The Ice Maiden's Sheikh (4 page)

“So the two men waited while the meal Anwar Beg ordered to be prepared for him was cooked and served. Scarcely containing his impatience, his friend ate the delicious meat stew that was brought, complimenting his host on the meal.

“‘Friend,' said the man when the meal was finished, ‘I wish to make you an offer again on that magnificent horse which you have always refused to sell.'

“Anwar Beg shook his head. ‘Impossible,' he said.

“‘But surely, with things with you as they now are,” the neighbour cried, ‘you must listen to reason! Sell me the horse! I will give you a good price for it so that you can provide for your family.'

“‘It is impossible,' repeated Anwar Beg. ‘You came to me as a guest, and it was necessary to show you hospitality. Having no other food to offer you, I ordered that the horse be slaughtered to make the stew you have just eaten.'”

Jalia gazed at Latif a long time when the story was finished, and predominant among her feelings was guilt. “I could never live up to a standard like that,” she said quietly.

“Yes,” he contradicted her. “This story describes not what is, but what we strive towards. You have a more generous spirit than you know—it is in your eyes. And in your blood. The al Jawadi have a tradition of great generosity.

“Think of your grandfather's generous treatment of the young orphan boy, Ghasib, who grew up to betray him. This is the blood you have inherited, Jalia, whether you know it or not. And when you stop being afraid, then you will find your generosity.”

He was always saying things like that, what she called his “gnomic utterances.”

“When I stop being afraid of what?” she asked, indignant.

“I cannot do all the work for you. Some things you must discover for yourself,” he said, and in his voice was an urgency that frightened her.

L
atif kept his eyes on the road. It was all he could do not to shout at her, so angry was he—at her wilful blindness, at fate, at himself.

Himself. Why should he blame her, or fate, when his trouble was of his own making? Fate had put her in his way; he had doubted fate's wisdom, as fools do. He had been too cautious in embracing the way fate showed him, and now he could never embrace her as his wife….

“Princess Muna, Sheikh Ihsan,” Ashraf had said, “here is my trusted Cup Companion, my ally and support throughout our struggle. Latif Abd al Razzaq Shahin will aid you and your family….”

The rest of what the new Sultan said was lost in the clamour in Latif's head. For, standing beside Princess Muna and her husband, watching him with a
clear, level gaze, was the woman he had been waiting for since that moment his soul had been plucked from its nest beside her in the heavens and sent into the cruel, testing world.

A stern nobility, which must have told anyone who looked at her that she was of royal blood, was evident in the set of her mouth, the lift of her head.

In addition she had an unusual, harsh beauty, proud and unapproachable. Her eyes were coolly intelligent as she gazed at him, and he felt that only he could see through to the secret of a passionately generous heart.

All that he saw between one painful heartbeat and another.

The thick fair hair had seemed like a fall of honey against her cheek, the promise of sweetness so tangible he had to clench his fists not to wrap his hand in its silky strands, bend closer to inhale the odour, bury his mouth in the taste.

“…Jalia…” he heard through the drumming of his heart, and with a fist at his breast, he bowed.

“Princess Jalia,” he said. His voice must have told her what he felt, how he took her name into himself, took her, possessed her self and her name forever by speaking two words that changed his life….

“I don't use that title,” she had responded with chilly disdain, cutting through the haze that enveloped his brain with the frosted blade of hauteur. “My name is Jalia Shahbazi, Your Excellency.”

Like a man on a journey faced with an ice-topped mountain in his path, he had advised caution to his heart. She was hostile and guarded, and he couldn't guess why.

Logic told him that nothing would be gained by a direct assault. He must give her time.

Weak, cowardly thought that it was, his heart had given it room, had considered it, had bowed to the dictates of logic when deep instinct told him that he must challenge her, that his own passion's fire would melt the ice in which her heart was encased.

He had given her time, but time was not his to give. Within days she had fled back to the cold northern country of her birth.

She had given no warning of her departure. Merely the next time he had met her parents and asked for her, he learned that she had gone “home” that morning.

For the next few weeks, carrying out his duties for the Sultan, advising Jalia's parents about their lost properties and treasures, helping them in their plans to return to Bagestan, he had called himself a fool. To be so blinded by a woman's beauty, to be so challenged by a cold demeanour—it was no more than a fool's obsession, a child seeing what it can't have and wanting it because of that.

Angry with her for her coldness, angry with himself for his heat, telling himself his heart was not truly engaged—so he had passed the time until the day of her cousin's wedding to his friend had approached, and Jalia had reluctantly returned to Bagestan.

And now she was wearing a ring. Another man's ring.

The first time he had seen her he had been deafened by the thunder and rushing of his own blood. This time he had been blinded—by a haze of anguished fury that ripped at him. Broken heart? he remembered
thinking dimly. Whoever felt so weak a torment had never known love: Latif's heart had been set upon by wild dogs and torn to pieces. He would never put it together again.

 

It waved at her from the top of a ridge, a soft silver hand catching the sunlight with a syncopated rhythm of glimmer under the bright sun, a liquid mirror. The breath hissed between her teeth as she groped for the binoculars against her chest.

“Something?”

The truck slowed, and she nodded once as she fitted the glasses to her eyes. “Something large and metallic. Moving in the wind.”

Latif Abd al Razzaq pulled the four-wheel drive off the road and stopped, and Jalia combed the ridge with the binoculars to find it again.

“There,” she said. It was a chunk of aluminum, perhaps, silver but not necessarily with the glitter of newly ripped-apart metal, not necessarily part of a plane that has crashed taking two young and vital human beings to a wasteful death.

“I can't tell what it is.”

But he had already turned off the engine and now stepped out on the grey-and-brown mountainside. Jalia scrambled to follow.

A familiar sense of dread dragged at her. In the past few days there had been a half dozen times when she had seen something that might have marked wreckage from a downed plane, and each time her heart beat a frantic, anxious message in her temples, weighted down her stomach so that she felt old.

She clambered after him across the rugged, half
breathtaking, half terrifying landscape, towards the ridge of rock overlooking a crevasse. Behind it the mountainside rose sheer and raw, making her dizzy.

If the plane had crashed here and gone over the edge…how far down was the floor of the crevasse behind that ridge?

The last few yards were difficult, and she was panting with fear and exertion as she approached the edge. Above her, Latif reached the object she had seen and knelt down to examine it.

“A cargo door,” he said as she came up, and her hand flew to her mouth.

“Oh, God!” It lay broken and torn where it had been caught on a sharp rock and prevented from falling over the edge. A thin strip of torn shiny metal attached to a hinge waved in the air. “Was there—is it part of Bari's plane?”

A sudden breeze caught the glittering aluminum, and her heart fluttered in time with it. Jalia dropped flat on her stomach and peered over the rocky ridge.

“No, it is too big. Part of a commercial or military aircraft, lost in flight. It has been here for a long time,” Latif said.

“Oh, thank God! Are you sure?” Her constricted lungs opened again, her heart calmed. She believed him, but still she put the binoculars to her eyes and peered over the ridge to get a view of the bottom.

She wasn't sure what hope there could be, if the plane had come down anywhere in the mountains. But she hated to imagine it pitching down into terrain like this.

“There's a
valley!
” she cried. Nestling down among the crags was a wide green oval, thriving with
life. She took the glasses from her eyes and peered down, half disbelieving.

“From the road you'd never guess it was there!” At either end of the valley two thrusting formations of rock created a kind of optical illusion when she looked up, seeming much closer together than they were.

“Look at those two peaks at either end! From this angle, don't they look like falcons or hawks or something? What a beautiful place.”

“Royal falcons,” he said. “They are called the
Shahins.
”

She became aware of a sense of peace surrounding her. In the far distance Mount Shir presided over all, a brooding presence, dangerous and protective at the same time, the powerful mother-father of the lands that pressed against her like suckling infants.

Jalia lifted her head and gazed up at the rich blue sky. Suddenly she understood that her defensive attitude towards this country had prevented her truly seeing it.

Now, for once, she allowed herself to see what she was looking at, to feel the air that surrounded her. It was so fresh, so pure. And it seemed charged with energy, as if the great mountain were a generator.

“This really is a wonderful place,” she murmured and, turning to share it with Latif, she smiled at him. “I'm beginning to understand why my mother and father never lost their hope of returning home.”

She gazed down at the valley again. There weren't words to describe the calm and beauty that lay over the scene.

“I can see goats! And farms—how can it be so
green after such a long drought, I wonder? So many trees. Do you know the name of the valley?” she demanded, thinking she would not be surprised to hear him say
Shangri-La.

“We call it Sey-Shahin,” he said. “Three Falcons.”

She turned to look into his face, her eyebrows climbing with surprised enquiry.

“Yes, this is my home,” said Latif Abd al Razzaq Shahin. “Outsiders give us, and the valley, the name Marzuqi.”

“Marzuqi,” Jalia repeated softly.
The Blessed.
She could see how the valley had achieved the name. It looked fertile and protected, and as old as time.

“It's so green,” she said, feeling how inadequate the word was to describe what she saw and felt.

“The drought did not affect us so badly here, so when the rains came, the fields recovered quickly.”

Jalia glanced around. “Can we go down? Where is the road?”

The valley looked at first glance to be completely surrounded by impenetrable, unyielding rock. But Latif pointed across the valley to where a grey line emerged from a dark circle like an egg under the feet of the falcon-shaped rock, and slanted slowly down to the valley floor.

“That is the tunnel. The road has been badly damaged by the heavy rains since the drought ended. At the moment the way in and out is on foot, or by mule.”

“My God, how will people manage?”

A pebble was dislodged under her elbow and went over the edge to bounce down and down. She watched
it with a curious feeling that the movement had significance.

“We are used to it. The road is only a few years old, and was badly made. Ghasib finally forced the tunnel through because every time he sent his administrators to the valley they lost their way in the passes. Some say that Genghis Khan had the same difficulty.”

Jalia laughed and clapped her hands together in delight. “So this is the valley that was never conquered?”

“Even Islam came to Sey-Shahin very late. There are many ancient rituals among our people that exist nowhere else in the world. Western scholars sometimes wish to come here to study what they call ‘living tradition'—hoping to find a mirror of the past in the present practices of the Marzuqi people.”

She frowned in thought. “I remember someone in the department coming on a field trip here a few years ago with very high hopes. But I don't think—”

She stopped because of his expression. “What happened? Do you know?”

“Possibly he got lost in the passes,” Latif said guilelessly, and Jalia erupted in a burst of laughter, then clapped her hands over her mouth and sat gazing up at him, her eyes alight.

His eyes met hers in shared amusement, and she felt a treacherous prickle along her spine that said it was not only the land her prejudices had prevented her seeing clearly.

“The only experienced guides in this area are Sey-Shahini tribesmen. Sometimes a bribe is high enough, and someone slips through. That encourages others to
think that such bribes work. Guides used to make a living in summer from failing to find the valley.”

She was laughing, though God alone knew why. Being an academic herself, she ought to have regretted the thwarting of scholarship.

But the valley looked so enchanting that something in her did not want to think of its people being analysed and “published.”

Her blood was stronger than her academic loyalties, maybe. Certainly as she gazed down at the flourishing little valley, her heart was drawn there.

“Suppose
I
wanted to—”

The expression on Latif's face struck her a blow that left her breathless, and choked the words in her throat. He was looking at her as if that was exactly the question he wanted to hear.

A chasm opened in front of her, without warning, dangerous and deep, as Jalia understood that she had been mistaken in his feelings all this time. Latif Abd al Razzaq might be angry, he might be impatient, but it wasn't dislike that was motivating him.

He wanted her. It was there in the fierce emerald eyes, in the set of his jaw, in the way his hand gripped the rock he leaned against—as if he held it to prevent himself from reaching for her. Every muscle and ligament now shouted the truth that she should have heard weeks ago—had heard, perhaps, and had run from.

But blindly. Like a terrified fool in the dark she had run straight into danger, straight into the falcon's nest.

Suddenly she saw it—the whole process by which he had brought her here, out into the starkly beautiful
land of her ancestors, to the heart of his own existence, to a state of mind where she could no longer deny the land's deep and abiding hold over her heart and blood. It was a trap, baited with the simplest psychological techniques.

This was what her parents had hoped for—that the country would somehow get to her. That the land and the people would convince her where words could not.

What a fool she had been, playing with so potent a danger as a man like Latif Abd al Razzaq. Her first instinct had been right—to run. She should never have come back to Bagestan, ring or no ring. What good would a ring do if her own heart betrayed her?

The silence extended while he watched the play of emotion on her stern, beautiful face.

“What did you want to say?”

“Nothing,” said Jalia. “We'd better get going.”

 

She was under threat. She knew it. Back in the little truck she watched Latif's profile surreptitiously, and reminded herself that she didn't go for the dark, eagle-eyed look.

And yet…oh, how his masculinity emanated from him, reaching out and touching her with an aura that said,
I am a man. You are a woman.