It was an odd shape, nearly rectangular, punctured by small harbors shaped like flowers. It had the effect of something man-made, something imaginary, and when Fatima looked at it, her resolve had wavered.
Yet she said nothing, and neither had Hassan. He looked defiant now, staring past Fatima at the row of masts before them. Only Vikram looked back, his canine tongue lolling between his teeth with a look of unmistakable irritation.
This will be more difficult than I had hoped, he said. One, two, three—yes, four of them. You’ll have to run for it.
You’re not coming with us? The thought came unbidden.
No, I’m not. I told Lady Aisha I would see you safely across the Vega, and I have. What happens now is your own affair.
But—instinctively, her hand went to the scruff of the dog’s neck, which she had shaken and caressed so many times. We can’t just part like this. This is such a silly way to leave things. I’m afraid. Vikram—
He shook her off and padded down the street in the direction they had come from. Fatima felt her heart begin to race.
Vikram!
Damn it all, don’t you dare panic now. Go, run. Both of you.
Fatima let the scarf fall from her face and seized Hassan’s free hand. He yelped as she pulled him along, splashing through a pool of foul-smelling water in her haste to move forward. A vile curse followed them, succeeded by the sickening hiss of a drawn sword. Unable to resist, Fatima looked back.
Four men in dark doublets and mud-spattered woolen hose circled uneasily around Vikram, who looked, in the darkness and at this distance, like little more than a shadow with teeth. One of the men feinted toward him with a dagger, only to be rewarded by a perfect semicircle of puncture marks on his arm. His scream was so high and terrified that Fatima felt momentarily light-headed. The scream brought shouts and whistles and still other men, who came rushing down an alleyway with their weapons already drawn.
“There! Toward the docks!” The one in front, his face masked beneath a steel half helm, pointed toward Fatima and Hassan with his pike. Beneath his cuirass, his doublet was red and black. Fatima’s stomach dropped.
“She’s here,” she whispered. “Those are her men.”
Hassan pushed her forward. The street behind them was dark where blood had soaked into the muddy ground. Vikram snapped and snarled at the men in red and black, but there were too many. Fatima saw the blade of a slender espadon flash in the torchlight and heard a wail that was neither human nor animal. She fell against Hassan, screaming. This was the wrong thing to do. The man with the espadon looked up and into her eyes and pointed toward her with a mail-clad finger. A moment later, the men in red and black closed in, and the shadow, or what was left of it, was entirely eclipsed.
“Let’s go—please, Fa, please.”
There was a sharp tug on her arm. Fatima didn’t realize she had stopped, and stumbled onward, too dazed to speak. The tangle of houses and refuse and wash lines parted in front of them: the horizon opened, revealing a wooden wharf with a line of cogs and fishing vessels moored alongside it, bobbing up and down in the soft swells. Under the moon, the boats were only half real, the conveyances of ghosts, their softly clanking masts discolored in the faint light.
“Which one? Which one?” Hassan was turning in a circle, the map clutched in one hand. He laughed in a way that frightened Fatima. She was struck by the impossibility of their enterprise. Even if they had time to search for one, no captain alive would agree to sail west with only Hassan’s map for reassurance—not for the ring on Fatima’s finger, nor for all the rings in Lady Aisha’s jewel box. Yet there was no way of escape now except by water. Fatima took one breath, and then another. Wrapping her fingers around Hassan’s sleeve, she pulled him down the nearest gangway, a mere plank of wood that shuddered under their combined weight, and tumbled him onto the deck of a small one-masted cog. The deck was pungent with the smell of tar and hemp. The cog was moored to a post with a thick rope, tied with a knot so elaborate that Fatima thought she might lose her wits entirely.
“Help me!” called Hassan. He had drawn his knife and was sawing furiously at the rope, just beyond the deck rail. Fatima hurried to do likewise, fumbling as her dagger balked at such a menial task, better suited to a sailor’s knife or a pair of shears. There were raised voices on the wharf. Fatima said another prayer, for herself, for Vikram, and most of all for the rope, which unwound strand by strand, complaining as it pulled against itself. Hooves clattered against wood, too close. Fatima looked up as the last strand of hemp snapped and the cog glided free, its sails belling eagerly in the night wind.
Luz was sitting astride her copper gelding at the edge of the wharf. For a moment, she was almost close enough to touch. She said nothing, only looked at Fatima with a colorless expression, her mouth set in a rigid line. Fatima looked back at her. She wanted to speak but could find nothing to say that Luz did not already know. The intimacy between hunter and prey had rendered speech unnecessary. Luz raised one gloved hand. A salute, or a farewell, or a warning; Fatima couldn’t tell. She raised her own hand unconsciously. A smile formed on Luz’s lips. Then the ashy fog that clung to the shoreline closed around her gelding’s feet. The lights, the town, the Roman fortress on the rise above it, the aqueduct standing guard in the hills above that: all were muted in gray, and there was only Luz, clothed in a veil of smoke.
Chapter 12
Fatima sat down where she was. Waves lapped at the sides of the cog, which heaved in time with the rising water. Hassan took her hand. They leaned against one another, panting for breath, until Luz had vanished, her image swallowed by the nervous sea. The stars returned to their stations in the darkness overhead. Fatima realized she was still holding her dagger and slid it back into its sheath, flexing her cramped fingers.
“Vikram—” said Hassan anxiously.
“Don’t.” Fatima pressed her hands against her eyes and bit back a sob. “Don’t.”
“What are we supposed to do now?” demanded Hassan, loosing her hand. “Without Vikram, we’re just two hapless idiots with a map. How do we steer this boat? How are we to provision ourselves?”
“Vikram’s lying dead on the wharf where we left him and this is all you can think about? He never promised to hold our hands for the rest of our lives. He said he’d take us across the Vega and he did, and now—” Fatima broke off as her breath caught.
“He abandoned us,” insisted Hassan. “We were meant to board a ship with a captain, a crew even, to buy passage as Lady Aisha said, not to commandeer a vessel like a couple of sad pirates.”
“Buy passage? Buy passage? To an island nobody can get to without your map?”
“Yes! That ruby on your finger would’ve been enough to convince an unscrupulous captain, and there are more than a few of those in Husn Al Munakkab.”
“This was your idea.” Fatima slammed her fist against the deck for emphasis. She looked about her for something she could throw for yet greater emphasis, but found nothing useful: only the salt-bleached wood of the deck and a coil of rope listing against the stern castle behind her. Instead, she lay down where she was, curling into the railing of the deck, which lifted and dropped her in an easy rhythm. Sleep suggested itself. The deck was warm and level, a better and safer bed than any she had had in recent nights. Thinking too hard, about Vikram or anything else, seemed wildly irresponsible.
She sat up when she heard a door bang open and shut again.
Hassan seized her arm with a startled cry. On the narrow wooden steps leading down to the galley stood a young northern man in the white woolen habit and black cloak of a Dominican friar, his straw-colored hair tousled from sleep. He froze where he was, staring at Fatima and Hassan in blank disbelief. Though he was not a tall man, the breadth and heaviness of his shoulders gave him the appearance of one. He had a face like a butcher’s cleaver: all thick, reddened angles beneath a prominent brow, yet his eyes were very blue and had a candid, appealing symmetry, rendering the sum of his parts les
s hostile than it might have been.
He frowned at them, fumbling in his corded belt for a weapon he did not seem to possess. For a long moment, no one spoke.
“Fa,” whispered Hassan. “I think we’ve kidnapped a monk.”
The monk looked from Fatima to Hassan with his lip curled.
“Penaos oc’h deuet?” His voice was low and grated on the ear. Hassan, in lieu of an answer, attempted to smile, and for a moment, Fatima thought everything might be all right. Then the monk seemed to coil up and threw himself across the width of the deck. He collided with Hassan, who shrieked, and both of them went down in a tangle of limbs. Fatima heard Hassan’s head hit the saltswollen planks beneath it. The sound froze in her guts.
“Stop!” She reached out and wrapped her hands around the first thing they encountered, the pointed end of the monk’s long cowl, and pulled as hard as she could. The monk fell backward with a squawk. Hassan was looking upward into the phantom darkness without expression, his eyes fluttering. Fatima drew her knife.
“If you’ve hurt him, I’ll kill you,” she said between her teeth. Blue eyes stared up at her in astonishment. “Do you understand me? I’ll kill you.” The monk struggled to sit: she drew back her foot and kicked him in the jaw, harder than she meant to, and sent him reeling back again, spitting blood. He moaned once, steadying himself on his hands. Fatima knelt on the deck next to Hassan and stroked his face.
“Please say something,” she whispered. He was gasping, his eyes wide and sightless.
“I see light,” he said. “I see light, but not you.”
Fatima put her cheek against his chest and closed her own eyes, battered by waves of hot and cold that seemed to break against her skin. It was impossible that Hassan should be hurt. Why had she come so far if not to avoid having to endure the world without Hassan in it? She thought of his narrow back as he hunched over his desk, his smile as he pretended not to notice her slip into his room and lift wedges of charcoal from the bowl beside him; he had been a boy, she barely more than an infant, and there had been a thousand other such moments, ordinary then but precious now, for they had been innocents together. She sat on her heels and howled, wondering if she could muster the courage to turn her knife on herself.
“Oh for the love of God—he’ll be all right.” The monk, smelling of wool and sweat, lowered himself to the deck beside her. He winced and rubbed his jaw. A line of blood was congealing across his clean-shaven cheek. “No reason to panic and carry on so. It’s only a bump on the head.” His Sabir was broad and accented, delivered with a singsong rhythm. “You can understand me when I speak like this, yes?”
Fatima forced herself to look up at him. There was no malice in his face, only a profound fatigue.
“Yes,” she said.
The monk nodded.
“I’ve a tooth loose,” he muttered, bending over Hassan. “You did me one better than I did this blev’ruz.” He cupped Hassan’s chin and turned his face one way and then the other. “You, friend. Does that hurt?”
“N-no.”
“I took you for brigands. Now I see you’re a couple of fops. You could have killed me twice over with those knives, as I’ve no weapon. But you can hardly even hold them properly.” He opened and closed his mouth experimentally, leaning sideways to spit a driblet of blood on the deck. “Your lover will live, madam, but he’ll shortly have a headache that’d make angels weep, infidel though he is.”
“It’s already here,” groaned Hassan, pressing his hands against his eyes. “It feels like being punished for something I didn’t do. I think I’d prefer death, all things considered.”
The monk laughed hoarsely. It was a good, full sound; an immodest sound; the laugh of a man who was not often afraid. Fatima felt her shoulders uncurl.
“I’m Gwennec,” said the monk. “Brother Gwennec, they call me. You’d best not move awhile, blev’ruz. If you think the pain’s bad now, wait until you get up and the blood rushes out of your head.” He looked as though he wanted to say something else, but his eyes traveled across the deck and out to the white-capped waves, and his smile fell.
“We’re at sea,” he said. The cog listed a little, as if to concur with him. Gwennec got to his feet, hitching up the skirt of his habit with one hand and nursing his jaw with the other. “Where is the harbor? Where is the lady Luz? What the hell have you done?”
Fatima groped for her knife again.
“I’m profoundly sorry to tell you this,” said Hassan, flat on his back, “but we’ve stolen this boat and have no immediate plans to return it. You’ll have to come with us, unless you’re a very good swimmer.”
Gwennec’s face darkened until his complexion was a shade of red Fatima had never seen before. He paced up and down along the deck railing, massaging his jaw.
“Stolen the boat,” he exploded. “Are you out of your minds? Which one of you is the crack sailor? Our delicate friend whom I laid out on the deck? Or you, madam? Where is your crew? Where are your supplies? Damn you both.” He sat down with a groan. His face, Fatima noticed, was swelling where she had kicked it.
“We had no choice,” she said, adjusting her grip on the dagger. “It was that or stay behind and be taken by the Holy Office, or go—” She almost said “back,” and realized, with some surprise, that the thought was abhorrent to her. Luz seemed a lesser punishment than returning to captivity, though captivity was surely pleasanter than death by burning was likely to be. Yet the internal logic of the palace, with its precise gradients of worth and worthiness, had failed her beneath that lonely tree on the Vega, at the feet of the dead Castilian scout, and would never be real to her again.
“The Holy Office,” muttered Gwennec. “I was wrong about you twice, and I was too kind in both instances. Here I thought, Ah, not brigands—running away, more like, perhaps their families wouldn’t let them marry or some such thing.’ But you’re worse than runaways and worse than brigands. What could you have done that’s so bad the Holy Office is after you?”
“I’m a sorcerer,” said Hassan.
“Aye, I can see that. You’ve transported us into open water without a damned idea where we’re pointed, all by cutting through a fucking rope. That’s magic.” Gwennec tucked the dirty hem of his habit into the cord at his waist, exposing a pair of shins covered in the same thick blond hair that populated his head, and divesting himself of his sandals, vaulted onto the mast to make for the rigging.
“You haven’t even set the mainsail!” he called down. “That’s why we’re keeling! Were you aiming to swamp the boat and drown? Take that rope that’s flapping about down there—yes, you, madam, since our friend is having a little rest.”
Fatima sheathed her dagger and stumbled across the deck as the cog pitched, sending a spray of froth over the railing. There was, indeed, a rope trailing from one corner of the mainsail, slapping against the outer railing in a petulant rhythm. Though it was thicker than her wrist, Fatima wrapped it around both hands and braced her feet against the deck.
“My name is Fatima,” she called up to the monk, who was holding himself aloft on a ratline with his toes and appeared to be cursing in his own language. “Not madam.”
“I don’t care,” snapped Gwennec. “The less I know, the less I’ll have to tell the inquisitors when they catch up with us, which they will. Christ Jesus, the beating I’ll get! I was meant to be keeping watch over this damned boat while the others went ashore.” He looped another, thinner rope around a beam partway up the mast, twisting it into a series of shapes which, when he pulled them, miraculously became a knot. The rope went taut and the mainsail belled out, carrying the little cog over a swell with such force that Fatima thought they might leave the water and take to the sky. Her own rope began to resist her violently. She dug her feet into the humid deck and pulled back with all her strength, certain, for one grave moment, that she was going to be slung overboard into the froth below.
Gwennec landed on the deck beside her with a thump and dried his hands on his
habit.
“A good, following wind tonight,” was all he said, relieving Fatima of the rope. He looped it around one shoulder and leaned into it like an ox in harness, gritting his teeth. The mainsail swung slowly around until the beam above their heads made a right angle with the mast. The cog settled into the wind almost meekly. With a weary sigh, Gwennec threw the rope around a large dowel set into the railing.
“Watch me,” he said. “This is a reef knot. You’ll need to know how to tie one, if you plan to make landfall in one piece.” He took two loops of rope, one in each hand, and bent them over each other. “Left hand, right hand. See?”
Fatima did not, but nodded anyway.
“You seem more like a fisherman than a monk,” she said. Gwennec shrugged, unoffended.
“You’re correct, as it happens. I was a fisherman until I took vows. My family fishes cod off the Breton coast.”
“Are you Breton?” called Hassan, sounding livelier. “So was my grandmother. She was captured from a trading ship that got caught up in some kind of naval encounter near the Strait. Her family never ransomed her, so my grandfather ransomed her as a dowry and married her. I’m one-quarter Breton.”
“Well I’m four-quarters Breton,” snapped Gwennec. “And if you think I’m going to clap you on the back and call you brother because your grandfather kidnapped one of my countrywomen, you’d best think again.”
The Bird King Page 17