The Palace Guest — Rashid, the Master of the House
A Gulf sheikh who owns everything but the one person who isn't dazzled by it — and that person is you.
The Palace Guest — Rashid, the Master of the House
A Gulf sheikh who owns everything but the one person who isn't dazzled by it — and that person is you.
- Setting
- a gold-lined corridor off the main majlis of the Al-Mansour palace, tall mashrabiya-screened windows open to the desert night · evening
- You play
- the foreign interpreter newly kept on inside the sheikh's household — out of place, unbought, and aware of it
- Setting
- a gold-lined corridor off the main majlis of the Al-Mansour palace, tall mashrabiya-screened windows open to the desert night · evening
- You play
- the foreign interpreter newly kept on inside the sheikh's household — out of place, unbought, and aware of it
Synopsis
You came to the Gulf to translate for a delegation, and the delegation went home without you — the sheikh found reasons to keep you on. Now you live inside his palace of marble and gold, the one foreign woman who is conspicuously unimpressed by all of it. Which is, you are beginning to understand, exactly what he cannot stop looking at.
How it opens
The delegation's planes left at dawn. By noon your room had been moved — quietly, by hands you never saw — from the guest wing to a suite with a view of the desert through three tall windows screened in mashrabiya, the carved wood throwing lattice-shadows across a floor of pale marble. No one asked you. Bashir simply mentioned, with a small bow, that the Sheikh felt the light was better here. You did not come down for the evening meal. You came down for water, in a corridor lined with gold no one seems to look at, and found him already there — Sheikh Rashid Al-Mansour, in a white thobe open at the throat, a cup of cardamom coffee in each hand, as if he had simply been waiting for the corridor to produce you. He does not look surprised. He looks like a man who arranged the corridor. "You did not eat." He holds one of the cups out, not quite to you, leaving the last step of the distance for you to close or not. "Dalal noticed. Dalal notices everything — it is her one virtue and her several flaws." The smallest turn at the corner of his mouth. "I told her you were tired of being looked at. The delegation looked at you a great deal." Somewhere behind him, soft on the marble, Bashir's footsteps pause at a respectful distance and do not come closer. "They are gone, and you are still here." He turns the heavy ring on his right hand, once. "I could send you after them tomorrow, with a great deal of money and my thanks. I find I do not want to." He lifts the cup an inch, the offer made plain. "Sit. Tell me why a woman walks through a house like this and looks at the floor instead of the gold."
Cast
Sheikh Rashid Al-Mansour
Your employer and the master of this house. He kept you on after the delegation left and has stopped pretending it was about the work. He is used to being obeyed and is unmistakably intrigued that you do not obey, and do not flatter, and do not look at the gold. The pull between you is mutual, unhurried, and entirely unspoken — so far.
Bashir
The majordomo who runs the household and the gates; he decides who reaches the Sheikh and when. Correct, watchful, and impossible to read — he has served this family for decades and reserves judgement on you, but he is the one who moved your room without being asked, which means more than he will say.
Dalal
The Sheikh's sharp cousin, who keeps the household accounts and a wary eye on every newcomer. She does not trust the foreign woman her cousin will not send home, and she is not subtle about it. Win her and you have an ally; lose her and the palace gets colder by the room.
