The Harem Wife

The Desert Dreamer

Sabaji Maroom, fourth eldest daughter of desert iman Hakhan Maroom, thanked the servant who'd come to her tent to summon her to her father's side. Hurrying to prepare for the day, she stopped before her looking glass, pinned her gaze on her reflection, and sighed.

Her face was the same one she saw every day for all of her twenty-two years. It was the face that beleaguered her mother, despaired her father, and made her gorgeous sisters snicker and point and sneer. Of her sisters, she was the largest. Her body rounder, softer, heavier than her lithe, proportionate sisters.

Long black hair always tied into a neat braid down to the small of her back. Eyes the color of Tamiri coffee—deep brown beneath thick, straight black eyebrows. A sun-tanned face with round cheeks and chin, thick lips, and a nose too wide to ever be considered feminine. She was the ugly daughter, the one forced to hide her face behind a veil to save her family from ridicule and shame. Most never actually saw behind her veil, but that didn't stop them from staring, pointing, leering. It only took a whispered word from someone who knew someone who knew someone who'd spoken to one of her sisters for them to "see" her ugliness.

Sabaji wasn't a fool. She knew that despite so few actually looking upon her countenance, she was as they said she was: repulsive. Unwanted. Repellent. No, she was no fool, but gods she wished and dreamed for better. So, perhaps, she was a fool.

Of her father's eight daughters, she was the only one left in her father's oasis. The others, even the younger ones, had already found advantageous marriages. The youngest sister, Meera, had wed just the month before to a wealthy Tamiriani merchant. Her family had taken the three-day long journey to the capital oasis for the ceremony and celebrations. For four days, her family, family connections, Meera's friends, and even members of the Vazimir Counsel, drank, danced, and made merry in celebration of Meera's wedding.

And they'd all known about the ugly Sabaji. Had all stared and smirked at her veil. Had all looked upon her short, soft form with pity or disgust. While they smiled at her sister in her traditional wedding garb of deep red khanka robes over a pair of diaphanous dhoti, they sneered at Sabaji, speaking behind their hands just loud enough to be heard.

"Good thing she has the veil to cover her face. Tis a shame, though, that they cannot make one big enough to cover the rest of her...."

After twenty-two years of humiliation, shame, disparaging, and ridicule, Sabaji had heard it all. She'd felt every word. Had tasted the scorn. Had bled the pain and despair.

But for every word spoken, for every mean and hideous glare, she'd added one more grain of sand to her dream.

The dream that the gods had a grander plan for her life. That she was meant to endure such misery only to find joy by the end. She had to hope. She had to dream that she would find a man so consumed with his love for her, that he could pull away her veil and find her the most beautiful of women. That he would take her hand in his, lead her to their marriage bed, and show her just how much he loved her. How needful he was of her. How utterly enthralled he was by her. His wife. His lover. His everything.

Sighing at her ridiculous self-reflection, she finished braiding her hair and pinned the ever-present veil over the lower half of her face, leaving only her eyes visible.

She hurried from her tent which was situated several yards from the tent her father shared with his wife, the imana, and two consorts. It was the largest tent in their moderately sized oasis, and was where her parents lived, her father conducted oasis business, and where they entertained travelling dignitaries. There had been several other tents dotted around the largest one, but once her sisters married and left to live with their husbands, the tents came down. The only remaining family tent was hers.

She was the literally the last one standing.

Though she longed to fall, to have someone worth falling for. Who would also fall for her.

Calling out from just outside the closed tent flap, she waited for her father's response before lifting the heavy oiled leather flap and entering. The inside of the tent was darker than the outside, and so she took a moment for her eyes to adjust.

Inside, her father was sitting on his usual pile of large, velvet-embroidered pillows. His large body listing and he sat, his left arm planted into the carpet lining the floor to keep the sand out. Upon seeing her enter, her father sat up, his spine straight, his dark eyes pinned to her. His usually unsmiling lips—he never smiled at Sabaji—were pinched more than usual.

Unsurprisingly, he waved her forward without a word. Surprisingly, the rest of the tent was empty of people. No servants. No advisors. No wife. No consorts.

Disconcerted, Sabaji moved forward slowly, her gaze caught on her father as apprehension suffused her body.

"Father, you wished to see me," she stated, kneeling before his pillow as was custom. He was the iman, one of the seven desert princes, who governed the oases supremely ruled over by the desert king. The Khan. The barbarian rebel who'd raised an army, tore through swathes of the desert kingdom, and conquered the whole of the desert. Finally taking his place as lord over all by killing the previous king and removing his head. It had been eight years since the new Khan had taken his throne—a crown of blood and bones on his head. Sabaji's father was a prince in only that he was allowed to keep his title, lands, and wealth if he remained a loyal servant to the king. The imans were his vassals, keeping peace, meting judgement, and collecting kingdom taxes from the people in their oasis during the yearly Abjdai, the pilgrimage of the desert people to the oasis of their birth. It was expected of all people of Tamir to travel to their home oasis, pay their taxes in gold and their homage in words of praise to their khan.

Her father's voice ripped her from her thoughts.

"The khan has asked for your hand in marriage," he father said.

It took a moment for his words to filter through the sudden ringing in her ears. She blinked, wide-eyed at her grave-faced father. She couldn't have heard what she thought she heard. It was impossible. Improbable. Utterly fantastical.

"Marriage?" she whispered, her voice barely audible over the sound of her own heartbeat banging away in her ears. "He...he asked for me? Specifically?" Her breath hitched, her chest unable to draw in the air needed to clear the fog invading her mind.

"Me?" she repeated, the fog lingering.

Her father nodded, his lips pinched beneath the thin yet well-manicured black moustache. "He sent his hawk to deliver the message, just this morning. He is expecting a response within the next three days."

Her hand trembling, she placed it against her wildly beating heart.

The Khan. Kamal Vartoosh. The barbarian prince.

The man who'd taken a handful of displaced Tamiriani, grew an army, and conquered an entire kingdom. The man who'd come from nothing and clawed his way into the place of ultimate power.

The man she'd fallen in love with seven years ago when she'd stumbled upon him, wounded, filthy, and exhausted at a hidden well just outside of Kertesh, the oasis nearest her father's oasis of Vantol. She'd been in Kertesh with her family to celebrate the engagement of her eldest sister, and had grown tired of the stares, the not so whispered comments, and the heat of the waning day. Tired, bored, stinging with humiliation, she slipped from the tent and moved through the growing shadows of encroaching twilight. She had no idea where she was going only that she needed to go away from where she'd been.

Slipping in between tents, she tugged one side of her veil free and headed toward the edge of the oasis, hoping to find a quiet place in the dunes to sit and stare at the darkening sky as the stars in the heavens began to sputter to life.

Rounding a boulder just after the last tent, she'd found a pathway leading away from the greater oasis and into an area of large palms, long grasses, and the floral explosion of jashir bloom bushes. Delighted by what she'd found, she'd hurried down the path, coming to a complete halt when she finally spotted the lone well in a small clearing. But it wasn't the well that had made the breath catch in her throat.

No, it was the nearly naked man, lying in the sand beside the well, his dark, penetrating gaze pinned to her face.

Her unveiled face.