But Abid got up, wiping the dust off the back of his dishdasha.
“So humans can see jinn, yeah?”
“If the jinni wants you to see him, you can see him. We must hurry.” Abid was heading back to the car. “It will rain soon.”
A black cloud had darkened the river, which no longer seemed so tame; in the gloaming, it looked very much like a hideaway for spooks and specters. Gabriel felt edgy as they set off for Rustaq to see another fort, especially when a few drops of water on the windscreen suddenly became slashing rain that thundered down onto the jeep.
With a glance at the sky, Abid invoked Allah as the vehicle bumped off the stones and back up to the track. “This is not good. It has been raining in the mountains. The wadis will flood.”
“Flash floods? Really?”
“Don’t worry. It will be fine.”
They managed to get across one wadi, where the river was rising, before coming to another just as a great torrent of brown water came roiling past. Abid drove back to a more elevated spot and parked. They could go neither forward nor back. “We have to wait.”
“So this is a flash flood?” Gabriel asked, raising his voice to be heard above the lashing on the roof and watching the slow flow of sludge. “Not exactly flashy, is it?”
“But it is very strong.”
Raindrops bounced around the bonnet, furious.
“How long will we be here?”
“A few hours maybe.”
“How many hours?”
Abid shrugged. “Five. Six.”
“Jesus.” They might be there all night. Omanis were loose with time. It was an elastic concept: five, six hours could mean ten, or two, and Gabriel loved it. He’d be happy to get into the groove of a time-loose existence—but this flood was keeping him from her.
From her, his jinniya. No way. For one thing, she had an Irish accent. She wasn’t Eastern in any respect. Irish jinn—now there’s a concept.
The water, thick as mud and full of debris, pushed past, with sporadic rushes, as if upstream someone was sweeping out a lake.
Unprompted, Abid began to talk again. His uncle, he said, had married a jinn and had a jinn family—female jinniya, he explained, always gave birth to jinn children—and they lived alongside his human family in another house beyond the orchard, but no one knew about them until his uncle died. He had divided his estate between his jinn family and his human family, since the Quran insists that all wives and children should be equally cared for, but his mortal children could not accept this. His eldest son even moved his own family into the house where the jinn lived. Abid shrugged. “For the jinn wife, it’s punishment time. After the funeral—fourteen days—any time the family has a meal, huge dust comes and spoils it. And then the house, the windows are rattling, shaking, showing her anger. Still they won’t recognize her, so she sends her boys to cry outside the door and the human family couldn’t do anything to stop this, so his sons went to find out what was the problem and she came to meet them. ‘I came only for one reason,’ she told them. ‘My children they have human brothers and if you don’t recognize them, I will make sure you will disappear from this world. One by one.’ The dead man’s sons laughed and told her that jinn are not strong enough to do that, but she said, ‘I have the power. My husband made me that promise, that my family would be recognized, and if a human promises something, he should do it.’”
Abid looked up and down the watercourse a little uneasily. “Jinn live sometimes near riverbeds. Places where not many people come. Like this. They come at the end of the day.”
He seemed a little spooked; Gabriel was fairly spooked himself.
“Very soon after that,” Abid went on, “one of the sons, his little baby disappeared. Two months old. The whole village went searching, looking, until finally, when it was almost dark, a young girl heard a baby crying deep in the oasis and found him on the ground beside a tree. The son’s wife, she took her children and moved back to her mother, saying she would never again go near that place, but the husband, he stayed, until one night he woke and there was a fire burning in his room. It happened many nights—fire burning, like that. So he left also, and the jinn family stayed, undisturbed until today. Still now, nobody goes there. It is full of jinn.’
“So humans can marry jinn?”
“Yes.”
And have children, Gabriel thought, and therefore have sex.
Back in Muscat, late that night, Gabriel checked every room in the house, and the first-floor windows, before locking the front door and the door to the roof. Then he waited, more apprehensive than usual, his chest tight, his bedsheets cold and crinkling. He thought about Annie, her longing to conceive, and shivered.
He didn’t want a jinn-child roaming the earth, the issue of this beautiful creature and his mangled conscience, and he fell asleep wondering what kind of a jinn he might create—evil or good?
When he woke, Prudence was lying with him. He went downstairs—the door was still bolted from the inside. Doubts pricked at him, but not enough to stop him going back upstairs to do what they did best.
“Come out with me,” he said to her afterward. “You always speak of the sea. Let’s get a blast of sea air.”
There was no moving her. She couldn’t go from where she was, she said, and it made sense that she didn’t want to be seen around town with him. It would be all over the expat community within hours.
She had to stay, she insisted, where she could hear the sea.
“You’d hear the sea a whole lot better if you were walking beside it,” Gabriel insisted, and with a faint sense of irritation he got up and left the house before she did.
On Yiti Beach, Annie stood by the water, loose waves fussing over her feet. Marie and Jasper’s pretty daughter was playing in the sea with Thomas and Margarethe’s trio of blond babes and Rashid’s moon-eyed sons.
“Gabriel was almost washed away in a flash flood last week,” Rolf said behind her, to their gathered friends.
“Oh, you have to be so careful!” Marie was sitting in the deckchair next to Gabriel’s. “It can be dangerous. You shouldn’t go driving around the country, especially when the weather isn’t good.”
“It was fine. I was with Abid. We sat it out.”
The children’s high-pitched screeches, their simple joy, held Annie there, adrift from the reclining adults who, apart from Rashid and his wife, Sabah, were oiling themselves against the blistering sun. Annie tried not to mind. She and Rolf were the only couple she knew in Oman who had no children, but she tried not to mind.
Yiti Beach, east of Muscat, was accessible only by 4x4, but worth every jolt of the physical shake-up that had to be endured before getting there. At one end, two huge rocks lifted out of the shallow waters and Annie stood gazing at them, her hands on her haunches, her toes sinking into the sand.
“Walk?” Gabriel asked, coming alongside
