Hot Arabian Nights

‘Context is all,’ Julia retorted. ‘To understand a plant, one must understand its environment.’

His lip twitched. ‘I am not a rare species to be documented and categorised.’

‘No, you are not rare, you are quite unique, which is why I’d like to understand you a little more.’

‘You flatter me.’

‘To speak the truth is not flattery,’ Julia said, quoting his own words back at him.

‘You are a very devious woman, Julia Trevelyan.’

‘I don’t think I’ll add that to my list of compliments. Has my deviousness paid off?’

Azhar laughed. ‘Yes, but you must not assume you have set a precedent. We will take a tour of the palace. You want to know more about my past. The palace both contains and defines my past. Can you be ready in half an hour?’

* * *

‘The palace is formed around four courts. The First Court functions merely as an entrance courtyard, with access to the stables, the guards’ quarters, the kitchens and stores. Anyone may enter the First Court. We are currently in the Second Court, which is the first inner courtyard, and the first to which entry is strictly controlled. You will observe too, that it is surrounded by a much higher wall than the First Court.’

Julia gazed around the huge open space, where five distinct paths formed by box hedges bordered by cypress and plane trees, radiated out at angles from the gated entry. She had passed through the space before, and had been much taken by the carefully tended formal gardens, which were laid out in the classical style around a huge central pentagon shape. She had noticed the high wall only to remark to herself on the quality of the shade it provided. Now it made her shiver. ‘It is like a castle keep.’

‘That is because it was originally built as a fortress. These walls form the oldest part of the palace, which dates back almost five hundred years.’

‘Are there still wars?’

‘Not for at least a century.’

‘Then the walls and the gate...’

‘Serve tradition. Symbolise the majesty of the King. Act as a reminder of his strength and his power. The walls demonstrate the gulf that lies between a king and his people.’

‘A gulf that you must have breached. You know the desert, Azhar, and the little I’ve seen of the people—they know you.’

‘That is true.’ Azhar agreed. ‘Even as a child, I hated the confines of these walls. I always yearned to know what was happening outside them.’

‘But your father preferred you to remain inside?’

‘He preferred that my trips into the kingdom were formalised.’ Azhar led the way along the middle of the five paths. ‘My father believed that a king must be seen to rule, that he must be a presence to his people, but that presence must be orchestrated. Processions. Feasts. Ceremonies. Always, the line between the King, his family and his subjects must be drawn firmly in the sand. And always, from my earliest days, as soon as I was old enough to think for myself, I disagreed with him. I wanted to see for myself, hear for myself and experience life for myself.’

‘Then as now,’ Julia said.

Azhar smiled grimly. ‘Then as now, as you say. If I make mistakes, they are my own. A king can never make mistakes.’

‘Never admit to them, at any rate. That is one royal trait that Daniel had in abundance,’ Julia interjected. ‘He hated to be in the wrong. There was a time in South America, when our barge—’ She broke off abruptly, shocked by the bitterness in her voice.

‘Your barge?’

Azhar raised an enquiring brow, but she shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter. He blamed me, and though it was ludicrous I allowed him to blame me because it was easier than arguing with him. It is mortifying, on reflection, how much I permitted his opinions to rule me.’

‘And to give you a very low opinion of yourself,’ Azhar said gently.

‘Yes, you’ve said that several times, and I’m beginning to think you’re right, which is why I’ve resolved to try not to dwell on the past. I am not incapable of making mistakes—my dragoman being an obvious example—but nor am I inept. I have travelled alone halfway across the world. I have been robbed, and drugged and carried off by a complete stranger to a remote kingdom I had no idea existed until a week ago, and yet here I am, still alive and kicking. You see,’ Julia said, smiling, ‘I do listen.’

‘I am glad to hear it.’

Azhar’s smile made her belly clench. His mouth distracted her. It reminded her of the kisses they had exchanged in the garden. It made her want more of them. She shouldn’t be thinking about kisses. ‘We are supposed to be talking about your past, not mine,’ Julia said.

She dragged her eyes away from the beguiling man to the almost-as-beguiling surroundings. It was cool in the shade of the tall trees. At the centre of the pentagon, on either side of their path, were a pair of matching fountains, their bases formed in a star shape, patterned with gold mosaic, the inside tiled in the traditional turquoise. In the centre of each, water spouted from a huge urn. Julia sat down on the edge of the nearest fountain, trailing her hand in the water. ‘It is very quiet here. I would have thought a court like this would be full of people coming and going—for it is a sort of waiting room, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Azhar said, with one of his fleeting smiles, ‘a waiting room. An empty one.’ He sat down beside her, leaning back on the edge of the fountain to gaze up at the inner wall, visible above the cypress trees. ‘My father was always very wary of foreign traders,’ he said. ‘He believed that Qaryma should be self-sufficient, that the wealth we had should be protected. He knew this desert like the back of his hand, but he rarely ventured beyond the boundaries of his domain, save on official visits.’

‘My own father never leaves Cornwall. He says that everything he needs is there, and in a way it is,’ Julia said. ‘He has his home, and he has his gardens, and he has his society meetings—men of science like Papa, who meet once a month to discuss the latest discoveries.’ She made a face. ‘Actually, what they mostly do is regurgitate their own work.’

Azhar laughed. ‘You make it sound as if they chew over their papers and spit them out.’

‘That is more or less exactly what they do,’ Julia replied. ‘In Cornwall, Papa is respected and admired, an established expert. Celebrated, in a way. Botanists travel from all over England to see his gardens, you know.’ She chewed her lip. ‘His fame in his field is well deserved, but it is a small field. He disapproved of Daniel’s book. He said it was far too wide in scope—that the best works concentrated on a narrow field of study.’

Azhar caught a small darting fish in his hand, its tiny scales flashing gold and green. ‘Then I assume he disapproves of your finishing it?’

‘Actually, he doesn’t know that’s what I’m doing,’ Julia confessed.

Azhar placed the wildly flapping fish gently back in the water. ‘Then what does he think you’re doing here in Arabia?’

‘He doesn’t know that either. He thinks I’m on a Hebridean island—that is in Scotland, the most remote part of Britain I could think of. I told him that I needed solitude to recover from Daniel’s death.’ Azhar looked so astonished that Julia laughed. ‘I wanted to surprise him with with the book when I had finished.’

‘I think you will do rather more than that.’

‘You think he’ll be angry?’

Azhar shook his hand dry. ‘In my experience men like your father do not like to be upstaged, especially by their own children.’

‘Do you think your father was afraid that you’d make a better king than he?’

Azhar snorted with derision. ‘My father thought no one would make a better king than he. What he was afraid of was that I wouldn’t make any sort of king, which is why he refused to allow me any sort of freedom.’

‘That is a recipe for disaster. He must have known a child with such an adventurous spirit as I imagine you would have been, would grow into a man who wanted to explore the wider world. If only he had permitted you to travel when you were younger, to satisfy your natural wanderlust...’

‘It was not so simple,’ Azhar said with a sigh. ‘It was not only my desire to experience a world beyond Qaryma, Julia, it was the fact that for me, Qaryma was...’

‘...a gilded cage,’ she finished for him with a smile. ‘A very beautiful one, and one that no longer contains your father.’

‘If I remained here, it would contain me though, for the rest of my life.’

‘Surely you exaggerate?’

Shaking his head, Azhar got to his feet, taking her hand to help her up. ‘Come, we can continue our tour later. I have ordered refreshments to be brought to us.’

* * *