Some years after Azrael’s father had been executed in Djalia, Azrael’s mother had returned to Quarein and remarried. The following year Tahir had been born. A former princess of Quarein, Azrael’s mother’s marriage to the ruling sheikh of Quarein had been as much a political alliance to strengthen her teenaged son’s standing as a personal relationship. Always guiltily aware of that truth, Azrael had grimly tolerated Firuz’s tough parenting regime and pitied his kid brother for what lay ahead of him.
‘He will not escape
a whipping,’ Butrus mused out loud with a faint but perceptible shudder. ‘You should tell Miss Carlisle that. Tahir will pay heavily for his stupidity. His father will ensure it. Prince Firuz makes no allowance for youthful mistakes.’
‘Unhappily for Tahir, this was much worse than youthful idiocy. It was a crime,’ Azrael pronounced stonily. ‘I feel dirtied by the whole business. For the first time in my life I have threatened a woman.’
‘Our country comes first and last,’ his advisor murmured heavily. ‘Occasionally there will be a need to face repugnant choices and choose the lesser of two evils.’
Azrael excused himself for the night. His brain recognised that Butrus was correct and that being a king would sometimes plunge him into contentious issues, but in his heart he was too conflicted to accept it. He had always tried to be an honourable, decent man but now he was utilising coercion on an innocent woman and the necessity of that treatment inflamed his pride and his own sense of justice. He felt guilty now.
About an hour before dawn, Molly crept down the spiral staircase carrying her shoes, the little tube of lip salve she had had in the pocket of her jeans and the bottle of water in a carrier bag she had found stuffed in the bathroom cabinet. She had tucked in a towel to cover her head from the heat because she had no hat to use. She had left her jeans behind, seeing no reason to burden herself with having to carry anything she couldn’t use. The forecourt, which had been so busy earlier in the day, was deserted but for one soldier stationed by the wall smoking. She lurked in the shadows until he began patrolling the battlements again and turned his back to the steps that led down to the next level. Then quick as a flash she darted out into view barefoot and sped down the steps.
There appeared to be no more guards but she still had to find her way out of the fortress. Fortunately for her, everywhere seemed to be deserted and she went down another flight of steps to find herself in a walled courtyard with closed gates and a pack of parked four-wheel drives. She wished she could steal a car and wondered what the punishment for that would be in Djalia. But starting up a car engine would attract attention, wouldn’t it? Or would it? Vehicles had been coming and going at all hours late into the night while she’d watched. At the same time she doubted her ability to drive up a steep sand dune and feared coming to grief at that first hurdle.
Picking her way between the cars while on the watch for anyone moving, she reached the gates and, with all the strength she had, she thrust down the iron bar on the gate to open it. As it creaked noisily open she slid out through the gap with a fast-beating heart and fled.
CHAPTER THREE
MOLLY RAN UP the dune through the deep pitted tracks left by the cars, desperate not to be spotted by guards at the fortress before she could get out of sight. She reached the peak and, because it was much colder than she had expected, she drew in a deep breath and kept on running, grateful that she was fit. Running was, after all, what she did for exercise at home, but running in a dress was another story altogether, she discovered, with the stretch of her legs restricted and her strides shortened. She thought about simply pulling the dress up to her waist but, although she could see no sign of life in the moonlit landscape, she didn’t want to expose herself in her underwear in a country where that was probably unacceptable.
She stayed on the tracks but they mysteriously petered out around the time the sun started rising and the glare of that alone made studying her surroundings a challenge. She was looking for a landmark of some kind to take as a direction to ensure that she didn’t get lost, but all she could see was marching lines of sand dunes. What did you expect? she asked herself irritably. A signpost to the airport?
Well, no, but she had hoped to find a recognisable road at least, only there wasn’t a road or tracks anywhere that she could see. Yet the cars must have travelled from somewhere, she thought in frustration, veering off to the left when she espied flatter land there because climbing a dune without tracks was too difficult and too tiring to get her anywhere fast. A stony plain stretched before her then, occasional small bits of vegetation appearing, which persuaded her that she was heading in the right direction and likely to draw closer to what she dimly thought of as civilisation. Buildings, roads, cars...people. It infuriated her that probably all those things were close by, but she couldn’t spot them because of the blasted dunes blocking her view. She stilled a few times and simply listened, hoping to catch sounds that would lead her in a certain direction, but there was nothing, only the soft noise of the light breeze in her eardrums and the fast beat of her own heart. While she was sipping her water, mindful that she needed to conserve it, however, Azrael was shouting for the first time in all the years Butrus had known him.
‘How could any woman be that stupid?’ he was demanding wrathfully soon after Gamila had discovered her unoccupied bed and a search had established that Azrael’s guest was no longer anywhere on the premises. ‘There is nothing out there but miles and miles of desert.’
‘But Miss Carlisle doesn’t know that...unless someone mentioned it,’ Butrus remarked, looking at no one in particular. ‘She will soon get tired and too hot and come back. Perhaps she simply went for a walk—’
‘A...a walk?’ Azrael erupted afresh in disbelief. ‘She has run away! She is a very stubborn, determined woman. I tell you...she has run away because I told her that she couldn’t leave!’
‘It is a source of greater concern to me that anyone was able to leave without a single guard challenging them,’ admitted Halim, the commanding officer of Azrael’s household guard, with a frown. ‘There will be an investigation into that worrying event after the woman is found. If someone can get out so easily, someone could have got in and reached His Majesty—’
‘His Majesty is very well able to defend himself!’ Azrael bit out rawly. ‘I am going out to look for her—’
‘I would not advise that,’ Butrus interposed, forgetting his usually punctilious manners in his dismay.
‘Nobody knows this part of the desert better than me...nobody is a better tracker!’ Azrael fired back at him with unarguable assurance.
‘But a severe sandstorm is due to move in before nightfall,’ Halim reminded his royal employer nervously. ‘You must not put yourself at risk when there is no need. The whole guard are already out there searching for her.’
But Azrael had always been stubborn as a rock and highly resistant to advice. He felt personally responsible for Molly’s disappearance and if anything happened to her he knew he would carry the shame of it to the end of his days. Furthermore, having spent his childhood at the fortress and many months in almost the same locality as an adolescent following his father’s execution, he did know the terrain better than anyone else available. When he had changed into more suitable desert apparel, the dark blue robes of his nomadic heritage, he politely refused Halim’s companionship, knowing that Halim’s disability would make hours on horseback a day of physical suffering for him. Halim had stumbled on a landmine during the struggle to topple Hashem from power.
‘You are not to take such risks.’ Butrus was still protesting Azrael’s involvement right to the door of the stables. ‘If anything happens to you, what happens to Djalia? You agreed with the council...no more personal risks.’
‘Don’t be silly, Butrus. This is an emergency,’ Azrael responded squarely. ‘I will scarcely come to harm in a storm. I was a member of our special forces. There is nothing the desert can throw at me that I cannot handle.’
‘The woman is not worth the danger to your life,’ Butrus breathed, his voice quavering with emotion.
Azrael was taken aback to see the level of concern in his adviser’s eyes and he gave his shoulder a rather awkward pat before vaulting up onto the back of his horse. ‘No one life is worth more than another. You taught me that,’ he reminded him with quiet authority.
‘I spoke in error.’ Butrus was still arguing vigorously as Azrael rode out of the courtyard.
Around the same time, Molly was beginning to realise that she might have made a very bad decision when she left the fortress. Once she crossed the flat plain to reach the one and only landmark she had even seen since venturing out, she knew she was weakening. The heat was unbelievable. She had never felt heat of that magnitude in her life. The sun above was relentless and the sand was scorching, burning her feet even through the soles of her canvas shoes. Afraid of getting sunburned, she had pulled her hands up into her sleeves and kept the towel over her head to cover her face.
She had rationed her water, belatedly realising that she had brought nowhere near enough water to meet her needs in such a challenging environment. Simultaneously she had asked herself what she had planned to do if she had miraculously found the airport. She had not thought through what she was trying to do. How could she have boarded a plane to go anywhere? She had no money, no identification, no phone, no passport, none of the necessities required for travel...
Now as she headed for the little triangle of shade she could see below the giant rocky outcrop, she was getting scared because she was down to her last inch of water in the bottle and, although she wasn’t yet admitting it to herself, she knew she was lost because when she had, at one nervous point, attempted to retrace her steps she had discovered that the steadily building breeze had already covered them up, leaving her with no idea of which direction she had come from. Now her head was aching and she was getting cramps in her legs and resting until the heat at least eased off seemed the best option available.