The Fierce and Tender Sheikh

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Epilogue

1

Hani’s Dream

In the dream she had a name. Her own true name. In the dream she knew who she was.

She wasn’t alone, in the dream. She had a home and a family, her own true family. The beloved faces she had lost so long ago were restored to her, in other faces that somehow belonged to her.

She wasn’t hungry, in the dream, and they told her that she would never go hungry again. And there was water there, clean water, to wash in as well as to drink. Nor did she sleep in mud under a filthy tent, nor in a tiny, stifling room with bars on the windows. No, she had a bed so large and comfortable and clean she could not sleep for the freshness and wonder of it, and a room so airy and beautiful that in the dream she wept to see it.

In the dream they said—her family—that it belonged to her by right and that she would never again be lost to them. People called her Princess in the dream, as if she were someone to cherish. Someone important, someone worth loving.

In the dream, she was a woman.

One

The desert lay smoking under the burning sun, rugged and inhospitable all the way to the distant mountains. Cutting across it, the highway made no compromise with the terrain, a grey, featureless ribbon streaking over gully and flat with ruthless self-importance: the hostile conspiring with the inflexible to produce a faceless indifference to human need.

A large flatbed truck, its load covered with a bright blue plastic tarpaulin and fixed with ropes, was roaring over the lonely stretch of highway, smoky dust rising from its passing, as if the flat tarmac were setting fire to its wheels and it had to keep moving or be consumed.

Far behind, on the otherwise empty road, in a glinting silver car that was quickly gaining on the truck, Sheikh Sharif Azad al Dauleh flicked his eyes from the map flattened against the steering wheel to the view out the window. No sign of his destination yet. All that met his gaze was the barren landscape, sere and rust-coloured, scratched with gullies as if by a giant claw, dotted with parched scrub. As barren as any Bagestani desert, and yet unmistakably alien. He could not feel at home here.

It was a printed map, on which the site he was searching the desert for was marked only in pen. Burry Hill Detention Centre had been scratched above a rough X near the line that was the road, some miles from the nearest town. His eyes flicked over the landscape, looking for evidence of a side road. According to his information, it would not be sign-posted. The general public was not encouraged to drop in at refugee camps.

He tossed the map down and sighed. A difficult mission, the Sultan had said. But neither Ashraf nor he himself had had any idea of the nature of the difficulties that would confront him. The assignment to find a lost member of the royal family, somewhere in the world’s refugee camps, was not merely a logistical nightmare; it was an emotional black hole. The scale of suffering he had seen was something no one could be prepared for.

The truck was belching a noxious, thick grey smoke. The sheikh put his foot down harder and pulled into the passing lane.

At the back of the truck, behind the veil of smoke and fumes, a bundle wrapped in dust-coloured cloth flapped wildly, as if about to be torn from its mountings: a boy, clinging to the ropes. The truck had a stowaway.

A thin, starved stowaway, agile as a monkey, who was coming down off the top of the load with an audacity that made Sharif’s groin contract. He watched as the boy stretched down one thin leg till his bare foot found the bumper. Then, standing, he glanced over his shoulder to check the road behind. Sharif realized with horror that his own car must be in the boy’s blind spot, for he now leaned out at the side of the truck opposite to the car, clinging with one hand, as if preparing to jump.

Sharif cursed in impotent amazement. Was he watching a suicide? But even as he slapped his hand to the horn, the stowaway lifted an arm and tossed something under the truck’s wheels.

The sound of an explosion drowned his own blaring horn. Ahead, the truck slewed into his path and shuddered to a halt. Pulling his own wheel to avoid a collision, he saw the small, slim figure leap nimbly down into the road directly in front of him.

Only then did the boy discover his presence. He flung a look of stunned horror towards the oncoming car, his eyes locking with Sharif’s for one appalling second, landed awkwardly, grimaced with pain, and rolled in a desperate attempt to get out of his path.

The car’s tires bit hard into the super-hot tarmac, screaming and jolting in protest as Sharif simultaneously hauled on the emergency brake and dragged at the wheel. Gravel flailed up against the body and windows with a sound like gunfire, and the hot, sharp smell of rubber pierced the air.

The silver car came to rest on the shoulder, its nose a foot or two from the banked edge that slanted sharply down to the desert floor. Ahead, the truck was angled the other way, its body forming a wide V with the car. Between them lay the boy, his thin arms wrapping his head, panting hard. Around him was a spread of fallen objects—chocolate bars, a toy, something that glittered pathetically in the harsh sun. An orange, its bright colour shocking in this dun-coloured landscape, rolled lazily along the tarmac.

The silence of settling dust. Sharif opened his door and got out. He was tall, as tall as the Sultan himself, with a warrior’s build and a proud, some might say arrogant, posture. His long face was marked by a square jaw and a straight nose inherited from his foreign mother. His upper lip was well-formed, his firm, full lower lip the sign of a deep and passionate nature which few ever saw. Dark eyes under low-set, almost straight brows showed the intense intelligence of the mind behind. His cheekbones were strong, his skin smooth. His fine black hair was cut short and neat, the curl tamed back from the wide, clear forehead.

The boy sat up, fighting to catch his breath. He seemed otherwise unhurt.

“You little fool,” Sharif said.

“Where…where did you…come from?” the boy panted.

His thick, sunburnt hair was chopped ragged. In the sharply revealed bone structure of the starved little face, the jaw was square but delicate for a boy, sloping down to a pointed chin. His wide, full mouth was too big for his thin face. So were the eyes. He was too young for the age in his eyes—but so were they all, in the camps. Sharif guessed him at about fourteen.

Sharif gave a bark of angry laughter. “Where did I come from? What the hell were you doing? You’re lucky to be alive!”

For a moment the boy simply gazed at him wide-eyed, taking in the sight of Sharif’s proud, stern handsomeness, the flowing white djellaba and keffiyeh so alien to this land.

“Yes. Thank you,” said the boy.

This was so unexpected that this time Sharif’s laughter was genuine. He drew a gold case out of the pocket of his djellaba, extracted a thin black cigar, and set it between his teeth. The boy, meanwhile, still breathing hard, got up on his knees and reached for a chocolate bar, then grimaced with sudden pain and turned to nurse one ankle.

Sharif paused in the act of pulling out his lighter. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” the boy lied, as if to admit to any weakness would be dangerous. Setting his teeth against pain, he turned doggedly to the task of gathering up his loot.

Sharif set his foot on a blue plastic ring in a brightly printed cardboard mount just as the boy’s fingers reached for it. The boy looked up into the dark eyes so far above, his gaze challenging, assessing.

“How bad?” Sharif asked.

The boy shrugged.

“How badly are you hurt?” Sharif insisted.

“What do you care? Does it make you feel better to think that you’re concerned? When you go on your way in your nice shiny car will it give you a warm feeling to know that you asked after my health?”

The cynicism was brutal, for it told of years of suffering, and the boy was still only a child. That such complete absence of trust could exist in a human breast suddenly struck Sharif as deeply tragic. He suddenly, urgently wanted this damaged child to understand that there was genuine goodness in the world.

Simultaneously he derided himself for the sentiment. He had visited nothing but scenes from hell for weeks past, and he had managed to keep his head above water. Why now? Why this skinny kid who trusted no one? He emphatically did not want to be drawn in. It was a one-way trip. Take one member of suffering humanity personally and there was no end to it. Like a surgeon, he had to keep a clinical distance.

“Don’t be a fool. Get in the car. I’ll take you to a doctor.”

The boy visibly flinched. “No, thanks. Are you going to lift your foot? I need this.” He tried to pull whatever it was out from under Sharif’s foot, but succeeded only in tearing the packaging.

They had both forgotten the trucker. Having moved his truck off the road, he now came towards them at a furious jog.

“You bloody little scum!” he cried, descending on the boy. “What were you playing at? You’re one of those bloody refugees, aren’t you?”

He grabbed the boy’s wrist and dragged him to his feet, spilling all his gathered possessions onto the ground again. The boy cried out with pain.

“Refugees?” Sharif Azad al Dauleh queried softly, his voice cutting through the other’s anger.

There was a pause as the trucker absorbed the powerful frame, the proud posture, the clothing from that other desert a world away.