TWO women robed in blue sat on easy chairs beneath the lemon trees in the courtyard, warmed by the sun reflecting off the red stone building.
‘Bliss?’ Mel said, turning to pick up the baby girl who grizzled quietly in a woven basket by her side.
‘Bliss!’ Jenny echoed, lying back, her hands linked around her bulging stomach. ‘Although it would be nicer if the men were here.’
‘Your wish is their command, I’d say,’ Mel said, turning her head the better to hear the rattling noise of the approaching helicopter.
It flew over them like a shiny green dragonfly, swooping low enough to make Mel shake her fist at the pilot.
‘He knows not to do that in case it wakes the baby,’ she told her friend.
‘The baby’s already awake,’ Jenny reminded her, nodding to the chubby infant sucking greedily on Melissa’s breast.
‘But she might not have been,’ Mel complained, although her heart wasn’t in it. Her heart, in fact, was dancing with excitement, although Arun had only been gone a couple of days—down to the city to the opening of the now completed renovations of the old hospital.
‘So, the lazy women of the harem are taking their ease.’
It was Kam who spoke as the two brothers entered the courtyard, so alike yet easily identifiable to their wives.
‘It’s not exactly ease when I’m having Braxton-Hicks’s contractions all the time,’ Jen told him, though she rose to go towards him, greeting him with a kiss and turning in his arms so they could walk together. ‘To think of all I went through to have this baby—operation after operation—and now it’s doing this to me.’
‘Ah, but it will all be worth it when you hold him in your arms,’ Mel said. ‘I think I was as excited as you were when you finally fell pregnant and then to learn it was a boy. Zaheer may be developing quickly but I’m not sure they’d be ready for a female ruler.’
‘Or that my sweet little Nooria would want the job,’ Arun said, reaching Mel’s side and kneeling by her, his eyes feasting on his daughter.
‘Sweet little Nooria?’ Mel responded. ‘This child is going to be the size of an oil drum, the way she eats.’
‘She is beautiful,’ Arun whispered, running his hand over the downy head. ‘As is her mother.’
He reached up to touch Mel’s lips with his fingers.
‘You are well?’
Mel nodded, the emotion she felt tightening her chest too much for her to be able to speak.
How could it be that love could grow so much? That what she had felt for Arun when they’d married, a couple of days later than they’d planned, could be but a shadow of the love that had grown between them in the year that had followed?
‘Is all prepared for the party?’ Arun asked, and Mel found her voice.
‘That’s why we had to rest—we haven’t stopped. That sister of yours is a slave-driver.’
She eased the baby off her breast and Arun helped her stand, then he slipped his arm around her and the five of them made their way into the grand hall, not for an audience today but to celebrate the first birthday of a very special, and very healthy, little boy.
Shiar.
But as Kam and Jenny walked under the arch into the cloister, Mel paused, turning to look back at the courtyard, seeing the greens of the trees deepen as the sun sank lower in the sky then the flush of colour above the palace walls as the magical evening light show began.
Arun turned with her.
‘You are happy, my love?’ he asked quietly.
She moved closer to his side and rested her head on his shoulder.
‘Happier than I ever thought a woman could be, Arun. And you?’
His arm tightened around her shoulder and he bent awkwardly around Nooria to kiss Mel on the lips.
‘How could I not be when you have given me so great a gift—when you have given me your love?’