The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (130 page)

“It is now.”

“No, I mean
this.
”

And he knew then that Zara meant their lying in the dark, so much unspoken between them.

“There’s something I need to tell you…” Raf said tentatively.

“Let me guess,” she said. “I’m not the first. In fact you’ve fucked your way through an entire phone book of my friends. You have three children, well, that you know about… You’re only after my millions…”

“This is serious,” said Raf.

“So was I,” Zara answered. And pulled Raf to her and kissed him as her hand slid under his rib cage and then both her hands locked behind his back, so that Raf’s full weight rested on her trapped arm.

She felt him go hard.

“You’re naked,” said Raf, the fingers of his right hand tracing the crease of her buttocks, just to make sure he hadn’t got that wrong.

He hadn’t known, Zara realized. She’d been safely tucked under a quilt by the time he returned to the room.

There’d been one night, months before, when she’d talked and he’d listened, although she couldn’t remember it and he could; but then, if Raf was to be believed, he remembered everything, which was maybe not a good place to be.

“It’s important,” said Raf, holding her face between his hands. “And it concerns who I am. What I am…”

“You’re you,” said Zara. “That’s enough.”

“No,” said Raf sadly, “it isn’t. It’s not anything like enough.”

Zara wanted to know why, so Raf told her. Or rather he didn’t. He told her a fairy story instead. “Once,” said Raf, his fingers caressing the side of her face, “there was a son of Lilith…”

Raf took it as read that Zara knew Lilith’s story. Adam’s first wife, mother to vampyres and djinn. A woman expelled from Eden for fucking the snake.

“He was older than he looked because, although his days were as your days, his nights were often longer, one of them so long that fir trees grew and houses were built while he slept. Someone who loved him grew old and stopped loving him, seeing her own life and increasing age reflected in the puzzlement in his eyes every time he woke from the cold sleep…”

If Zara thought it was odd that Raf told her a folktale she kept this thought to herself. Remembering stories Hani had told her. Small girl’s stories. Of the kind easily dismissed.

“He slept the cold sleep because that was the easiest way not to die. Until one day he awoke and Lilith had died and her friends had forgotten him or no longer cared if he escaped. So he did what sons of Lilith do, moved to a strange country to live undetected as a human for seven years. For if a vampyre or djinn can live undetected for seven years he will become as human.”

“So Hani told me,” said Zara.

“She did?”

“She’s told everybody,” Zara said. “It’s in a book, the original story. About how a son of Lilith can become as human. But the children will be born sons of Lilith.”

“Sons of Lilith, daughters of Lilith,” said Raf. “In my case it’s called germ line manipulation. Whatever I am my children will become.”

“And what are you?”

Raf thought about it. “I’m not sure,” he said finally. “I get voices. I see in the dark. There are three extra ribs on either side of my rib cage. My eyes hurt in the daylight. My memory is too distressingly perfect for my mind to manage…”

“All of this is your mother’s responsibility?”

“Or Emir Moncef’s,” said Raf, “but it gets messier.” He felt the girl go still and shifted gently away from her, giving Zara space. “I’ve opened the bags… Secret files,” he added, when he realized she didn’t quite understand. “It’s like reading the technical specifications for a new type of car. One that might not work.”

“What’s the worst?”

“Immortality. Or if not immortality, then longevity. How long I don’t know but longer than is now normal.”

“You knew this when you refused to marry me?”

“Some of it,” said Raf. He stopped himself. “More than some,” he said but the anger was directed at himself. “What I wasn’t told as a child I overheard. It’s relatively easy to code for heightened hearing. Less easy to understand the implications if one’s own hearing is normal and the subject is three rooms away.”

“I’m sorry,” Zara said. Her hand moved up to touch his face and came away wet. She believed him implicitly.

“So am I,” said Raf.

Later, when he hung over her in the darkness, both of them drunk with longing, Raf bent forward and kissed Zara lightly on the forehead. There was something else he hadn’t mentioned. If he understood it right, then immortality was sexually transmitted; the act of being pregnant infected both mother and embryo.

The second time they made love began slow and ended up hard and fast. It started with Zara swinging herself on top of Raf and straddling his hips, her face only inches from his. Outside their window, the city was expectant for what would come the next day. Guards stood at the gates of the Bardo and patrolled the streets around the palace complex. Major Gide and Raf having agreed this as a matter of protocol only. Done because it was expected.

“Remember the boat?” Zara said.

As if he could forget. Water so blue it was almost purple. The scent of rosemary and thyme carried on a warm wind across a bay. And then the return trip. Hani safely asleep and Zara bringing him a beer as he sulked outside and time and the ocean slid past.

“What boat?” Raf demanded.

Leaning forward, Zara put her mouth over his and bit, hard enough to draw blood. “That boat,” she said.

They kissed and, slowly and rather clumsily, Zara reached down to position Raf against her. To Zara he was a shadow against white sheets, a watchful silent silhouette; for Raf she was lit clear as daylight… He could see her mouth twisting, eyes open and fixed on nothing, her breasts swaying forward with each rock of her hips, impossibly beautiful.

Reaching up with open hands, Raf felt warm flesh overflow his fingers and tried not to be offended when Zara absentmindedly lifted his hands away and went back to her rocking. After she’d ridden him in silence long enough for Raf to fade out his vision and lose himself in the rhythm, Zara took his hand and positioned it on her abdomen so that Raf’s thumb reached between swollen lips.

“There,” she said, “keep it there.” And went back to her darkness and a burst of half cries and swallowed words. There was no sharing this time. And angry was the only way to describe the abruptness with which Zara shuddered to a halt, her hand still holding his own hard against her smooth mons.

Smooth, because she lacked all body hair.

Zara had given him the list once. One night in another palace; the time she’d cried herself to sleep and woken to swallow him as she knelt on white marble tiles in the middle of a sunlit floor, three days before he prosecuted her father for murder. A fact neither one had ever mentioned. The list was relatively short and went no body hair, no labia minor or hood or tip to her clitoris… But, as she’d pointed out, a full Pharaonic would have been infinitely worse.

According to a doctor in New York (the one Zara saw at seventeen, the week after she arrived at Columbia), a rewarding sex life was perfectly possible. It might just take more effort than for some other women. And she stood, the doctor said, a better chance than many of those whose scar tissue was mental rather than physical.

The tiny vibrator the woman gave Zara went unused. Ditto a collection of glass dilators from small to medium. Zara found one article on female genital mutilation, attended one meeting at which she said nothing, then went back to writing law essays. And lying in the darkness as she said this, that time in El Iskandryia, Raf had been unable to work out from the flatness of Zara’s voice if she regarded this as common sense or cowardice…

“My turn.” Raf rolled the two of them over, so Zara lay underneath and he was between her legs. Widening her knees, Raf withdrew until the tightness at the entrance to her sex was about to release him, only to slam back, watching Zara’s chin go up in shock or surrender.

Her hands rose and fell, arms crooked at the elbow as fingers fluttered batlike in darkness. Tied to some plea forever unsaid. On her breath were white wine, hashish and the faintest trace of capers. Tastes that Raf took from her lips. And then her legs locked over his and her hips began to grind against him.

They came together with that blinding luck those new to each other sometimes get and slept, still locked in each other’s arms.

CHAPTER 54

Saturday 26th March

“Take a guess,” said Hani, nudging Murad Pasha and
nodding to where Zara and Raf stood beside a wall, holding hands. A half dozen of Major Gide’s handpicked guards stood impassive against the opposite wall of the decorated alcove, carefully not noticing. “Go on, guess what they’ve been doing…”

Murad blushed.

“How do I look?” said Hani. She twirled on marble tiles, her silk dress spinning out like the cloak of a dervish. The dress was meant to go with knee-length socks but Hani had refused. Not just refused but refused totally. Sitting naked and dripping on the edge of her bath, unwilling even to let Donna dry her until the old woman agreed that white socks were out.

And Donna, still furious at being dragged from El Iskandryia to Tunis, had threatened to fetch Khartoum but even that failed to move Hani. In the end they settled on short white socks rather than the black tights Hani had wanted.

“How do you look?” Murad considered the question. She was dressed in white silk. Around her neck was a single row of black pearls, fastened at the back with a clasp made from jade and gold. Her ears were now properly pierced and a tiny drop-pearl hung from each lobe. On her feet were silver pumps.

“Anachronistic,” he said finally.

Hani punched him.

Not hard. Just enough to deaden his arm.

“The correct answer,” she said, “is like a princess.”

They were waiting near the entrance to a salon de comeras, hidden from the crowd by an elegant carved screen. Admission to the ceremony was by order of precedence and some people, mostly
nasrani
lucky to be there at all, had been sitting for over an hour as more upscale arrivals filed in to be shown their places.

It had given the new Emir great pleasure to make sure that the Marquis de St. Cloud was one of those forced to wait in the cheap seats. Sitting much closer to the front, looking slightly bemused, were Micki Vanhoffer and Carl Senior, dressed for what could only be a night in Las Vegas.

Outside, Rue Jardin Bardo was lined ten deep with people waiting for the Emir’s Bugatti coupé Napoleon to sweep past, only to be hidden on arrival by veils of silk as it disgorged its occupants, a colonel from the engineers, his young wife and their two children. Decoys insisted upon by Major Gide, who’d gratefully accepted the new Emir’s suggestion that she remain his head of security.

The actual players in the spectacle about to unfold in front of TV5, C3N and one other, randomly selected, camera crew had been the first to arrive, spirited into the salon via a back route.

“You ready?” Raf asked Zara.

She nodded. Not entirely convincingly.

Outside in the audience were Hamzah Effendi, Madame Rahina and the brother Zara had tracked down to a squat on the edge of Kharmous, half brother really. Hamzah’s bastard. Once a factory and later an illegal club, he’d soundproofed his squat with cardboard and spray painted it gunmetal grey. The floor had been earth, friable and damp but he’d doped it with liquid plastic, tipping the can straight onto the ground.

“What are you thinking?” Raf asked.

“About Avatar. You know, back when he was a kid, was it right to take him home with me—or was I just being a spoilt brat…?”

“Ah,” Raf smiled. “The
what-if
factor.”

Zara stared.

“For every action we take,” said Raf, “there’s probably a better one.”

“Does that apply to this?”

“Which this?” Raf demanded. “
Us this or this this
?” The sweep of his hand took in the coughing and restless shuffle of feet beyond the screen.

“Both,” said Zara.

In a different world Raf might have answered that there was nothing he’d do differently where Zara was concerned, not even his jilting her which put Zara across the front of
Iskandryia Today
and nearly cost him his life. He loved her and had no certainty that any other course of action would have led him to where he stood; but Murad turned and caught Raf’s eye and the words went unsaid.

Checking his watch, Raf listened to something in his earbead and nodded.

Three, two, one…

On cue, an unaccompanied voice rose in the salon outside.
Maaloof al andalusi
, the music Ifriqiya made famous. Frail and strong, haunted and ancient. The words a lament for those who had gone before and a greeting for those who were to come after.

Near the far end of the suddenly silenced room, Khartoum raised his head and hung a note on the air so unearthly that Hani shivered. The poem that echoed off the salon’s high roof came from Rumi, the great Sufi sage but the intonation was Khartoum’s own.

Slowly, one note at a time an
’aoued
filled the spaces around the words. Then an instrument that Raf thought might be a
nai,
only deeper than any flute he’d ever heard.

“Time to move,” Hani whispered.

“Yep. Everybody’s waiting.” This was, Zara knew, a stupid thing for her to say. Unfortunately it was also true: five hundred carefully chosen people were waiting on the far side of that screen to see the proclamation of the new Emir. A ritual intentionally designed to mix Western with North African traditions.

For religious reasons the proclamation needed to happen in the salon de comeras, the hall of ambassadors, rather than the Zitouna mosque, because women and men could not be allowed to mix in the mosque and, anyway, letting
nasrani
into the prayer hall would outrage the mullahs.

Officially the beards were no longer a problem, Kashif’s arrest and subsequent suicide had seen to that. Major Gide’s interim report suggested reality was different. The fundamentalist tendency would remain quiet only for as long as their embarrassment lasted at having backed a man given to treachery and wicked living.