The Bird King

by G. Willow Wilson

  “Hmm?” Lady Aisha was waiting for an answer, her eyebrows raised half-mockingly.

  “I don’t want to be a slave anymore,” said Fatima. The plainest possible language. She cursed herself silently.

  Lady Aisha gave an undignified snort.

  “How modern that sounds,” she chortled. “This is what happens when you let a concubine read Ibn Arabi and Plato and sneak about with cartographers. What on earth would you do with your freedom, if it were granted? A small house, a bad-tempered husband, a child every year—what happiness could that bring you? Here you are clad and shod in silk, taught to recite poetry and to do sums and figures. You listen to music and wait upon great ladies. What does the world offer you that you don’t have here?”

  Fatima looked around helplessly. The serving woman came in to light a clot of incense in a brazier. Its scent wafted up and mingled with the steam to form a dense, sickly smell, like flowers left too long in a bowl of water and gone to rot.

  “Air, my lady,” said Fatima.

  Lady Aisha did not pretend to misunderstand her. She peered up at her bondswoman and pursed her thinning lips.

  “Interesting,” she said.

  Chapter 2

  The sultan called for her that evening. Fatima was sitting in the doorway of Lady Aisha’s private room leafing through an illuminated volume of Hafez when his messenger arrived—a boy of eight or nine, young enough to act as liaison between the world of women and the world of men. The book was written in Persian, a language that Fatima did not know but which shared enough vocabulary with Arabic to be intriguing. She sounded out the foreign words, encountering a term here or there that was familiar, so that the poems became abstract impressions of themselves: love, seeking, oneness, restraint, prayer. It was a pleasant way to spend an idle evening, especially one as fine as this: through the open door she could see the courtyard, lit now by innumerable little oil lamps, and the cicadas, which had been riotous in early summer, had subsided to a pleasant hum. The interruption of the boy annoyed her.

  “Mistress Fatima,” he panted. “His majesty is asking for you. Now, or sooner.”

  Fatima clapped the book shut. The child was currying favor; she was no one’s mistress, not even her own.

  “Call me girl,” she muttered, standing up. “Everyone else does.”

  “Girl Fatima,” said the boy obediently, “his majesty—”

  “Yes, fine, all right. I’ll follow in a minute.”

  The boy disappeared. Fatima padded into Lady Aisha’s room and returned her book to the carved wooden case where it lived with a dozen others: the Ibn Arabi and Plato for which Lady Aisha had mocked her, but also several volumes of jahili poetry, and a large, odd-smelling book of folktales called Alf Yeom wa Yeom. Tucked beside them was an unbound folio of yellowed paper, the first pages of The Conference of the Birds.

  She ran one finger over the untidy leaves, pressed indifferently between two ledgers of receipts to keep them upright. They had been bought, at great cost, from one of the only booksellers the palace had seen in recent years: a man so elderly that the Castilians had not seen fit to embargo him as he passed through their siege lines. So elderly, in fact, that he had been allowed into the harem itself to spread his wares at Lady Aisha’s feet. It was a paltry offering. There had been a few books of fiqh by lesser scholars, an illuminated French chanson or two. There were even, as Fatima remembered, shipping manuals and fat lists of tariffs, the source or interest of which remained unclear. The Conference of the Birds, though incomplete, was the only thing in which Lady Aisha had seen any value.

  She bought it with a melancholy she did not bother to disguise. Fatima read the first pages to her mistress so many times that she had committed them to memory. But the story stopped just as it began to get interesting. It unfolded in the time before Adam, when the animals could still speak. The birds, forever quarreling with each other, had long been without a ruler, and gathered together in their meeting place to decide what must be done. The hoopoe, wisest among them, urged the rest to put aside their differences, and rallying the hawks and owls and sparrows and ravens, they set off to the land of Qaf to find their lost king. Yet there was no hint of what befell them next. The folio ended in midverse with the birds in flight over the Dark Sea. There were no teachers left in the palace, aside from a sheikh or two to instruct the sons of bureaucrats. If anyone knew the rest of the poem, no one was telling.

  Unsatisfied, Fatima brought the folio to Hassan, who could make anything funny. He had not disappointed her. That was the beginning of their game: they chose a bird, gave it a story, and sent it off, like a child’s paper sparrow, into the air. They had not, as yet, bothered with an ending.

  Fatima smoothed the loose pages of the folio so that they were even with the edge of the bookcase. She couldn’t stall much longer. Lady Aisha was lying on her divan with one arm thrown over her face, as if even the feeble light of the oil lamp above her was too much for her eyes. Fatima touched her foot.

  “I’m going,” she said.

  Lady Aisha turned on her side with a sigh.

  “This is a reminder,” she said to Fatima, reaching out to stroke the papers she had just arranged. “This is what it looks like to live at the end of history. There was a time when the most flea-ridden dervish could recite the entirety of The Conference from memory. Now, like the birds, we’ve forgotten more than lesser peoples have ever remembered.”

  Fatima waited for the moment to pass.

  “Wear something pretty,” murmured Lady Aisha.

  Fatima was already pulling her tunic over her head, scanning the fat wooden wardrobe that stood against one wall for something suitable. She selected a robe made from sheer, gauzy fabric, embroidered with thread-of-gold stars.

  “There’s no point,” she said, wriggling into it. “It’s just going to come off in five minutes, and it’s nearly too dark to see.”

  “It’ll give you confidence,” said Lady Aisha. “He favors you more and more, my dear. My son is not a profligate man—unlike some other sultans one could name. He beds his two wives. Not even that—he beds one wife, as Lady Maryam has seen fit to shut herself away from the world since her children were taken. He beds you. And maybe, once in a while, he beds that blonde Provençal war captive who refuses to learn Arabic or Castilian—but she’s not important. The point is: freedom is well enough, but influence is better, and if you wanted it, you could have influence aplenty.”

  Fatima softened at the thought that her mistress had listened and understood. She did not want influence but didn’t say so; instead she bent to kiss Lady Aisha’s slender hand.

  “Tell him to come and visit his old mother,” said Lady Aisha, nestling into her divan. “He hasn’t been to see me in a week.” She sighed again, but she was smiling now. Fatima blew out the lamp and left.

  The corridor that led to the sultan’s private quarters was dark as Fatima walked along it; someone had forgotten to light the torch in the wall sconce midway. But there was a moon, and eddies of silver penetrated the latticed windows overhead, creating a feeble glow that kept Fatima from blundering into anything. She dragged one hand along the wall at hip level to steady herself. Her fingers accumulated the dusty residue of whitewash as she went, but then encountered something warm and sleek: the pelt of an animal. She clung to the wall and bit back a shriek.

  “Dog,” she gasped.

  A shadow detached itself from the wall and came toward her, panting, its yellow eyes hanging in the dark like drops of molten glass.

  “What are you doing here?” Fatima demanded, still in a whisper. She reached out her hand: the dog breathed on it happily. “How many times do the guards have to throw you out? They’ll poison you next.”

  The dog shook itself and farted, as if to demonstrate its bravado. Fatima stuffed her hand into her mouth to keep from laughing. In the daylight, the dog was a mangy, jackal-like thing: head too large, limbs too long, giving it a strange, loping gait, like that of a crouching man. How the
creature continually made its way into the harem was the cause of spirited debate. Nessma and her ladies pretended to be afraid of it, claiming it was the daytime shape of some ungodly thing, a jinn perhaps, who entered and left the harem by turning sideways into the realm of the unseen. Lady Aisha was perpetually offering to kill it herself with her own eating knife, but this was an empty threat: the dog adored her, and would sit at her feet with its eyes closed, just like a real courtier, when she played the lute.

  “You have to go,” whispered Fatima, tugging on the scruff of the dog’s neck. “The sultan can’t see you here.”

  The dog snapped at her hands. It smelled of sulfur and warm iron.

  “I’m not joking,” said Fatima. “Go. I have things to do.”

  The dog groaned and ambled into the dark, its nails clicking rhythmically on the stone floor. Fatima waited until she couldn’t hear it anymore before wiping her hands on her tunic and continuing down the hall.

  The door to the sultan’s rooms was slightly ajar when she reached it. Fatima cleared her throat to announce herself. It opened wider to reveal Abu Abdullah himself, clad for sleep in a white izar tied at his hips, falling in pleats to his ankles. Fatima studied his bare torso ruefully. He was handsome enough, and still young—young enough to sire many more children—but there was already gray at his temples, and his face, always a little too round for a sultan’s, had acquired a permanently stunned expression.

  “Good, you’re here,” he said, grazing her forehead with a kiss. “Come in.”

  Fatima slipped past him into the room. Abu Abdullah’s sleeping chamber was modest, as he was: a cotton mattress on a low dais at the center of the room, the skin of a large buck he had hunted as a youth growing ratty on the floor. Fatima had long thought that if Abu Abdullah had been born a commoner, he would have been perfectly content as one of the farmers who lived outside his walls: florid, hardworking men with smallholdings and large families. Kingship did not suit him. He had no taste for fine clothes or complicated dinners. When, in her rare bouts of enthusiasm, Fatima called him by his name instead of his title, he did not reprimand her.

  “I’ve taken you away from your books,” he said now, his voice amused and sad. “I can always tell when you’ve been reading. You come in with this unmistakable look of irritation.”

  Alarmed, Fatima ducked her head and smiled through her lashes in her best imitation of modesty.

  “Never, my lord,” she said promptly. The sultan laughed.

  “There’s no use denying it,” he said. “I know you too well for that.”

  Fatima wondered whether this was true. She looked away, not daring to meet his eyes, and her gaze fell upon a map on the far wall. It was one of Hassan’s early efforts, the size of his signature betraying the self-confidence of a very young man. It was large: ten handspans tall and at least as many across. Sketched along its mottled vellum perimeter was the outline of the Iberian Peninsula; below that, the crown of Africa curved up to meet it at the Strait of Jebel Tareq. To the southeast was the Middle Sea, called mediterranean by the Catholics; to the northwest, the Dark Sea, represented by an expanse of nothing. The nothing was inhabited by a sea serpent. It drifted in the featureless ocean with an expression of inky melancholy, treading water at the edge of the world. Fatima often found herself staring at it on nights when she would rather have been somewhere else, imagining what it might be like to be the only figure in the blank space at the end of the map: solitary but free.

  East of the lonely serpent, the Iberian Peninsula was shaded green to show the extent of the Empire of Al Andalus. Beginning at the feet of the Pyrenees, it swept south, shying away from the kingdoms of León, Castile, and Pamplona, curving west to encompass Lisbon, and dipping south again to Toledo, Córdoba, Seville, and Granada. It was a good size. There were ports marked in blue and high roads in red, which, taken together, gave the impression of unassailable prosperity. The Catholic kingdoms to the north were small and divided. They posed no threat.

  The map was four hundred years out of date.

  “You often stare at that map,” came the sultan’s voice, breaking her reverie. “Why do you like it so much?”

  “Why do you keep it?” countered Fatima.

  “I suppose to remind myself of what I might have ruled,” said Abu Abdullah, kicking off the scuffed leather slippers he wore. “To give myself a reason to rise from bed in the morning. I tell myself that Al Andalus is still here, even if it extends no farther than the walls of this city. And then I can sit on my divan in the Mexuar with a straight face.”

  His candor alarmed Fatima. She scanned the room for something else to talk about, thinking of all the poems she’d read about other concubines; tender, jeweled, unfailingly loyal women who lived in a golden era receding ever farther into the past, and whom Fatima would never resemble. Her eyes were drawn to a small table pulled up next to the bed, stacked with papers and waxy scrolls: he had brought his work back with him from the Mexuar, as he so often did now. Fatima clucked her tongue and knelt next to the table, tidying the heap of petitions.

  “You know you’re not supposed to bring all this to bed with you,” she said. “Your physicians have said over and over that it disturbs your sleep and your appetite. How many of these couldn’t wait until tomorrow?”

  “Considering the centuries of mismanagement that brought us to our current apocalypse—all of them,” said the sultan drily, throwing himself onto his bed. He still moved like a boy. Fatima had found it charming once, but lately it had begun to unnerve her.

  “Have you eaten?” she asked, scrutinizing his ribs. Abu Abdullah rolled onto his back with a groan.

  “Now you’re just nagging. Good God! Even my slaves nag me now. What a farce.” He caught her by the waist, pinching her in a particularly ticklish spot. Fatima shrieked and doubled over and let him pull her laughingly down beside him.

  “My dress,” she gasped. The thread-of-gold was heavy and sharp and dug into her shoulders.

  “Is there no end to these small humiliations? Here.” Abu Abdullah helped her pull the offending garment over her head. It ended up in a crumpled heap on the floor. Fatima put her face up to be kissed. His mouth was fragrant and bitter with the mastic powder he used to clean his teeth. The taste of it never failed to remind Fatima of the first time she had been presented to him, on a night two years ago when Lady Aisha had declared her old enough to share a bed: he had been affectionate but impersonal, handling her as deftly as he would a horse on a hunt. She had left him on sore legs, bewildered and imagining herself in love, imagining, in fact, many things that would never come to pass: confiding in him, advising him on matters of state, giving and receiving impassioned letters hidden in flowers, as lovers did in poems. But whatever desire she felt had faded when she realized he was still her king. She could neither initiate their lovemaking nor reject it: it was a transaction in which her desire played no part.

  Now, as he pulled her beneath him, Fatima found herself staring at the oil lamp on the table nearby and calculating how long it would be before she could return to her poems. But Abu Abdullah did not touch her in the usual way: instead, he pressed his face against her neck and tucked the wool coverlet around them both.

  “Will you stay here?” he murmured. “Sleep here, I mean.”

  “Of course,” said Fatima warily, wondering whether this was some trick. “If that’s what you want.”

  “Good. I’d like company just now.”

  Fatima traced a scar that wandered down his right arm, a legacy of his ill-fated battles in Castile, and felt uneasy.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  For a moment, he didn’t answer her. There was kohl smudged in the creases beneath his eyes; his hair, which he wore long, hung in lank strands across his pillow. Fatima imagined him in a farmer’s unbleached linen shirt, his head shaved and his golden skin dark from long hours working under the sun. He would have been happier, and not much poorer than he was now.

  “There is
no money left,” he said softly. “And no grain. The shipment of wheat from Egypt that was meant for us was stopped at the port in Rejana by the Castilian blockade. I had a courier this morning. You won’t be spared this time, you and the other women. We will not last the winter.”

  Fatima was silent. All her life, meals had appeared at their appointed times, made by unseen hands and unseen means. She knew, or rather sensed, that the rest of the palace had been hungry for some time—perhaps even the sultan himself had missed meals, if the hollows between his ribs were any hint. Certainly Hassan was always eager for whatever she brought him. But the harem had remained apart, supplied in all seasons with bread and oranges and meat, even if there were fewer and fewer maids to serve it.

  “We’ll be fine,” she said with more confidence than she felt. “Every year your viziers wring their hands and say it’s the end of the world, but it never is. Granada is still here. We’re still here. We’ll be all right, surely.”

  She felt him shake his head.

  “Not this time,” he said. “Not anymore.”

  Fatima had never heard him speak so quietly. She felt a sudden pity for the man beside her. In other circumstances, circumstances in which she could say yes or no to the nights they spent together, she might well have loved him. The feeling was so analogous to desire that she pulled him toward her, sinking her teeth gently into the flesh of his shoulder. He caught his breath.

  “Fatima.”

  “My lord.”

  He kissed her neck, pulling her upright, lifting her onto his lap. There was a frantic series of knocks at the outer door of the dressing room behind them. Fatima wanted to cry.

  “Whoever you are, I’m going to have you executed,” shouted Abu Abdullah.

  The knocking continued. Cursing, Abu Abdullah rose, hopping awkwardly on one foot as he retied his izar around his waist. Fatima pulled the wool coverlet over her shoulders and followed him, hiding herself behind a large wooden wardrobe in the gloom of his unlit dressing room. Abu Abdullah yanked open the outer door.