queen-mab
Really Experienced
- Joined
- Aug 14, 2001
- Posts
- 176
Men are so funny when their illusions are destroyed
Delia’s smile was almost tender as she watched the tossings and turnings of Robert Van on the hard floor of the cave. She had noticed, in that brief moment before he shut himself firmly away from the night’s events, that he had a very nice body. She wondered if perhaps it would make it easier for him somehow if she offered herself to him now. Men always felt at their most invincible when they had a woman writhing and moaning underneath them, didn’t they? And Delia could not say that she would find such an impassioned interlude to be completely without its compensations.
But then she unfortunately heard the muffled laughter of her terrible brothers away behind the rocks. Jubran, Qasim and Mujab were youngsters still, not one of them older than twenty years. They each had had a different mother, and had been born late in their father’s life. But still, her eldest brother Omar had trained them well.
Like young lions they prowled the waste, the eyes and ears of her father, Al-Shariff. Better than any surveillance plane, they had known the very minute when their sister crossed into their territory.
It had taken many years to get to this night. Patience was one of the greatest virtues, wise men said. Delia (or more properly Daliya Azhara Khalida, but she would spare Robert Van the full litany of her name) had always been the dagger in her father’s right hand. She spoke many languages, and could wear many skins. It had always been so easy for her. A game. Play-acting and borrowing lives like new robes. But at core, she was, as they all were, just a vessel for her father’s will.
“Your birthright is not this waste of sand,” Al-Shariff had told her so many times when they sat together away from the silken tents and the songs of the shabbaba and zarb, “but a world that hangs like a jewel so far across the night sky that no man on earth has seen it since time began. The blood of a vanished race runs in your veins, Daliyah. A race who came and lived amongst us when the desert was green and lush as a garden. My father was descended from them, and his father, and on for ten thousand generations or more.”
That every member of her father’s clan wore a ruby or rubies was something accepted by other desert tribes. But few knew the significance; the symbol for the red star Aldebaran. “Our sun” as her father called it, always smiling. Only later, when she prepared to go to Cambridge at her father’s command, was she told the rest of the story.
“In the West are the shipwrights who will give us the means to make our way back to our ancestors,” the old man had said to her. And he had laughed with delicious amusement, telling the story of the day when the priceless Golden Eagle had been entrusted to him by Robert Van. “He could not have known that he was giving us translations of our own ancient language. He thought that his government alone knew the secret contained in those symbols. No doubt he thought we were too ignorant to care about sky-ships or the speed of light. Westerners always see us trudging behind camels, living in tents, having nothing beyond what we can carry from camp to camp. They forget that Arabs were the first astronomers. And they never think that perhaps our way is the more evolved way in which to live.”
Al-Shariff had sighed deeply then. His smile had faded. Without the flame of his joy, his face was old and scarred. He was an ancient man.
“We need Western men as our shipwrights. But beyond that we need the last part of the star-writing. The tablet on which was written the way.”
“A map?” Delia had asked.
“Of sorts. Without the final codex, the writing contained in the Golden Eagle is worthless.”
“And this final codex, Father – where is it now?”
“In the possession of a man called Angus Farquhar. At the University of Cambridge in England. It is there that I am sending you now. To translate and bring back the final codex so that our birthright may be regained.”
And so she had left the desert for England. She had insinuated herself into the Department of Archaeology as the sole assistant of Angus Farquhar himself.
Angus Farquhar had always been too passionately aroused by Delia ever to wonder why she took to Linear D so naturally. There had been times when her transcriptions had had almost a quality of being written down from memory. But his brain was so deadened from a lifetime of translating cuneiform inventories of olive oil and figs that it never occurred to him to look over her shoulder and see what she was actually producing just across the hall from him. His whole being was wrapped round and round with visions of her butter-smooth and honey-sweet flesh.
Of course, the ancients had also been very clever. The meat of their code was embedded within a layer of irrelevant gossip and instructions for prolonging the male orgasm. (Dr. Farquhar had always thought Delia deserved the Nobel Prize just for having decoded that tasty bit.) To keep his trust at fever pitch, she had become his lover very soon after her arrival, and tried every newly decoded sexual secret out with him in his canopied bed in Surrey. So he left her alone professionally, even while he could not leave her alone personally. And her translations continued, week after week, month after month.
She might have succeeded in carrying out her father’s command, had Angus Farquhar not allowed half of the precious tablet to be stolen before she had come to the end of the crucial translation. It was an almost mortal shame to her, to have to confess that it was through her own stupidity that the shard had now been almost certainly irrevocably lost.
Unless somehow Robert Van could help her to find it.
Robert Van was different from any Western man she knew. She could almost have believed that he had Arab blood somewhere. His mind was as sharp and his will as merciless as hers. If he would only help her, she knew there was no force on earth that would be able to get the upper hand.
But she had to convince him.
Somehow.
Delia’s smile was almost tender as she watched the tossings and turnings of Robert Van on the hard floor of the cave. She had noticed, in that brief moment before he shut himself firmly away from the night’s events, that he had a very nice body. She wondered if perhaps it would make it easier for him somehow if she offered herself to him now. Men always felt at their most invincible when they had a woman writhing and moaning underneath them, didn’t they? And Delia could not say that she would find such an impassioned interlude to be completely without its compensations.
But then she unfortunately heard the muffled laughter of her terrible brothers away behind the rocks. Jubran, Qasim and Mujab were youngsters still, not one of them older than twenty years. They each had had a different mother, and had been born late in their father’s life. But still, her eldest brother Omar had trained them well.
Like young lions they prowled the waste, the eyes and ears of her father, Al-Shariff. Better than any surveillance plane, they had known the very minute when their sister crossed into their territory.
It had taken many years to get to this night. Patience was one of the greatest virtues, wise men said. Delia (or more properly Daliya Azhara Khalida, but she would spare Robert Van the full litany of her name) had always been the dagger in her father’s right hand. She spoke many languages, and could wear many skins. It had always been so easy for her. A game. Play-acting and borrowing lives like new robes. But at core, she was, as they all were, just a vessel for her father’s will.
“Your birthright is not this waste of sand,” Al-Shariff had told her so many times when they sat together away from the silken tents and the songs of the shabbaba and zarb, “but a world that hangs like a jewel so far across the night sky that no man on earth has seen it since time began. The blood of a vanished race runs in your veins, Daliyah. A race who came and lived amongst us when the desert was green and lush as a garden. My father was descended from them, and his father, and on for ten thousand generations or more.”
That every member of her father’s clan wore a ruby or rubies was something accepted by other desert tribes. But few knew the significance; the symbol for the red star Aldebaran. “Our sun” as her father called it, always smiling. Only later, when she prepared to go to Cambridge at her father’s command, was she told the rest of the story.
“In the West are the shipwrights who will give us the means to make our way back to our ancestors,” the old man had said to her. And he had laughed with delicious amusement, telling the story of the day when the priceless Golden Eagle had been entrusted to him by Robert Van. “He could not have known that he was giving us translations of our own ancient language. He thought that his government alone knew the secret contained in those symbols. No doubt he thought we were too ignorant to care about sky-ships or the speed of light. Westerners always see us trudging behind camels, living in tents, having nothing beyond what we can carry from camp to camp. They forget that Arabs were the first astronomers. And they never think that perhaps our way is the more evolved way in which to live.”
Al-Shariff had sighed deeply then. His smile had faded. Without the flame of his joy, his face was old and scarred. He was an ancient man.
“We need Western men as our shipwrights. But beyond that we need the last part of the star-writing. The tablet on which was written the way.”
“A map?” Delia had asked.
“Of sorts. Without the final codex, the writing contained in the Golden Eagle is worthless.”
“And this final codex, Father – where is it now?”
“In the possession of a man called Angus Farquhar. At the University of Cambridge in England. It is there that I am sending you now. To translate and bring back the final codex so that our birthright may be regained.”
And so she had left the desert for England. She had insinuated herself into the Department of Archaeology as the sole assistant of Angus Farquhar himself.
Angus Farquhar had always been too passionately aroused by Delia ever to wonder why she took to Linear D so naturally. There had been times when her transcriptions had had almost a quality of being written down from memory. But his brain was so deadened from a lifetime of translating cuneiform inventories of olive oil and figs that it never occurred to him to look over her shoulder and see what she was actually producing just across the hall from him. His whole being was wrapped round and round with visions of her butter-smooth and honey-sweet flesh.
Of course, the ancients had also been very clever. The meat of their code was embedded within a layer of irrelevant gossip and instructions for prolonging the male orgasm. (Dr. Farquhar had always thought Delia deserved the Nobel Prize just for having decoded that tasty bit.) To keep his trust at fever pitch, she had become his lover very soon after her arrival, and tried every newly decoded sexual secret out with him in his canopied bed in Surrey. So he left her alone professionally, even while he could not leave her alone personally. And her translations continued, week after week, month after month.
She might have succeeded in carrying out her father’s command, had Angus Farquhar not allowed half of the precious tablet to be stolen before she had come to the end of the crucial translation. It was an almost mortal shame to her, to have to confess that it was through her own stupidity that the shard had now been almost certainly irrevocably lost.
Unless somehow Robert Van could help her to find it.
Robert Van was different from any Western man she knew. She could almost have believed that he had Arab blood somewhere. His mind was as sharp and his will as merciless as hers. If he would only help her, she knew there was no force on earth that would be able to get the upper hand.
But she had to convince him.
Somehow.
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