The Bird King

by G. Willow Wilson

  The rubble beneath Fatima’s feet began to slide away. She crouched and pressed her back against the hillside, holding herself rigid. A trickle of rock clacked and tumbled down the meandering slope to rain on the edge of the clearing below, tickling the boughs of the pines that ringed the soldiers’ camp. One of the men looked up and swatted his companion on the belly.

  “Creo que he oido algo.”

  “Qué?”

  The first man whistled. The boy who had been fiddling with the stack of armor got to his feet and frowned up the hill, lifting a pike in his small hands. Fatima closed her eyes and willed him not to see her. She thought of the contours of Hassan’s map and tried to re-create them in her mind: the way the ravine turned west at its narrowest point, the gentler slope of the hill on the far side. Hassan himself had said that Fatima could navigate the mountain passes on her own with a map such as his. These were not simply tick marks on a piece of paper: they were hills with a definite shape, if only she could remember. Perhaps if she could cross the ravine in front of the soldiers, she could put the far hill, the one with the more forgiving elevation, between them and herself. Barely breathing, Fatima altered course, inching sideways along the hillside instead of down, lowering each foot to the ground by increments.

  “Start singing again,” she whispered. “Sing your horrible songs.”

  The men stayed mute. Fatima could hear the clatter of steel and wood, the squeal of a rudely awakened horse. In front of her, the ground was dropping away: the ravine shrank to a treeless gap wide enough for a single man on horseback, full of brittle shale, the debris of old rockslides. Clinging to the branches of a young pine, Fatima lowered herself into the gap, dropping the last several feet to land hard on the shattered rocks below. The jolt made her howl. Somewhere behind her, the men began to shout. Clawing at the pliant earth, Fatima dragged herself up the far side of the ravine, kicking up a hail of dirt and stone until she could taste both when she breathed. She didn’t dare look over her shoulder. Finally she emerged onto turf and autumn weeds: the far hillside sloped upward toward its mild zenith, treeless except for a few knots of juniper. Fatima ran, her feet protesting, registering each footfall as a dull throb in her heel. The voices behind her were growing closer.

  “¡Una mujer! ¡Veo a una mujer!”

  The air sang in Fatima’s lungs. Panting, she crested the hill, cursing at the bushes that snagged her robe. Beyond the downward slope was another valley, much wider than the first and still concealed in gloom. It was papered with overgrowth, a thick, undifferentiated mass of brush and turning leaves that petered out into a colorless darkness. Fatima kept running, lifting the skirt of her robe to keep it from tearing in the dense brush. For a moment she felt giddy with triumph: the voices behind her were growing fainter and farther away and it seemed she might escape them entirely.

  She was dismayed when she felt herself begin to fall. First there was packed earth beneath her feet and then there was air: she twisted, reaching for something to grab onto, and felt her fingers brush the woody bark of a tree. It was not brush and overgrowth she had seen from the hilltop but the canopy of a scrub forest. Fatima had thrown herself off a cliff.

  Instinct overtook her. When she hit the ground, she was already curled into a ball, her legs tucked against her chest and her arms around her legs, her forehead pressed against her knees. The impact drove the breath from her body. For a moment, she thought she was drowning, and began to flail, reaching for a surface that did not exist, tearing up handfuls of loam and rock. Ground and sky switched places and then switched again. Fatima reached out a hand to stop herself. The world came to a halt and went silent.

  Fatima could hear herself breathing. Faint, rosy outlines of clouds were visible overhead, and all the stars had gone save the herald of morning. She opened and closed her hands. There was a sharp pain in her left side when she breathed in. When she turned her head, she saw white, chalky gravel bordered by pines, the demarcation between the two abrupt and purposeful. Turning on her side, she lifted herself carefully to her knees, repeating in her mind the little lullabies Lady Aisha had sung when she or one of the other children scraped a knee or an elbow in the courtyard of the harem. There was no one to kiss her now: she rocked back and forth, singing to herself under her breath. Her head pounded in time with her heart. It was several minutes before she felt ready to sit up and examine her surroundings.

  The white gravel scar was plane and level and wide enough to admit several wagons abreast; it curved into the distance between the rust-colored cliffs that flanked it on each side. Fatima got to her feet and turned in an unsteady circle. The scar continued behind her, leading briskly uphill, cutting a path through the scrub until it vanished beyond her range of vision.

  It was the road.

  Chapter 10

  It was empty: at such an early hour any sensible merchant or mercenary would still be breaking his fast and readying his horses. Fatima limped a few steps, testing herself. She wanted desperately to sit down, but there was nowhere to conceal herself: the road was hemmed in by cliffs with only a narrow ditch running along one side, a ditch where Fatima could see shattered wheel spokes and bundles of rags and animal bones, the refuse of human transit. An odd clarity overtook her. She limped to the edge of the road, slid down into the ditch among the discarded things, and drew her knife. The voices began again in the high ground. They were shouting, calling downhill toward someone she couldn’t see, and then there were hoof beats on the road behind her, where the ground rose.

  She told herself not to look. The horses were armored or carried armored men: she could hear the chattering complaints of steel on steel. Someone ordered a halt and the clatter ceased. A single rider came forward, the dull iron of his mount’s shod feet grating against the stone, and stopped near Fatima’s head. She closed her eyes.

  “Ho, old boy,” came a woman’s voice, as high and ringing as a girl’s. The horse danced a few steps and chewed noisily on its bit. “That’s enough now.”

  Fatima looked up and into Luz’s face. The sight of her braided hair, the snowy crest of her collarbone above the bodice of her black gown, filled Fatima with a feeling she couldn’t name and didn’t like, something that wandered between fury and regret. Luz was not looking at her. She was staring down the road with a frown, her brows knit together, one hand soothing the neck of her coppery gelding. Fatima adjusted her grip on the knife. Its weight was familiar now; the heft of it calmed her. She couldn’t kill a battalion of armed men with it, but she might kill one woman.

  “Fatima,” came Luz’s voice softly. “Come out, come out.”

  Fatima froze in terror. Luz’s gaze was fixed on the road. At first, Fatima thought it was a trick: Luz was taunting her now, forcing her to reveal herself. But Luz gave no sign of having seen her. She pulled one hand from its black calfskin glove and chewed restlessly at her thumbnail, as if she did not know she was being watched. Her skin glowed faintly as the dawn intensified, illuminating the flush of her bowed lip; yet there was something in her left eye, a splinter perhaps, or a fleck of soot from a campfire, that made Fatima recoil with a disgust she could hardly justify. An unhealthy air clung to Luz’s black velvet shoulders like the residue of a long illness. Fatima’s head throbbed. She was certain she had been spotted—by whom, she couldn’t tell—and dug her fingers deeper into the yielding ground.

  “Are they certain the girl came this way?” Luz called above her. “And that she was alone? No one else was with her?”

  “No one else, my lady,” came a man’s voice.

  “Strange,” murmured Luz. She was silent for a moment. The throbbing in Fatima’s head increased. She closed her eyes again.

  “Bring the man who pursued her,” called Luz, sighing in a weary way. “And bring my implements, please.”

  There was a rattle, a shuffle, the squeal of an offended horse, and several sets of footsteps approached.

  “Here he is, my lady,” said a rough voice. “One of the mercenaries who fo
llowed the girl over the hill.”

  Luz slid from her horse’s back. There came a pretty sound, the clang of fine metal conversing with itself, like an anklet or a necklace unrolled from a velvet pouch, but the sight of it, whatever it was, made the mercenary whimper in fear.

  “Please, my lady,” he begged, “I told the truth, the absolute truth—I ran after her on foot through the gully on the far side of the ridge, and when she came out onto open ground, she jumped—jumped, as plain as could be, into the trees.”

  “Bind his hands, please,” instructed Luz, her voice impossibly gentle.

  “Please!” echoed the mercenary. “I’m telling you the truth!”

  “You’re lying,” said Luz in the same gentle way. “Why would the girl jump? And even if she did—that drop is sharp and high. She would be injured, perhaps even dead if she fell the wrong way, yet I see no sign of her. And where are her companions? A man and a dog on foot with an injured girl—they couldn’t get far, not in this terrain. Yet I see no sign of them either.”

  “Why would I lie?” countered the mercenary, fear making him ambitious. “I’d never laid eyes on her before this morning; I owe her nothing.”

  Metal rang merrily against metal again. The mercenary’s breath went ragged.

  “Perhaps you felt pity for her,” said Luz. “A beautiful girl lost in the mountains—it would be only natural if you did.”

  “She was a slattern,” spat the man. “Out on her own, hair loose, dressed in a fancy man’s robe. Not a respectable lady like you, my lady. I could never feel pity for a girl like that. She was probably a Moor, even pale as she was. She had hair like a Moor’s. They say they’re all feebleminded, the ones that come from south of the Great Desert, no more than animals some of them—”

  “That is a vicious lie,” said Luz calmly. “There is an empire south of the Great Desert larger than any in Europe. The best doctors in the world are trained at its capital. All they lack is faith. If ignorant men like you would not stand in our way, sir, perhaps we could bring it to them.” She drew away to where Fatima could no longer see her.

  “Please,” said the mercenary again, “please—” Metal clinked and sang and the mercenary shrieked in pain.

  “Where did the girl go?” asked Luz. Her voice was soft, maternal.

  “I told you, I’ve already told you—” The mercenary shrieked again. Fatima could smell his fear from where she sat: it congealed with the bittersweet resin of Luz’s perfume to form something rank and almost solid. Fatima felt light-headed. She dug her fingers farther into the earth and pressed the back of her head into the dirt, telling herself to take small breaths, small breaths, though she longed to gasp and run.

  She had a fleeting impulse to reveal herself and spare the mercenary further pain, though she knew he would hardly do the same for her if their places were reversed. Yet the guilt was there nonetheless: she would live and he would not, and though she preferred her own life above his, it hardly seemed fair that he should die for telling the truth.

  “Where is the girl?” coaxed Luz. “This could be over in a moment. I’ll bathe your wounds myself, with my own hands. Wouldn’t you like that?”

  “Yes,” wept the mercenary. “Yes.”

  “Tell me, then.”

  “She jumped, may God be my witness—”

  There came a sound Fatima would remember for the rest of her life: the dull pop of bone forcibly dislodged from its slick cradle. An irreparable sound. Fatima was only half aware when the mercenary tried to scream and found he couldn’t. Stars rose and set in the sliver of sky beyond the ditch; the sun crossed rapidly before her eyes and was lacerated by clouds. She heard a muted exchange, an irritated sigh, and then the sound of horses turning, their iron-shod hooves grating like knives against the gravel road. The retinue moved off in the direction from which it had come, its clatter replaced by the little noises of the woods.

  Dazed and thoughtless, Fatima got to her feet. There was no sign that Luz or her retinue had ever been there but the half-moon depressions of hooves in the packed gravel—that and a spatter of blood, small but ominous, pooling between the stones. She could think of nothing better to do under the circumstances than continue down the road. She climbed out of the ditch and limped away, following the trail of gravel as it spooled south between the sentinel cliffs. The sun had broken free of the mountains and hung low in the east, casting rosy shadows across Fatima’s feet. That she was alive and upright struck her as extraordinary. She lingered on the gold-flecked dust that dripped from the pines, the clumps of green reeds that lined watery depressions in the earth, presaging the sea. How had the brutality she had witnessed occurred on this very same road? Every time she blinked she saw the little spot of blood and heard the thunder of the birds, and wondered how it could all be cut from the same eternal cloth as the sun, the grass, the unseen ocean.

  Fatima was so lost in herself that she did not hear the return of hoof beats at first. It was only a feeling of dread that made her stop and hold her breath. The road was flat there and the sun was high; there was no ditch in which to conceal herself; there were no shadows to protect her. She turned, preparing herself. A very lathered mare was cantering up the road from the north with her head high and her eyes rolling. A large dog, brindle-black, ran along beside her and nipped at her flank. And atop the horse, keeping his seat remarkably well, was Hassan.

  Fatima’s feet gave out; she collapsed onto her knees and then fell to her side, sobbing harder than she ever had in her life, as if her body was trying to expel something upon which she had choked.

  Little idiot, came Vikram’s voice in her head, why are you lying here like a beached porpoise? I expected more backbone from you. Get up. Fatima felt teeth grip the back of her robe. Up, up.

  Fatima forced herself to her feet. She couldn’t catch her breath. Hassan was reaching down: she took his arm, struggling to throw her leg over the mare’s broad back as he hauled her up.

  Run, pretty pony, hummed Vikram. Run as fast as you can, or Vikram will start at your hocks and eat his way up.

  Squealing, the mare turned on her heel and bolted. The road became a shuddering line, the trees a blur on either side. Fatima wrapped her arms around Hassan’s waist. With each hoof beat, her teeth clacked in her jaw. She pressed her face into Hassan’s back to make it stop. He smelled ripe, like sweat that had dried over dirt. She didn’t mind: she took it in, scent and color and all the jumbled sensations that made up the mutable world.

  I want to live, she thought. It seems a terrible lot of trouble, but I want to live.

  I know, said Vikram. You’ve developed a talent for it.

  Chapter 11

  The mare ran until she couldn’t. As the sun climbed higher, they passed slow-moving caravans on the right and left, their haggard custodians leading mules and oxen harnessed to canvas-covered wagons laden with cloth. They stared in disbelief as Vikram set about with his teeth, driving anything that breathed out of their path. No one tried to stop them; no one could. Fatima looked over her shoulder once or twice but could see no evidence of Luz and her men. They pressed on along the road, which widened and narrowed according to the terrain of the valley it followed, shrinking when the mountains on either side grew steep, widening when they flattened out into grassy high plains dotted with the dark green of wild olives. It was the ragged breathing of the mare that finally drew them off the road and into the dwindling hills.

  “This poor beast is done for,” said Hassan, his own breathing labored as he slid off the mare’s back. The cicadas were deafening and seemed to be everywhere. Fatima allowed herself to be lifted down and immediately collapsed, clinging to the withered trunk of a juniper bush when her legs wouldn’t hold her. The mare, too, fell to her knees, her flanks heaving. Bipedal again and barely winded, Vikram sat cross-legged on the ground and cradled the animal’s boxy head in his lap, stroking its ears gently.

  “She’s run her last,” he said. “She won’t get up again. What selfless creature
s horses are. Remember her in your prayers, dull and dumb as she is, for she has saved your lives.”

  The horse groaned and pressed its ears back along its neck. The sight of it was pitiful. Suddenly furious, Fatima lashed out at Vikram’s woolly extremities, kicking him as hard as she could.

  “You left me,” she shouted. “You both left me. I called and you never answered. I wish I’d never set foot in that stupid cave—it was gone the moment I turned my back. I thought I was going to die—I nearly did. You left me.”

  “We looked for you,” said Hassan, crestfallen, his face sallow. “We called too. I had the strangest feeling you were nearby, near enough to touch, even, but I couldn’t see you. We stole this poor horse from a sleeping tinker farther up the road so that we could try to find you. And we did. Everything was all right in the end, wasn’t it?”

  Everything was so profoundly not all right that Fatima thought it best not to answer. She lay down in the stiff grass and drew her knees against her chest. She felt Hassan’s fingers on her head, stroking the curve of her skull.

  “I wouldn’t leave you behind,” he said, sounding hurt. “I didn’t leave you behind. Please don’t shout at me like that.”

  Fatima sniffled and reached back to intertwine her fingers with his.

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I saw Luz on the road. Something was different about her—something was wrong, though I can’t tell what. There was a man who chased me through the hills. She asked him about me, and when he couldn’t answer, she—I was right there, under her feet almost. I should have been caught, I should have been dead.”