Also by G. Willow Wilson
FICTION
Alif the Unseen
NONFICTION
The Butterfly Mosque
COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS
Cairo
Air, Volumes 1–4
Vixen: Return of the Lion
Mystic: The Tenth Apprentice
Ms. Marvel (2014–present)
Wonder Woman (2018-present)
The Bird King
G. Willow Wilson
Copyright © 2019 by G. Willow Wilson
Cover design by studiohelen.co.uk
Epigraph translation © Richard Davis and Afkham Darbandi, from The Conference of the Birds by Attar
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].
FIRST EDITION
Printed in the United States of America
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: March 2019
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.
ISBN 978-0-8021-2903-1
eISBN 978-0-8021-4684-7
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
19 20 21 22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my daughter Safeya, who fought and lived.
Though you have struggled, wandered, traveled far, It is yourselves you see, and what you are.
—Farid ud-Din Al Attar,
The Conference of the Birds
Table of Contents
Cover
Also by G. Willow Wilson
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Acknowledgments
Back Cover
Chapter 1
29 August 1491 AD / 23 Shawwal 896 AH
Hassan was deep in prayer.
He was not on his knees, however, nor bowing toward the gold-painted medallion in the southeast corner of his workroom that marked the direction of Mecca: instead, he sat on a cushion in the sun with his legs crossed and a string of wooden prayer beads slack in his hand, his eyes focused on something Fatima could not see. She had no way of knowing how long he had been in this attitude when she slipped into his room from the shaded path she had taken through the Court of Myrtles. Sweat glowed on Hassan’s brow where the sun struck it, and when she stepped on his shadow with her bare foot, the marble tiles beneath were cold. He might have been there for hours, so lost in God that he had trouble finding his way out again. His lips were parted as if he had gone silent in midconversation. A holy name had been upon them, but which?
“Hayy,” whispered Fatima, guessing. Yet that syllable fell on the wrong part of the palate.
“Hu,” she guessed again.
There was a door in the western wall that hadn’t been there on Fatima’s last visit to Hassan’s workroom. It stood innocently ajar in its frame of white plaster, a simple rectangle of wood dotted with iron fastenings, its edges cracked and dry, as if it had been there as long as the Alhambra itself. Fatima stood on one foot and leaned sideways to peek around the door, shielding her body behind its solid bulk to protect herself from whatever might lie beyond it.
Her worry proved needless. Through the doorway was the familiar lantern-shaped interior of the Mexuar. Fatima could see the outline of its low balcony and the wood-paneled ceiling above, the small dais at the end of the chamber where the sultan sat to hear lawyers argue and listen to the complaints of his viziers. It was empty now, though it still smelled of incense, as if the men who spent their days in its rich gloom had only just left.
It was certainly the Mexuar, yet the Mexuar was on the far side of the Court of Myrtles, in the opposite direction.
“It was convenient to have a door there.”
Startled, Fatima turned and shut the door abruptly behind her. Hassan was alert now, smiling, his velvet brown eyes lucid and unperturbed, as though falling into trances and summoning passageways out of solid walls were ordinary late summer occupations.
“I got tired of walking back and forth across the courtyard in this heat,” he continued, getting to his feet. “Why should the royal mapmaker burn to a crisp when all the other viziers and secretaries sit inside all day? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I can easily make another.”
Fatima looked over her shoulder and saw only the chalky plaster wall she had seen a hundred times before, uninterrupted by passages of any kind.
“I didn’t mean to close it,” she said. “It’s just that you startled me.”
“I said it doesn’t matter.” Hassan, yawning, shuffled to the stone balustrade that ran the sunny length of his workroom. It looked out through a series of slender wooden arches onto the green hedge-ways that gave the Court of Myrtles its name, separating Hassan’s quarters from the courtyard in the briefest and most ceremonial way. Maps drawn on parchment and vellum and linen were piled along its length and weighted with stones, their edges curling in the heat while the ink upon them dried. Hassan teased one out from under a chunk of quartz and held it up critically. A grid of streets traversed its length, terminating in what to Fatima’s eyes looked like a river.
Fatima went to her favorite spot along the balustrade, yawning herself as Hassan’s indolence grew contagious. She pushed aside a pile of paper and sat on the sun-warmed stone, allowing herself, finally, to relax.
The golden hour bloomed around them, yellowing the myrtle hedge, the grass, the marble paths, the long reflecting pool that pointed through the courtyard toward the administrative wing of the palace. It was in this vaporous time of day, when Lady Aisha liked to doze, that Fatima would often slip away from her mistress, leaving the harem through an unguarded door used primarily by the washerwoman and the unfortunate pox-scarred girl whose job it was to empty the stool chamber. It led to a windowless corridor which was entirely dark when the doors at either end were closed, and emerged, by Hassan’s benevolent wizardry, in the Court of Myrtles, allowing Fatima to come and go without being seen, provided she kept her wits.
“You’re fond of that spot,” said Hassan. He threw the map he was holding at his worktable, where it unrolled only a little, and pic
king up a small lead compass, began to clean his fingernails with the sharp end. “But you’d better get down from there before someone sees you.”
“Why must I?” Fatima countered.
“You know very well why. You’re not allowed to be here unchaperoned, let alone sprawled languidly across the railing of my terrace. The poor dear sultan looks weak enough as it is without you thwarting his authority as well. The Castilians and the Aragonese surround us on all sides, the Egyptians have abandoned us, and the Turks have swallowed all of Anatolia in one gulp. Our Abu Abdullah is master of an empire that no longer exists. His own mother overrules him when it suits her. Who is left to take him seriously if not his concubine? I pity the fellow.”
Fatima sighed in irritation. She swung her legs over the edge of the balustrade and sat up, shaking the hem of her loose linen trousers to free the belled bracelets that lay in the hollows below her ankles.
Hassan chewed at a tuft of beard beneath his lower lip. His hair, another of his perversities, was reddish, the legacy of a Breton grandmother taken hostage in some war or other. Fatima was not sure he was handsome—his nose was too sharp, his eyes were too small, his complexion was too hectic, apt to turn red and blotchy on the frequent occasions when he was flustered. No, he was not handsome, yet he was the only man she had ever come across who did not desire her, and for that, she forgave him many things.
“Have you brought me anything?” he asked now, his voice boyish and pleading.
Fatima pointed to his worktable: in a handkerchief was a small, sticky pile of orange-scented sweets.
“Bless you,” said Hassan fervently. He picked up the handkerchief and began to shovel its contents into his mouth.
“Slow down,” said Fatima, laughing at the droplets of honey that clung to his beard. Hassan made a face at her.
“I forget you aren’t starving,” he said. “You live in the harem eating honey and playing the lute and mincing around in silk slippers all day, while the rest of us are chewing old shoe leather. You might at least have the grace to pretend to suffer. We’re under siege, after all. The sultan will be forced to accept terms from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella at any moment.”
“Would you trade, then?” asked Fatima, her lip only a little curled. “I’ll happily do your job and starve if you’d like to do mine and eat well. You can listen to Lady Aisha insult people all morning, mend dresses all afternoon, and then—” Here her voice caught in her throat. Hassan studied her with one ruddy eyebrow raised.
“And then lie with the sultan all night? I’d trade you in a flash, Fa, in an absolute instant. My God! Those melancholy lips. What? Don’t you think he’s handsome?”
Fatima thought nothing. Her body felt suddenly heavy and sluggish, like some unfamiliar borrowed thing growing damp in the heat. She hung above it in the air, tethered to it only loosely, and wondered whether she would find the sultan as handsome as Hassan did if she had a choice in the matter.
“Fa? I’m sorry, my love. Don’t look like that. I didn’t mean to upset you. Fa—” Hassan pressed an anxious kiss into her palm.
Fatima took a breath.
“Choose a bird,” she said, changing the subject. It was the way all their conversations went now: the palace, rambling as it was, had grown cramped under siege, the air perpetually stale with the shut-up breath of a hundred half-starved mouths. Every conversation became an argument. It was safer to retreat into the games of their childhood, as they did more and more; into the stories of creatures that could fly away. Fatima returned to her patch of sun on the balustrade.
“A bird,” she repeated.
Hassan chewed for a moment before answering.
“Red-crested pochard,” he said triumphantly. Fatima laughed at him.
“That’s not a real bird,” she said. “You’re just being an idiot.”
“It is so a real bird! It’s a sort of duck, a waterbird. We used to have them on my mother’s land, near the lake. Hunters would come to trap them in the fall.” In the course of their game, they had long ago run through all the ordinary birds, and had since moved on to more exotic ones.
“Very well,” said Fatima. “The pochard, the pochard—since he has a bright crest, perhaps he was vain, and when the other birds sought him out to accompany them on their journey across the Dark Sea to the mountain of Qaf, he refused. Why should he leave his home, where everyone flattered him and he could spend all day preening? The people of Qaf might not appreciate his plumage as they ought to do. But the hoopoe—”
“Ah yes, the hoopoe is my favorite.”
“The hoopoe, who also had a lovely red crest, scolded the pochard for his shallowness.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know.” Fatima yawned. The effort of thinking too hard in bright sunlight had begun to tire her. “But surely something silly enough to be called a pochard wouldn’t survive such a long journey. Make me a new map. I want a view.”
“A view,” muttered Hassan. “You’ve got lovely views already. Look at this view! Look at the fork-tailed swallows flying low across the reflecting pool! At night, you can see a second field of stars in the water. Enjoy it now, Fa, for soon it’ll all belong to Castile.”
Fatima had never seen the Court of Myrtles at night, when being caught anywhere outside the harem or the sultan’s own rooms might have real consequences, but was in no mood for another argument.
“Will you make me a map or not?” she demanded.
“Yes, of course I will. A map. A view.” Hassan wiped his hands on his coat and sat down at his worktable, a low, scuffed oak plank balanced on two stacks of books. Fatima knelt beside him. She liked to look at his face while he worked, to see it transformed by the fervent, vacant light that possessed him as his maps took shape. His lips would part in an eager smile, like a child’s; there was a bliss about him when he worked and when he prayed that made Fatima wonder whether he knew what it felt like to have one’s faith in the goodness of things removed. Fatima herself had never knelt upon a prayer mat except grudgingly. Obedience was demanded of her all day and on many nights; when she was asked to pray, she had no more left in her. Hassan was different. His obedience was always rewarded; whatever force he called upon in his silent moments always answered him, and though the maidservants might giggle and the undersecretaries scowl when he passed, he did not appear to notice.
Hassan was the only person she allowed herself to watch so openly. To look too long at anything male, the palace guards or the cook or the dozens of secretaries and lawyers who populated the Mexuar, was to commit impertinence; to look too often at the freewomen she served was to risk rebuke. Hassan was different. It gave her a stealthy joy to sit beside him and try to translate the lively conversation between his brows, and know he neither minded nor misread her. He saw her looking now and smiled absently, reaching out to stroke her jaw with one finger. He took out a charcoal pencil and whittled it with a small knife, removing a fragment of paper from one of the untidy stacks on his desk. His fingers—the length and suppleness of which almost redeemed his awkward features—moved quickly across the page, defining the right angles of a short hallway, the nautilus-shell progression of a flight of stairs.
“This is the way you came,” said Hassan. His pencil rasped and shed black ash. “This is a door. It leads off the small antechamber in the harem where the washerwoman keeps her baskets and soap. That is the door you want.”
Fatima teased the map from beneath his fingers and slipped it into the embroidered V at the front of her tunic, against her skin. Hassan watched her and sighed.
“You’re wasted on me,” he said. “God’s names, look at you.” He took her hands in his and turned her to face the sun. “Look.”
Fatima smiled. She was not above admiring herself. Her eyes were so black and unflawed that they swallowed the afternoon light without reflecting anything, like a night without stars. They floated in a face whose pallor might make another girl look sickly. There was no high color in her lips or ch
eeks of the kind the poets praised: her beauty was something too remote for poetry, a tilting symmetry of jaw and cheekbone and dark brow. Only her hair seemed to be made of anything earthly: it billowed over her shoulders in a mass of dense sable curls that snapped the teeth of every comb Lady Aisha had ever taken to them.
The effect of it all was singular. Whenever Fatima encountered newcomers walking the halls with her mistress, they would invariably stop in their tracks, put one hand on Lady Aisha’s arm, and ask, Where did you get her? And Lady Aisha would say, She is Circassian. And whoever it was would raise one eyebrow and say, Ah. It was always the same: Ah. Much was contained in that single syllable. Ah! All are equal before God, but some are meant to be bought and sold.
Yet Fatima was the only Circassian slave left in the Alhambra, the others all freed or sold off to pay debts, dispersing across the Strait to safety as the armies of Castile and Aragon pressed down from the north. There was no one left to praise her in the language of her mother, whose face she could barely remember and whose homeland she had never seen. She was the last reminder of a time of prosperity, when pretty girls could be had from Italian slave merchants for unearthly sums; there had been no money and no victories since. The Nasrid sultans, heirs to the empire of Al Andalus, to the foothold of Islam in Europe, seemed to have few talents beyond losing the territories won by their forefathers. They preferred beauty to war: they had built the Alhambra, every brightly tiled inch of which represented the lifework of some master craftsman. That was all Al Andalus was now: an empire indoors. A palace, and inside it a garden, and inside that, a beautiful girl.
“Men would risk their fortunes for an hour in bed with you,” said Hassan, letting her arms drop. “Other men.”
“You risk your fortune for my company,” said Fatima. “I love you better than I would love those other men.”
Hassan leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes with charcoal-blackened fingers.
“You’re a good friend to me, Fa. Friends are rare these days. But you’ve got to be more careful. Laughter carries in the Court of Myrtles, and a woman’s laughter most of all. It may carry all the way to the sultan’s quarters—and then what?”
The Bird King Page 1