The Bird King

by G. Willow Wilson

  Hassan squeezed her hand. The cicadas droned in her ear, their shrill song rising and falling in waves. She knew she should apologize to Vikram as well, but apologies were costly and she hadn’t the stomach for another. When she looked up, she saw his face close to her own, framed by a dark mane, looking, for the moment at least, wry and real.

  “Cousin,” he said. “Haven’t we been friends, in our own way, since you were a fat baby in swaddling clothes? Is this any way to treat such a friend, kicking him and cursing him?”

  Fatima let her head fall forward and buried her face in Vikram’s hair. The scent of it awoke old memories of the harem and its long afternoons, vague and shot through with sunlight.

  “I get so angry,” she said. It was as close to an atonement as she could manage.

  “Anger is good,” she heard him say. “Anger teaches you things. How to lead. How to make the decisions you’d rather not make. It protects you from fear and hesitation and the desire to turn back. Don’t waste it on old Vikram, or on Hassan, who would die for you in a moment.”

  “I was taught to waste it,” said Fatima. As soon as she said the words, she saw the truth of them. “On silly fights with Nessma and the other girls. Clothes and food and who’d gained weight and who’d seen the sultan that day. Lady Aisha encouraged it.”

  “Yes, you were taught to waste your anger. It’s convenient for girls to be angry about nothing. Girls who are angry about something are dangerous. If you want to live, you must learn to use your anger for your own benefit, not the benefit of those who would turn it against you.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “You’ve already begun.” Vikram rose to his feet and surveyed the landscape. “We need to keep moving. Over the top of that next hill is a sight that will make you smile. I’ll carry you for a little while.”

  Fatima clung to Vikram’s shoulders as he lifted her up. Beside her, Hassan stood with a groan.

  “Are we going to leave this valiant creature unburied?” he asked, wincing as he looked at the silent mare.

  “She doesn’t care,” said Vikram. “She’s already grazing in fields of eternal grass. Rally yourself, young Hassan—we’re nearly at the end of this little journey.” With that, Vikram shifted Fatima on his back and set off through the brush, away from the road. Fatima felt herself nodding off, lulled by exhaustion and the hearthlike warmth of Vikram’s body. A crow swooped low and threw its shadow over her neck, complaining hoarsely. Fatima convinced herself it was the same crow she had seen on the mountainside at daybreak, the one that had set off southward into the gloaming when she laughed at it.

  “Lucky crow,” she said. “At least the birds have a proper king, even if we don’t.”

  “Ah, but the crow’s part in that story is not a cheerful one,” said Vikram. “Crows are clannish, disliked birds. None of their cousins will let them roost close by. The smallest songbird will chase down an entire murder of crows that settles too close to her nest. The crow who set off with the hoopoe to find the Bird King was flying into exile, and he knew it.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He chose the love of his king and of his friends over his own happiness.”

  “But doesn’t love make a person happy?”

  “Fatima was raised for the purpose of love. Fatima knows better than most whether love makes a person happy.”

  The horizon rocked back and forth in time with Vikram’s steps. The afternoon light had grown red-orange and brought with it a wind that was light and cool. Fatima knew, somehow, that the summer had spent itself for good; there would be no more days of heavy heat.

  “Love must make people happy sometimes,” she murmured. “Otherwise, I don’t see the point of it.”

  Vikram only chuckled and continued along his invisible path through the grass. Hassan was leaning on him now as well, one hand braced against the jinn’s brindled back, his brown eyes glassy.

  “I had a dream,” he said faintly, wiping his brow, “in the cave last night. I heard you talking as I was nodding off to sleep, and then I dreamed of a great golden bird. I sat in the shade beneath its wings. There was a beach—all lovely pale sand and white cliffs going right down to the water. You were there, Fa. It was very pleasant. You’ve just reminded me of it.”

  Fatima tilted her face toward the sky and thought it was easy to be reminded of pleasant things in this place. The early evening was entering the peak of its violet beauty, heightening the contrast between the parched earth and the green-dark trees. Ahead of them was a sharp drop between two hills: the gap was spanned by the pocked remains of a Roman aqueduct, its stone columns weathered to a golden brown the same shade as the fading grass.

  “How lovely,” said Hassan. He jogged ahead, his satchel thumping against his back. “It’s even taller than the one outside Granada,” he called back to them. “What master builders the Romans were! You’ve never been on the high road into the North, Fa—wide enough to race horses on and as level as you like, and over a thousand years old. How the earth remembers!” He sat down on a flat rock with a sigh, craning his neck to take in the stone edifice above them. Vikram veered around him.

  “Hold on,” he instructed, and leaped up the rocky incline that hugged the aqueduct’s right side, his talons crumbling the stone as he went. Fatima held her breath and shut her eyes. Her center of balance shifted wildly, leaving her dizzy even with her eyes shut, as though the world had spun off its axis. After several long minutes of this, Vikram came to a stop.

  “You can open your eyes now,” he said in a merry voice. Fatima opened one and then the other. They stood at the crest of the hill. Below the aqueduct, the ground wandered down into the winking lights of a small city, its red-brown tile roofs overhung with smoke; at its zenith was a dusty rise on which stood a Roman fortress. Beyond that, the earth stopped, replaced by a color Fatima had never seen. It was neither green nor blue but encompassed both of these, like dark glass. It broke against the land in a line of white froth, which pushed and pulled against a thin ribbon of sand in a rhythm she could hear from where she stood. Fatima’s throat closed. Her robe furled around her ankles as if to draw her into the wind, which rushed down the hillside toward the waves like an eager lover.

  “That’s the sea,” she rasped.

  Vikram sat on his haunches with a sigh. “Yes. That is the sea.”

  Fatima reached toward it with her hands. The color stretched out toward a horizon that was perfectly flat, where it merged with the setting sun.

  “I want to touch it,” she said. “It can’t really be water. It must be something else. I want to touch it.”

  Vikram only smiled and began to sing. Fatima stood where she was and listened to the breathing of the waves. She could hear Hassan struggling up the hillside toward them, exhaustion making his gait halting and irregular. At the summit, he lowered himself to the ground and reached up for Fatima’s hand.

  “We’re alive,” he marveled. “Three days on foot over bad terrain, with worse food, and nearly murdered, and we are still alive. If only Lady Aisha could see us now.”

  “I don’t even care about that,” said Fatima. “I don’t want to look at anything else except the sea, ever again. Let the Holy Office come.”

  “Let it not,” sighed Hassan, leaning against her leg. He followed her gaze over the firelit town and down to the open water. The roll and hush of the waves below steadily filled the silence between them. The line of sand thinned minute by minute as Fatima watched it, and the slim hulls of beached fishing boats began to right themselves and float.

  “The beach is disappearing,” she said, alarmed. “It’s filling up with water. Look.”

  “The tide is coming in,” laughed Hassan. “It’ll go out again before dawn.”

  “Why?”

  “The moon pulls the water when it rises and sets.”

  “The moon?” Fatima looked over her shoulder and saw a waning crescent peek out from beyond the hilltops. “How is that possible?”

/>   “Merciful God, I don’t know. But the look on your face right now is so funny. Ask some more questions.”

  Fatima realized her mouth was hanging open and shut it. She lay down and looked at the first of the stars overhead. They glittered faintly, multiplying as the light faded. The air was full of salt and smoke. There seemed, for the first time since she had left the Alhambra, paths through the great world that were open to her.

  “It’s time to make a decision,” came Vikram’s voice in the twilight, gently. Fatima turned to look at him. His hair streamed down across his shoulders, lifting strand by strand in the light wind; his smile was, she thought, a little sad.

  “Not now,” she begged, propping herself up on one elbow. “I haven’t had a rest since before dawn.”

  “You can’t live on this hill. Down in the harbor there are ships. Each will run a different course, but you can only board one.”

  Fatima twisted Lady Aisha’s ring on her finger. Now that she had the leisure to admit it to herself, she found she had thought no farther than this hill at the edge of the map that hung on the wall in the sultan’s bedroom, beyond which was only blank paper and Hassan’s crudely drawn sea serpent: perhaps she never believed they would survive long enough to decide what came next. They had fled to spite their masters but now they must live for something else. The how seemed as important as the where, but the where came first, and try as she might, Fatima could not imagine a place that felt safe.

  “Should we cross the Strait, like everyone else?” she hazarded.

  “You ask that as if there is a right and a wrong answer,” said Vikram. He was looking at her in a way she found unsettling.

  “I want to say something,” announced Hassan, looking out toward the water. “Something mad.”

  Fatima recognized the vacant light that had entered Hassan’s eyes and quaked inwardly.

  “The thing I do with maps. I’ve always wondered whether it isn’t some kind of intuition, better than what everyone else has, but the same sort of thing: whittling unconsciously through possibilities until I arrive at the sole possibility, the truth. Like being very, very good at guessing, so good that sometimes the angels indulge me and make my guess right even when it isn’t—so that a cave appears in the rocks, or a tower in the palace, or a trapdoor in the floor of my room. That’s what it feels like—like being spoiled by heaven as if I’m some willful but beloved child. Though I don’t know why it should be so—I haven’t been good, not really.” He sniffed and rubbed his nose absently with the back of one hand. Fatima felt a swell of tenderness and pulled his hands away from his face, kissing one and then the other.

  “You’re wonderful,” she pressed. “You don’t lie or steal or gossip and when you’ve had a terrible day, you don’t even take it out on your friends.” She paused, her words hanging reproachfully in the back of her mouth. Everything seemed clearer to her on the hilltop: the horizon and the curve of the earth, and also her own faults, which seemed to multiply the farther she got from the life that had fostered them. “You’ve saved the lives of people who are afraid of you,” she said in a softer voice. “More than once.”

  Hassan was shaking his head.

  “It’s not enough. Luz and her inquisitors are probably right: I should be put on the rack and made to atone or some such thing, for my impudence if nothing else.”

  “No one can choose who God loves, or change who God loves,” said Vikram. “Not even the Inquisition.”

  Hassan looked back toward the water.

  “I want to say something,” he repeated. Fatima knew what it was, and her heart sank.

  “I can get us to Qaf,” he said. “I can get us to the isle of the Bird King. That’s where we should go. That’s where we’ll be safe.”

  Fatima closed her eyes and attempted to muster her self-restraint.

  “It’s a game, Hassan,” she said as gently as she could. “We were bored children shut up in a crumbling palace, so we made it up. Bit by bit. We made up a story.”

  “But that’s just it,” said Hassan, leaning toward her. “What if our stories are like my maps? What is a story but the map of an idea? There is a secret in the poem of Al Attar—we made it into a joke because joking felt better than despairing. But perhaps that is the secret. The Bird King is real, and we are his subjects.”

  “Hassan—”

  “What other choice do we have?” Hassan’s voice rose unsteadily. Fatima pressed her hands to the sides of his face, smoothing away the mania that lodged in the creases around his eyes. She understood now: he was not quite mad, but he had chosen madness over despair. Yet if she followed him there, into madness, it meant she had despaired already.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he begged. “Please.”

  “All right, all right.” She pulled away. The sea below her was unchanged, or rather, it was changing as it always had, exhaling against the brief shoreline, a white curl of froth the only bright color left in the waning day. She should have seen it. The way he had laughed at meeting Vikram, at the scout they had left dead beneath the willow tree on the Vega: the brittleness of it, his fine nervousness, like that of a racing horse. Of course he was going mad. He needed solid walls and certainty to counter the constant upheaval of his gift. If the world couldn’t keep him safe, he would seek safety in the stories of their childhood. Her cheeks were wet: she dried them with her sleeve and tried to smile.

  “I’m not mad,” he said, reading her thoughts. “I’m as sane as I’ve ever been, though perhaps that’s not saying much. I’ve just decided we weren’t ever living in the world we thought we were. Everyone always looked at me and saw the odd one, the freak, the pervert. But maybe I wasn’t any of those things. If we can drop through a door and land in the dark, in those tunnels beneath the palace, and see demons, and the palace dog was really a jinn after all, who’s to say I wasn’t the only person in that pile of stone who saw things clearly? Why did we tell each other those stories if not to escape? We were making a map, Fa. We can follow it out of this.”

  He made her want to believe, though she was no more convinced than she had been when he first suggested it. The thought of leaving entirely, leaving not just the siege, the war, the threat of capture, but the world itself, caught her powerfully, and she answered him before thinking.

  “All right,” she said. “We’ll do as you like. We’ll go to Qaf.”

  Hassan grinned. Fatima saw his fingers, bluish under the moon, twitch on the leather flap of his satchel.

  “I’ve never tried to draw a sea chart,” he said. “I’ve only been on a boat a handful of times, and never out of sight of land.”

  “You want to try,” said Vikram, roused from silence. “Your fingers say so.”

  “But if I can’t—” Hassan flexed his hands and began to crack each knuckle, one after another. “We’ll die of thirst or drown or be killed by brigands or worse.”

  “You’ll never be free of danger. But that’s a choice you’ve already made. If you wanted certainty, you would never have left Granada.” The jinn studied Hassan intently, as if to assess his fitness: if he thought Hassan mad, his face did not betray it. Yet he seemed to be waiting for something, and Fatima, now that she had made her decision, did not want to linger and hear a jinn talk her out of it.

  “We’re going,” said Fatima. “Hassan, draw your map.”

  There was a small pause.

  “I’ll need some light,” he said.

  Fatima knelt next to him and put her arms around his neck.

  “I love you madly,” she whispered. “Even when we do get lost and drown or die of thirst or any of those other horrible things, I’ll still love you madly.”

  Hassan kissed her shoulder.

  “We won’t get lost,” he said.

  Husn Al Munakkab was cloaked in a murky darkness that was half smoke, half fog. This was a blessing, or so Vikram said, for it made two silent travelers and a dog less remarkable as they slipped through streets of salted mud toward the harbor.
Torches lined the main thoroughfares, where weary fishermen loaded the evening catch into barrels and onto wagons, assisted by equally weary boys who managed the tack of their mules and oxen. The side streets were dark, however, and it was along these that Vikram led them, skirting kitchen gardens and lines of washing hung out to dry and the constant punctuation of animal waste.

  Fatima had taken another sash from Hassan’s canvas sack and draped it over her head and shoulders, pulling one end over her face as a freewoman would do in the presence of men, leaving only her eyes exposed. Managing this was unexpectedly difficult. Lady Aisha had always made an art of it, holding her scarf across her cheekbone with three fingers, her wrist bent at an elegant angle. Fatima feared her own clumsy approximation would give her away. She felt shy in the unfamiliar garment, even fraudulent; she had to remind herself that she had the same right to wear it now as any freeborn girl. Yet there were no other women in evidence: she could hear women’s voices singing or scolding children from inside the mud-plaster houses they passed, but the streets, it seemed, belonged to the realm of men.

  Eager to appear irrelevant, Fatima kept her head down, watching the interwoven tread of Hassan’s boots and Vikram’s paws. She made a game of setting her feet precisely where Hassan’s had been, filling his watery footprints with her own, exactly equal in size in her borrowed boots. They had been walking for at least a quarter of an hour when the footprints paused. Fatima looked up. A forest of masts was bobbing between the roofs of the houses up ahead. She almost gave a little cry of happiness, but Vikram nipped at her hand.

  Quiet, he murmured from somewhere inside her skull. There is a man behind us, and he stopped when we stopped. No, don’t look. There may be more where he came from.

  Fatima pursed her lips to keep from making a sound. Beside her, Hassan was clutching a thin sheaf of paper to his chest as he walked, and seemed not to hear what Vikram had said to her. He had drawn the map while hunched over a stack of split wood behind a barn at the edge of town, beneath a greenish circle of lantern light. It was not like the other times Fatima had watched him work. He swayed back and forth like a woman in childbirth, muttering to himself and sometimes to Vikram, who had perched on a log beside him to hum and stroke his hair, like some demonic midwife. It had taken so long that Fatima became restless and wandered too far away, nearly getting lost on a cow path as the night darkened. Afterward, Hassan had been flushed and quiet. He showed the map to Fatima only once before clasping it to his chest: it was a beautiful thing, an astonishing thing, radiant with rhumb lines originating at set intervals across an empty sea. To the east was the coastline from the map that hung on the wall of his palace workroom; to the west, where the sea serpent had been, was an island.