‘It’s me. We’re leaving tomorrow at first light, and apparently there’s no coverage in the desert without a satellite phone,’ Desi said. ‘So I’ll be incommunicado for a few days. I know you wish me luck.’
She was restless. She read for a little, then knelt up on the bed, turned out the lamp, opened the wooden jalousie, and rested her elbows on the window sill, gazing out on the silent courtyard and the stars.
If only she could get a sense of where she was headed! But the future was as black and impenetrable as the sky. She felt nothing—no sense of impending doom anymore, no promise of release. Only an intense, unbearable yearning for his presence. His arms, his mouth, his body. Please, please, let him come to me…
After a while she slipped down into bed. She didn’t notice when sleep came.
She woke suddenly. Through the open window above her bed she saw stars in a clear black sky. A cooling breeze blew in over her, shaking the wooden jalousie, but that sound was not what had awakened her.
She leaned up and put her hand out to the lamp. Before she could turn it on, he was there, kneeling beside the bed.
‘Desi.’ His voice was hoarse with the struggle against longing. ‘Deezee.’
She reached for him, and in the next moment his body was hot against hers and she was drowning.
Chapter Ten
THE sun flamed up in the sky on the right, a perfect circle of burning fury that promised the greater ferocity to come, and the grey line of the mountains’ shadow rushed towards them, chased by golden sand.
‘That’s quite a vista,’ Desi murmured. It was a dizzying view all the way to white-topped Mount Shir, brooding high above the foothills like the lion it was named for.
Salah glanced at her, and away again. She looked like what she was—a beautiful woman who had known passion in the night. And he realized, from the change he saw in her, that it had been a long time since she had experienced the kind of lovemaking he had given her. Her skin had a glow that had not been there before; her eyes were soft with remembered pleasure, her mouth was swollen with the memory of kisses.
His kisses.
He felt a burst of masculine satisfaction. That was the measure of a man, or one of them: to give his woman true pleasure—so that afterwards she was sweet, like honey. His own body ached and sang with the thought of her sweetness, and for him, too, it had been lovemaking like nothing he had known for ten years.
‘I told you once that you would like it,’ he said, but he was not talking about Mount Shir.
Then he heard his own thoughts—his woman. But she was not his woman, not now, not ever again. And he was a fool if he let sex cloud his thinking about her. She had betrayed him once, when he needed her most. She was almost certainly betraying him now, betraying his country, perhaps—for although he had no proof of what she really wanted here, he could be very sure at least that she was lying to him.
Sex made fools of men. He knew that, he had seen it happen to others. He would not be of their number. He would keep a clear head. He had four or five days to get the truth from her. Desire must not blind him to the need to do it. Sex must not be allowed to interfere with his plans. He reached out and pressed the radio into life, to puncture the mood in the truck’s cabin.
He had been ten times a fool to think he could undertake this task without risk.
Desi smiled and stretched in her seat, letting the incomprehensible chatter from the radio blend into the background like music. Every muscle in her body simultaneously protested and relayed a honeyed memory of the lovemaking just past.
Salah had been wild with need in the night, seeking the solace of her body over and over, as if to make up for ten lost years in a single night. When they arose at daybreak Desi had no idea whether she’d slept. The mix of languor and energy in her body was like nothing she’d ever experienced before.
The memory of their lovemaking was in the vehicle with them now, heavy in the air, liquid in her cells. She was sensitive even to the pressure of the air against her skin; any movement was slow dancing in honey.
A few more minutes of driving in shade, and then, with a little explosion of light, they were in full sunshine.
There was a smile in her being, and it played with her eyes and the corners of her mouth. Desi leaned lazily back and watched the landscape. Silence fell for minutes, during which she savoured shimmering crystal sharp air, blinding light, purple-grey shadows under distant foothills.
Watching the shadows retreat across the desert as the sun climbed higher could almost be a life’s occupation, she reflected. And again she had that strange feeling of belonging, as if the desert had been waiting for her and would now claim her.
He had not mentioned the letter, but she thought he would soon. He had to. Could he explain, would he apologize? Surely now they could discuss what had happened so long ago with some detachment?
She shifted nervously. Everything was too overwhelming, happening too fast. If he did bring it up, where would that lead them? Was she ready for that?
Would she end up telling him about Sami? she wondered suddenly. No real explanation was possible between them without that, but…how would he react? She had promised Sami she would not tell Salah. If she risked betraying that…she had no idea where the discussion would go.
‘So much traffic!’ she said. ‘Does everybody start early, or have they been driving all night?’
‘This is the main road to the oil fields. In summer everyone avoids driving in the middle of the day.’
In his voice she thought she heard a reflection of her own nervous reluctance to start on something where they could not be sure of the end. Well, there was time. Five days they would be alone. Five days to try to sort her thoughts. No hurry.
They drove in silence. Now and then Salah pointed out an ancient ruin in the desert, or a distant nomad encampment. Desi laughed aloud when they came up behind a pickup truck carrying a young camel which was hunkered down with its legs folded beneath it, complacently regarding them over the tailgate, chewing its cud.
‘And my camera’s packed in my case!’
‘You have a camera?’
‘Of course! I want to—’
‘You will not be able to take photographs at the dig,’ Salah said.
‘Oh! Is—’ But she was afraid to ask why for fear of exposing her ignorance. ‘Have you been to the dig before?’ she asked instead.
‘A few times,’ Salah said. ‘When it was first discovered.’
‘What can you tell me about it? I couldn’t find any information. Sami said it might be contemporary with Sumer. It sounds really exciting.’
It was barely three weeks since Desi had first heard of Sumer, the ancient civilisation that thrived between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers five thousand years ago, but she wasn’t faking her interest. There was something about five thousand years of history that sparked her imagination now as much as when she was eleven.
She had crammed a lot of study into the short time she had to prepare. But although she could bone up on the Sumer period and archaeology in general, she had found absolutely nothing about the site Salah’s father was working, so far from where ancient Sumer had prospered. Some mysterious outpost, some far city?
‘My father is maintaining very close secrecy until he can publish,’ he said. ‘You he could not refuse, but no other outsider has been allowed to visit. No media. A hand-picked team. You understand.’
‘I see,’ Desi said lamely, who didn’t know what it meant to ‘publish’ a site, couldn’t imagine why an ancient site would be kept secret, and was dismayed to learn