“With an aerial blitz?”

He threw his magnificent head back and laughed before looking his pleasure and merriment down on her. “The extra zeal is in honor of your recovery and your gracing of their feast tonight.”

She raised him a wider grin, her heart zooming again with elation, with anticipation. But mostly, with his nearness.

She’d been up and about for three days now, had recovered fully. But what relieved her was the condition of his wound. Her sutures had been very good. And had remained mostly intact, with only a few needing reapplication. The healing had been spectacular. She’d never known humans could heal that fast. She kept teasing that he must have mutants or local gods in his ancestry. Which wouldn’t surprise her.

And during the idyll of recuperation and recreation, they’d remained in the cottage or its garden, with the oasis people coming periodically to check their needs and replenish their supplies. She hadn’t wanted to go out, to see more.

She’d had Harres with her.

She now knew that the bonds of harmony and sufficiency they’d forged during their desert trek hadn’t just been crisis induced. It hadn’t been the isolation or the desperation. It all originated from their unpressured choices, their innate inclinations, their essential selves, and flowed between them in a closed circuit of synergy and affinity.

Being with him was enough. Felt like everything.

Tonight was the first night they would join the oasis people. She felt so grateful to them, so humbled by their hospitality. But earlier she’d felt embarrassed, too.

The oasis-elder’s wife and daughters had come, bringing her an exceptionally intricate and stunningly vivacious outfit to wear to the feast. As Harres had stood beside her translating their felicity at her recovery and her thrill over their magnificent gift, the ladies had eaten him up with their eyes. She’d wanted to jump to their side and indulge in the pleasure of oohing and aahing over the wonders of him with those born equipped to appreciate them. Which was every female with a pulse.

But it had been when their eyes had turned to her with knowing tinged with envy that she’d realized. With her and Harres’s living arrangement, they must think they were…intimate. And if she was truthful, and she was, they hadn’t been only because of his consideration and restraint.

Not one to let misgivings go unvoiced, she’d asked. Was their situation compromising him, a prince in an ultra-conservative kingdom? Now that her staying with him was no longer necessary, couldn’t she move elsewhere until his brothers came for them?

He’d said that the oasis people didn’t follow any rules but their own. Being one with nature, living outside the reach of politics or material interests, they didn’t police others’ morality and conduct, lived and let live. But even if they hadn’t, he cared nothing for what the world thought. He cared only about what she wanted. Did she want to move out?

Her heart thudded all over again at the memory. He’d been so intense, yet indulgent, not taking it for granted that she didn’t want to. And she didn’t. She couldn’t even think how fast the day was approaching when she would move out of his orbit, return to a life that didn’t have him in it.

She couldn’t think, so she didn’t. Plenty of time later to. Her lifetime’s worth.

Now with her heart thudding, she investigated the external source of pounding.

In the dual illumination of a waxing moon and raging fires, she saw it was coming from the direction of the biggest construction she’d seen so far in the oasis.

Silvered by moonbeams and gilded by flickering flames, a one-story circular building rose among a huge clearing within the congregation of dwellings. It was made of the same materials but could accommodate probably a few thousand. It had more windows than walls, and flanking its single door, older women in long-sleeved flowing dresses with tattoos covering their temples and chins were squatting on the ground, each with a large wooden urn held between bent legs, pounding it with a two-foot pestle.

He smiled into her eyes. “When it’s not used as a percussion instrument, the mihbaj doubles as a seed grinder, mainly coffee, and…” A storm of new drumming drowned out his voice, coming from inside the building, making him put his lips to her ears. “The whole rhythm section has joined in. Let’s go in.”

As they did, she felt as if she’d stepped centuries back into the ancient orient with its special brand of excesses.

The ambiance was overpowering in richness and depth and purity with an edge of mystic decadence to it. Heavy sweet-spicy ood incense blended with the distinctive smell of fruit-mixed tobacco that many smoked in their water-filled sheeshas. The fumes undulated like scented ghosts, twining through the warm, hypnotic light flickering from hundreds of polished, handcrafted copper lanterns.

The huge circle of the floor was covered in handwoven rugs, the whitewashed walls scattered in arabesque windows, most thrown open to let in the desert-night breeze and the rising moon rays.

All around, multitudes of exuberant cushions were laid on the floor and against the walls, with tableyahs—foot-high, unpolished wooden tables—set before them for the banquet.

On the unfurnished side, a three-foot-high platform hosted the dozens of drummers producing that blood-seething rhythm.

“The tambourine-like instrument is the reg. The doff, the large one with no jangles, acts as the bass drum.” She followed Harres’s pointing finger, eagerly imbibing the info. “But it’s the darabukkah, the inverted vaselike drums, whose players keep up the hot rhythm. Usually they wow the crowd with some impossibly complex and long routines before the other instruments join in.”

They sure wowed her. She felt the rhythm boiling her blood, seeping into her nervous pathways, taking hold of her impulses.

She let Harres guide her to the seating arrangement. But with every step she swayed more to the rhythm, her every cell feeling like popcorn, ricocheting inside her with the need to expend the surplus energy gathering in them in unbridled motion.

Suddenly Harres took her hand and spooled her away then back into his arms, all while moving as one with the beat. “Dance, ya nadda jannati. Celebrate being alive and being in paradise.”

And being with you, she wanted to shout.

She didn’t, let her eyes shout it for her. Then she danced, as if she’d been released from shackles that had kept her immobile all her life, riding the compelling rhythm, moving with him to the primal beat, her heart keeping the same fiery tempo.

Somehow, they wound up in the middle of a dancing circle that he’d either led her to or had formed around them.

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