Sweet Revenge

the direction of the gardens. If found there, he could make a plausible enough excuse about his interest in flora. The truth was, he wanted out, and he wanted to think.
    Adrianne hadn’t realized it would be so hard to do what she had come to do. Not technically—she was confident in her skill, and in Philip’s. What she hadn’t known was that there would be so many memories. Like ghosts, they whispered to her, brushed against her. There was something comforting about the harem with its women’s talk, its women’s scents, its women’s secrets. It was possible to forget its confines for a short time and bask in its security. No matter what happened now, she’d never be able to fully turn her back again.
    Talk went on, still focusing on sex and shopping andfertility, but there were new things. A cousin who’d become a doctor, another who’d earned her teaching degree. There was a young aunt who worked in construction as an administrator, though all contact with the men she worked with was done by letter or phone. Education had opened up to women, and they were taking it with both hands. Male instructors taught over closed circuit television, but they taught. And the women learned.
    If there was a way to juggle the old with the new, they were going to find it.
    She didn’t notice the servant slip in and lean close to her grandmother’s ear. When Jiddah touched a hand to her hair, Adrianne turned and smiled.
    “Your father wishes to see you.”
    Adrianne felt her pleasure dry up as if it had been a pool struck by the desert sun. She rose. Though she slipped the
abaaya
over her shoulders, she refused the veil. He would see her face, and he would remember.

Chapter Twenty-Three
    Like Jaquir, its ruler had changed yet had remained, essentially, the same. He’d aged. It was the first thing that struck Adrianne when she saw him. Her memory, enhanced by the old newspaper prints her mother had hoarded, was of a man hardly older than she herself was now, with a hawklike, unlined face and rich black hair. The hawk was still there in features carved sharp and hard, but there were lines that time and sun had dug deeply. They were chiseled beside a mouth that smiled rarely, etched around eyes that watched and measured. His hair was still rich, still brushed back like a mane, as full as in his youth and part of his vanity. Silver glinted in it. Over the years he’d put on very little flesh so that his body remained one of a soldier.
    His white
throbe
was embroidered with gold, his sandals studded with jewels. If possible, age had made him only more handsome in the way it does with men. It was a face women would be drawn to even though, or perhaps because, there was so little compassion in it.
    Adrianne’s stomach clenched as she approached. She moved slowly, not from uncertainty, not even from respect, but from the desire to bring this moment, so long awaited, so long imagined, into clear focus. Nothing had been forgotten. Nothing would be forgotten.
    As with that one stunning moment of memory in the harem, there were scents here—polish, flowers, a trace of incense. She continued, moving closer to a past she had never fully released. She had walked toward him before, or cowered away. Until that moment she hadn’t realized she couldn’t recall one instance when he had come to her.
    He hadn’t brought her to one of his private rooms, but to the large, brightly lit area where he would give his weekly
majlis
, or audiences. The drapes on the windows were heavy, the royal blue he had always preferred. The rug was old, one his father, his grandfather, and the kings before them had all walked over. It had a dense pattern of blue and black worked through with gold in a sinuous design, like a snake. There were urns as tall as a man on either side of the door. Legend had it that they had been brought from Persia to another Abdu two centuries before. Inside each had been a virgin.
    A lion fashioned from gold with sapphire eyes guarded the chair of blue silk, where Abdu would sit and grant his time to his people.
    Though this room was closed to women on such occasions, it showed Adrianne that he still thought of her as a subject, not as a daughter. Like the virgins of Persia, she would be expected to submit to the will of the king.
    She stopped in front of him. Though he wasn’t a tall man, she had to tilt her chin to keep her eyes directly on his. Whatever he felt, if he felt, was carefully masked. He bent and gave her the