The Ice Maiden's Sheikh by Alexandra Sellers Page A

Ghasib’s looting. We knew that his men would steal all our treasures if they saw them. We hid and buried many, and left out only a few, so that they would not be suspicious. That is why the house is so empty. Do not fear that Ghasib got the treasures of our Shahin.”
    â€œNo, the earth holds them!”
    That seemed to be a joke, too, but no one explained, and with so much going on, and the language so difficult for her, Jalia let it go.
    â€œWe had word that Lord Latif would come, but not that he brought his bride! Look how the chamber is not decorated, Lady Jalia, but we will bring perfumes and lamps….”
    She didn’t protest. Why shouldn’t they set up the bedroom for seduction, though they completely misunderstood who would be seduced and who seducer?

Ten
    T he women, young and old, began the ritual decoration of the bedchamber.
    It seemed as if, in order to cope with this invasion of outside moral laxity, they had simply decided to rewrite the agenda. Lord Latif had said that he intended to marry the Princess—therefore he had married her. This was their wedding night.
    So the afternoon was spent preparing and bringing special foods for the couple, and creating a bed of flowers and scented boughs, in the ancient tradition, and enacting a few other little rituals that Jalia knew her colleague at university, whose field was the early history of the area, would give his eyeteeth to watch.
    Someone gave her beautifully embroidered pyjamas to wear, in soft jade silk, the trousers caught at the ankles, the jacket closed over the breasts with onedelicate embroidery frog. Jalia knew it must be something that had been worked on and treasured up for the girl’s own wedding, but they insisted, and it was impossible to refuse the gift. All she could do was make a mental promise to herself to find something as beautiful to send back to the valley as soon as she returned to al Bostan.
    They bathed her, and rubbed her skin with a curious perfumed salve, and plaited special love knots into her hair, though grieving that it wasn’t long enough, not even to the shoulders!—how strange things must be in the outside world, if a woman voluntarily cut off her own glory!
    They marvelled at the paleness of her hair, straight and almost white, when every woman in the valley had black, thick curls. Just so, they had sometimes heard, was the hair of the Kamrangi tribeswomen, a marvel someone’s grandfather had seen many years ago, when he had accompanied some foreigner as guide into many strange places…
    Jalia was falling more and more under the spell of the women and their beautiful valley. Their values were plain and true, their laughter infectious, their collective beauty and wisdom astounding. Whenever she tried to claw back a sense of her own world, it rang false in this pure environment, like a toxin in the fresh mountain air.
    She mentioned, for example, the village council that was sitting—weren’t the women annoyed that they were not members, that they didn’t decide such matters along with the men?
    There were smiles and shrugs all around the circle—yes, it was true that in the ancient days in thevalley the council had been all women instead of all men, and that was as it should be, for women were much better judges of human nature than men, and everyone knew it.
    But men were good judges of the law. Most petitions to the council now were legal matters—who owned a piece of land, who was entitled to inherit—and were both uninteresting and unimportant, though of course the men could not be expected to think so.
    The serious work of the tribe—who should marry whom, for example, and when, decisions about planting and harvest and festivals—was still carried on by the women.
    And eventually Jalia simply gave up trying to connect the two worlds, and enjoyed being with the women and seeing life from their point of view.
    When the sun was setting beyond