22
“Sheikh Darius has gone by himself?” Ephraim’s driver asked again, his dark face twisted by a scowl as he listened over the phone to Darius’s attendant, the same woman who had dried Jan’s feet on the banks of the Golden Oasis a week earlier. “Ya Allah, Sheikh Ephraim and the American left by boat alone this morning as well!”
Ephraim’s driver and Darius’s attendant had met several times over the years as part of the entourages accompanying the respective Sheikhs when they attended conventions and pan-Arab gatherings of the region’s royal families. They’d become friendly, and sometimes spoke when on relief from their duties at the same time. This conversation had started as a simple text message from the attendant to the driver, saying that Darius would be away for a few days, visiting Noor Island, and she had time to talk and catch up if he did. The driver had immediately called her with the news that Ephraim and Jan had taken a boat into the Golden Oasis just that morning, with supplies for at least a few days.
“It cannot be a coincidence,” the driver rasped, scratching his thick black beard fiercely as he thought back to the way Jan and the Sheikh had toured the city and talked about policies and politics in a way that seemed odd. After all, she was an outsider, with no business questioning the decisions of the supreme Sheikh of Habeetha! “Not if you say that this same American woman was with Sheikh Darius just last week. Who is she? What spell has she cast over the great Sheikhs?”
“It does not take much for a woman to cast a spell over Sheikh Ephraim, I hear,” teased the attendant. “But I admit, it does appear to be a strange coincidence.”
“You have heard Sheikh Darius and the American speak,” the driver said. “What did they say to each other? You understand English better than I do.”
Darius’s attendant had remained quiet for a bit. “You know I cannot repeat anything my Sheikh says. It is a betrayal of my position as a personal attendant. Do you not follow the same custom in Habeetha? You do. I know it. How can you ask me to speak of my Sheikh’s private conversations?”
“The conversations may be private, but the effects might be public! There is something strange about to take place. I feel it. Four years of the Sheikhs threatening war, and now, out of nowhere, both Sheikhs are having a secret meeting with an American woman who has visited each one privately.”
“What are you saying? That she is a spy? A political agent? American CIA? Ya Allah, I promise you, that is not the case,” the attendant said, snorting with laughter over the phone.
The driver tensed up and exhaled hard. “Ah, now you have already revealed much. So the relationship between the American and Sheikh Darius is personal. He has taken her to bed? Yes?”
The attendant remained silent, but the driver could hear her breathing quicken in a way that told him he was right. “Sheikh Ephraim has taken the American to bed as well. She has been with both of them in one week. Are you still convinced there is nothing strange in the works? Are you ready to speak of what you heard?”
The attendant stayed quiet for another long moment, but the driver kept going, pushing, cajoling, reminding her that in the end they served their kingdom and not their Sheikhs, that sometimes those in the shadows had to take things into their own hands if they saw something that did not seem right.
“I will tell you what I heard,” the attendant finally said, her voice soft but firm. “But only so you understand that what is happening is not a great evil but instead something that could be the greatest good.” She paused a moment, as if wondering whether to say what she was about to. “Perhaps then you will see that although it appears that our Sheikhs took this woman to bed, the truth might well be that it was she who took them to bed, that it is she who might be in control, that it is she who we might someday call Sheikha and queen. Queen to both of us, to both our kingdoms.”
The driver listened, his disbelief rising with his rage as the attendant spoke of what she’d heard, told of how Darius had ordered a gown of blue silk made for the American, taken her to London to the charity gala where he knew they’d meet Ephraim, of how they’d spoken of shared marriages, symbolism and perception, experiments and traditions.
In stunned silence the driver hung up the phone, not sure if the world had gone mad or if it was just him. He’d gotten used to Sheikh Ephraim challenging tradition by now: After all, gambling and alcohol were banned by Islamic scripture. Still, the driver had seen enough of the hypocrisy of the citizens and rulers of stricter Arab kingdoms, and he knew that thousands of the younger generations openly violated those laws on pleasure trips to the West. So why not expose the hypocrisy and bring it into the light? There was a boldness and strength to Sheikh Ephraim’s move that the driver admired, and he also understood that the revenues from tourism would help the country once all the cars in the world ran on electricity and not oil. But this shocking plan to reverse the Islamic tradition of one Sheikh taking many wives was too much. How could that be a show of strength?! It was weakness, to bow to a woman, was it not?! How could Sheikh Ephraim betray the trust and faith of his people like that? It would make all of them look weak and foolish! How could he say with pride that he was a natural-born citizen of the great kingdom of Habeetha once his Sheikh bowed his head to a woman—a brash, rude, unattractive American woman, that too! It could not happen. And it would not happen.
No, he decided as he scratched his beard and clenched his jaw so tight his head hurt. It would not happen.