Sleeping with the Sultan

“My name is Morningstar,” she overrode him in her coldest voice. “And how accounts stand between me and my father is absolutely none of your business.”

His eyes narrowed at her, but if he expected her to be cowed, he could think again. She tilted her chin and gave him stare for stare. Her tone was no more insulting than his own had been, and she would be quite happy to point that out to him. But the man bowed his head a fraction.

“I apologize. I was given to understand that you were Colonel Golbahn’s daughter.”

“My father is Khaldun Golbahn. He is no longer a colonel, and the regiment he was colonel of hasn’t existed for over thirty years,” she returned through her teeth.

Before he could respond to this, a waiter appeared to pull out her chair, and Dana gratefully turned away and sank down to accept a napkin on her lap. Only a few people were still milling around, tying up their conversations before heading to separate tables. People were watching her more or less covertly, and she realized that her argument with the stranger had given them another reason to stare and whisper.

She could sense that he was still hovering behind her. She hoped he wasn’t intending to get in the last word. Dana picked up the printed menu card propped in front of her wineglass and wished he would disappear.

“Sheikh Durran!” a crusty old voice exclaimed with satisfaction.

“Sir John,” his voice replied, and she almost fainted with horror. Her eyes flew to the place card at the setting next to her. Sheikh Ashraf Durran.

Ya Allah, she would be sitting beside him for the next two hours!

The two men were shaking hands behind her, and she heard the clap of hand against shoulder. “I was hoping to see you.” The old man dropped his voice. “How did your brother manage? Can I assume your presence tonight means I am to congratulate you?”

Dana found she was holding her breath. There was an air of mystery over the conversation, suddenly, and it gripped her. She bent further over the menu card, but she wasn’t taking in one word of what was printed.

“He was successful, Sir John, in a manner of speaking—and flying by the seat of his pants, as usual.”

He spoke quietly. His voice now held a hint of humour that she hadn’t been privileged to hear when he spoke to her. It was deep and strong, as compelling as the man. A voice an actor would kill for.

“You have it safe, then?” The old man was whispering now.

“I do.”

“Tremendous! Well done, all of you! One might almost say, an omen.”

“Mash’Allah.”

The two men sat, one on either side of her. Dana stared fixedly at the menu. She had never felt so unnerved by a situation. She reminded herself how many times in the past she had made conversation with awkward, difficult strangers, more or less successfully. There was no reason to feel as though there was a chasm in front of her.

Waiters were already circulating with trays of starters and pouring wine. Onstage the tar was being played with a heartrending virtuosity that no other instrument, she thought, ever achieved.

“Asparagus or tabbouleh?” the waiter asked her.

Dana loved the food of Bagestan; she had been raised on it. At sixteen she had stopped eating it, as a rejection of her father and all he stood for. That time of rebellion was long past; she was twenty-six now. But she found herself thrown back into that old, combative mind-set now.

She wanted to let Sheikh Ashraf Durran know that she was not to be judged by any of his rules. As she had her father.

“Asparagus, thank you,” she said, and a plate of butter-soaked green spears was set before her. She took a sip of wine.

“Tabbouleh,” Sheikh Durran firmly requested a moment later. She noticed that there was no wine in his wineglass. Well, she could have guessed that.

In the loud buzz of conversation that was going up all around the ballroom, it seemed to her that the silence between the two of them must be as obvious to everyone as their earlier disagreement. She wondered if gossip about them would find its way into the tabloids. Journalists often needed no more. Find a button and sew a coat onto it was their motto.

Dana glanced around the table in the hopes of finding a conversation to join. Somehow she had got put in with the political crowd. She recognized an academic who was often called in to discuss Bagestani affairs on a BBC current events program, and a television journalist who had made her name covering the Parvan-Kaljuk War and whose career was now devoted to reporting from one Middle East hot spot or another. Dana thought she would have enjoyed talking to them. But they were directly across the table from her, chatting quietly together.

Sir John Cross, too, was engaged with the person on his other side.

“You have no desire to see your father restored to his command, Miss Morningstar?” Sheikh Durran clearly had no reservations about picking up where they had left off.

Dana picked up a stalk of asparagus and turned her head. Up close she recognized the Parvan flag on one of his medals. He was a veteran of the Parvan-Kaljuk War, then, but she was no closer to knowing who he was.

“I have no expectation of seeing it,” she returned, before biting into the tender, delicious tip.

“Why not?”

“My father is, after all, nearly sixty. Not very much younger than President Ghasib.” She said the name deliberately, for in expat circles it wasn’t the thing to give the dictator his title. Saying it on an occasion like this was tantamount to declaring herself on the Ghasib side.

She wasn’t on the Ghasib side and never had been, not even in her days of wildest rebellion. But no way was she going to fall meekly in line with the sheikh’s expectations.

She pushed the buttery stalk into her mouth. There was no change in the sheikh’s expression, but suddenly she felt the phallic symbolism of it, almost as if he had pointed it out to her. Dream on! she wanted to snap. She chewed, then licked the butter from her fingertips before deliberately reaching for her wine again.

Sheikh Durran seemed to take no notice. He picked up a small lettuce leaf and used it to pinch up some of his tabbouleh salad.

“Do you think the only thing that will remove Ghasib from power is death from old age?”

She chose another stalk. She opened her mouth, wondering if she could unnerve him by sucking the butter from the tip. Her eyes flicked to his. His look was dry and challenging, and without any warning, heat flamed in her cheeks.

“Even granting the unlikely proposition that there was an al Jawadi heir,” she said defiantly, “even granting that this mysterious person should at last reveal himself and, even more amazingly, make the risky attempt to take power, and then granting that he should be successful in restoring the monarchy in Bagestan—what are the odds that my father would be given his old job back by someone who wasn’t even born at the time he held it?”

His eyebrows went up, but he made no answer.

“But the truth, if people would stop being excited by newspaper reports as reliable as sightings of the Abominable Snowman, is that it’s a mirage. No prince is going to come riding in on his white horse and wave his magic wand to make Ghasib disappear.”

“You know this?”

“Look—I got that nostalgia stuff at my daddy’s knee. He talked of nothing else all through my childhood. When I was a kid, I believed it. I had a huge crush on the mysterious Crown Prince who was going to make it all happen. I wrote letters to him. I even had a dream that I was going to marry him when I grew up. But he never came, did he? Thirty years now.

“I paid my dues, Sheikh Durran. I believed the myth as firmly as I believed in Santa Claus. After my mother and father split Santa Claus never visited our house again, but I went on believing in him. And I went on believing in the al Jawadi restoration, too. But a dream like that only lasts so long. And then one day you wake up and realize—it’s a fairy tale.”

“And at what age did you wake up?”

Dana tensed and wished she hadn’t spoken so openly. She wasn’t sure why she had. “From the Santa Claus myth, eight. From the prince on a white horse fiction, sixteen,” she said shortly, and applied herself to her meal.

“Sixteen,” Sheikh Ashraf repeated consideringly. “That’s young to stop believing in justice.”

She supposed he was right. But she had had a very rude and sudden awakening.

Dana shrugged, demolished another spear of asparagus, and wiped her fingers on her napkin. He waited, and she felt forced to answer. She waved a hand at the room.

“What amazes me is the number of people who never wake up—who refuse to wake up.”

“What happened at sixteen that took the stars from your eyes?”