The Bird King

by G. Willow Wilson

  “That’s the flood basin,” said Hassan. “We’re doing all right. We’re doing very well, actually.”

  Fatima felt Vikram grumble beneath her cheek, though he said nothing. The grasses thinned into rock and scrub as they moved toward higher ground. The mountains were opaque before them; the campfires Fatima had seen at a distance seemed to hang in the sky. She could hear laughter, faint but sharp, carried with the smell of woodsmoke.

  “Men everywhere,” muttered Vikram. “Men on the road, men in the foothills, men at our backs. What a pageant. This is the last favor I’ll ever do for that woman.”

  “It’s only a bit farther to this first gully.” Hassan’s face was ghostly in the dark. “It’s quite steep. Maybe we can find an overhang or some such thing to shelter under.”

  “Make one,” said Fatima. “A nice, dry place to rest. You can do that much, Hassan, I know you can.”

  Hassan mumbled something inaudible and scuffed at the ground with the toe of his boot. Nevertheless, he withdrew the map from his satchel, holding it up against Vikram’s flank as they walked and scratching away at one corner with a nub of charcoal.

  “That’s not terribly comfortable,” Vikram complained.

  “Wait,” said Hassan. “I’m almost done. There. Look at this, Fa.”

  Fatima unlinked one hand from around Vikram’s shoulders and held up the altered map, turning it this way and that to catch what feeble light she could. On the northwestern edge of the map, near the mouth of a narrow valley between two steep slopes, there was now a series of closely concentric shapes, like a knot in the bark of a tree.

  “A cave,” said Fatima.

  “Yes, a cave,” said Hassan, dancing a little. “I do so like being useful.”

  “Let me see that.” Vikram reached over his shoulder and snatched the paper out of Fatima’s hands. He examined it for a long moment. “Remarkable,” he said finally. “The wind has just changed key to accommodate your landscaping efforts. I can hear it whistling up ahead. Look.”

  Fatima followed his gaze up the embankment they were climbing. Beyond the pine trees, the ground rose sharply and narrowed to a peak. Another hill was visible just beyond it. The pairing was familiar: it was the entrance to the gully that led southwest on Hassan’s map, and sure enough Fatima saw, tucked into the eastern flank of the nearest slope, a blot of darkness among the rocks.

  “Your talent is a far finer thing than I had thought, Hassan of Granada,” said Vikram. He sounded somewhat astonished. “It’s one thing to alter the works of man, but quite another to alter those of nature. Tell me—when you were a child, did you confuse colors with sounds, or perhaps with numbers?”

  “Yes,” said Hassan, surprised. “And numbers had genders, too—they were male or female, and sometimes both, and sometimes a third sex without a name. Whenever I heard a loud sound, I saw a color or a pattern, as though a cloth had been laid over my eyes. It was abominably confusing.”

  “It would be,” said Vikram in a distracted voice, studying the map again. “Yes. That’s common enough with a gift such as this.”

  “What does that mean? What’s common?”

  Vikram handed the map back to Hassan and shifted Fatima on his back.

  “All children of the banu adam are born with a bit of the First Speech,” he said. “The language spoken by the angels and the beasts and the jinn before the birth of humankind. Incorruptible knowledge. Helps you see the intersections of things. You call it fitrah in your faith. In nearly all cases, it fades as the child grows up, but for a very few, it doesn’t.”

  “Does that mean you know what it is?” asked Fatima, sitting up straighter. “Is there a name for what Hassan does?”

  “Oh, undoubtedly. It’s a miracle.”

  “Don’t make fun of me,” protested Hassan.

  “Who’s making fun of you? I’m as serious as I ever get.”

  “But Hassan isn’t a holy man,” said Fatima. The image of Hassan as a wandering ascetic, with a long beard and a short robe and a pious scowl, was so comical that she almost laughed.

  “Neither are most miracle workers,” said Vikram. “Most are ordinary men and women with all the usual flaws and hypocrisies. People would rather call them witches and burn them than acknowledge that miracles are bestowed upon the world with glorious, unfathomable generosity, because people are idiots.”

  Fatima studied Hassan’s long fingers, occupied now in stowing the map in his satchel. They did not appear miraculous. Or if they did, so did everything else: the trees exhaling in the darkness, insensible of any danger Fatima might face; the halo of distant stars overhead, more insensible still. The matter that populated the world seemed bound together by nothing, yet it all persisted nonetheless: trees, stars, foxes, corpses, Castilians and Berbers, jinn and men and slaves. Fatima was hungry and dirty, but somewhere far behind her, Lady Aisha was clean and well fed, and perhaps thinking of her at that very moment, just as she was thinking of her old mistress. Perhaps the real miracle was that the world could support so much contradiction. Next to that, Hassan’s talents seemed rather modest.

  “A miracle,” said Hassan from the darkness beside her, his voice small. “I never had the courage to think of it that way. People always thought it was funny that I still pray, in spite of being—well, being the way I am. The imam who gives the Friday sermon at the Alhambra told me I needn’t bother. To my face, Fa! As if I had no right to pray, as if one must be perfect before one sits on a prayer mat. Yet I have always prayed. As a child, I asked for so many things. I would kneel and ask and ask and ask. It was the only time I ever felt as though someone heard me. I never got most of the things I prayed for. But I did get this.”

  He lapsed into silence. Fatima reached out and took his hand and held it up against the sky, and through his fingers saw the starlight winking. The cave Hassan had coaxed out of the rock looked small as they approached it, a simple confluence of sandstone blocks to which a few young pines were clinging: when Hassan stood upright, his head brushed the ceiling; and when Fatima climbed down from Vikram’s back and limped toward him, she had to duck to fit inside. Nevertheless, it was dry and level and several strides long, tapering downward as it merged into the rubbly hillside. Fatima lowered herself to the ground with a moan, curling her knees up toward her body.

  “Give me your feet, little sister,” said Vikram. “And chew on this lovely thing I picked as we were walking.” He pressed something flat and damp into Fatima’s hand. It was a length of pale tree bark, its greenish underside glistening with sap. Fatima popped it into her mouth. A bitter, herbal flavor burst over her tongue. She chewed obediently, trying to ignore the stabs of pain as Vikram bent her foot from side to side.

  “What a mess,” he said. “Hassan—choose the least offensive of those gaudy sashes you’ve got in your sack and give it to me.”

  Fatima heard Hassan sigh as he riffled through the canvas bag.

  “That’s three robes and two sashes you owe me now,” he told her.

  “I saved your life,” said Fatima.

  “When we’re stashed in a nice little cog on its way to Tunis or Timbuktu, with a hot plate of food and one snug berth apiece, I will thank you properly,” said Hassan. “For now, I’ll keep a tally of my clothes.”

  “You’re so sweet,” Fatima muttered. Hassan lay down next to her and flung his arm across his face, kicking off his own boots and wiggling his toes in the night air.

  “I really am grateful,” he said in a different voice. “It’s an awful thing, you know, to be tolerated—everyone needs you, nobody wants you. There was a time when I thought the sultan—” He paused with the smallest catch in his voice. “He was always very pleasant to me, except for once or twice. He never seemed afraid or disgusted. I know he has to do what he thinks is right, but I never imagined that he—that I could be taken from my own room in the middle of the night, and he would say nothing. That I could mean so little in the end.”

  Fatima found Hassan’s hand and stroke
d it, unsure of what to say. The willow bark was doing its work: the pain in her feet, though persistent, was no longer at the forefront of her mind. Vikram was a surprisingly delicate nurse, winding one half of Hassan’s sash around her heel and tucking the end in with a gentleness that did not seem possible for a set of talons. Looking down, Fatima saw two neat bundles of blue cloth where her feet had been. The effect was somewhat ridiculous.

  “Why do we have to run?” she burst out, suddenly exhausted. “We were on the bottom of the heap anyway. We haven’t started any wars. Why should we be chased into the sea when we haven’t done anything wrong?”

  No one saw fit to answer her question. Hassan was rapidly falling asleep, his breathing softer and more regular. Vikram had arranged himself at Fatima’s feet with his back pressed gently against her aching heels. Suffused with warmth, Fatima felt her body go heavy.

  “I wish we were running toward something,” she murmured, “instead of away.”

  “Would you like to hear more about the journey of the birds?” asked Vikram from the vicinity of her toes. “Something you haven’t heard before?”

  “You’re offering to tell me a story?”

  “Yes, I am. I feel you’re about to do something stupid and I’m trying to delay you.”

  “Why can’t you ever be nice?”

  “I thought you were grown-up enough to prefer honest counsel. Do you want to hear the story or not?”

  “Fine,” said Fatima. “Tell me something I haven’t heard before.” A thought occurred to her. She propped herself up on her elbows, eyes widening.

  “Vikram,” she said. “Do you know how the poem ends? The real poem, the one Lady Aisha bought from the bookseller all those years ago?”

  Vikram raised one eyebrow, or perhaps it was just a smoky crest of fur; the sleepier Fatima was, the more difficult she found it to distinguish between what he was and what he appeared to be.

  “I do know how the poem ends,” he said. “But your poem, the one you and Hassan have been telling to one another, has diverged from it so profoundly that it doesn’t matter. There is no longer any real poem, or rather, one is now as real as the other.”

  “There is so a real poem,” said Fatima, annoyed. “The real Conference of the Birds was written by someone, by a real person. He had certain intentions. I want to know what they were. He wrote the poem for a reason, and the reason matters.”

  “Does it?” Vikram stretched his toes, revealing a row of claws as black as obsidian. “Once a story leaves the hands of its author, it belongs to the reader. And the reader may see any number of things, conflicting things, contradictory things. The author goes silent. If what he intended mattered so very much, there would be no need for inquisitions and schisms and wars. But he is silent, silent. The author of the poem is silent, the author of the world is silent. We are left with no intentions but our own.”

  His voice, the least frightening part of him, as mirthful and resonant as a piece of music, sounded so unhappy that Fatima reached out instinctively to stroke his head. She had no notion of how she had blundered; the conversation had seemed safe enough. Yet Vikram was disinclined to tell her whatever it was he had intended to say, lapsing instead into purposeful silence.

  “Tell me one thing, then,” she pleaded. “Tell me about the king of the birds.”

  Vikram was silent a moment longer, and Fatima began to think he wouldn’t answer her.

  “The king of the birds is a simorgh,” he said finally. “A phoenix.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “What a silly question. What do I look like?”

  “You look like a lot of things, depending on how I look at you.”

  “Well. Perhaps I’m not the only one.”

  Fatima was too tired to press him further. She turned on her side, nestling against Hassan’s warmth, the skin on her neck prickling with eddies of air, warm and cool, warm and cool, as he breathed out and in again. She thought she might like to tell him that she loved him. It seemed a shame to wake him up, yet she did not often have such an uncomplicated impulse and could not let it pass.

  “Hassan,” she whispered, nudging him with her shrouded foot.

  Hassan made a small, high sound, like a child, and did not stir.

  Fatima woke again in the bluest part of the night. Habit roused her: in the Alhambra she nearly always awoke to the voice of the palace muezzin as he called for the daybreak prayer. His invitation, melodious though it might be, was heeded only by the most pious of the women, among whom Fatima did not number. Lady Aisha was different: her shrewdness was tempered in those lucid hours by a more spiritual impulse, which caused her to rise, cloak herself in a plain shawl, and go to the courtyard to kneel. For Fatima, it was simply an interruption: she would wake and yawn and sigh, and relieve herself in the chamber pot, returning to her bed in a half-conscious state of protest. Lady Aisha had once said, “You might join me one day,” to which Fatima replied, “I might not,” and there the conversation had ended. Yet it seemed the continual summonses of the muezzin had done their work: she was awake now, called by a voice she could no longer hear but still heeded.

  Extracting herself from Hassan’s limp arms, Fatima stood, hissing as she put weight on her feet. She was surprised to discover she could walk well enough if she wasn’t too hasty about it: Vikram’s bandages were wrapped so tightly that they diffused much of the pain. Vikram himself had disappeared. Stepping gingerly toward the mouth of the cave, Fatima retrieved her boots and levered her feet into them by careful degrees. They were snug now, but they would serve.

  The birds were waking as she stepped out onto the mountainside. A little snow star nestled between the rocks just beyond the mouth of the cave, its pink blossoms incongruous in their bed of nettles. Farther downslope, dwarfish pines twisted out of the steep gradient and turned toward the sun at right angles, taking on a dizzy, scattered appearance, like a forest tipped on its side. Fatima squatted against one of them and pulled up her robe. She found herself looking downhill, past streams of gray rubble that merged and split like water as they descended toward the bottom of the ravine. There was movement below her: the glossy shoulders of a crow stretching its wings in the boughs of a woody rosemary. It croaked bitterly to itself, as though the riot of songbirds had disturbed its rest. Fatima laughed. The crow cocked its head and looked up at her. In a burst of black feathers, it leaped into the air, rising steadily until it cleared the pine tops, and then turned south, disappearing into a damp and still-dark sky.

  Alone again, Fatima shook out her robe and began climbing back up the mountainside. Going up was more difficult than coming down: the angle hurt her feet and the rubble that had been so compliant while she was going downhill slid about when she put weight on it, giving her no purchase. It was noisy too. Cursing in a whisper, Fatima dug her fingers into the earth and pulled herself along, glad there was no one to witness her fumbling. After a few minutes of this, she cursed in earnest, and leaned against the roots of a dead tree to reorient herself.

  She could not see the cave. The rocks, the bent trunks of the pine trees, all these looked familiar, but then again, they all looked alike. Turning in a half circle, Fatima couldn’t determine where she had gone wrong. She thought she recognized a ledge of sandstone some distance above her, yet there was nothing below it but rocks and dirt. Fatima climbed a bit farther and tried not to whimper. Something pink trembled just beneath the hem of her robe: she teetered to avoid it, startled.

  It was the snow star. Fatima’s limbs went wooden.

  “Hassan?” she called, as loudly as she dared. No one answered. The songbirds had fallen into a syncopated rhythm, each melody filling the silence left by the one that preceded it, making the air dense with sound. Fatima called for Vikram, willing him to frighten her, to pop out of the ether near her elbow as he seemed to like to do, but wherever he was, the opportunity did not tempt him. Fatima felt as though she were hovering over the crown of her own head, observing herself with the disp
assion of an undertaker.

  She had left without the map.

  It had not occurred to her to do otherwise. The cave seemed profoundly unremarkable: chilly, shallow, perfumed by loam and the chalky scent of sandstone, as banal a place as Fatima had ever seen, except for the fact that it hadn’t existed before she and Hassan set foot in it. It felt unfair: she had gone out unthinkingly, with every intention of returning. She had walked only a dozen paces downhill. Surely a little convergence of stone and earth, even one Hassan had created, could not be so far outside the ordinary scheme of things that it couldn’t be found if sought. It was as if Fatima had been snubbed. For a moment she was envious of Hassan, not for his talents, but for the way the silent, visceral elements of the world seemed to love him and conspire on his behalf, to the exclusion of others.

  Fatima turned in a circle, scanning each little undulation of rock for some sign. She found none, and began to make her way down the mountainside again, in what she hoped was a southerly direction. Light was beginning to break on the narrow valley below, illuminating tangles of gorse still pricked with yellow flowers. The wind carried hints of smoke; the campfires she had seen in the night would be out by now, leaving her with no way to guess where the men who had lit them were waiting. Fatima told herself she would not cry again: she hated crying; it gave her none of the relief it seemed to give other people. Instead, she balled her hands into fists, digging her nails into her palms until they smarted. This sensation, and the complicated nature of scrambling down a steep slope in bad light, occupied her thoughts so completely that she did not at first register the sound of singing that carried toward her from the valley.

  The voices were gruff and happy and possibly a little drunk. It was only when she realized they were singing in Castilian that Fatima seized up where she stood, one swollen foot hanging in midair. Limping toward a fallen log, Fatima peered down at a small clearing on the valley floor, and saw a cluster of felt caps around the remains of a fire. A pair of broad-shouldered packhorses dozed nearby. There were cuirasses of battered steel plate piled beside the fire, attended by a boy, a squire or a servant perhaps, who appeared to be fiddling with the buckles while half asleep. These were soldiers, then, or mercenaries of some wealth. In the half dark, Fatima could not make out the colors of their doublets to determine where they owed their allegiance: all she could tell for certain was that they were directly in her path.