Chapter 7 · Chapter 7

The elders went out to the courtyard in ones and twos, the way old men leave a room they have decided not to be blamed inside of. They carried their finjans with them. They did not carry the page.

The attendant drew the majlis doors back on their track and left them standing wide, so the courtyard lamps and the cold of a Riyadh night came in over the carpet, and any man under the far arcade could see, if he troubled himself to look, exactly how much carpet lay between the bench where I sat and the chair where Saad Al-Buqami had not yet risen.

I kept my hands in my lap. Hands are what a room watches when the talk turns, and I had already given this room enough to watch for one evening.

He set his cup down on its saucer with the small deliberate care of a man who wants the sound of it noted, and then he turned his head and looked at me across eleven empty places.

"Sayyidati." He said it the way a host says a guest's name when he has decided to learn it properly. "You left Riyadh in the spring.