his personal servant in the middle of the night, Rafiq knew it could mean only one thing. Another outbreak of the sickness.
‘I was reluctant to have you disturbed, sire,’ his man said, ‘for the case in question is not one of your thoroughbreds but a mere mule. However, your Royal Horse Surgeon was most insistent you be alerted.’
Were it not for his anxiety at this worrying new development, Rafiq would have smiled at that. Stephanie would not have insisted, she would have demanded. Quickly donning his riding clothes, he made his way through the silent and sleeping palace out through the courtyard to the stables, sick at heart at this new proof of the plague’s persistence. It would be wrong to expect too much from Stephanie’s first case. He could only hope she did not fail completely.
Flambeaux had been lit in the stable yard. Stephanie had had the distressed beast brought in to one of the enclosed stalls primarily set aside for mares in foal. As he approached the hushed huddle of his stable hands gathered outside the door, he could hear the ominously familiar sound of the animal’s laboured breathing punctuated with a hacking cough. Until now, the sickness had confined itself to the horses, but even before he entered the stall, Rafiq knew with heart-sinking certainty that it had spread to the pack animals.
Stephanie was at the mule’s head, trying to calm the animal. She looked up when he closed the door softly behind him. ‘Thank goodness. They said I should not disturb you because it was only a mule, but I knew you would want to be here, and besides, I need you to verify that the symptoms are the same.’
She wore a plain white tunic similar to his own, an abba of the same cotton. Her hair was down. It was shorter than he had imagined, falling just past her shoulders.
‘Rafiq? Can you see the swelling and redness around the eyes? The discharge from the nostrils and the fever? Though it is not so severe as you described it...’
‘The cough is the same. And the laboured breathing. There is no doubt that it is a case of the sickness. What course of action do you recommend?’
‘Do nothing,’ Stephanie said after a long, tense moment’s thought.
‘Nothing!’ Rafiq stared at her in consternation. ‘You don’t think bleeding, or a poultice or...’
‘Nothing,’ she said firmly. ‘Jasim has tried these treatments before, has he not?’
‘Yes, but you can’t mean to sit back and do nothing,’ Rafiq said incredulously. ‘What about an emetic, cautery—there must be something you can do, some course of treatment you can attempt?’
‘All the standard remedies have been tried by Jasim to no avail. He has been very thorough, but we are obviously dealing with something new here,’ she replied gently. ‘So we need to do something different. It strikes me the one thing that hasn’t been attempted is to let nature take its course without interference. Poor Batal here will need all his strength to fight the fever. In my experience all the remedies which you suggest will only serve to weaken him further.’
‘But to do nothing—!’
‘Is sometimes the very best course of action, when one has no certain knowledge of the cause. We can calm him. We can keep him cool, and we can keep him on his feet walking, fighting. Trust me.’ She turned her attention briefly from her patient to face him. ‘Rafiq. I will not dose him with powders or drain away his lifeblood just to demonstrate to you that I am well versed in traditional treatments. Perhaps Batal will live up to his name, prove himself a hero and survive. Perhaps he will not, but at the very least we will have ruled out this approach as a treatment option without having added to his suffering.’
She would not defer to him, nor would she lie to him. She gave him no false promises, but that in itself raised his hopes. Rafiq nodded his agreement. Stephanie’s satisfied smile was cut short when the mule gave a distressing hack and tried to escape her hold, bucking feebly and tossing his head.
‘Here, let me,’ Rafiq said, taking the rope. ‘Trust me,’ he added when she looked as if she would refuse, ‘I too know what I am doing.’
* * *
Stephanie watched, fascinated, as Rafiq murmured to the terrified mule in a language she could not understand. In less than a minute the animal had calmed, his breathing eased marginally, and he had ceased straining at the halter. It was almost as if Rafiq had managed to put Batal into a trance.
‘Are you a horse mystic?’ she asked, only half-joking. She had heard tell of such things, but she had always been sceptical.
‘I learned some of the ways of the Bedouin as a child,’ he answered in a whisper. ‘If you wish to cool him down now, he won’t resist.’
She did as he suggested. The mule’s flanks were worryingly swollen, his fur already damp, though the water she doused over him seemed to give him some relief. They worked together, calming and cooling, listening, their own breathing suspended, their own hearts pounding, while Batal grew worse, every breath a tremendous effort.
‘Is there truly nothing you can do, at least to ease his suffering?’ Rafiq said, breathless with the effort of keeping the mule on his feet during the last, grim bout of coughing.
Stephanie shook her head. Her own feeling of helplessness was reflected in his expression. ‘We must not despair,’ she said, far more reassuringly than she felt. ‘Hope is the most mysterious of all healers. Batal will sense it if we give up on him.’
‘Then we won’t give up,’ Rafiq said grimly.
* * *
They did not, though it was a long, exhausting night. The lanterns were extinguished, the first grey morning light filtering through the high window of the closed box when Stephanie carried out her half-hourly check of the mule’s heartbeat. Rafiq had no need to calm him this time. She thought at first that desperation had misled her, but a second listen was reassuring. ‘I think he has turned a corner. He is not out of danger yet, but his breathing has eased marginally, and his fever is slowly abating. I think he has a fighting chance of a full recovery.’
‘You can have no idea how much this means to me.’
‘Rafiq, we must not get ahead of ourselves. This proves nothing as yet. Batal’s infection was a less severe case, I think. It may affect mules differently from horses. You must not think I have necessarily found a cure. I simply let nature take its course.’
‘Which achieved more than all of Jasim’s remedies put together.’ He pushed her hair back from her face. ‘Thank you.’
Rafiq’s touch was gentle, he smelled of sweet sweat and fresh straw and olive-oil soap. It was a very different kiss from that one yesterday by the pool. A gentle kiss, their lips clinging, almost tender in the dawn’s light, after the long night’s vigil. Her fingers in his hair, his in hers, threading themselves through her tangles, so gently, the warmth of his palm on her nape, the soft flutter of his breath. She was acutely aware of his body, though there was still a tiny gap between them which neither moved to close, because this lingering kiss was enough, more than enough.
They broke apart slowly. Their eyes met, slightly dazed. Stephanie did not speak. She had no words, and no desire to spoil the tenderness of the moment. Rafiq’s mouth curled into a half-smile that twisted her insides, reminding her that desire was not entirely a foreign country after all, and so she busied herself with the now exhausted Batal. ‘I think we can let him lie down and rest now.’
‘I think all three of us would benefit from a rest,’ Rafiq said. ‘I will ask Fadil to look after Batal. No,’ he said, when she made to speak, ‘there is no need for you to stay here with him.’
‘But, Rafiq...’
‘You will be no use to Batal if you don’t rest yourself. You have been up all night. That is a command, Stephanie, from a prince. Do not pull a face as stubborn as your plucky patient here.’
She was forced to laugh. ‘Very well. Only let me see him settled—and, no, I won’t leave that to anyone else, no matter what you