Yasmini sat on the sandbar and watched him. She did not share his love of cold water. She held his clothes in a bundle, then almost stealthily buried her face in them. She inhaled the masculine odour of her husband and delighted in it. Even after all these years she had never tired of it. The smell of him made her feel safe and secure. Dorian always smiled when she picked up the discarded robe he had worn all day and donned it in preference to her nightdress.
“I would wear your skin if it were possible,” she replied seriously to his gentle teasing. “This way I can be close to you, part of your raiment, part of your body.”
At last Dorian waded ashore. The phosphorescence of the tiny plankton in the lagoon sparkled upon his body, and Yasmini exclaimed with delight, “Even nature decks you in diamonds. God loves you, al-Salil, but not as much as I do.”
He stooped over her, kissed her with salty lips, took his turban from her and used it to dry himself. Then he wound it round his waist as a loincloth, and let his long wet hair hang down his back.
“This night breeze will finish the job before we reach our hut,” he told her, and they walked back along the sand to the encampment. The sentry greeted them and called a blessing as they passed the watchfire. Their own hut was well separated from that of Tom and Sarah. Mansur preferred to sleep with the ship’s officers and the men.
Dorian lit the lanterns, and Yasmini carried one when she went behind the screen at the far end of the room. She had furnished the hut with Persian carpets, silk draperies, silk mattresses and cushions filled with wild-goose down. Dorian heard the purl of water from the jug into the basin, and Yasmini hummed and sang softly as she washed. Dorian felt his loins stir: this was Yasmini’s prelude to love-making. He threw his robe and damp turban aside and stretched out on the mattress. He watched her silhouette, thrown by the lamplight on to the design of birds and flowers that decorated the Chinese screen. She had placed the lamp artfully and knew he was watching her. When she stood in the basin and bent over to wash her intimate parts, she turned so that he could watch the shadow show, and see how she was sweetening and preparing the way for him.
When at last she came out from behind the screen she hung her head demurely, allowing her hair to hang forward over her face like a dark silver-shot curtain. She covered her pudenda with both hands, then tilted her head and peeped at him with one eye through the veil. It was huge and luminous with the light of passion.
“You succulent, salacious little houri,” he said, and stiffened into full arousal. She saw what she had done to him, and tinkled with laughter. She let her hands fall to her sides, and her own sex was meticulously plucked free of hair. It was a plump and naked cleft below the ivory smooth curve of her belly. Her breasts were small and pert, so her body seemed that of a young girl.
“Come to me!” he commanded, and she obeyed with joy.
Much later in the night Yasmini felt him stir beside her and came fully awake immediately. She was always sensitive to his moods or needs. “Are you well?” she whispered. “Is there anything you need?”
“Sleep on, little one,” he whispered back. “’Tis only your friend and fervent admirer who demands to be taken in hand.” He stood up from the mattress.
“Please convey to the friend my respectful salaams and my wifely duty,” she whispered. He chuckled sleepily and kissed her lightly before he rose from their mattress. Dorian would only use the chamber-pot in the gravest emergency. Squatting was the woman’s way. He slipped out through the back door, to the pit latrine which stood fifty yards from their hut, screened by the trees of the forest verge. The sand was cool under his bare feet, the night air soft and perfumed by forest flowers and the fret off the ocean. When Dorian had relieved himself, he started back. But he stopped before he reached the rear door of the hut. The night was so beautiful and the blaze of the stars so dazzling that they mesmerized him. He stared up at them and, slowly, he found himself transported into a deep sense of peace.
Until this moment he had been storm-tossed by doubts. Had his decision to turn his back on the Elephant Throne been selfish, and unfair to Mansur? Had he failed in his duty to the peoples of Oman who were grinding under the cruel yoke of Zayn al-Din? He knew deep in his heart that Zayn had murdered their father. Did not the laws of man and God also place upon him the blood duty of retribution for the terrible crime of patricide?
All these doubts receded as he stood now under the stars. Even though the night was chilly and he was naked as a newborn, he was still warm from the arms of the only woman he had ever loved. He sighed with contentment. Even if I have sinned, it was the sin of omission. My first duty is to the living, not the dead, and Yasmini needs me as much if not more than all the others.
He started back towards the hut and at that moment he heard Yasmini scream. It was a shocking sound, terror and mortal agony blending.
As Dorian left the hut Yasmini sat up and shivered. The night had turned cold, much colder than it should have been. She wondered if it was a natural cold or the cold of evil. Perhaps some baleful spirit hovered over them. She believed implicitly in the other world, which overlapped their own so intimately, the realm in which the angels, the djinni and the shaitans existed. She shivered again, this time more in dread than with cold. She made the sign to avert the evil eye with thumb and forefinger. Then she stood up from the mattress and turned up the wick of the lantern, so that Dorian would have light when he returned. She went to where Dorian’s robe hung over the screen and slipped it over her naked body. Sitting on the mattress, she wound his turban round her head. It had dried but it still smelt of his hair. She lifted a fold of his robe to her nose, and smelt the odour of his sweat floating up from the cloth. She inhaled it with pleasure, and the comfort it imparted to her forced back the premonition of lurking evil. Just the faintest twinge of unease lingered.
“Where is Dorry?” she whispered. “He should not take so long.” She was about to call out to him through the thatched wall when she heard a stealthy sound behind her. She turned and was confronted by a tall figure clad in black, a black headcloth swaddling its face. It seemed to be some evil manifestation, a djinni or a shaitan, rather than a human. It must have entered through the other door, and its ghastly influence seemed to fill the room with a choking, cloying emanation of pure evil. In its right hand a long curved blade glinted, reflecting the dim lantern light.
Yasmini screamed with all her strength and tried to rise, but the thing sprang towards her and she did not see the knife stroke for it was so swift as to cheat her eye. She felt the blade go in, so sharp that her tender flesh offered little resistance to its entry. There was only a stinging sensation deep in her bosom.
The assassin stood over her as she sagged down on legs that were suddenly without strength. He made no effort to pull out the long blade. Instead he cocked his wrist and held it rigid, so the blade was angled upwards. He allowed the razor edge to slice its own way out, enlarging the wound, cutting through muscle, vein and artery. When at last the blade came free, Yasmini fell back upon the mattress. The dark figure looked about, seeking the man who should have been present, but was not there. He had only realized that his victim was a woman when she screamed—but by then it was too late. He stooped and pulled the turban loose from Yasmini’s face. He stared at her lovely features, now so pale and still in the lantern-light that they seemed carved from ivory.
“In God’s Holy Name, only half my work is done,” he whispered. “I have killed the vixen but missed the fox.”
He whirled and ran for the door through which he had entered the hut. At that moment Dorian burst naked into the room behind him. “Guards!” Dorian shouted. “Succour! On me! Here!”
Kadem ibn Abubaker recognized the voice and turned back on the instant. This was the victim he was seeking, this man and not his woman dressed in his robes. He leaped at Dorian who was slow to react, but threw up his right arm to deflect the blow. The blade raked him from shoulder to elbow. His blood sprang darkly in the lamplight and he yelle
d again, then dropped to his knees. His arms dangling at his sides, he looked up with a piteous expression at the man who was killing him.
Kadem knew that his victim was twice his age, and from his first reaction that the years had slowed him, that now he was helpless. This was his chance to end it swiftly and he sprang forward eagerly. But he should have been warned by the warlike reputation of al-Salil. As he stabbed down, going once more for the heart, two steely arms shot out, swiftly as striking adders. He found his knife arm trapped in a classic wrist block.
Dorian came to his feet, splattering blood from the long wound down his arm, and they whirled together. Kadem was intent on breaking the lock, so that he could stab again. Dorian was trying even more desperately to hold him, as he shouted for help. “Tom!” he screamed. “Tom! On me! On me!”
Kadem hooked his heel behind Dorian’s foot and lunged against him to trip him and throw him over, but Dorian changed his weight smoothly to the other foot, and turned inside him, twisting the wrist of his knife hand back against the joint, straining the sinews and tendons. Kadem grunted with pain, and fell back a pace against the unbearable pressure. Dorian pressed forward. “Tom!” he yelled. “Tom, in God’s Name.”
Kadem yielded to the pressure on his wrist. The release gave him just enough latitude to turn his hip into Dorian, and throw him across it. He broke Dorian’s grip and sent him cartwheeling across the floor of the hut. Like a ferret on a rabbit, he went at him, and Dorian was only just able to catch his knife wrist again as he fell back. Once more they were chest to chest, but now Kadem was on top of him, and the difference in their ages and their state of martial fitness began to tell. Remorselessly Kadem forced the point of the curved blade down towards Dorian’s chest. The assassin’s face was still covered by the headcloth. Only his eyes glittered above the black folds, just inches from Dorian’s.
“For my father’s memory,” grated Kadem, his breath coming hard with the effort, “I perform my duty.”
All Kadem’s weight was behind his knife arm. Dorian could not hold it longer. His own arm buckled slowly. The knife point pricked the bare skin of his chest and slid on, deeper and still deeper, up to the hilt.
“Justice is mine!” Kadem cried in triumph.
Before the cry had died in Kadem’s throat, Tom charged through the doorway behind him, furious and powerful as a black-maned lion. He took it all in at a glance, and swung the heavy pistol he carried in his right hand, not daring to fire it for fear of hitting his brother. The steel barrel crunched across the back of Kadem’s skull. Without another sound he collapsed on top of Dorian.
As Tom stooped to drag the Arab off his brother’s inert body, Mansur dashed into the hut. “For the love of God, what’s amiss?”
“This swine set upon Dorry.”
Mansur helped Tom to lift Dorian into a sitting position. “Father, are you hurt?” Then they both saw the terrible knife wound in his bare chest. They stared at it in horror.
“Yassie!” Dorian wheezed. “Look to her.”
Tom and Mansur turned towards the small figure curled on the mattress. Neither of them had noticed her until then.
“Yassie is all right, Dorry. She’s sleeping,” Tom said.
“No, Tom, she is mortal hurt.” Dorian tried to shrug off their restraining hands. “Help me. I must attend to her.”
“I will see to Mother.” Mansur jumped up and ran to the mattress. “Mother!” he cried, and tried to lift her. Then he reeled back, staring at his hands, which were shining with Yasmini’s blood.
Dorian crawled across the floor, dragged himself on to the mattress and lifted Yasmini in his arms. Her head lolled lifelessly. “Yassie, please don’t leave me.” He wept tears of utter desolation. “Don’t go, my darling.”
His entreaties were in vain for Yasmini’s elfin spirit was already well sped along the fatal way.
Sarah had been awakened by the uproar. She came swiftly to join Tom. A quick examination showed her that Yasmini’s heartbeat had stilled, and she was past any help. She stifled her grief, and turned to Dorian for he was still alive, if only just.
At Tom’s curt order, Batula and Kumrah dragged Kadem out of the hut. Using rawhide thongs, they tied his elbows and wrists behind his back. Then they pulled his ankles to his wrists and bound them together. His spine arched painfully as they riveted a steel slave collar round his neck and chained him to a tree in the centre of the encampment. As soon as the dreadful tidings of the assassination flashed through the camp, the women gathered around Kadem to curse and spit at him in anger and revulsion: they had all loved Yasmini.
“Keep him secure. Do not let them kill him, not yet, not until I order it,” Tom told Batula grimly. “You sponsored this murderous swine. The duty is with you, on your own life.”
He went back into the hut to give what help he could. This was not much, for Sarah had taken charge. She was highly skilled in the medical arts. She had spent much of her life tending broken bodies and dying men. She only needed his strength to pull the compression bandages tightly enough to stem the bleeding. For the remainder of the time Tom hovered in the background, cursing his own stupidity for not anticipating the danger and taking precautions to forestall it.
“I am not an innocent child. I should have known.” His lamentations hampered rather than helped, and Sarah ordered him out of the hut.
When she had dressed Dorian’s wound and he was lying more comfortably Sarah relented and allowed Tom to return. She told him that although his brother was gravely injured, the blade had missed his heart—as far as she could divine. She thought it had pierced the left lung, for there was bloody froth on his lips.
“I have seen men less robust than Dorry recover from worse wounds. Now it is up to God and time.” That was the best reassurance she had for Tom. She gave Dorian a double spoonful of laudanum, and, once the drug had taken effect, left him with Tom and Mansur to tend him. Then she went to start the heartbreaking process of laying out Yasmini’s body for burial.
The Malay servant girls, also Muslim, helped her. They carried Yasmini to Sarah’s own hut at the far end of the encampment, laid her on the low table, and placed a screen round her. They took away the bloodied robe and burned it to ash on the watchfire. They closed the lids of those magnificent dark eyes, from which the luminosity had faded. They bathed Yasmini’s childlike body and anointed her with perfumed oils. They bandaged the single dreadful wound that had stabbed through to her heart. They combed and brushed her hair, and the silver blaze shone as brightly as ever. They dressed her in a clean white robe and laid her on the funeral bier. She looked like a child asleep.
Mansur and Sarah, who after Dorian had loved her best, chose a burial site in the forest. With the crew of the Gift, Mansur stayed to help dig the grave, for the law of Islam decreed that Yasmini should be buried before sunset on the day of her death.
When they lifted Yasmini’s bier and carried her from the hut, the lamentations of the women roused Dorian from the sleep of the poppy and he called weakly for Tom, who came at the run. “You must bring Yassie to me,” Dorian whispered.
“No, brother, you must not move. Any movement could do you terrible ill.”
“If you will not bring her, then I will go to her.” Dorian tried to sit up, but Tom held him down gently, and shouted for Mansur to bring the funeral bier to Dorian’s bedside.
At his insistence, Tom and Mansur supported Dorian so he could kiss his wife’s lips for the last time. Then Dorian worked free from his own finger the gold ring over which he had spoken his wedding vows. It came off with difficulty for he had never before removed it. Mansur guided his father’s hand as he placed it on Yasmini’s slim tapered finger. It was far too large for her, but Dorian folded her fingers around it so that it would not slip off.
“Go in peace, my love. And may Allah take you to His bosom.”
As Tom had warned, the effort and sorrow exhausted Dorian and he sank back on to the mattress. Bright new blood soaked into the bandages about
his chest.
They carried Yassie out to the grave, and lowered her into it gently. Sarah placed a silk shawl over her face, and stood to one side. Tom and Mansur would let no one else undertake the harrowing task of covering her with earth. Sarah watched until they had finished. Then she took Tom’s hand on one side and Mansur’s on the other and led them back to the camp.
Tom and Mansur went directly to the tree where Kadem was chained. Tom was scowling darkly as he stood over the captive, arms akimbo. There was a large swelling on the back of Kadem’s head from the blow with the pistol barrel. His scalp was split and the blood was already congealing into a black scab over the laceration. However, Kadem had recovered consciousness and he was once more alert. He stared up at Tom with a steely, fanatical gaze.
Batula came and prostrated himself before Tom. “Lord Klebe, I deserve all your wrath. Your accusation is just. It was I who sponsored this creature and brought him into your camp.”
“Yes, Batula. The blame is indeed yours. It will take you the rest of your life to redeem yourself. In the end it may even cost you your own life.”
“As my lord says. I am ready to repay the debt I owe,” Batula said humbly. “Shall I kill this eater of pig flesh now?”
“No, Batula. First he must tell us who he truly is and who was the master who sent him to carry out this vile deed. It may be difficult to make him tell us. I see by his eyes that this man lives not on an earthly plane, as other men.”
“He is ruled by demons,” Batula agreed.
“Make him speak, but make certain he does not die before he has done so,” Tom reiterated.
“As you say, lord.”
“Take him to some place where his cries will not affright the women.”
“I will go with Batula,” said Mansur.