Gabrielle wasn’t sure where she was when her eyes flickered open to a gray and shadowy pre-dawn light that barely penetrated the tent. She’d dreamt she was with her grandfather after a day’s digging in the desert. That the fire had died down and they were talking with ease about everything under the moon before they retired to bed. The same sense of comfort and rest and love had settled over her, calming her unquiet spirit. The same feeling was still with her as she looked around, trying to make out the shapes of things within the tent to place herself. Then she heard a rustle of clothing, and she turned to see a dark shape of a man coming towards her. She wasn’t scared. She knew in an instant that it was Zavian, and everything else fell into place.
“You’re awake,” he said. There was a rasping sound as he struck a match and lit a candle before placing the brass cover back on the lantern. He stayed there for a few seconds, adjusting the flame, his face lit randomly by the darting flame, one moment casting his face into shadow, his strong features softened, the next highlighting the whites of his eyes, distorting his familiar features until he looked like the very devil. The thought made her sit up, now wide awake.
“Just,” she replied. “What time is it?” She groped in the shadows for her phone.
“Before dawn. I wanted to speak with you before the world awoke.”
She felt a flutter of nerves in her stomach. She sat up more and leaned back against the soft pillows, drawing the cover to hide her nakedness. “That sounds… serious.”
He smiled an enigmatic smile that told her nothing. “And I’ve brought coffee.”
“Um, you’re trying to soften me now, before you get to the serious stuff.”
“Maybe.” He passed her a cup.
She breathed it in, closing her tired eyes against the steam, feeling invigorated simply from inhaling its strength. She took a sip. “Well, it’s working.”
He sat down—not close to her, she noticed—but made no attempt to drink his own coffee. “Good. Then perhaps we can begin.”
“Begin… what?”
“To talk about our future. After last night you can no longer deny your future is here, in Gharb Havilah. You are accepted by our people, and you are accepted by me.”
His plainly spoken words fell like a challenge between them both. She placed her cup onto the side table with a shaking hand and swung her legs off the bed, still clutching the covers around her.
“On second thoughts, perhaps I should be dressed before you throw important questions at me.” She rose and walked over to where her clothes were scattered.
She heard a sigh from behind her. “You think your clothes will protect you from my questions?”
“No,” she said, deliberately dropping the awkward cover to pull on her top. If he thought he could side-swipe her with difficult questions, she knew she could divert him with one simple movement.
And, if his silence was anything to go by, it had worked. A shower would have to wait. Only when she was dressed did she turn around. And, yes, from his expression, she knew his thoughts had strayed. His eyes were dark, liquid and his lips were parted as if he imagined pressing them against her. She shivered.
He jumped up. “I’m sorry, you are cold. Please, drink your coffee.” He went and got a soft throw and gently pulled it around her shoulders. “Your clothes might not have protected you, but your nakedness very nearly did.” He kissed her gently and then withdrew back to his chair. “Nearly, but not quite. I repeat you’re acceptable to us both—my country and me—and you must see that now.”
“Acceptable,” she repeated with a soft grunt. “Now, that’s quite a word. Practically guaranteed to make a woman change her mind.”
He frowned, the darting shadows falling heavily now around his eyes and below his cheekbones. He looked… dangerous. But it didn’t matter how dangerous he looked, she wasn’t about to surrender herself to a man who found her simply “acceptable”.
“And what word, Gabrielle, would you prefer? Something suitably sentimental, like love?”
She shrugged, as if nonchalant, as if that word wasn’t the fulcrum of her life and her future. “It certainly has the ring of tradition about it. It’s usually mentioned when a man tells a woman she should stay with him.”
“Not this man. You should know by now that love is irrelevant to me. It has no meaning.”
She approached him. “It does if you have a heart.”
“Ah,” he said, his eyes still hard, despite the way she drew her head closer to his. “Now there is the crux of the problem. I have no heart. Only a body and a mind—both of which want you, no, need you to stay.”
She shook her head. “You have a heart, Zavian, whether you like it or not.”
He shook his head. “Only one which pumps blood around my body. It’s a functional heart, not a sentimental one. And why do you insist on this point? You are a scientist and believe only what can be proved.”
“And love can be proved, and it endures when all else fails.”
He grunted in disbelief and shook his head again, shifting in his seat. She knew he hated to discuss such things. She decided to press her advantage. “Thoughts and beliefs change, lust burns out—”
“But you think love lasts forever, hey?” He drank back his coffee. There was movement now from outside the tent. People had risen and were going to pray. He stood up. “You are innocent to believe such a thing.”
“You’re wrong. I have seen and felt too much in my life to be innocent, too much to not believe in love. It’s the only thing I have faith in. I might belong, but only to the country, not to you. I can’t be with you. I cannot trust someone who doesn’t love me, someone who I don’t even know can love.”
A tense silence fell. “I don’t know if I can love, either, Gabrielle.”
“Then you need to find out. Because, while I might stay here in this land—because you’re right, it is my home, and last night showed me that people I respect and admire, believe it to be my home, also—I can’t be with you, not with a man who doesn’t know his own heart.”
She stepped away and opened the flap to the tent where the sun rose at the same time as the call to prayer filled the air. She looked back. “You’re afraid, I get that.” He shook his head, incensed at the idea that he might be afraid. She held up her hand, something she never did, and his words died in his mouth with surprise. “But until you face your fears and figure out your feelings”—she tapped her heart—“what you have, here, then there is no way forward—for either of us.”
She didn’t wait for an answer but swiftly left the camp and secured transport for her return to the city. He might have got what he wanted from the trip into the desert, but she’d left him with something to think about.
Part of her had wanted to cave in and be with him. She loved him, and she loved this land. But she’d done enough soul searching over the past year to know that it wasn’t enough. Until he allowed her into his heart, their relationship had no future. He’d got it quite wrong. It was the other thing, lust, which was ephemeral. That could end, and if and when it did, so would their relationship. It was only love which endured. Her grandfather had taught her that.
It had all gone spectacularly wrong. For a man who prided himself on careful calculation, he’d completely misjudged the situation. Zavian picked up a pen and tapped it on the table, irritated beyond belief that instead of ridding himself of an obsession, being with Gabrielle had only increased it, creating a panic inside of himself which he’d managed to tie into a knot since he’d returned from his night in the desert. He refused to indulge it.
The tapping increased in intensity until he slid the pen away from him and jumped up from the table and strode to the window. He was suddenly aware of a silence which had descended on the room. He turned and glared at the people seated at the board table, aware that he had no idea what they’d been talking to him about.
“The meeting is concluded.”
There was avoidance of his gaze and some mutterings. His vizier frowned and picked up his papers. The others looked to him for guidance in their confusion but he gestured for them to leave. Naseer watched the door close and only then approached Zavian.
“Your Majesty,” he began.
Zavian raised his eyebrow. “Formality. This must be serious.”
“When you cannot concentrate in a policy meeting, it is serious.”
Zavian grunted and continued to look straight out to the distant horizon, toward the desert where his thoughts remained. “There was nothing being discussed that needed my comment.”
“Everything needs your comment.”
“You do not need to lecture me on the responsibilities of kingship, Naseer.”
“Unfortunately, it appears I do. You’ve brought that chit of a girl into our country, against my wishes I may add, and carry on with her as if you’re a teenager. Allah only knows why you brought her back into your life again.”
He turned to his trusted vizier and not for the first time wished he was a little less wise and bit more supportive. “Do you want to know why I brought her here? Hey?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “Because I needed to rid myself of her. Absence didn’t work, so I thought familiarity might.”
“And did it?”
Zavian turned away again, back to the view of minarets and spires and towers mysterious in the soft, hazy light of early morning. “No.” His vizier gave a heavy sigh and turned away. It seemed this conundrum had even flummoxed his wily old advisor. “No words of wisdom, eh Naseer? No advice? No wise words about troubles of the heart?”
Naseer paused and looked away. In that one single movement, Zavian knew for sure. He turned to him.
“You put her up to it, didn’t you?”
If there had been any doubt in Zavian’s mind, it was wiped away when Naseer looked him in the eye. There was guilt, recognition of truth, but also something else, defiance. “Yes, I suggested it to your father as the only way out. Your father was a dying man, and with your brother gone, I knew you were the future. But not with her. You needed a suitable wife.” He waved his hand. “Not an English academic.”
“She’s more than that,” Zavian said quietly.
For the first time ever, Naseer bit his lip, and his eyes shifted, betraying his lack of certainty. Eventually, he nodded. “Yes, maybe she is. But at the time, your father and I saw her departure as the best thing for your country, and you.”
“And now?”
“Now”—Naseer forgot about royal etiquette and sat wearily on the chair next to Zavian—“I’m beginning to think I might have misjudged the situation, and Dr. Taylor.”
“You think you did the wrong thing.”
Naseer nodded but couldn’t meet Zavian’s eye. “Dr. Taylor is most… unusual. Sometimes I listen to what she’s saying, and I can hardly believe she’s not of our lineage. When I listen to my granddaughters speak of frivolous things, I could only wish that they had a quarter of Dr. Taylor’s commitment to Gharb Havilah. My advice? Marry her.”
“That’s some turnaround.” He rose and strode to the window. “But what about love?”
Naseer scoffed, just as Zavian had known he would, reflecting his own thoughts. “You talk of love?” he asked, incredulous. “This isn’t about such a fancy.” He dismissed the notion with a wave of his hand. “And I cannot advise you on such matters. I have no knowledge of the affairs of the heart. I only know they can derail people from their purpose. And your purpose, may I remind you, Zavian, is to head a country of ten million people, numerous conflicting tribes, and resist international inroads on our port. We are at a strategic part of the world that the superpowers wish to control. The country is at the center of global power, and you are at the country’s center. It all depends on you. Love is not a factor in any of these things.”
“I am aware.”
“And you must also be aware that marriage is crucial, and your Dr. Taylor appears to be the only woman of whom Sheikh Mohammed approves. And if Mohammed approves, then you’ll have the support of others. ”
Naseer put a hand on Zavian’s shoulder, and Zavian turned to him, surprised. His vizier rarely touched him. He was a supremely intelligent man, a master chess player, and a man he’d never seen cry or express any form of emotion. A man who’d only made physical contact with Zavian a few times over their long relationship. Once when he’d been a child and had got into a fight with street kids. Zavian had lost his temper, and it had only been his vizier’s touch which had dissipated the mist and allowed him to see clearly again. And then when his mother had died, and grief had threatened to overwhelm him. Both times, Zavian realized, were when Zavian’s emotions had threatened to gain a hold over him. And now this.
“She doesn’t wish to marry me.”
It appeared he’d found a way to floor Naseer. He poked his old head forward, his brows knitted in bewilderment. “What?”
“Gabrielle does not wish to marry me.”
“Then she is a fool.”
“We both know she isn’t that.”
The vizier’s frown hadn’t lessened, but he nodded. “She has a weakness. A sentimentality that has no part in ruling a country. But…” His vizier paused as the frown lifted and his eyes brightened. “But,” he repeated with a shrug, “such sentimentality is a small thing. This weakness, Zavian”—he waved his hand in dismissal—“can be addressed. Do whatever you have to do to make her marry you. Promise whatever you have to.”
“I can become someone I am not.”
“You have no choice. Time is running out. An announcement of some sort has been made at the bi-millenial celebrations and an announcement there will be.”
Naseer left the room without waiting for a response from Zavian, which was just as well because Zavian was confounded. He’d assumed his vizier would come up with a way out of their predicament. But it seemed there was no going back. He wanted Gabrielle, and his country and advisors wished him to marry Gabrielle. The only stumbling block was Gabrielle. She wanted love, and he couldn’t deliver love.
He slammed the laptop closed with a snap and walked out the room. His vizier had been wrong once before, and he was wrong again. Naseer underestimated Gabrielle, something Zavian did not. She wouldn’t change her mind. She was as stubborn as her grandfather. Once her heart and mind were made up, they were as one and couldn’t be changed.
If he had to do without her, then so would his country. Both would survive. It’s just that he’d hoped for something more than survival.
Gabrielle squinted as she moved the object to the bright mid-day light streaming in the museum window. Yes, it was definitely from the same period as the other. She replaced it gently into its case and made a few notes on her laptop. She rubbed a remaining trace of sand from the object between her fingertips, and her mind was instantly back in the desert, with Zavian.
She wished it wasn’t. Whenever she thought of him she felt hurt, literally, from the tingle in her fingertips to the sinking in her gut. Her love for him created a visceral, physical response in her. Pity it was one-sided. Zavian had made it clear that he didn’t and couldn’t love her. She didn’t believe him. She knew him. She. Knew. Him. Like he didn’t know himself. He’d been forced to draw shutters around his heart from an early age, to keep it caged, imprisoned, somewhere deep inside where it couldn’t hurt him. His parents had done that to him, and even the love he’d received from his grandfather had been a chill affair, trained into external accomplishments, hunting, physical things which further worked to hide his emotions so well that now he didn’t know they existed. He gave them different names, different attributes. He was lying to himself, and only he could discover the truth.
She sat away from the screen and rubbed her tired eyes. Only one more week to go before she could leave and return to her Oxford position, her college no longer in financial trouble. And her? She had a feeling her trouble was only just beginning. But it was something she’d have to learn how to live with.
The phone buzzed, and she answered it. “Okay,” she said with a sigh. She tried to muster a smile. It wasn’t the TV crew’s fault she hated publicity. “No problem. I’ll be right there.”
She rose and swept her hands down her clothes and checked her face in the mirror. It was all fine. More than fine. She’d decided against her usual academic clothes, and went with her instinct, wearing a traditional abaya. It felt right, and the more Zavian went against feeling, the more she was for it.
She also knew that any nerves would vanish the moment she began talking about her work, the moment the passion she felt for it kicked in and overcame any superficial nerves. People wanted passion these days in their news and entertainment—everyone, that is, except Zavian. And yet he was one of the most passionate men she knew, deep down. And one with the most self-control and self-discipline. For a few long moments she imagined what that passion might be like for him, for her, and for his country, if he let the control and discipline slip. She’d seen glimpses of it and knew it was a life-giving and life-changing moment when he allowed it to show. It was for her, and it would be for his people, if only they were allowed to see the real man.
But that wasn’t real life. Real life was where people—where Zavian—refused to acknowledge such feelings and instead dealt with the real. And so could she. For now, at least.
She picked up the things she needed and walked out of the office and down to the exhibition room. This was her real life, she reminded herself—museum rooms, TV cameras and the dusty objects she lived her life through. Bringing the past to the present. All she had to do was what Zavian did with ease—stop feeling.
There would be no future for them, Zavian repeated to himself for the millionth time. She demanded love, and he didn’t do love. End of story. Or it would have been if he could stop seeing her, stop hearing about her, stop thinking about her.
Because despite being king, Zavian’s wish to avoid Gabrielle had proved elusive. Sure, he may have managed to not spend any time with her—something she obviously felt equally strongly about—but if he’d wished to avoid the sight of her, and talk about her, he’d been disappointed.
Every job she did was excellent, according to the museum director, who sung her praises at every opportunity. He couldn’t get through a meeting without someone bringing up her name and commending her on her work and her vision for the country and its artifacts.
All he heard was how wonderful she was—a fact he couldn’t deny—and there had even been veiled suggestions about her suitability for him. People knew they were friends, but few people knew just how close they were. Although, since the celebration of poetry in the desert, word had begun to get around. Something he regretted.
And this afternoon appeared to be no different. He’d intended to watch the new video released for the celebrations—something to bring his mind to focus on the important events coming up. Instead, all he saw was a close-up of Gabrielle explaining her work with that passion, which landed a punch straight into his gut.
He was pushed down on the chair by the force of the blow. She’d forgotten herself. He could see that. Her eyes were with her work, the history, her life. There was something incredibly seductive about seeing someone unaware or conscious of themselves, living only through their emotions and thoughts, both one.
The desert wind had blown her blonde hair free of her hijab, and it was like pale satin under the hot sun. Her face had become tanned since she’d returned to Gharb Havilah, making her blue eyes even bluer. He remembered them open, startled, as she climaxed in his arms. And in that moment he knew that he was not only fooling himself, but his vizier, and the whole country.
He slumped in his chair, put his head in his hands and acknowledged the visceral response he had for her wasn’t confined to his body. She was more than a body he craved, more than a mind he respected, she was… herself. A woman who his heart beat for, a woman he could no more be without than the air that he breathed. He looked up, startled. Was that love? Could it be that, without any effort or desire from him, she’d shattered the defenses he’d built around his heart so effectively he hadn’t even seen them fall?
He couldn’t have said how long he continued to sit there. But the sunlight tracked across the room, his phone rang without answering, his vizier came and went—somehow understanding his need to be alone for once—and made sure he was given the space. Space to think about how he could convey to the woman he loved, that he did, indeed, love her. And that it was no mere words, no mere ticking a box, nothing that he was saying to keep her. But that his love was real. How could he show her that, after all he’d said and done?
It wasn’t until the daylight had faded completely from the sky that the answer came into his mind and stuck there. He knew what he had to do, even if he didn’t much like it.