time she was paid for checking the status of the borders in trying, as James put it, ‘to mess around with the source of a river that we all know is there’, and in doing so avoiding doing any ‘proper work’. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
‘Take no notice of him,’ Talia had tried to comfort her before she had injured herself. ‘He obviously has issues with you, and that’s his problem, not yours.’
‘The trouble is that he’s making it my problem,’ Sam had told her. ‘I really resent the way he’s making such an issue of my interest in the source of the river—as though he thinks I’ve got some kind of ulterior motive.’
‘I should just ignore him, if I were you,’ Talia had told her. ‘I mean, we’ve all heard the legend of how the river was first supposed to have been found—and who, in all honesty, wouldn’t find it fascinating?’
Sam had nodded her head.
The story was that, centuries earlier, the forebears of Dhurahn’s current Ruler, desert nomads, had been caught in a sandstorm and lost their way. After days of wandering in the desert, unable to find water, they had prayed to Allah to save them. When they had finished praying their leader had looked up and seen a bird perched on a rocky outcrop.
‘Look,’ he had commanded his people. ‘Where there is life there must be water. Allah be praised!’
As he had spoken he had brought his fist down on a rock, and miraculously water had spouted from that rock to become a river that watered the whole of Dhurahn—the land he had claimed for his people.
‘It’s been proved now, of course, that the river runs underground for hundreds of miles before it reaches Dhurahn,’ she’d reminded the other girl. ‘The legend probably springs from the fact that a fissure of some kind must have allowed a spring to bubble up from underground. And luckily for Dhurahn it happened on their land.’
Dawn! Here in the desert it burst upon the senses fully formed, taking you hostage to its miracle, Vere acknowledged, as he brought his four-by-four to a halt so that he could watch it.
Naturally his was the first vehicle in the convoy, since it would be unthinkable for him to travel in anyone’s dust. He had, in fact, left the others several miles behind him when he’d turned off the road that led to an oasis where the border-mapping team had set up camp, to drive across the desert itself instead.
As teenagers, both he and Drax had earned their spurs in the testosterone-fuelled young Arab male ‘sport’ of testing their skill against the treachery of the desert’s sand dunes. Like others before them, they had both overturned a handful of times before they had truly mastered the art of dune driving—something which no one could do with the same panache as a desert-dwelling Arab.
These days, with modern GPS navigation systems, the old danger of losing one’s bearings and dying from dehydration before one could be found wasn’t the danger it had once been, but the desert itself could never be tamed.
The Oasis of the Doves, where the team was encamped, was just inside Dhurahn’s own border, at the furthest end of a spear of Dhurahni land which contained the source of the river that made so much of Dhurahn the lushly rich land that it was.
Their ancestors had fought hard and long to establish and hold on to their right to the source of the river, and many bitter wars had been fought between Dhurahn and its neighbours over such a valuable asset before the Rulers had sat down together and reached a legal and binding agreement on where their borders were to be.
Vere could remember his father telling him with a rueful smile that the family story was that their great-grandfather had in part legally secured the all-important strip of land containing the beginnings of the river that they had claimed by right of legend for so many generations because he had fallen passionately in love with the daughter of the English diplomat who had been sent to oversee the negotiations—and she with him. Lord Alfred Saunders had quite naturally used his diplomatic powers in favour of his own daughter once he had realised that she could not be dissuaded from staying with the wild young Arab with whom she had fallen in love.
It had been at Vere’s insistence that the scientific and mapping teams had been housed in the traditional black tents of the Bedou, instead of something more westernised. It might be Drax who was the artist, but Vere’s own eye was very demanding, and the thought of seeing anything other than the traditional Bedou tents clustered around an oasis affronted his aesthetic sense of what was due to the desert.
He restarted the four-by-four’s engine and eased it easily and confidently down the steep ravine that lay ahead of him. His mother had always loved this oasis, and it was now protected by new laws that had been brought in to ensure that it remained as it was and would never, as some oases had, become an over-developed tourist attraction.
The oasis itself was a deep pool of calm water that reflected the colour of the sky. It was fringed with graceful plants, and the narrow path that skirted it was shaded by palm trees. Migrating birds stopped there to rest and drink, the Bedou nomads drove their herds here, and held their annual trading fairs here. Bedou marriage feasts took place here.
It was a place for the celebration of life, symbolised by the oasis itself—the preserver of life. But for once being here was not soothing Vere.
Instead he felt hauntingly aware of an emptiness inside himself, and the ache that emptiness was causing. How was it possible for him to feel like this when it wasn’t what he wanted? He had grown so used to believing that he could control his own emotions that he couldn’t accept that somehow his emotional defences had been breached. It shouldn’t have been possible, and because of that Vere was determined to believe that it wasn’t possible.
The pain he had felt on losing his parents had shocked and frightened him—something that he had never admitted to anyone, not even Drax, and something he had tried to bury deep within himself. He had reasoned at the time that it was because his father’s death had made him Dhurahn’s new ruler—a role that demanded for the sake of his people that he show them that he was their strength, that they could rely on him as they had relied on his father. How could he manifest that strength when alone in his room at night he wept for the loss of his mother? For the sake of Dhurahn and his people he’d forced himself to separate from his love for his mother and the pain of his loss. He had decided there must be a weakness within him that meant he must never, ever allow himself to become emotionally vulnerable through love, for the sake of his duty. He couldn’t trust himself to put his duty above his own personal feelings should he fall in love and marry and then for any reason lose the woman he loved.
Those feelings and that decision still held as good for him now as they had done the day he had made them, sitting alone in his mother’s private garden, sick with longing for her comfort. His father had worshipped and adored their mother, but Vere knew that, had he survived the accident, he would somehow have continued to be the Ruler of Dhurahn, not a grieving husband, because that was his absolute and predestined duty. The weakness within him, Vere had decided that day, was one he must guard against all his life.
