Chapter Two
"I have met my wife." Osman let his words sink in as he watched his brothers stunned faces. They sat on low cushions around the enormous traditional hookah the servants kept preparing despite his continued insistence that none of them smoked. Their father had smoked a bowl of something or other every day, and apparently he was expected to continue the tradition. The air was thick enough already. Incense smoldered in a brazier in one corner, and beeswax candles burned in several hanging lanterns, casting flickering light over the multicolored mosaics on the walls.
Zadir spoke first. "You'd marry an American?"
"Why not?" Osman had ushered Samantha to their finest guest chamber, where she was changing for dinner. He let his mind briefly stray to wonder what she was wearing right now. "I've spent most of my adult life in the U.S. Most of the women I've dated are American. Why would you find that strange?"
"That was when you lived in America." His younger and more serious brother Amahd gestured with his hands. "It's one thing to date a girl in the land of milk and honey, quite another to bring her back to this barren wilderness and ask her to live here."
"I'd hardly call our ancestral homeland a barren wilderness." They'd all grown too used to Western luxury. "Besides, we can maintain a residence or two abroad."
"You can hardly be king and live somewhere else."
"I'm sure I wouldn't be the first."
Zadir ran a hand through his already tousled hair. "I think we've found the real reason our father decided to split the throne between the three of us. He wasn't sure which-if any-of us he could count on to come back and stay."
Osman frowned. He'd secretly dreaded his father's death, not out of filial devotion but because of the responsibilities that came with his passing. As the oldest son he'd long been expected to ascend the ancient throne of Ubar in the tradition of his ancestors. It had been a slap in the face when he discovered that his father had rewritten the Monarchic Accord to divide their nation into three equal-sized principalities, promising one to each of his brothers as well.
He had half a mind to wash his hands of Ubar and its problems and head back to New York. Then something more primitive-stupidity, probably-tugged at his heart and made him determined to ascend the basalt throne of his ancestors.
"Our father may have had a heart of stone, but he was a very intelligent man. I think he knew that if he got the three of us here together we'd figure out a way to see this thing through."