Although he could explain the trees.
‘They were a gift, sent unexpectedly to my father, and he planted them along here.’
That would do for now.
She smiled at him.
‘They look great. They obviously like it here. Where I grew up was on the coast and although we had sand, we had rain as well so the trees grew tall and strong. Can you smell them? Smell the scent of the oil? Sometimes at night it filled the air, and especially after being in the city it would tell me I was home.’
‘The desert air is like that,’ Tariq told her. ‘Cities seem to confuse our sense of smell, but once we’re out of them it comes back to us, familiar as the sound of the wind blowing sand across the dunes, or the feel of cold spring water in an oasis.’
Lila heard the words as poetry, and stared at the man who’d spoken them. He’d erupted into her life, caught her at a time when anyone would be vulnerable—new job, new country, new customs and language—then confused her with her mother’s name.
Seeing the familiar trees had strengthened her, and she decided to go along with whatever was happening, not that she’d had much choice up until now. But she’d come here to find out about her parents, and this man had known her mother.
Had suspected her mother was a thief?
So maybe she had to stay in the palace, if only to clear her mother’s name...
She turned away, catching a glimpse of a large building at the end of the avenue.
A very large building, not replete with domes and minarets but with solid, high stone walls, earth brown, and towers set into them at regular intervals.
Guard towers? For men with guns?
More a prison than a palace, surely?
Her mother had been a thief?
No, that last was impossible!
She was letting her imagination run away with her, but as they drew closer to the imposing façade, she shivered.
‘It is old, built as a fort, not a palace,’ her companion explained. ‘But inside you will see. It is a home.’
He said the words with the warmth of love and she smiled, remembering how forbidding her childhood home, an old nunnery, had looked from outside, yet how homelike it had been.
‘It’s the people inside that make a home,’ she said, and saw his surprise.
Then his smile.
And something changed...
Something inside her gave way, weakening her when she would have liked to be strong.
Needed to be strong...
* * *
Tariq glanced at his companion, aware of the complications he was undoubtedly bringing into his life by insisting she stay in the palace. She would be accommodated in the women’s house, which he knew, both from his early childhood within its confines and from sisters, aunts and cousins, was a hotbed of intrigue, gossip, innuendo and often scandal.
But if she was family this was where she belonged.
And if the Ta’wiz was genuine, and the thrill he’d felt as he’d touched it suggested it was, then this was where it, too, belonged.
She was looking all around her, taking in the forbidding walls, a small frown teasing her delicate eyebrows.
‘The gold on the walls?’ she said. ‘I took it to be decoration—a bit odd on a fortress but still.’
She paused and turned to look at him.
‘But it’s script, isn’t it? That lovely flowing Arabic script? What does it say?’
He could lie—tell her anything—tell her it said ‘Welcome’, but the memory of his father’s anger as he’d marched, often dragging his eight-year-old son, around the fortress walls, demanding the words be written faster, was imprinted in his mind.
As were the words!
He looked out at them now, as if to read them, although they were written on his heart.
‘They say,’ he explained slowly—reluctantly—“The head must rule the heart.”’
‘All the way round?’ the visitor asked, obviously astonished.
Tariq shrugged.
‘It is my father’s motto and there may be variations on the theme,’ he said, trying hard for casual while remembered anger tore at him. ‘Here and there he may have put, “The heart must follow the head,” but you get the gist of it.’
‘And he wrote it all the way around?’
The woman, Lila, was wide-eyed in disbelief.
‘‘And inside too,’ Tariq told her, finally summoning up a small smile as the silliness of the whole thing struck him. ‘He claimed it was an ancient ancestral ruling that had kept the tribe in power for so many generations. But in truth I think it was to annoy First Mother, who had the temerity to complain when he took a second wife.’
Ya lahwey, why was he telling this woman the story? Didn’t the British have a saying about washing dirty linen in public? Wasn’t that what he was doing?
But the pain he’d felt for his mother—First Mother—had imprinted that time like a fiery brand in his memory and still it burned when he remembered it.
Beside him he heard the visitor murmuring, and just made out the faintly spoken words—‘The head must rule the heart.’
‘Maybe,’ she finally said, loudly enough for him to hear, ‘it is a good rule to live by. Do you follow it?’
You don’t have to answer that, his ruling head told him, but as she’d asked...
‘For my sins, I do,’ he admitted, as they waited for the big gate to be opened. ‘My head told me that the country needed doctors more than it needed more princes, and children’s doctors in particular, to take health facilities to those who live far from the city.’
He paused.
He’d said enough.
But as the visitor gasped at the vision inside the palace walls—his father’s vision—he felt compelled to finish what he’d been saying.
‘It has caused a rift between us, my father and I.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said softly, but then she looked around and he had to smile at the astonishment on the woman’s beautiful face. The old walls of the fort might remain, but inside was an earthly paradise made possible by the unlikely combination of oil and water. Oil revenue paid for all the water in his land, paid to have it desalinated from the ocean, so once what had been desert could blossom with astonishing beauty.
‘But this is unbelievable,’ the woman, Lila, whispered, turning her head this way and that as she took in the formal gardens, the bloom-covered bowers, the fountains and hedges, and carefully laid-out mosaic paths.
‘It has been my father’s life work,’ Tariq told her, pride in his voice hiding the tug he felt in his heart as he thought of his father, ailing now, distanced from him, heart-sore over Khalil, a son from his second wife. Once he, Tariq, had chosen to do medicine Khalil had been brought up to be ruler, trained almost from birth. But now Khalil was ill with leukaemia his father was caught in a tussle over his choice of a successor should Khalil not survive.
Wanting Tariq to change his mind but too proud to beg...
Tariq shook away the exhaustion threatening to engulf him. He’d get his visitor settled, sleep for a few hours, then return to the hospital. He’d already assigned a staff member to act as guide and liaison for the new doctor but of course she was at