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Sarah, he bent down and gave Sarah a huge hug.
     

Chapter 7
     
    “I think Ali’s asleep now,” Sarah told Akbar.
    They were sitting in the kitchen, drinking hot mint tea. On the way back from the restaurant, they’d stopped at a small shop to pick up some basic supplies. For Akbar, good tea and fresh mint were some of those basics.
    “Thank you for what you’ve done today,” Sarah continued. “I haven’t seen Ali this happy for a long time.”
    “I think we’re all very happy.” Akbar smiled at her. He still had perfect teeth.
    Sarah thought about how he used to kiss her and how he would press his mouth hard against hers. She could feel the colour rising in her face.
    “Are you okay?” he asked. “You look a little hot. Maybe I should open a window?”
    “No, I’m fine, thank you. It must be the tea,” she lied.
    “Can I take Ali out again tomorrow?”
    “Of course. He’d love that. I’m sorry I overreacted earlier. I didn’t see the note.”
    “Next time we’ll pin it to the door. I’ll take him horse riding and then to the park to play football. Why don’t you meet us there when you finish work?”
    “Great. Thank you for helping Ali to be friends with those boys. I thought you were going to yell at them when they called Ali names, but that was amazing the way you got them all playing football together.”
    “I believe in solving problems through peaceful means, not war. I thought you knew that about me.”
    One of Akbar’s main aims as the ruler of the Al-Zafir tribe was to bring peace to the Sakara region of Yazan after many decades of warfare under the previous leader, his brother, Sheikh Omar.
    “Have you brought peace?” Sarah asked.
    “Mostly, yes, but sometimes it’s been necessary to remind people about who I am.”
    “And how do you do that?”
    “The guns we have aren’t just for decoration.”
    Sarah remembered the huge collection of weapons that Akbar kept in the camp.
    “You said that Ali’s been having problems at school.” Akbar picked up his cup and drank the last of his tea.
    “I think that football game in the park really helped.”
    “I spoke to my old friend at the restaurant today. Ali won’t be having any more problems.”
    “What did you say? You haven’t threatened anyone, have you?”
    “Threaten people?” Akbar laughed. “I don’t need to threaten people. Yacoub’s my friend and now he knows who Ali is, soon the whole of London will know that he’s my son and the future sheikh of the Al-Zafirs. That is enough.”
    Akbar said in the restaurant that Ali was his heir. Sarah wasn’t sure she wanted her son ruling over a bunch of gun-wielding Bedouin. Also, there was the matter of Akbar’s second wife’s child and now was the time to ask.
    “What about Rasha’s son? Won’t he be disappointed when you tell him he won’t be the next sheikh?”
    Akbar picked up his empty cup to signal that he wanted more tea. Sarah ignored the hint.
    “Rasha didn’t have a son. She had a girl.”
    Sarah couldn’t help but feel a little surge of delight. Rasha might have got her husband, but Sarah, the woman that Rasha accused of being barren, had Akbar’s son, though of course there was always the possibly that Rasha had more than one pregnancy.
    “How many children have you and Rasha got now?”
    “None. Ali’s my only child.”
    Sarah was confused. She knew that daughters were often disregarded and thought of as being less valuable than sons, and that technically Rasha’s daughter was the child of another man, but as Akbar’s wife, the child was effectively his.
    “You said Rasha had a girl,” she prompted him.
    “She did. The baby died after just a few hours.”
    “I’m sorry.” Sarah guessed that Rasha had given birth out in the desert, like most Bedouin women, where medical facilities were almost non-existent. If the birth had been complicated, it probably explained why Rasha hadn’t conceived again. “Rasha must have been very