Dr. al Khouri shook his head, sighing. ‘You bought her from nomads?’
‘Yes, for twenty dirhams. She’s in the truck.’
‘Then tomorrow you will show her to me. This, we suspect—’ he waved his arm to take in the entire site ‘—was her particular city. Perhaps the people came here on pilgrimages.’
‘The goddess of love was the chief god?’ Desi asked, amazed.
‘Yes, and such worship left its mark on later generations. In antiquity, Barakat has had many ruling women, and even after Islam, we often allowed queens to rule us. You have heard of the great Queen Halimah?’
‘Yes.’
‘Her path was of course paved by the goddesses and queens of antiquity, who still exist in the psyche of Barakat.’
‘Oh!’ Desi said in surprise.
‘Your own little goddess probably came from this area, but not this particular site. The flooding brought many things to the surface all along the valley. We have seen evidence for at least two more large settlements not far away.
‘That is why it is so critical to keep this secret for as long as possible. We can never hope to police every potential site in the valley, and if we lose too many of them…but we start with the largest, hoping that it is also the most important.’
‘Salah says looters aren’t the worst threat, though,’ she said, remembering. He had said it only a day or two ago, Desi realized in distant surprise. She seemed to have lived a lifetime since then. Then she had felt alive, that was why it seemed so long ago.
‘That is true.’
The archaeologist guided her over a narrow bridge of land between two square holes, smiling and nodding at the diggers below, who were starting to call to each other about the happy prospect of downing tools and cold beer.
‘Looters take what they find for their own enrichment. But the others, the fools who cannot bear to know that once the feminine was worshipped as fervently as the masculine is today, the idiots who must force the past to match their ideals as well as the present—they are a different kind of danger. They want to destroy the evidence.
‘Whatever we find here, Desi, it is the heritage of the whole world. It is our collective history. These madmen—they want to forget that all of Mohammad’s line comes through a woman. Fatima. Without his daughter, there would be no sharifs at all, no descendants of the prophet. But still they want to wipe the feminine out of the world.’
‘And you thought I might be helping these people?’ she asked in quiet bitterness.
He stared at her. ‘Help them? What intelligent person would help such lunatics?’
‘Salah said you suspected I wanted to come here because—’
‘Oh!’ he said, in a different tone. His eyes moved to her face. ‘My wife said that if we wanted Salah to be happy, I had to let you visit, in spite of Salah’s objections. And I had to pretend to suspect your motives, too. I am only an archaeologist, I don’t really understand these things. But you will know—is my son happy now?’
Her heart was suddenly beating in hard, heavy thuds. ‘How would I know?’ Desi protested. ‘Isn’t he going to marry Sami?’
He shrugged. ‘My wife says not.’
Desi took a deep breath and sighed it out. Promise me you’ll tell Uncle Khaled only if you’re absolutely certain he’ll be all right with it, Sami had said. And here was Sami’s chance. This at least she could accomplish. This at least she could pull from the wreckage. No happiness for herself, that wasn’t possible now, but…
She said, ‘Dr. al Khouri—’
‘But you must call me Khaled!’
‘Khaled, I have something to tell you, and something to ask you, from Sami.’
‘Ah, yes, my niece is your friend! My wife said. Let us sit here, then.’ He guided her to a bench beside a table under a canopy, where they had a view over the whole dig. ‘Now. What has to be said that my niece could not say to me herself?’
Desi stared out over the scene, watching long shadows move and dance as the workers moved out of the field and headed towards the tents.
‘It’s about…the marriage.’ Her voice grated on the word. ‘Sami asked me to tell you that she—doesn’t want to marry Salah. She’s already engaged to a man she loves, but her brothers wanted to choose her husband. It was they who chose Salah. She’s told them she doesn’t agree, but they…’
‘Do you speak of Walid and Arif?’ the scientist interrupted in amazement.
Desi nodded. ‘She asked me to beg you to overrule Walid and send your permission for her to marry the man she loves. Otherwise she’s afraid Walid will do something…really stupid.’
Khaled al Khouri’s eyebrows went up as he inhaled all this, and when she stopped speaking he sighed explosively.
‘Well, they are fools, these young nephews of mine! If they do not control themselves, they will soon be among the madmen who come to destroy history for the sake of their convictions. What is his name, Samiha’s fiancé?’
‘Farid Durrani al Muntazer. His family is originally from Bagestan, but he’s Canadian.’
‘Madthe?’ Khaled threw back his head and laughed a loud, boisterous laugh. ‘Well, they are worse than fools. They are ridiculous! This boy is a member of the royal family of Bagestan!’
Desi stared. ‘What?’
‘This is one of the names the al Jawadi took decades ago when they went into exile. Why does he not tell them so? It is no secret anymore. They are on the throne now, as the world knows.’
The Silk Revolution. Desi, like everyone else she knew, had been thrilled when handsome Sultan Ashraf had been restored to the throne of Bagestan. And Farid was related to him?
She smiled, and her heart lightened a little with happiness for her friend.
‘I don’t think Walid rejected him on his merits. It was the principle of the thing.’
‘Well, I will give her my formal permission, it is the only way with such young men as this. But I will also have something to say to them.’
He stood and lifted a rope barrier for her. ‘And now you have done your duty, Desi. Come and look at the lady’s temple before the sun goes.’
Salah stood in the doorway of the mess tent, a cup of coffee in his hand, watching from a distance. The grace with which she moved up the long buried slope of that ancient temple where his distant ancestors had once worshipped love. In the shimmer of heat he seemed to see her through millennia. As if she belonged there, the high priestess of the religion of love.
Once he had worshipped at that shrine, had drunk from the honeyed chalice. Then with his own hand he had smashed it to fragments.
All the pieces of his life had come apart a few hours ago, and no new image had yet formed. He seemed to himself to be still staggering under the blow. All his landmarks were gone, blown down by the whirlwind of the horror of what he had done.
But the answer was here. He gazed at the lithe beauty of her as she talked earnestly to his father. She lifted her arm to point into the distance, and a last ray of the setting sun caught her suddenly, haloing her figure with flames of red gold, imprinting the shape on his heart, where it matched some shape already there…
The answer would be found here.
‘Everyone eats in the food tent,’ Salah told her a little later, leading her across the moonshadowed desert towards the trailer where she would sleep. ‘Supper will be ready in half an hour. Or someone can bring you