“There’s no need to be ugly about it,” said Hassan. He raised himself to his elbows with a groan. “I was only making conversation. Am I supposed to act contrite over something that happened forty years before I was born?”
“Not contrite,” Gwennec muttered, untucking his habit from his belt. “Only a little less glib.”
The cog rose and dipped, gliding down the far side of the swell almost gently, as if to apologize for its earlier misbehavior. For a moment, Fatima saw a young, red-haired woman standing at the rail, wearing a dress too thin for strong weather. She wondered whether Hassan’s grandmother had mourned in secret, whether she had looked upon her children with ambivalence, as offspring who were not quite hers, from whom her history had been erased. Was it possible to love children born of war? Fatima tried to remember her own mother’s face and found she couldn’t. Perhaps if she had birthed her child in her own land, among those she loved, she would have lived.
“My grandfather loved her, if that means anything,” said Hassan in a different voice. “She used to sing to us in her own language. I’ve forgotten the words now. I was her favorite grandchild. Out of all of us, I was the only one who inherited her coloring.”
Gwennec studied Hassan with a scowl. “You do have a Breizhiz look about you,” he said. “Though only in the hair and complexion. Your features are Moorish.” He spat a clot of blood onto the deck. Turning his back, he stumped up the short steps to the raised platform that made up the stern castle and ran his hands over the tiller, soothing it as he might a nervous horse. Satisfied with whatever the tiller had told him, he tugged on several of the slender ropes that ran from the top of the mast to the deck railing, testing each for tension. His hands, like his face, were red and wind-roughened, but Fatima liked the way he used them: they were fluent, like Hassan’s, though their language was wood and water instead of paper and ink. When they finally settled on the tiller again, the cog began to turn, gliding obediently where they told it to go.
“What are you doing?” cried Fatima, roused as if from sleep.
“Turning around,” said Gwennec. “The wind will be against us, but if we tack a little, we should make it back to port in a few hours.”
Fatima stared hard at Gwennec. He only spat again and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Gathering her robe, Fatima ran up the steps to the stern castle and dug her nails into Gwennec’s clever hands, wrenching them away from the tiller. Gwennec gave a hoarse cry and danced backward. Fatima put herself between him and the tiller, pressing her back into it until she felt the pressure in her spine.
“We’re not going back,” she said. Though she had spoken as calmly as she could, her voice shook. “She can’t have him and neither can you. He’s mine. He isn’t a sorcerer. I’m not giving him up to die.”
Gwennec’s face rearranged itself, the lines and hard edges softening with incredulity. He looked her up and down.
“My God, but you’re made of stern stuff,” he said. “Somebody must have done you a terrible wrong if you’ve lost your natural fear of the sea.”
Fatima looked over the railing at the nameless hues rising and falling around them, the green that was also gray, the deep wine color that hinted at an element finer than water, an echo of the fire the alchemists said burned undying at the center of the world. Every sinew in her body was taut; the profound anxiety of being so close to both escape and recapture left no room for any other emotion.
“I’d never seen the sea until earlier this evening,” she said. “I don’t know it well enough to fear it.”
Gwennec was shaking his head, though whether in admiration or disgust, she couldn’t tell.
“They say people in love do mad things,” he said. “But this is madness of a purer sort than any I’ve ever seen.”
It was the second time he had implied that Fatima and Hassan were lovers. Fatima glanced at Hassan, but he had closed his eyes again and was pinching the bridge of his nose, taking long, dramatic breaths to quell his headache.
“We’re not in love,” said Fatima.
“You must think I’m an idiot,” said Gwennec. “I might be a monk, but I still know what two people in love look like.”
“It isn’t like that.” Fatima felt her cheeks go hot. “We’re not—we don’t—Hassan doesn’t—”
“In addition to being a sorcerer, I’m also a sodomite,” supplied Hassan. “But let it be known that I am passionately in love with you, Fa. I’d offer to marry you if it were even remotely fair to either of us. Alas. The world doesn’t supply happy endings to people like us.”
Fatima looked at Gwennec and saw her own bafflement mirrored on his face. She wondered with fresh alarm whether Hassan might really be injured, and tripped back down the steps of the stern castle to kneel by his side. He looked up at her and cocked one eyebrow.
“This blond, hulking fellow, on the other hand, I would tumble in an instant,” he said to her in Arabic. “If he could only be persuaded.”
“Shush,” said Fatima, looking over her shoulder. “What’s wrong with you? Why are you saying these things? I’m worried you’ve cracked your skull. And anyway, he’s celibate.”
“It only adds to his appeal.”
“You shouldn’t have made that little speech.” Fatima smoothed the front of his robe with hands that shook. “Northerners aren’t friendly to men like you. Who knows what he might do now that you’ve told him?”
“North, south—it’s all the same,” muttered Hassan. “Even in the Alhambra, all it would have taken is for four pious men of sound mind to open my bedroom door at the wrong moment, and I would have been banished or executed. The only reason I still have all my limbs is that everyone was willing to pretend I’m something I’m not.”
“They pretended because they loved you,” said Fatima. She smoothed and smoothed, as if her hands could brush away whatever had possessed him.
“That’s not love,” said Hassan, shaking his head. “You were the only one there who loved me, Fa.”
On impulse, Fatima bent and kissed him. She didn’t want him, exactly, but the intensity of feeling that overwhelmed her suddenly had no other means of expression. His lips were warm and soft and dry and parted under her own without returning their pressure.
“Marry me anyway,” she said, withdrawing only a little. “We like each other best of anyone. The other things don’t matter.”
The smile that rose to Hassan’s mouth was too quick. It told her he had considered and rejected this possibility, perhaps many times over.
“They matter, sweet friend,” he said. “They matter.”
Gwennec thumped down the stairs from the stern castle and sat down hard on the last step, splaying his legs and leaning back on his elbows like a large child.
“You’re a very strange pair,” he said. “And not to be trusted with a ship.” The wind was only skimming the mainsail now, and the ship rode over each swell at an angle, bringing the surface of the water up and down, up and down, as though the bow were a needle pulling through cloth. Fatima saw the lights of Husn Al Munakkab bobbing in the distance.
“Turn us back around,” she said to Gwennec, her chest rising and falling with the water. “Or show me how.”
Gwennec glanced out at the lights and rubbed his scalp vigorously with his fingertips, shedding dander on the shoulders of his black cloak.
“You don’t really want that,” he said. “There’s barely any food to speak of on board. A couple of casks of water, another of wine, though that’s not much good to you Mohammedans. Wherever it is you think you’re going, you won’t get there in this ship, not without resupplying.” He looked around the deck and laughed harshly. “And not without someone who knows a thing or two about sailing.”
“Did you say wine?” Hassan sat up and looked suddenly alert. “Do you think you could go and get me a ladleful, since we’re having such a nice conversation?”
“You drink, then?”
“I do. I have. I’ve broken one of God’s dictates. I m
ight as well break several. It’s a cycle, you see—I adore Him, I disobey Him, and I drink to make sense of it.”
Gwennec looked hurt, as if Hassan had leveled a personal insult.
“I don’t think that’s so,” he said. “God isn’t like that. He knows we’ve all got things we can’t do or can’t stop. It doesn’t follow that we’re excused from those things we can do and can stop.”
Hassan, wincing, propped himself against the deck rail with a dry smile.
“You really are a monk,” he said. “Can I have some wine or not?”
Gwennec snorted and rose to his feet. Crossing the deck in a few long strides, he clattered down into the darkened hold, from whence came the sound of a barrel scraping across the floor. After a moment, he emerged again, balancing three dripping wooden cups dexterously between his fingers. Two cups were full of dark liquid, but the third was clear; this he set beside Fatima.
“Water for you, madam,” he said. “Since you told me no different. Here, blev’ruz. Your liquor.”
Hassan reached up and took the cup reverently between his hands. He drained it in a few gulps, smacking his lips with obvious relish.
“Bless you, Brother Gwennec,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of one hand. “My head feels better already.”
Gwennec himself took only a small sip before grimacing and setting his cup on the ground.
“The salt air has tainted it,” he said. “In Breizh, we drink ale and beer. Keeps better at sea. But southerners insist on the fancy stuff by land or water.”
Fatima, forgetting herself, leaned over Gwennec’s cup and sniffed: a vinegar smell, embroidered with a more compelling scent of fruit and earth, jutted into her nose. She leaned back, tears pricking her eyes.
“How do you drink this?” she asked from behind the sleeve of her robe. “It smells like something the washerwoman uses to make soap.”
Hassan and Gwennec laughed. Hassan pushed his empty cup toward Gwennec and helped himself to the monk’s full one, raising it in a halfhearted toast before draining it as he had his first. Gwennec smiled and let his head loll back against the railing. His skin, though coarse, was unlined; despite his skill in handling the ship and reckoning with God, he could not be older than Hassan, and might well be closer in age to Fatima herself. Fatima could see doubt flickering in his eyes: he had fought and laughed and reconciled with them, and this had upset the straightforward matter of turning them over to his masters. She told herself not to hope too much, though hope promptly suffused her limb by limb, making her heart thud against her ribs.
“Show me how to turn the ship,” she said again, in a softer voice. Gwennec studied her for a moment. His gaze made her uneasy: it was frank, direct, without any of the cool hesitation of the men of the Alhambra, to whom she had been both an object of desire and a source of uneasiness.
“Where is it you mean to go?” asked Gwennec. Fatima leaned over and coaxed Hassan’s satchel from behind his back. Unbuckling it, she withdrew the map, curling now from the damp and the heat of Hassan’s body. She held it out toward Gwennec, only to be stricken with fear as he took it from her, worried for a moment that he would tear it up, or worse, that he would laugh.
Gwennec did neither. He adjusted himself so that the slender moon was at his back and frowned hard, attempting to read Hassan’s complex web of intersecting rhumb lines in the weak light.
“This is a portolan chart,” he said with some astonishment. “Where did you get this? Did you steal it?”
“I made it,” said Hassan indignantly. “I’m a cartographer by trade.”
“But you’ve used a thirty-two-point compass,” pressed Gwennec. He put his thumb over one of the spindly roses that marked various points on the empty seascape, radiating lines across the page at measured intervals. “Only a master navigator would know how to use one of those. Yet you can’t even point this little cog where you want it to go.”
“I used no compass,” said Hassan. “Only the skill of my fingers.”
Gwennec considered this for a moment.
“You’re a liar,” he said finally. “Or you really are a sorcerer.”
“I’m neither. I have one talent. This is it.” The wine had softened Hassan: he gazed steadily back at Gwennec with the calm of a saint. Gwennec looked as though he wanted to argue, but thought better of it, and frowned at the map again. “Here’s the Strait of Gibraltar,” he murmured. “The Dark Sea. And this—” He brushed the oblong perimeter of the island with one flushed finger. “This is Antillia.” He looked at Hassan and then at Fatima, visibly perplexed. “The Isle of Seven Cities. You’re going to Antillia.”
Fatima leaned forward and took Gwennec’s musty woolen sleeve, as if to tether his words to her.
“You know this place?” she asked. “Have you been there? How far is it? How many days?”
Gwennec threw back his head and laughed.
“Every Breizhiz sailor knows it,” he crowed. “And nobody’s ever been there. It’s a myth. No one’s set foot in Antillia for six hundred years, if anyone ever set foot there at all.”
Chapter 13
The sounds of the water and the quiet groaning of the ship went dull in Fatima’s ears. She leaned against the rail and shut her eyes against the stars, lapsing into darkness. Gwennec’s voice came from somewhere else: another ship, another sea.
“It’s an old legend,” he said. “I’m no poet, but I’ll tell it as best I can. Long ago, when the Moors conquered Iberia, seven sainted bishops on seven ships fled into the Dark Sea with their flocks. They were from the old tribes—the Visigoths, the Vandals. Ancient folk whose tongues are all lost now. They sailed for many days and nights without sight of land. Then, when their supplies were almost gone and death seemed certain—”
“Ah,” came Hassan’s voice from the darkness. “Death always seems certain at this point in the story.”
“When death seemed certain,” continued Gwennec, “a child sighted land on the western horizon. They had discovered an island, rich with every conceivable kind of country—dense forests, watery plains, deserts as white as bone, hills under eternal snow. At the center was a lake, perfectly round and so clear you could see every fish that swam in it. They named the island Antillia, thanked God for His bounty, and determined to settle there, burning their ships to remove the temptation of return. Each bishop founded his own city—Aira, Antuab, Ansalli, Ansessali, Ansodi, Ansolli, and the largest, called Con. There they lived in prosperity, and there they remain, for all I know, since no one else has ever reached Antillia to tell of it.”
The moon flickered behind Fatima’s eyelids. It took the form of a bird, a gull, beating its crescent wings against the vastness of the sea.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “How can there be two such different stories about the same island?”
“Two stories?”
“Ours is about the king of the birds.” She opened her eyes to make the moon stand still again. “Long ago, all the birds of the world began to forget their history and their language because they had been leaderless for so long. So a brave few sought out the king of the birds, a king in hiding—the wisest and greatest of all kings, living on the island of Qaf in the Dark Sea beneath the shadow of a great mountain. Waiting for those with the courage to seek him.”
“Are these Muslim birds we’re talking about?”
“I suppose so.”
“Well, there’s your answer then.” She heard Gwennec shift his weight and drum his fingers against the wooden steps. “These are stories about two different kinds of defeat. Mine is about an empire that was conquered by force. Yours is about an empire that faded away. That’s why yours is sadder. There’s no real ending.”
“But which one is true? Either the island is the realm of the Bird King, or it’s the colony of your seven bishops. One or the other must be false.”
“I don’t particularly want to hand myself over to a bunch of bishops, or to their descendants,” Hassan chimed in, waving his c
up. “That’s exactly the fate we were hoping to avoid when we embarked on this little misadventure.”
Gwennec shook his head at them.
“Neither story is true,” he said. “They’re both made up. Made up! It’s a pretty map, though. Thirty-two-point compass.” He chuckled and squinted at it again. “True north and each and every rhumb line as fine as you like. A beautiful map.”
“If I drew it, it’s real,” said Hassan. There was no malice or defensiveness in his voice, only soporific certainty. Gwennec laughed at him, his eyes disappearing into the thick slope of his brow.
“You’ve got a high opinion of yourself, blev’ruz,” he said. “As I’ve told you, no one living has ever set foot on that island. It’s a story they tell in church to seagoing people who need to believe there’s something left once they’ve lost sight of land.”
“No one has ever set foot in the Kingdom of Heaven and returned to tell of it either,” said Hassan, setting his jaw. “Yet I’m certain you believe heaven is a real place, Brother Gwennec.”
“That’s different,” said Gwennec curtly.
“How? How is it different?”
“Because heaven isn’t some little sandspit off the coast of Spain,” the monk snapped. “It’s another realm entirely, one only those beloved by God will ever see.”
“Yes.” Hassan leaned forward to look into Gwennec’s eyes, his cheeks mottled with high color. “That’s it exactly. What if this island is just such a place? What if we are thus beloved by God?” In spite of the liquor, his posture was straight and purposeful; his face, though wine-flushed, was lucid.
“We?” Gwennec’s mouth twitched, as if he couldn’t decide whether or not to smile. “Christ Jesus. A redheaded Moor who likes it with men, and a fisherman who’s only recently learned his letters, and—” He looked sideways at Fatima and a mild flush of embarrassment crept up his neck. “Forgive me, madam, but I can’t tell at all who you might be or where you might come from. There’s no one like you in my land.”
The Bird King Page 18