Chapter 1: Prince Habib

The first encounter between His Magnificence, the Emir Mahmoud Abdullah, may he live for ever, and the despised son of the Khan of Tirfil was at the celebrations for the tenth anniversary of the Emir's accession to the throne. A number of notables had been invited to attend the ceremonies, during which a competition was held to select a Special Concubine to the Emir. The notables were each offered the privilege of deflowering one of the losing competitors, and the Emir recalled with distaste the crude and brutal way in which Prince Habib had performed what was, in Kobekistan, a formal ritual of considerable antiquity, surrounded by conventions and customs, and to be performed with grace and panache.

Tirfil shared a land border with Kobekistan which was ill-defined on the ground, as it ran through some of the most arid and almost trackless desert on the planet. The border was drawn formally on the map shortly after the First World War when oil was discovered beneath those deserts. A wise and far-seeing Emir had persuaded a Khan who eschewed all modernity that the line ran along a certain trade route, and as a sweetener, he allowed that the trade route was in Tirfil and not in Kobekistan, thereby allowing Tirfil to collect the taxes on travellers and their goods. Unfortunately no physical border markings were possible because of the shifting sands, and the maps agreed had lines drawn on them which translated to a border several tens of miles wide on the ground. Thus modern Global Positioning Systems which can define a surveyor's location to a matter of inches do not help. Where the few roads passed from one country into the other, of course, there were border posts and fencing for up to a mile in each direction, but there were many large desert areas where the border was literally unknown.

What the Khan knew, but did not understand was that oil deposits lay beneath the now Kobekistani part of the desert. Oil which would make Kobekistan the place it became by the early part of the twenty-first century, and provided the wealth it enjoyed in the third decade of the twenty-first. This prosperity was denied to Tirfil, but allowed Kobekistan to be a land where traditional values were cherished without sacrificing any of the more useful gadgets of modern civilisation.

Air-conditioning protects the inhabitants from the rigours of a sub-tropical climate. Motor cars whisk them from one building to another. Desalination plants provide ample water. The most modern medical advances are practised in the hospitals. Television shows umpteen channels. Education utilises the most modern computer-aided systems. Moderation in all things is the watchword. Toleration extends to allowing alcohol to be sold to foreign workers in the country, though only within their company compounds. Women are even taught to read and write, at least in some harems. Of course, these facilities are not all available to all of the population, but for all those who matter, the better families, they are taken for granted. A field slave might not benefit from all of them, but the highest quality medical services ensure that a slave no longer has to be put down if an over-enthusiastic owner damages it somewhat while administering discipline.