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CHAPTER 1
Finally, thought Sarah as she jumped off the bottom step from the cool of the air-conditioned tour bus. Sirun! The country she’d been researching madly for the past six months. The country which was as secretive as it was rich in history. A country she hadn’t known was part of her own personal history until only six months ago.
The hot, dry smell of the desert immediately filled her lungs. For a moment she steadied herself as she gasped for breath. Then she took a few steps, turned and forgot all about the heat.
Before her, the adobe colored walls of the desert castle soared over twenty feet high, pock-marked with slit windows, which provided dark points in the austere walls. Its bleak facade was broken by the semi-circular towers which framed the massive front entrance. Otherwise, it looked impregnable.
Sarah frowned and retrieved the map of the area, spreading it in her hands in the quickening wind. She pulled it taut and peered at the lone dot on the map. Yep, there it was. The castle surrounded by desert on all sides, the nearest town miles away. Apparently deserted now, but once owned by the late king—the man responsible for destroying her family.
Heat glimmered over its austere facade. It looked like the rest of the country—alien to her eyes. She was more accustomed to the small cottage in which her grandfather had raised her, deep in the English countryside. But this place was a million miles from that. And she was from this land? She felt adrift, unable to compute what her grandfather had told her in the last months of his life. Words which had turned her world upside down.
A harsh shout caused Sarah to look across to where a harried looking tour guide was beckoning people around one side of the castle, away from the gates.
“This way! This way!” he shouted. “There is only a part of the castle which is open to the public. This way!” But Sarah was itching to step through its mighty walls and see what the public could not see. To see such things as her grandfather had described to her when he’d visited eighty years earlier, when he’d been a child. For a moment she was lost in a dream—a dream of family which had been missing all her life, a dream about a sense of belonging which her grandfather had denied her until he’d realized time was running out and he could no longer deny her the facts of her birth.
She closed her eyes at the memory of his passing, which was still raw, compounded by the revelation. She gritted her teeth, opened her eyes and swept away the tears. Now wasn’t the time for grief, now was the time to connect with the echoes of a lost past and a lost family. But the doors were locked against her and she had no option but to return to the others.
She turned abruptly from the castle walls to join the tour group—mostly noisy teenagers from Australia and England creating yet more problems for the tour guide—and she realized she’d been forgotten. From the sounds of things, the group had gone around a corner to a cluster of outbuildings, which was all, it seemed, they had access to. She looked from them back to the enticing door, dark, knotted with scarred and silvered wood,hammered by sand and wind over the ages. Had she come all this way just to look around the remains of a few outhouses, long abandoned?
Hardly aware she was doing it, she reached out and touched the wall. A wave of heat flowed through her body, absorbed into the walls through the scorching sun. She splayed her fingertips over the rough surface, humbled by its antiquity and size, in awe of its connection to her countrymen and possibly her family. She glanced around and realized she was quite alone now, although she could hear the noisy group. She sighed. She really wasn’t in any hurry to return to them. She’d had enough of their drunken laughter and aggressive flirtation and wanted to be alone to discover more about this place, which called out to her.
And without a further thought, she walked swiftly the other way. She didn’t stop until she’d turned a corner and the thick high walls completely blocked out the sound of the tour group. In the distance there was a cluster of what looked like uninhabited cottages—dwellings built into a cliff face. But she couldn’t see anybody around. Away from public view, the castle took on a different atmosphere. She closed her eyes once more, but this time to imagine the world in which her grandfather and his family had once lived. A world which had been stolen from her parents—a dangerous world which they’d not survived. And it was a world she’d known nothing about until the last few months of her grandfather’s life when he’d revealed the past which he’d kept secret from her. But it seemed he couldn’t die without her knowing the truth.
She couldn’t have said how long she stood absorbing the atmosphere, breathing the air, desperately wanting to connect with a past she knew so little about. When, at last, she opened her eyes, she felt the strain of the past months slip away, replaced by a sense of hope. Maybe she would get answers inSirun? Maybe after a lifetime of feeling like a misfit, she’d find a place she belonged?
She glanced at her watch. She still had plenty of time while the tour guide herded the students around the other side of the castle. She was in no hurry to join them and lose her newly found sense of peace and so decided to walk to the rocky outcrop, from where she hoped she’d be able to see into the castle grounds.
It took her longer than she’d expected and she arrived out of breath at the top of the hill. But she was glad she’d made it because the view revealed more of the castle than she’d seen standing at the base of the soaring walls. Enough to see that it wasn’t as austere inside. She heard a stream of shouting and looked across and grinned to see the harassed tour guide trying to wrangle the unruly group into some sort of order. She relaxed. She certainly didn’t intend to lose sight of them! Another glance at her watch showed she still had time to linger a few more moments before returning.
The glimpses inside the walls intrigued her. It looked more habitable than she’d expected but then the guide had said something about it being in private hands. She supposed the royal family of Sirun still owned it. But it didn’t look as if anyone was in residence now.
She unsnapped the buckle from around her waist and dropped her backpack to the ground and rummaged in it, eventually bringing forth a tattered old photograph she’d found amongst her grandfather’s things.
She held it up to eye level and turned to look out at the surrounding land, as if she were looking from one of the turret rooms inside the castle, and from which she guessed the photo had been taken. The horizon shimmered where she knew the city lay just out of sight. Its buildings and individual forms couldn’t be seen; only a gleam of light indicated its location.The same gleam of light which smudged the dark horizon in the photograph. She sighed. A tangible connection at last.
Then a gust of wind brought with it a strange metallic smell, and she looked up to see the sky wasn’t blue to the south, but the color of a bruised peach. She didn’t know what that meant. Not sunrise for sure, or sunset. It was still only midafternoon. But whatever it was, she decided to return to the coach and wait for the others to finish their tour.
She turned around to find two young children who’d appeared out of nowhere, running at her. It felt like the world had slipped into slow motion as her yell was knocked out of her as the older one launched himself at her legs with a rugby tackle which knocked her, winded, to the ground. Dust and sand filled her eyes and mouth as she lay helpless for one vital split second, during which the younger child scooped up her backpack and they both tore off down a dusty path.
“Hey!” She pushed herself to her feet and went running after them, adrenalin pumping through her veins. Her backpack contained everything vital to her trip—passport, money and other papers—which was why she’d refused to leave it on the bus. She should never have put it down, she thought as she stumbled over the stony path, skidding down the other side, to a cluster of houses.
She glanced back towards the bus and saw that people were making their way back. She was running out of time, so she charged into the nearest cottage, but it was empty. She checked the other houses, but they all had the same air of abandonment. The children had obviously returned to wherever they come from. There was no sign of them.
By the time she’d checked the last of the deserted stone cottages, she looked up to see the sky had darkened even further and the forbidding clouds were heading her way, swamping the sky with a rapidity which sent a sudden blast of fear through her.She retraced her steps at a run. But she had to go up and over the rugged hill and hadn’t realized how far she’d come. With panic pumping through her, she approached the rear side of the castle, stumbling on the uneven surface and falling, grazing her knees. Ignoring the trickle of blood, she turned the corner and shouted out to the harassed-looking tour guide who was physically pushing the last person back onto the bus. But her shout dissolved into the whining sound of the rising wind and the guide didn’t turn around. She increased her pace, her throat and lungs burning, but the winds had strengthened and swept sand into her eyes, covering the windows of the coach, as it set off on the short ride to safety.
She knew the hotel wasn’t far away and, as she watched the departing bus, she was hit with the realization that she would have to walk there. Through a desert storm, without a passport. Fear gripped her gut, and she knew she needed to return to the houses she’d just left to take shelter until the storm had passed. But she hadn’t even reached the end of the castle before the wind powered into her. She’d never reach the houses. Instead, she returned to the rear gate of the castle where there was enough shelter for one person. No doubt, centuries earlier, it had accommodated a guard. But surely even a guard wouldn’t have stood outside in such a storm.
The sand bit into her face and arms and she pulled up her scarf, so it covered her eyes and mouth and tried to breathe as she squatted low, cowering in the corner. She was terrified, choking on the sand, and suddenly realized that she could very well end up there, suffocated, found when the next tour bus went through. She lifted her head briefly to the heavens and let out a loud wail of despair. She immediately regretted it as sand slammed into her eyes and mouth and she coughed as she gasped for air.
Suddenly, there was a loud scraping sound, and she thought the gate was about to fall in on her. But she couldn’t run away and couldn’t figure out what was happening. The world had turned to chaos, where nothing made sense. Sight, sound and smell were consumed and upended, disguised by the sand-filled air and her stinging eyes.
But, while she couldn’t see anything, there was no disguising the feel of being knocked off her feet, and of two powerful arms scooping her up into the air. Coughing, and gasping for air, she turned her head and found her mouth pressed against warm cloth. As she inhaled a little more freely against it, she realized it wasn’t some foreign djinn reaching down from the heavens to save her, but a real life man with very strong arms who smelled heavenly. The instantaneous, visceral response passed as quickly as it had hit her as he dropped her to her feet.
She stumbled, clutching at the wall, as she gasped for air. She was dimly aware of the great doors clanging closed, shutting out the worst of the storm. More jolting followed this as she was lifted by the man and carried across the courtyard. A door was pushed open with his foot and she was deposited unceremoniously on a couch.
As she struggled to breathe, this inner door was also slammed closed against the tumultuous wind and the man uttered a string of Arabic. She had no trouble realizing the words were curses, but she wasn’t in any condition to respond. And she was also in no condition to fight, being picked up roughly once more and carried through the castle to another chamber. Her breathing was coming easier now and whoever this rough man was—his face swathed in cloth, his eyes shaded by dark glasses—at least he’d saved her from certain death outside the castle walls.
The man’s coarse robe was pressed against her mouth and face. He smelled of leather and heat and ambergris. He kickedanother door open and allowed her to slide to standing while he pulled away her scarf from her face. He gripped her shoulders as he peered at her through black sunglasses.
