“You forget a lot of things,” Gabriel said.
She pulled her towel across her lap. “Excuse me?”
“How can you not remember me?”
“Look, maybe it was my sister you knew. Kate? Where are you from?”
“Cork.”
“Well, there you go. My sister went to college in Cork. You possibly did too?”
“I was . . . well, yeah.”
“That’s it, then.”
“I don’t know your sister.”
“You don’t know me either.”
“We met in Muscat. Twenty-six years ago.”
“As I said yesterday, this is my first time in Oman, so that’s simply not possible.”
Some things had changed—the swimming, the energy and body tone (her upper arms were strong)—and this directness. He picked up a stone and skimmed it across the pool. It leaped—once, twice, three times—and hit the chalky wall opposite. “You here for long?” he asked Kim.
“Six days. That’s all they’d pay for. You?”
He skimmed another pebble. “I live here.”
“Oh.” She glanced back at the women. “So . . . you’re a guide?”
“Sometimes. Tour operator mostly.”
“But you do your own driving?”
“He has his own business,” Abid interjected. “And he has many drivers, but sometimes he likes to come out with his friends. Isn’t that right, Jibril?”
“So you’ve been in Oman for some time,” said Kim.
“A long time,” he said, with a slow glance at Thea. “A long time waiting.”
It was quiet. No birdsong, even, as they walked back to the vehicles in single file, just the scrape of stones, and that scraping voice: “Cyclone Gonu has done its worst. There are dead trees everywhere. Some appear to have lain right down in the gush of waters that came through this broad wadi, while others have been uprooted whole and carried downstream, where they’re bunched up in the shallow, torpid water at the river mouth. It’s like walking through a cemetery,” Kim went on, “dead palms lying side by side, their root balls—stringy orange strands—exposed, like . . . genitalia. A Guernica of date palm.” She switched off and said to Gabriel, “You might be quite handy for my article. Mind if I ask a few questions?”
“Fire ahead.”
“What makes you so sure you know Thea? She doesn’t appear to know you.”
He turned to check that his ladies were bringing up the rear. “That has nothing to do with tourism.”
Kim shaded her eyes to look around, Dictaphone held to her lips. “A solitary living tree, its foliage starry against the orange cliff, offers a flash of green, a splash of life.”
“Oman Tourism will love you.”
Thea was standing with her hands on the small of her back, looking up at the mountains pulling away from the wadi floor. “I’ve always wanted to see a place like this—like those old sepia photos in travel books, where you’d see camels crossing a stony plain.”
Abid turned, his gray dishdasha chalky around the hem. “The Bedouin say that if you think of a place, or if it comes into your mind, like that, for no reason, then you must go there, because it has something for you, and you won’t know until you get there.”
Coming back into the oasis, into the shade of living trees, they passed more damaged ones—some beheaded, their crowns lopped off and dropped beside their trunks; others leaning, like injured soldiers, folding into the ground. It embarrassed Gabriel, as if it was his fault that this place, this jewel of Arabia, had been left in such a state. The damage wrought by Gonu six months earlier was countrywide, but as he glanced at the dead fronds of one of the trees, he saw a shoot of green poking out. Regeneration.
He drove too fast around the U-bends that wound down into Tiwi but, delayed by his trio, he had been forced to watch the other party go ahead, Abid—so portly now, but still smart and neat, his silver sideburns complementing his thick mustache—striding on with Kim and Thea. He hoped to catch up with them at Qalhat.
A curve of bay swept out beyond Tiwi. Beautiful. He reached into his bag for the roll he had made at breakfast and munched it. It was good. Everything was good. This was the best day.
The palms that had survived the storm were like a torn population, all along the coast. “This is Qalhat,” he explained to the women. “It’s one of the most ancient sites in Oman and was an important port in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It was destroyed by an earthquake, and then the Portuguese ransacked it. We’ll head up here to Bibi Maryam’s tomb.”
They stopped near the square pink-brown mausoleum, which enjoyed a panoramic view of the Gulf of Oman. “So who was she,” Hetty asked, as they walked up to it, “this Bibi Maryam?”
“She was a Turkish slave who married the Prince of Hormuz and, after he died, she became governor of Qalhat, which was famous for its export of Arabian horses. She built this for herself, and a splendid mosque.” The women looked up at the domed roof. “But this is all that remains,” he said, looking around, “and a water cistern.”
No sign of the others. If they had stopped here, they had made swift work of it. Apprehension and excitement poked him alternately. He would not lose her again.
The Bibi’s remains were buried in a vault, now covered with the red and green Omani flag, and, taking his clients around the side of the mausoleum, Gabriel showed them what were believed to be the graves of her maids, who killed themselves after she died.
“Like Cleopatra’s handmaidens,” said Hetty.
Gabriel nodded. “Eastern history is full of determined women.”
“Cleopatra,” said Betty. “Who else?”
“The Prophet’s wife, Khadija,” he said, “was a businesswoman—the Prophet was one of her employees. Zenobia of Palmyra. The Queen of Sheba.”
“Hardly a handful,” said Betty.
Hetty put her hand on the ageless wall. “But how many in Western history, Betty?”
Gabriel looked down the coast. He knew where Abid would take them for lunch.
Right again. When he walked into Abid’s favorite Indian restaurant in Sur, their voices came from behind a screen at the back. Kim was
