“Thank God,” said Hassan fervently, falling to his knees. A copper kettle tied to a length of cord sweltered in the sun nearby; he dropped it into the well, laughing in triumph when it landed with a faint splash some distance below.
“Let’s live here,” he said, drawing up the kettle hand over hand. “Now I know why heaven is said to be awash in pure water. I never want to drink out of an old sluggish river again. You should have seen what came out of me before you woke up, Fa. I didn’t know I could produce matter of that color and quantity, of such—”
“Stop,” begged Fatima, queasy again. “Stop talking.”
Hassan shrugged. The kettle came up cold and dripping, beads of sweat forming on its battered surface as he drew it into the light. Putting it to his lips, Hassan drank noisily. When he was done, he wiped his sodden beard on his sleeve and passed the kettle to Fatima.
The water was cold enough to make her teeth ache, but very clear, and so sweet that she forgot herself for a moment and gave a little cry of pleasure. Vikram laughed at her. He stood on the lip of the well and surveyed their surroundings, glaring out at the quiet hills that tumbled south, rising suddenly at the horizon, like waves breaking on a seawall, to become green and violet mountains.
“If we make good time, we can reach the southern pass by nightfall,” he said. “And strike the harbor road while it’s dark.”
“A road sounds nice,” said Hassan in a hopeful voice. “I like roads. Better than scrambling over streambeds and cutting across other people’s fields.”
“You say so now, but you won’t when the time comes,” said Vikram with a smile that Fatima did not like. “That road is watched day and night by Castilian scouts, and there is no other way through the southern mountains—at least, none for human feet. The Vega may be abandoned, but the coastal towns are not, and they all belong to Spain now. The danger of the past two days has been slight compared with what lies ahead.”
Hassan chewed on his beard.
“Give me my satchel,” he said, gesturing at Vikram with one hand. Recognizing the glint in his eye, Fatima felt less sluggish and went to sit next to him, pressing her back against the warm stone lip of the well.
“Are you going to draw something?” she asked.
Hassan pulled a roll of paper from his satchel and spread it out across his knees. “There’s never no other way,” he murmured. “There are always other ways. If there are scouts who watch the harbor road, there are scouting paths that run alongside it. They won’t expect us there, especially in the dark. It’s better than nothing.” He ran his fingers around the edge of the paper. Picking up a charcoal, he drew a meandering line. On either side of the line, he began to sketch what looked to Fatima like the ripples caused by throwing a stone into a quiet pool, yet instead of concentric circles, these were irregular shapes, bulging and shrinking at odd intervals.
“What are those?” she asked, not quite touching the paper with one finger.
“The southern mountains,” said Hassan. His eyes had grown bright. “I’m drawing the elevation of the range that runs alongside the harbor road—which is this line, here. Each peak is highest where I’ve drawn the smallest shape. The widest shape is the base. The closer together the lines are, the steeper the slope. If I had more time, I would mix some colored inks and shade everything, so it would make more sense. But you can still grasp the abstract. Think of it like looking straight down at a mountain from overhead, as a bird does.”
Fatima squinted at the map taking shape beneath Hassan’s long fingers. After a moment, the nebulous shapes seemed to pop in front of her eyes, taking on depth, becoming a range of hills that rose and flattened at organic intervals.
“I’ve never seen a map like this before,” she muttered.
“That’s because no one else makes them,” said Hassan with a little smile of pride. “Most mapmakers draw little ticks to show you where the hills are, but that tells you nothing except ‘There is a hill here.’ Anyone who wants to navigate between the hills must rely on the knowledge of someone who’s already been there. If that person dies or forgets, the knowledge is lost. The map goes silent. This map cannot be silenced. If you learn how to read it, Fa, you can walk through those mountains to the south as sure-footedly as the best Castilian scout, all by yourself if you want to.”
Fatima looked again at the map. Running between the feet of the mountains were narrow bands of white space—gullies perhaps, or little valleys, zigzagging toward the edge of the map haphazardly.
“Here,” she said, tracing a path with her finger. “If I wanted to stay off the main road, this is where I would go.”
“You see?” Hassan actually giggled. “There’s always another way.”
A shadow peered over their shoulders.
“Your way is clever,” said Vikram, “but also slow. Many sharp drops and sharp rocks on which to break ankles. There’s a reason your ancestors put the harbor road where they did. If I were you and I had Vikram along to rend and rip where necessary, I would take my chances on the road and reach the sea with all possible speed, rather than fumble through gullies and give my enemies time to turn every shipmaster in the harbor against me.”
“Do you think they will?” asked Fatima, looking up at him. He was a dark blot against the sun. “Do you think we’re that important?”
“I think you’re that distinctive,” said Vikram, leaping off the edge of the well and landing in a soft puff of dust. “All one would have to do is put out the word that a Circassian girl is making her way south with a red-haired scribe for a companion, and make it clear that anyone who helps them will run afoul of the Holy Office. How many travelers fit that description, do you suppose?”
Fatima looked down at her hands and said nothing.
“Besides,” said Vikram in a quieter voice, “that woman—the golden-haired one—she has a vicious streak in her. Do you know she broke two of my ribs that night in the harem garden? Crunch, with that little white foot, right here.” Vikram gestured to his side, where the broad chest of a man blended shade by shade into the dappled pelt of a beast. “It’s difficult to hurt something like me. You couldn’t manage it, Fatima, because you don’t like to cause pain, even at the height of your fury. You could kick and kick without making a dent. No—to hurt me, you’d have to enjoy it.”
Fatima didn’t like to remember that evening. The thought of Luz made her chest tighten unexpectedly. She rose and shook the dust from her bloodied robe. A breeze had kicked up and was dancing down the valley, buffeting her face; it smelled of the sap and oil of the olive groves, the warm untended earth. A lone sheep-bell clanked tonelessly somewhere nearby, rattling with the breeze and then going silent when it died down, only to start up again when the air roused itself. Fatima followed the sound into the shadow of the abandoned house, now more a carapace of stone than anything resembling a dwelling: everything made of wood had been looted or burned, leaving the doorways empty and the windows unshuttered, the slanted roof open to the sky. Fatima ducked through the remains of the front door to stand inside.
The house was generous. It had been two full stories once and a stone staircase still ran halfway up one wall, ending at nothing. Fatima was standing in what must have been the kitchen. There was a blackened hearth in a tiled niche; a domed clay oven sat above it, unraked coals still inside. The floor was filthy, covered in a thin layer of dried mud and rushes and signs of animals bedding down at night. An animal smell lingered too. Near Fatima’s foot was the unmistakable imprint of a man’s boot, the toe pointing toward the center of the room like the tip of a spear: the smallest suggestion of violence.
A bell began to clank again, so close that Fatima jumped. The sound was coming from a far corner of the room, where, draped across the steps leading down to a weedy garden, lay the skeleton of a ram. Its skull, all jawbone and hollow eyes, was flung back, as if the beast had offered itself up for sacrifice. The bell Fatima had heard hung from the sinewy remains of its neck and swayed back and forth i
n an invisible current. Fatima stared at it, transfixed. How quickly the earth and air reclaimed the dead, stripping fur from flesh and flesh from bone, leaving behind only an outline, a tailor’s pattern, pinned together with vertebrae. Fatima felt as though she was intruding on something sacred. It was as if a tailor was there in the room, unstitching the work of man, returning the house and the beasts to rubble and loam, and Fatima was not meant to see.
A sudden flash of red made her gasp. There was something moving behind the ram, extricating itself from the nest of bones in a rippling mass of fur. Fatima groped at her knife. The mass made a small chittering sound and sprouted a pair of tufted ears. It was a fox. Fatima sighed with relief and sat down hard on her tailbone, her legs weak and sweating.
“You scared me,” she told the fox. It looked at her with round yellow eyes, baffled.
“I thought you were a jinn,” she said. “Some horrible thing with too many teeth, like Vikram.”
Indifferent, the fox flicked its tail at her. It slipped down the garden stairs on tiny black feet and disappeared into the weeds. Fatima took several long breaths, fanning her face with one hand.
“You shouldn’t be here alone.” Vikram appeared beside her as if summoned and sat on his haunches, his own yellow eyes following the trail the fox had left behind in the swaying grass. “It’s not safe.”
Fatima wiped her face on her sleeve.
“I like to be alone sometimes,” she said. “This isn’t an evil place. Evil things have been done here, that’s all.”
“You try very hard to be brave. Well and good. You can be as brave while walking as you can while sitting. The sun is high, it’s time to go—and you’ve got to change first. If you’re spotted in that butcher’s apron, someone might think you’ve killed a man.”
Fatima looked down at the blood-stiffened embroidery along the front of her robe. Beneath it, her skin felt tacky; she had not yet washed.
“Is the whole world like this?” she asked, half to herself. “Full of endings? Does anything begin anymore? Are there places where people laugh?”
“Why should it matter to you?” Vikram picked himself up and shook the dust from his pelt. “You don’t laugh much.”
“Sometimes I think I might like to.” She watched as he ambled into the sunshine on all fours, growling incoherently.
“Vikram,” she called after him. “I’m serious.”
He turned and considered her.
“This isn’t the end of the world, little Fatima,” he said in a voice that was almost kind. “It’s only the end of the world you know.”
Boots scuffed toward the threshold of the house: Hassan stood in the ruined doorway, holding a sheet of paper above his head.
“Finished,” he said.
Vikram curled his lip.
“I still say we follow the harbor road. Why must I be the civilized one? You’ll add at least two days to our journey if you insist on taking this martyr’s route.”
“Better two days in the wilderness than the rest of our short lives in the hands of the Inquisition,” snapped Hassan, waving his map like a flag. “Lady Aisha told us to stay off that road, and you yourself say it’s always watched. Why can’t you be sensible?”
Vikram paced back and forth across the threshold on his knuckles.
“Fatima wants to live,” he said. “Let her decide. The map or the road, Fatima. Choose.”
“So you can blame me when things go wrong? You’re the ones who are bickering—you settle it. I want whatever route gets us to the harbor alive. I don’t care about anything else.”
“For God’s sake, woman,” barked Vikram, baring his teeth. “If you don’t pick something, I’ll eat you both and save us all the trouble.”
Fatima looked from the dog-man to Hassan and bit her lip. Hassan was doing a sort of pirouette, drawing the map across his body like one of the coquettish boys who danced for money in the medina, his face expectant.
“The map,” said Fatima.
Chapter 9
By nightfall, Fatima could no longer feel her feet. Long hours in large boots had left a mass of blisters on her heels and along the ball of each foot; long hours after that, the blisters had broken and bled. When she began to weep silently, Vikram had taken pity on her and carried her for a while, slung over his shoulder like a bear cub. Now she was walking again. Each step landed in her ankle, as though her feet had worn away entirely and she were walking on bone. The landscape that had looked so mild in the sunlight was alien in the dark, the soft hills swollen and pale as they listed south into the starlight. Beyond them, the Sierra Lújar rose in a jagged line, pierced here and there by campfires. At their lowest point, where the scrub-clad peaks dipped down to bow toward one another, was the southern pass, and strung along it, cloaked in the newborn darkness, lay the harbor road.
“We need to keep to the west,” panted Hassan, squinting at his map in the dim light cast by Vikram’s eyes. “See this flood basin? We’re going to pass by its southern tip presently. There’s a little river that feeds into it, running out of the mountains—we’ll follow it upstream, and then—oh God, give me a minute.” He sat down on a flat boulder, or perhaps a remnant of a stone wall, half concealed by grass. “I need to catch my breath. The harbor road—here, look. It runs along the river valley of the Río Guadalfeo, which we’d be able to see by now if there were still good light. That empties into the sea at Salobreña. Any ship we might want to take will be docked at Husn Al Munakkab, just to the west. So the way we’ll take is actually more direct, after a fashion.”
“If you like sharp rocks and bandits,” muttered Vikram, “then yes, very direct.”
“Can’t we stop here for the night?” pleaded Fatima, easing herself onto the boulder beside Hassan. “I can’t walk another hour, and it sounds as if you mean to go two or three.”
“This isn’t a good stopping place,” said Vikram. In the dark, he was nearly invisible; a pair of eyes above a crescent of teeth. “We need to get to higher ground and find a copse of trees or a rocky hillside.”
Fatima curled her lip at him and reached down to work at the laces of her boots. Her feet stung as they slid free, peeling away from the damp leather only grudgingly. The shock of air on her raw flesh made her catch her breath.
“Is it bad?” asked Hassan, peeling back the hem of her robe with two fingers. “I hate blood. Or anything—pulpy. I have no courage at all.”
“You did all right with that old Castilian,” said Vikram. He squatted at Fatima’s feet and took her left heel in his talons. “It was Fatima who nearly fainted.”
“I was the one who killed him,” said Fatima, incredulous.
“I beg your pardon, but you were the one who refused to kill him. Hassan, on the other hand, landed some very creditable kicks on the man.”
“That was different,” protested Hassan. “It was just instinct. I couldn’t very well let him murder Fa while I stood there doing nothing.”
“What do you suppose courage is, for God’s sake? You’re not a palace sycophant anymore, young Hassan. There’s no need for any of this affected modesty. Blood doesn’t bother you one bit. Be yourself, it’s far less irritating.” Vikram bent close to Fatima’s foot and sniffed. “This isn’t good.”
“You wouldn’t smell like a rose either if you were forced to walk all day in those boots,” snapped Fatima.
“I don’t care about the smell. You were right: you can’t walk anymore tonight. We have to bandage these and find you some willow bark to chew on, otherwise you won’t be walking tomorrow either.”
Hassan went to kneel next to Vikram and peered at Fatima’s feet. His eyes widened.
“Oh Fa,” he whispered. “You must be in horrible pain.”
Fatima was glad it had grown too dark for her to see what he was looking at. She lay back against the rapidly cooling stone and shut her eyes. Free and toes up, her feet were beginning to throb.
“Is this really the farthest you’ve ever walked?” asked Hassan,
massaging her ankles. “When I came to apprentice at the Alhambra, I walked for four whole days with a pack that weighed half as much as I did. I still remember the way my knees felt at the end. The other boys were all from wealthier families—they bought rides to the capital with the cloth merchant caravans. They made fun of me for weeks.”
“Hassan,” said Fatima, trying not to betray her frustration, “I was born in the harem, in the yellow-and-white guest room that opens onto the shaded part of the courtyard. The farthest I’ve ever walked in my life was from my room to yours.”
Hassan stared at her in disbelief. Then, impulsively, he leaned down and kissed the instep of her foot.
“Precious girl,” he murmured. “Your poor feet.”
“She’ll survive,” said Vikram with a long-suffering sigh. “Though I may not, at this rate. Up you go, Fatima. Put your arms around my neck. We’ll make for the foot of that slope, there. Hassan—stay close to me and clear of the lights. The men at those campfires are not your friends.”
As gamely as she could, Fatima laced her arms around the back of Vikram’s neck, clinging to him as he hoisted her onto his back. At this angle, all his limbs seemed disproportionate; it was difficult to look at him without a stab of revulsion, of primitive fear. Fatima laid her head between his shoulders and closed her eyes again, remembering the palace dog and attempting to forget everything else.
“This way, then.”
The lithe shoulders beneath Fatima’s cheek swayed back and forth. She could hear Hassan traipsing along nearby, his breath labored. Night air had altered the scent of the hills: the sweetish perfume of carob and juniper replaced the yellow-green smell of grass; the breeze was full of pine sap. Opening one eye, she saw the ground to their left spill away into a rubbly depression, the stones marbled in the bluish light of the band of stars overhead. At the bottom was a shallow pool of black water.
The Bird King Page 13