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“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 was dead, and I was left with no explanation of anything.”
He paused. The boat sped over the lake, and he blinked at the sun dancing off the water.
“What did you do?”
He glanced towards her, then back to the past again. “I made approaches to these new princes, my uncles. I demanded to know what my grandfather’s plans for me had been.”
“And they didn’t tell you?”
He shook his head. “Nothing. They would not speak to their own nephew. I had been taken from my mother’s home, but those who had done this thing would not let me enter my father’s.”
He turned to gaze intently at her. “Was this not injustice? Was I not right to be angered?”
“Zara told me they never knew. Your uncles, Rafi and Omar and Karim—they didn’t know who you were. Isn’t that right?”
“It is true that they themselves had never been told. They said afterwards that my letters, even, did not make the point clear. They thought me only a bandit. But someone had known, from the beginning. My grandfather himself…but he had made no provision for me in his will. No mention.”
“Isn’t that kind of weird?” It struck her as the least credible part of the whole equation.
His eyes searched her face with uncomfortable intensity.
“You would say that my uncles knew the truth, and only pretended ignorance until they were forced to admit it? Do you know this? Has your sister said something?”
She shook her head, not trusting the feelings of empathy that his story was—probably deliberately—stirring in her.
“No, I don’t know any more than you’ve told me. It’s just very hard for me to accept that a woman wouldn’t insist on meeting her only grandchild, the son of her own dead son.”
His face grew shadowed. “Perhaps—perhaps my illegitimate birth was too great a stain.”
“And so they never even met you?” Clio tried to put herself in such a position, and failed. She herself would move heaven and earth to have her grandchild near her, part of the family, whatever sin of love his parents had committed.
“Nothing. Not even a letter to be given to me after their death.”
No wonder he felt at home nowhere.
He was silent as they skimmed across the endless stretch of water, that seemed as vast as any desert.
“What did you do when your uncles refused your requests?”
He had made his way back to his “home,” the desert of his childhood. But the bonds had been severed.
“The desert could never be home to me. The tribe—so ignorant, living in another century, afraid of everything new—could not be my family.” So his determination to force his real family to recognize him grew. He had collected followers to his standard—and eventually…he had taken a hostage.
“And the rest you know,” he said, in an ironic tone.
“The rest I know,” she agreed. “And now your life has changed all over again. Thanks to Zara, you’ve proven your bloodline, you have your father’s titles and property…and you’re so trusted by your uncles they’ve made you Grand Vizier and now you’re on a mission to—”
His head snapped around, and if his dark eyes had searched her before, they now raked her ruthlessly.
“Mission? Who has told you I had a mission?”
She returned his look with surprise. “I thought the reason you were coming here was to get a better command of English so you could study political science or whatever at Harvard in the autumn. I thought a summer with the rowdy Blake family was supposed to be the perfect way to do it.”
The guarded look slowly left his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “It is true.”
Clio turned back to the water ahead of her, her mind buzzing with speculation. What on earth was that about? Did it mean he wasn’t really here to learn English at all? That it was some kind of blind? But for what? What other reason could Prince Jalal possibly have for coming here to the middle of nowhere?
Three
Jalal stood and moved towards the stern, gazing around him as they passed into yet another lake. He lifted both arms, stretching out his hands in powerful adoration. “It is magnificent! So much water!” He breathed deeply. “Smell the freshness of the water! This water is not salt! Is it?”
A loud horn startled her, and Clio whirled to discover that she had turned onto a collision course with another boat. She waved an apology to the indignant pilot as she hastily and not very gracefully adjusted her course. Jalal half lost his balance and recovered.
“Dammit, don’t distract me when I’m driving!” she cried. She had been staring over her shoulder at him. He had a huge physical charisma, but she would get over that. “No, of course it’s not salt,” she said when the danger was past. “All Canada’s lakes are freshwater.”
“Barakallah! It is a miracle. And you drink this water!” He spoke it as a fact, but still he looked for confirmation from her.
“Yes, we drink it.” She smiled, and then, realizing how much she had already let her guard down with him, steeled her heart against the tug she felt. “For now. It may end up polluted in the future, like everything else.”
But his joy would admit no contaminants. “It must be protected from pollution,” he said, as though he himself might fix this by princely decree. “This must not be allowed, to destroy such rich bounty.”
“Yes, really,” Clio agreed dryly.
“Why do they pollute such beauty?”
“Because it is cheaper to dump than to treat waste.”
Prince Jalal nodded, taking it in. Was it his grandmother’s blood in him that so called to this place?
“My mother’s mother was raised in a country of lakes and forests.” He spoke almost absently, as if to himself, and he blinked when she responded.
“Really? How did she happen to marry a desert bandit, then?”
“On a journey across the desert, she was abducted by my grandfather, Selim. She spent the rest of her life in the desert, but she never forgot her beloved land of lakes.”
The result of that union had been only one daughter, his mother. Desert-born Nusaybah had heard many longing tales of her mother’s homeland as a child, and later she had passed them on to her son. She had also passed on the information that his grandmother was a princess in her own country.
That had seemed unlikely, until the DNA tests showed that he was more closely related to Prince Rafi than to Rafi’s two half brothers. Then a search of the family tree showed that Rafi’s mother, the Princess Nargis, was the daughter of a prince whose sister had been abducted and never spoken of again.
For centuries the family had spent every summer in the highlands, just as Jalal’s grandmother had always said. So it was deep in his blood, the longing for lake and forest, though he had not felt its force until he saw these sights.
Clio frowned. “She spent the rest of her life in the desert? She was never rescued?”
He shook his head. “In those days no one would have troubled. She had no choice but to marry her abductor.”
“You mean her family knew where she was but left her there?”
“I cannot say what they knew, only what was the tradition. A woman captured by a man in this way…her family would have ignored her existence from that moment.”
She threw a look over her shoulder at him. “And you accept that?” she demanded incredulously.
“There is nothing for me to reject, Clio. It was finished, many years ago. I am here because of it. My mother Nusaybah was the child of that union. What shall I say? Maktoub. It is written.”
“So that’s in your blood too, is it—abducting women? I suppose that makes it all right! Were you expecting my family and Prince Rafi to leave my sister Zara to her fate?”
He shook his head impatiently, but did not reply.
“But no,” she supplied for him. “That wouldn’t have served your purpose! You knew Rafi had to get her back—world opinion would dictate that. You probably thought he’d refuse to marry her, but that wouldn’t have bothered you. If you spoiled their love, it would be just their bad luck, wouldn’t it? So long as you got what you wanted.”
“I did not reason in this way,” he said levelly. “I believed that he would want her back and would make her his wife when I released her unharmed.”
She had succeeded in talking herself into deep anger. She could not trust herself to make an answer.
So he was a chip off the old block. Did her parents know this about Jalal’s genes? But she didn’t suppose it would have made any difference. If they weren’t concerned about what he had done to Zara, they’d hardly worry about what his grandfather had done to a nameless princess fifty years ago.
A few minutes later they arrived at a large, rambling brick house. It was on the shore of a very pretty lake, smaller than those they had crossed to get here. There were tree-covered hills rising high around one end of the lake, as if some spirit brooded protectively over the water. Fewer houses dotted the shore.
As they approached their destination, he saw a marina clustered with boats on one side, and a pretty painted sign high on one wall of the house that advertised homemade ice cream, a crafts shop and an art gallery.
Clio guided the powerboat in, cut the engine and expertly brought it up beside the dock. Meanwhile, the door of the house exploded outward, and at least half a dozen children of all ages, four dogs and a couple of cats erupted into the morning to cries of “Is he here? Did the prince come? What does he look like?” and loud excited barks.
Everybody raced down to the dock, except for the cats, who dashed up the trunk of a large, leafy tree that over-hung the water so picturesquely he felt he was in some dream, and clung there indignantly, staring at the scene.
“Calm down, yes, he’s here and he doesn’t want to be deafened on day one! Here, Jonah, grab this,” Clio commanded lazily, tossing the mooring rope as a tall boy ran to the bow. The dock beside the boat was stuffed with children and canines, all gaping at him and all more or less panting with excitement.
“Is that him? Is that the prince?” In the babble he could pick out some sentences, but most of what they were saying was lost, as always when too many people talked at once in English.
