Fatima looked up: the stars overhead formed a thick band, like a thread-of-gold sash holding up the garment of the sky. She didn’t care to summarize herself. She was no longer a concubine to a king or a companion to queens and princes, yet there was no word for what she had become instead. Hassan, at least, had a skill and a title that persisted beyond the palace walls; Fatima had been taught to describe herself only in relation to the palace itself.
“I was born in Granada,” she said finally. “And rose as high as a girl without rank could rise.”
“And your people?”
“My mother was sold as a captive.”
“Like this one’s grandmother?” Gwennec’s expression altered a little. “Then you’re not a Moor. We’re not enemies after all.”
“I didn’t know we were enemies before.”
“Well.” Gwennec sighed and followed her gaze upward. “There is a war, after all, and you did steal this boat.”
Fatima looked back at the monk. He faded into the unlit ship, his cloak an uneven blot slightly darker than the deck around them.
“Are you one of them?” she asked, uneasy again. “One of Luz’s people?”
“You mean the Holy Office?” Gwennec shook his head. “I haven’t even taken my perpetual vows yet. I’m just a novice. I was sent down because I’m all right with boats and I don’t speak enough Castilian to go bearing tales.” Here he laughed. “They’re regretting that decision now, I promise you! Oh to be back at Saint Padarn’s! I should be waking for lauds and singing the antiphons while the dew settles on the hay crop out in the big field, yet here I am.” He hummed under his breath in a voice that reminded Fatima of the sea itself, resonant and cold.
She stood and leaned against the railing, bending as far over the water below as she dared. It was nearly invisible now, more sound than substance: a rhythmic thud against the hull of the cog, a line of white foam where it broke over the prow. It had never occurred to Fatima that the stories she and Hassan told each other might also belong to someone else. Though Qaf was a myth, it must be real in the way she had envisioned it: the seat of a king who was good as she understood goodness. Now it was all thrown into doubt: other people longed for the same place, but in a different way, and in a hostile language. It seemed there was nothing that war could not touch.
“Fa.” Hassan reached out his arms for her. Fatima curled against his side and rested her head on his collarbone, ignoring the sharp pain that flickered between her eyes every time she blinked. Her body’s sole purpose now seemed to be to keep her awake and ready for whatever minor disaster came next. She shuddered and pressed her face into Hassan’s robe.
“I’m right, Fa,” he said in Arabic. “Don’t listen to this celibate Ulysses. My maps are never wrong. When I sat down to chart our way, I was drawing a path to the isle of the Bird King. I’m certain of it.”
Fatima reached out and slid the map from between Gwennec’s fingers. Holding it up to the sliver of moon, she counted the strange little inlets that punctured the perimeter of the island.
“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,” she said. “They’re cities, Hassan. Seven cities.”
Hassan took the map from her. She felt him shiver beneath her cheek. Then he laughed—a high laugh, like a madman’s—and clenched his hands as if to tear the map in half.
“No!” Fatima pulled it away from him with a wail and pressed it against her chest. Brother Gwennec twitched, startled, and again groped at his belt for a phantom weapon. Hassan’s face was ghostly and wild in the dark, his eyes like gray fragments of the invisible water. Fatima backed away from him on her knees.
“Don’t do that,” she begged. “Not to your own beautiful map. It’s like hurting yourself.”
Hassan shook his head violently. “It’s no use,” he said. “The monk is right. We should turn back. At least our fate is certain in that direction. We’re fools, and we’ve been fools since we left the Alhambra. I should never have let you come with me. You could be safe at home right now, well fed and warm, in bed with the sultan, everything as it was before, instead of sailing into nothing with me like a pair of children. Think of it—if you conceived tonight, you could be the mother of a king nine months from now. That’s a better fate than most. I should have left you behind.”
“You talk like a coward,” she spat. “It wasn’t your choice to make. It was mine. I chose to leave. I couldn’t let you die. You’re alive because of me, yet you talk about leaving me behind to breed heirs for a man who will be sultan of nothing as soon as he hands the keys of Granada to King Ferdinand.”
Hassan laughed again. Fatima would rather have come to physical blows. She would rather he struck her so she could strike him back: it would be over then, and the sting would fade, and the marks would remind them that they were capable of hurting each other. She sat back on her heels and hugged herself, the map crinkling and bending across her chest.
“I, I, I, me,” said Hassan. “It wasn’t me you wanted so desperately to save, it was yourself. You can’t bear to lose me because it would cause you pain. That’s not the same as wanting to save my life. You do nothing for its own sake, Fa, you never have. You do what serves you best, and damn anything or anyone who contradicts you.”
The words Fatima wanted to say would not come out. She stroked the map as if to comfort it, running her fingers along its crackling perimeter. She had never quite understood what was meant by heartbreak: when the sultan was cold to her or Lady Aisha was cruel, she would simply withdraw. What she felt now was something else, something so visceral that she found herself taking shallower breaths, until she was dizzy; Hassan, the person she knew and loved best, now sprawling wide-eyed against the rail before her, seemed as foreign as their kidnapped monk. Betrayal bloomed in her.
“I think our friend might be a little addled after all,” murmured Brother Gwennec from somewhere behind her. She felt the pressure of his fingertips on her shoulder, lightly. “Look at his eye. The left one.”
Fatima did as he bade her: Hassan’s pupils were lopsided, the left far larger than the right.
“I shouldn’t have given him that wine,” said Gwennec. “He needs to be abed. Propped up, though, so the blood doesn’t settle where it oughtn’t to. You might as well sleep yourself, madam, as it’s clear you’ve had none in some time. I’ll keep watch a few hours.”
The lights of Husn Al Munakkab were growing brighter. Fatima peeled the map from her body and held it up again, studying the punctured shore of the island floating in its net of rhumb lines. Perhaps it was the Qaf of the Bird King, perhaps the Antillia of Gwennec’s seven bishops. Perhaps it was neither, and Hassan’s miracle, confronted with her own overweening ambition, had deserted them. Yet the map remained: real enough to touch, full of possibilities that the way behind them lacked.
Fatima plucked at Gwennec’s sleeve, knowing this was a kind of trespass, and was rewarded with a wary glance.
“Help me turn the boat,” she said.
“No,” said Gwennec.
“I won’t sleep,” she said. “I’ll wait until you do, and then I’ll throw you overboard. We’ll be no worse off than we were before. So you choose. Help me turn the boat and you can be on your way when we dock to buy supplies. Or don’t and I’ll find a way to kill you.” The words came easily to her.
Gwennec pulled his arm back, turning his wrist to loose the fabric from her grasp.
“You don’t have it in you,” he declared.
Fatima laughed in what she hoped was a careless way. “The last man who thought so is lying on the Vega with his guts out,” she said. That she had stabbed him accidentally and lost her nerve seemed like an unnecessary level of detail with which to burden the monk. Gwennec looked her up and down, attempting to guess whether she was lying.
“You really mean to,” he murmured.
“Yes,” said Fatima.
Gwennec got to his feet with an oath.
“You can resupply at Marbella, let’s say,” he said. “
That’s as good a place as any for me to go ashore. From there, you pass through the Strait, assuming you’re not taken by pirates or the inquisitors don’t catch you first, and once you’ve cleared the Strait, on to the Dark Sea. Yes, Marbella will do nicely. There’s a Franciscan priory nearby—I stayed there for a night on the way down. They’ll take care of me. I’ll tell them I was kidnapped, and I’ve got a swollen face to show for it.” He thumped up the steps to the stern castle, folding the sleeves of his habit past his rough elbows. “Sleep a while, madam, while I get us under way. When you wake up, I’ll show you how to manage this boat.”
Fatima studied his face. There were weary creases around his mouth, and resignation in the bright, flat blue of his eyes. There was no love there, but no malice either.
“You’re the one with the knife,” he said drily. “I’m not even allowed to carry one, and I’m not likely to bludgeon you to death in your sleep with my sandal.”
She had to smile at this.
“Very well,” she said, and turned away toward the hold.
Chapter 14
Fatima slept without dreaming. The hold of the cog was outfitted with four narrow bunks set into the hull; a wooden screen separated this makeshift cabin from the aft portion of the hold, where the barrels of water and wine and one precious crate of hard cheese were lashed together. Gwennec half carried Hassan down the stairs and secured him in one of the bunks, rolling blankets and burlap behind him to keep his head elevated. Fatima collapsed into the opposite bunk without speaking and turned her face to the hull, listening, for no more than a few moments, or so it seemed, to the groans and sighs of wood and water before sleep took her.
When she woke again, there was sunlight streaming down the open staircase from the deck above, leaving a square of yellow on the sloping floor of the hold. A familiar shadow fell across it, its sloped shoulders rocking up and down with its strange gait. Vikram paced back and forth, his dark head awash in light.
“You’re alive,” she called to him, laughing, reaching out her hands. He turned and curled his lip at her.
“If you can call it that,” he snapped. “I had a vision of my own death at that stinking, mud-caked wharf. It’s all I can think about now. Mortality! If you’d listened to me and run when I told you, I might have been spared such awful knowledge, along with enough spear wounds to impress a messiah.”
Fatima tried to make sense of this accusation. “How?” she asked after a pause. “How will you die?”
“In bed with a full-figured, golden-haired woman who will weep and rend her garments at my passing.” Vikram sat down and began to chew on his talons, looking melancholy. “An enviable death. No less than I deserve.”
“When?” pressed Fatima.
“Many hundreds of years from now, as far as I can tell, though visions aren’t always precise about these things.”
Fatima felt her shoulders drop. “That’s a very, very long time away,” she said, relieved.
“For you, perhaps. But I’ve lived five or six times that long already. It doesn’t seem very far away to me.” Vikram looked into the sunlight cascading down the staircase. “Listen: remember this part. I’m sending someone to you, someone I trust. I say I trust her, but you must not. Do you understand? She will help, but only so long as it pleases her to do so. You mustn’t make her angry. And try not to fall in love with her. That’s a doom I wouldn’t wish on anyone.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Are you thick? I’ve just explained it all. You should get up. That monk is too polite to come and wake you, and it’s after midday.”
“I’m already up,” said Fatima.
“You’re so funny,” said Vikram.
Fatima opened her eyes. The hold murmured around her as the boat shifted from side to side, as if it, too, had been resting, and was stretching and rousing itself now in the bright sun. Across the narrow width of the hold, Hassan was still asleep, his breathing regular, his lips parted slightly. His color looked better. For a moment, Fatima was happy. The way they had left each other intruded on her thoughts slowly, like a child dragging its feet. Averting her eyes, Fatima kicked off the rough blanket under which she had slept and stumbled across the gently swaying floor to the stairs.
A rush of cold, wet air pummeled her as she emerged onto the deck. Above her head, Gwennec clung to the mast like a great black crow, his cloak and habit flapping about him. It was an unsuitable garment for ship work. Every few moments, he was forced to interrupt the complicated operation he was performing on the rigging to curse and push his skirt down over his legs, which, in contrast to his reddened face and hands, were blue-white, as if he had been stitched together from two entirely different skins. Fatima couldn’t help herself: she laughed, leaning against the last stair for support. Gwennec twisted up his face at her, one hand raised to shield his eyes from the cloudless glare.
“Laugh now, madam,” he said, “but you’ll miss me when you’ve got to do all this by yourself.”
Fatima let her gaze wander across the ship to the series of ropes that connected parts of the deck she couldn’t identify to pieces of the sail and rigging that were likewise inscrutable. She adopted an aloof expression, determined not to let Gwennec see her uncertainty. He clambered down the mast and presented himself with a lopsided smile, shaking out his scapular.
“Let’s start with pointing the boat the right way,” he said. “There’s a treasure on board you didn’t know about. I’ve set it all up. Look.” He led her up the steps to the stern castle. Fatima could see nothing but sail and water, a field of royal blue unfurling in every direction. A thin ribbon of land lay off their right flank, the sky above it discolored with smoke: this was the only sign of human life.
“A sane man would stick closer to shore than this,” said Gwennec. “But you don’t want to be spotted, so.” He gestured toward the tiller. Beside it stood a little table, upon which lay Hassan’s map, weighted by stones on three corners and by a small oil lamp on the fourth. Next to that sat an instrument Fatima had never seen before: a hemisphere of brass suspended between two slender halos of similar metal. The face of the hemisphere was a wind rose with arrows to mark each of the cardinal directions; smaller lines marked the degrees in between. The compass lay still between its twin satellites, which orbited around it slowly, keeping it flat as the ship rocked back and forth.
“What is it?” asked Fatima. She didn’t dare touch the thing, which seemed to move through some delicate, internal volition, like a living being.
“It’s a dry compass,” said Brother Gwennec with a hint of pride in his voice. “Suspended in a pair of gimbals to keep the needle from grounding. It was a gift from the Portuguese to Queen Isabella, who lent it to the lady Luz for her journey. It’s worth more than this boat and all our lives put together. She’ll be wanting it back, I’ve no doubt.”
“It’s beautiful,” said Fatima. More beautiful, perhaps, because it had been Luz’s and now belonged to her.
“Aye,” said Gwennec, who looked at her approvingly. “It’s very beautiful. Better than the old water compasses—a child could make a water compass, but one big wave and the needle goes sloshing out on your shoes. And the dry ones as they use on land ground like hell aboard a ship for the same reason. Too much back-and-forth. This—” He reached out and tapped the edge of one gimbal; it responded silently, sending its sibling rotating in the opposite direction. “This is as pretty to me as a painting in a church or a sleeve of the best silk brocade. If a man can dream up a compass like this, we must not have forfeited God’s grace just yet.”
Fatima realized she was smiling at Gwennec and looked away. She heard him clear his throat.
“Anyway,” he said. “Here’s what you must know: you align the compass with the keel of the boat, as I’ve done. That way, when the ship turns, the wind rose’ll tell you which direction the keel is pointed in. That’s your heading. You must keep the joints of the gimbals oiled so that they have free motion, otherwise th
e needle inside the compass may ground, and then you’re blind. And whatever you do, by God, don’t get anything made of iron within five feet of this table. Now, your map.” He smoothed the corners and traced the edge of the Iberian Peninsula with one finger. “These rhumb lines, here, are like a compass that doesn’t move. You pick out where you are on the map as best you can with your dead reckoning, then you choose the rhumb line that most closely gets you where you want to go.” He traced one, a long arc that began just inside the Strait of Jebel Tareq and continued toward the lone island that hung silently in the middle of the Dark Sea. “You turn the tiller until the keel of the boat lines up with that rhumb line. If we were here, say, which we’re not, it’d be four degrees west-southwest. Then your job is to keep the boat on that heading with all the wind and the currents and the tides working against you.” He grinned wolfishly. “That’s the hard part.”
Fatima swayed on her feet, looking from the tiller to the compass to the implacable water with a dismay she no longer bothered to conceal.
“It would take months to learn all this properly,” she said. “Years.”
“You haven’t lied yet,” laughed Gwennec. “We’re a day out from Marbella, though, so we’ll see what you and the blev’ruz can learn before nightfall tomorrow.”
At the mention of Hassan, Fatima felt a little thrill of doubt. She looked over her shoulder at the empty stairwell leading down into the hold: no shadows interrupted the square of sunlight on the floor below. Hassan must still be asleep. She was surprised by how profoundly she did not want to see him.
“Do you think I’m selfish?” she asked.
Gwennec shifted on his feet.
“I don’t know you at all, madam,” he muttered. “And you nearly broke my jaw.”
“I think—” Fatima stopped and searched for words in the water that foamed and clapped against the hull of the cog. “I think I’m much smaller than the things I set out to do, that’s all. It’s not selfishness. I spent all my life in the same place. You get no sense of proportion that way.” Her eyes were watering; she wiped them with the back of her hand. Gwennec’s face softened.
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