LITMIR.BIZ

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had stopped excavating, they sat, as had become their habit, chatting and drinking water from Christopher’s goatskin flask. Tahira looked up at the sky and sighed. ‘I must leave a little sooner tonight. My friend is worried. Farah,’ she added. ‘My friend’s name is Farah.’

      The first name she had spoken save her own and Sayeed’s. Christopher acknowledged this rare confidence with a quirk of his brow. ‘Would Farah happen to have access to a camel?’

      ‘You guessed!’

      ‘I reckoned you would not dare risk taking one from the family stables.’ He angled himself towards her. ‘So Farah knows that you escape at night? She must be a very good friend if you trust her with such a big secret.’

      ‘None better. Farah was once my maidservant, but she is so near in age to me that she has always been more of a friend. When Mama died, we became closer. Too close,’ she said, her smile fading. ‘My brother was jealous.’

      ‘It seems all roads in your life story lead to your brother,’ Christopher said, grimly. ‘What happened?’

      ‘It would have been better if we had kept our distance in front of him, but we were children, and my brother—oh, we thought him just a spiteful little boy. We never considered that there would be consequences to our excluding him from our games. But as the years passed and we became closer, and Farah—I fear that she took her lead from me and was too bold in her dislike of him, and I was naïve enough to show how much I cared for her. It shouldn’t have been a surprise when he contrived to have my father unfairly dismiss her, causing her character to be unjustly blackened.’ Tahira clenched her fists. ‘But it was.’

      ‘And so your friend takes pleasure in thwarting your brother by assisting you?’

      ‘She has always been happy to do so, but tonight—you see, until lately my absences have been well spaced. It is only recently that I’ve risked escaping so often. Farah is afraid that I will be caught. Which made me worry about what would happen to her if I was. It has been selfish of me not to think that by implicating her I was putting her at risk too.’

      ‘Does she know that you are to be married?’

      ‘She does now. She is pleased for me,’ Tahira said, with a bittersweet smile, for Farah had actually been delighted that she would escape from Ghutrif, even though it would mean they would never see each other again.

      ‘So you haven’t shared your own feelings on the subject with her, even though you trust her implicitly?’

      ‘No. Nor—Christopher, you must not worry that Farah knows about you.’

      ‘I hadn’t even considered it.’

      ‘No one knows of you, or our meetings. You are my secret, and mine alone.’ Flushing, startled by the tone of her voice, which gave her words far more meaning than she had intended, Tahira hurriedly pulled her headdress over her face. ‘I must go. I don’t want to upset Farah any further.’

      Urging her sluggish camel into a trot, she wondered with a sinking feeling how many more times she would make this journey. If Farah had her way, it would be none. It would be the same number if common sense prevailed, but Tahira had never felt less sensible. She had never had so much to lose. She couldn’t stop now, not with the tomb to be opened, the turquoise to be matched, Christopher’s quest to be completed.

      The dangers made her head spin, but the rewards made her heart soar. With Christopher she was alive. Why shouldn’t she admit that she cared for him, longed to be with him, relished every moment they were together? Their time was so precious, it intensified every feeling, but their time was finite, and so too, she was sure she would discover, were her feelings. It was as if she had leapt from the highest mountain. It was impossible to stop herself, impossible to climb back, so she could enjoy every moment of the wild careening down before coming back down to earth. She would find a way to beat the odds. She would find a way to land safely. But in the meantime, she had no intentions of shortening the fall.

      * * *

      Even by the opulent standards of the royal palace of Nessarah, the library was an imposing room, and one which was very different in style from the rest of the palace. The ceiling was not decorated with traditional tiles but was elaborately moulded, painted in a soft palate of gold and celestial blues, the central fresco depicting a summer sky with light fluffy clouds of the sort never seen over the Nessarah desert. In contrast, the vast floor space was laid with simple polished flagstones, and just as sparsely furnished. Four long, highly polished reading tables doubled as cabinets for storing papers, but there was not a single other item of furniture or any form of seating. A harem sentry guarded the other side of the door through which Tahira entered for her pre-sanctioned private visit. On the opposite wall, light streamed in from a vast arched window.

      Every other inch of available wall space was taken up by books and scrolls. Thousands of them, in shelves which climbed to the ceiling. A narrow gallery ran at half-height, reached by a single narrow, spiral staircase which required the intrepid reader to walk around the full length of the library to reach the books on the furthest side. A single freestanding ladder on wheels provided access for the reader to the lower shelves. The library, created and largely populated by Tahira’s great-great grandfather, was not a place often visited by her more recent forebears. No catalogue of any sort existed, and she had never been able to divine any system for the placement of tomes on the shelves. In this sense, every visit to the room was a voyage of discovery, but it could also be highly frustrating. As a result she had started her own system. In effect, creating her own library within the library, relocating, book by book, scroll by scroll, the volumes in which she was interested.

      Today however, she was not consulting any of those previously read works on Nessarah’s history. The book which lay open on the reading table was bound in red leather tooled with gold, and intriguingly entitled The Art of Love. It was not the first book she had perused today, but the illustrations in The Garden of Delights had appalled her. Such contortions appeared more likely to induce pain rather than delight, and the book, while it contained a great many words in praise of the male member, contained no relevant information on how to minister to it. The Art of Love, which she had discovered between a guide to the art of an Italian painter, and a notebook containing household remedies, was a very different matter. There were no illustrations and no poems eulogising male prowess. Instead, the book was a practical guide to giving and receiving pleasure, narrated alternately by a man and a woman.

      She had not progressed beyond the early chapters, for the descriptions brought to mind her own experiences. Christopher’s kisses. The way her nipple had tightened when he took it into his mouth, the way she had arched under him in response. The tension. And the heat. Which Christopher, according to the book, had been experiencing too. Eyes closed, seated cross-legged on the floor, she tried to imagine what he would feel like. Silk and iron, the book said, but such a combination was too strange. His chest was hard, solid muscle, expanding and contracting as he breathed. He was clean shaven, though his cheek was rough compared to hers. Would his chest be smooth, or would there be a smattering of dark-gold hair? And his nipples? A flush stole over her cheeks, embarrassment mingled with excitement. Her own nipples peaked against the silk of her camisole, proving that the little book was right. Arousal did not require physical contact. But she did touch herself, imagining her hands were Christopher’s, imagining his skin against hers, his rough palms on the soft skin of her breasts.

      Only when she slid on to the floor, her breathing ragged, did she remember where she was. Thankfully no one would disturb her with the sentry outside. All the same. Tahira closed the book and got to her feet, placing it carefully on her own shelves before wandering over to the window. Though it looked out only to a rather boring courtyard with a rather plain fountain, at least from here she could see the sky. Cloudless again. It would be another clear night for their work at the tomb. It would take them several nights, Christopher had estimated, before they would be ready to break through to whatever was on the inside. He was working longer hours than she. She had asked him to promise not to work when the miners were there, not in daylight, but he had avoided answering her. though he had promised he would not enter the tomb unless she was present.

      Ishraq

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