“Only in passing. They keep to themselves. As far as I can tell, they don’t bother with events as insignificant as hangings.” He said this last with bitterness in his voice.
With his hands on her shoulders, he held her away from him. “Kady, my love, are you hungry? My father—that’s what I call him—is cooking something over a campfire.”
“Oh?” she said in a way that made him laugh.
“Maybe you could learn something,” he said, egging her on. “He doesn’t have copper pans and a gas-fired stove. All he has is a few sticks and a couple of cast-iron pots and—”
“Are you saying that I couldn’t cook over a campfire?” she said, glaring up at him, then realized that he was teasing her. “I’ll get you for that,” she said under her breath as they approached the campfire, and when she saw a whole lamb skewered on a wrought-iron spit, she forgot all about Tarik’s teasing.
“Roast lamb,” she said, then looked at an enameled plate by the fire. “And kebabs and . . . is that baba ghanouj?” When Gamal handed her a piece of meat pulled from the lamb, she said, “Ooooh, what did you marinate this meat in? No, don’t tell me. It’s—”
Tarik laughed. “I thought you came here to rescue me, not exchange recipes.”
“I should have let them hang you.”
“You would have missed me. Who would brighten up your life if I weren’t around?” He looked at Gamal. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
“Yes, very. And she can cook?”
“Divinely.”
“So how many children have you given her?”
“None. Yet.”
“Ah, that is what happens when you dilute Arabian blood. You get men who are not men.”
At that both Kady and Tarik laughed. It was such an oldfashioned attitude to judge a man by how many children he could make.
For a moment Gamal was silent as he watched them; then he turned to Tarik. “You say you are my son, but I have been wondering who your mother is.”
Before Tarik could answer, Kady, with her eyes wide, said, “It’s true then. There are lots of women who could possibly be the mother of your children.”
Gamal was heaping plates with food for them. When he smiled, his eyes crinkled at the corners.
“Ruth Jordan,” Tarik said after a moment.
“But I have never—” Gamal said, then smiled. “But I have wanted to. She is a beautiful woman, but if you are her son, then you are not my son.”
Tarik took the plate held out to him. “Actually, I’m not your son, I’m your great-great-great-grandson, and if you don’t do anything with Ruth, I may cease to exist.”
“I see,” Gamal said, amused. “You are a storyteller. A weaver of dreams.”
“Oh, yes,” Kady said. “He’s a regular Scheherazade. You should hear the whopper he told me about a codicil to Ruth’s will.” Her lightheartedness was to cover how Tarik’s words were upsetting her, as it was something she’d never thought of before. If Tarik had prevented the tragedy of the Jordan family, how was that going to change the twentieth-century Jordans? If Ruth wasn’t widowed and if she didn’t go to bed with Gamal and give birth to a child when she was in her forties, how would that affect Tarik in the twentieth century?
Tarik was looking at her as though reading her mind. “I think someone who lives in Legend now should know all the story because some things need to happen this year,” she said pointedly.
Tarik looked at Gamal over his plate. “Do you think I could persuade you to seduce Ruth Jordan?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On how much I must pay you. I am a poor man.”
While the two men laughed together in conspiracy, Kady looked up at Tarik and said, “He’s your grandfather all right.”
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