“You’re very brave,” he said. “That I do know. Brave to a fault.”
“You know we’re going to die,” said Fatima, unwilling to be flattered.
Gwennec was quiet. Beyond him, the shoreline in the far distance had changed shape: a fat line, cliffs perhaps, marched along the horizon in a sweep of ocher and green.
“Yes, I know you’re going to die, one way or the other,” said Gwennec after a while. “I spent all night thinking about it. You’re daft as a pair of barnacle geese, you and your friend. But you’re not bad sorts. I could tell if you were. I don’t know why the Holy Office wants you, but—” He stopped and scratched at the back of his flaming neck. “Sometimes these things get muddled.”
“Muddled.” Fatima laughed spitefully. “What a stupid word for the state we’re in. A death sentence for something you didn’t do isn’t a muddle. It’s a crime.”
“Call it what you want,” said Gwennec, looking away. “What I meant is I’m sorry for your trouble.”
Fatima regretted hurting him. The day was so fine that they might have been on a pleasure outing: though the wind had already begun to chap her face, the air itself was delicious, a vapor of salt and pitch and warm wood. Black-headed gulls rode the breeze overhead. They complained at the lack of food scraps, diving toward the deck and then veering away again as if puzzled. A familiar gait trod up the steps from the hold, and Hassan, his hair askew, emerged on deck, wrinkling his face at the strong light.
“Afternoon,” called Gwennec. “How’s the head?”
Hassan made a noncommittal gesture. He took several deep breaths, holding the last for a long moment before letting it out again. Fatima tried to smile: he wouldn’t look at her.
“Do you think you can take the tiller for a little?” Gwennec asked her in a low voice. “Watch the compass and keep us on this heading, just as I showed you.”
Fatima straightened and nodded.
“Good.” Gwennec hitched up his skirt and made his way down the stairs toward the main deck. “I’m going to teach our friend how to tie knots.”
With only the sun to mark the passage of time, the afternoon passed slowly. Fatima watched Gwennec and Hassan squat near the mast with piles of rope between them: Gwennec would make coils and loops and pull them tight, then untie them again with a single tug, like a bazaar magician, and hand the rope over to Hassan for practice. Hassan was evidently enjoying himself. Fatima could hear him laugh as he produced a series of useless tangles, but she suspected this was a performance for Gwennec’s benefit: Hassan learned everything quickly, and a knot, after all, was a map of sorts, a path that led into the heart of something and out again. Before long, he had mastered Gwennec’s teachings well enough to follow him up the ratlines toward the top of the mast, where they were both obscured by sail, inaudible save for an occasional curse or howl when the cog pitched suddenly.
Fatima, for her part, watched the gimbals of the compass dance in their drunken, meditative way, completing a half rotation only to pause, seemingly think better of it, and slowly turn in the opposite direction. When they began to list off course, she put gentle pressure on the tiller, keeping the ship on a more or less westerly course to follow the distant shoreline. It was odd work, requiring a kind of detached focus that reminded her of sewing a hem or repairing a torn sleeve, each stitch, like each small correction at the tiller, closing the gap between two disconnected points.
Fatima fell easily into a stupor. She let her eyes rest on Hassan’s map and saw the light change on the outline of the lake at the center, dappling its ink perimeter in gold and blue. Though she would never set foot in Qaf, or Antillia, or whatever it was, it pleased her to imagine it: to fill in the lines of Hassan’s map with forests and fields and little streams, a sort of garden writ large. The king of the birds resided within it somewhere, at the foot of the great mountain, but he remained indistinct: the only simorgh Fatima had ever seen was in an illuminated book of Persian poetry, a beast in gold ink whose torso and head resembled an eagle’s or a griffin’s and whose tail was like a peacock’s. The memory of that image made her wistful now, and filled her with a delicious, wasteful hope.
It was only when Gwennec stamped up to the stern castle with a wooden plate of bread and cheese that she realized she was hungry. Her mouth watered at the sight of food so plain and dry that she might once have refused it entirely; as it was, she took the plate without a word and dug her teeth into what was offered.
“Wait, wait,” said Gwennec. “Soak it in a little water first, if you don’t want your teeth broken.” He pressed a wooden cup into her hand. Fatima sputtered out a mouthful of crumbs as arid as brick dust as he laughed.
“I’m going to sleep,” he said, still grinning. “Much as it pains me to leave the two of you in charge of anything, I need a proper rest. Wake me at compline—that’s like your night prayer, or close enough.” He surveyed the deck, where Hassan was arranging the rope he had practiced with into neat coils, heaving each thick length over his shoulder with theatrical effort.
“He’s as clever-handed as they come, our blev’ruz,” said Gwennec. “He has a natural sense of where things ought to go. But he hasn’t got brute strength and neither have you. You won’t be able to reason your way out of a mess at sea, with who knows what following behind you. That’s what should worry you.” He sniffed, phlegm rumbling in his throat, and made his way down toward the hold, the top of his yellow head descending, or so it seemed, into the deck itself.
“You’ve been awfully nice to us,” called Fatima, before he disappeared entirely. “You didn’t have to be.”
The head paused.
“I had a choice to make, and I made the choice I could live with,” came Gwennec’s voice. “That’s all.” She heard the thump of sandals being cast off, and then another that might have been a body landing in a berth, and then nothing. As if by silent agreement, the gulls overhead veered toward land, where a rust-colored river tumbled down over slabs of bare rock and ebbed by small degrees into the sea. The two waters did not mix. They battled one another in plumes of blue and red that extended into the open water, each color distinct, irreconcilable.
The clarity of the shoreline made Fatima twitch: she had allowed the cog to drift too close to land. Wiping sweat from her lip, she pressed on the tiller, watching the prow tip until it pointed southeast. Hassan dropped his coil of rope and stood to watch.
“You’ve overcorrected,” he called, peering toward land.
Fatima clenched her jaw to keep from retorting. At some point, Hassan had pulled his hair back with a leather thong to keep it off his face; the sun had made his skin as pink as a ferenji’s. The effect was transformative: his jaw, newly exposed, was firmer; the lines of his face were more decided. He was increasingly unfamiliar. Fatima watched him, disquieted. They had revealed too much to one another. Fatima knew from experience that such a mistake was rarely reparable in full: she could remember lying in bed beside the sultan at fifteen, when the experience was still new enough to inspire giddiness, telling him how often she thought about him and how beautiful he was, and his laugh, forever stamped in her memory, reminding her that she was not his lover, nor were her confidences welcome. It had been the same with Luz, who had drawn her out only to extract what she wanted. Now it would be the same with Hassan. Intimacy invited ugliness; only girls like Nessma were silly enough to think otherwise. There was no point, really, in making such an effort to survive; great love, for which so much was sacrificed, curdled as quickly as the ordinary kind.
After critiquing Fatima’s skill as a pilot, Hassan made no further attempt at conversation. He flitted into and out of her field of vision, disappearing into the rigging and reappearing near the prow, teaching himself to know the joints and sinews of the vessel. At one point he loosed a rope that caused the boom atop the mainsail to swing east and the keel to follow it in a big, swinging arc. Fatima thought of telling him he had overcorrected, but instead compensated silently on the tiller, returning t
he cog to its course while Hassan swore and tied the rope down again. By sunset they had achieved a wordless understanding of the way the work of one affected the other. It was only when pinpricks of fire lit up the shoreline in the growing dark that Hassan broke the silence.
“Is that Marbella, do you suppose?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said Fatima. She glanced at their wake, as if the dimming outline of the coast behind them contained some clue. “Someone should go wake Gwennec.”
Hassan, who had been leaning against the prow, pushed himself to his feet in a restless motion.
“What I don’t understand is why they haven’t followed us,” he said. “It’s been bothering me all day. Surely the Inquisition isn’t put off by a little water. And they had more boats moored there at the harbor in Husn Al Munakkab. Bigger and faster ones, probably. They could have given chase. What are they waiting for?”
Fatima studied the fires along the shoreline. It must be a largish town, as there were many bright clusters of light; a few were suspended in the air, as if from the ramparts of watchtowers.
“Maybe they’re waiting to see where we’ll go,” she said.
“You think they might be here at Marbella? You think it’s a trap?”
Fatima shook her head. “It’d take them twice as long by land as it’s taken us by water. Unless they managed to pass us by boat without being spotted, I don’t see how they’d know.”
“They could be trailing us, too far in our wake for us to see,” pressed Hassan. “They could have sent a scout on ahead. A single rider with a change of horses could make that distance faster than we have.”
“Yes, all right, there are half a dozen ways they could find out we’re planning to dock at Marbella,” snapped Fatima. “I just don’t find any of them very likely.”
The silence fell again.
“I’ll go get our monk,” Hassan muttered, disappearing belowdecks. Several minutes later, Gwennec emerged, rubbing bloodshot eyes.
“You didn’t sink the boat,” he said, his voice hoarse with fatigue. “That’s a good sign.”
“Have we put it in the right place, though?” asked Hassan with forced cheerfulness. “That’s the real test.”
Gwennec leaned over the deck railing and studied the lights.
“Aye, I’d say you have,” he said, sounding a bit surprised. “You haven’t passed another port town like this one, have you?”
“No,” said Fatima. “There’s been nothing larger than a little smoke on the horizon until just now.”
“Did you notice a river mouth, probably two or three hours back? Reddish water, lots of it.”
“Yes,” said Fatima, feeling more confident. “We passed it late in the afternoon.”
“I’ll be damned, then. This must be Marbella. I expected to wake up in North Africa or Italy or possibly dead. Well done, barnacle geese.” He drummed his fingers on the railing in a cheerful rhythm.
“Save your praise,” said Hassan. “There’s still the small matter of docking and provisioning the ship and setting sail again without being caught.”
“And paying for it,” said Gwennec. “You haven’t got any money, have you?”
Fatima pulled Lady Aisha’s ring over her knuckle and held it up, admiring the many-faceted stone with a feeling of profound regret.
“Will this do?” she asked, handing it over with no small reluctance. Gwennec tested the band with his teeth and grunted.
“Handsomely,” he said. “You’d eat like princes if you had time to kit yourselves out the proper way. As it is, you’ll have to make do with whatever you can find fast at this hour.”
The lights onshore were arranging themselves into straight lines, a few of which might be wharves reaching out like bright fingers into the bay. Fatima could smell smoke and charred meat.
“Pork,” she said.
“Catholics,” said Hassan. “All Catholics between us and the Strait now. The last scions of the Moorish empire stand here on this boat.”
Fatima paced at the railing. Though the air was chilly, she felt moons of sweat cooling beneath her arms and in the hollow of her back.
“I can’t go ashore,” she said. “They’ll know something’s wrong if they see me. You’ll have to go, Hassan. You look as if you could be Castilian.”
Hassan stared at her incredulously. “I can barely speak the language. Your Castilian is twice as good as mine. I’ll have to speak Sabir, and then they’ll know at once what I am.”
“Tell them you’re Breton,” said Gwennec drily. “That’s only a three-quarters lie.”
“You’ll help, surely.” Hassan put his hand on Gwennec’s arm. “You know who to speak to and what to say. I don’t even know what to ask for.”
Gwennec looked away, rubbing his jaw.
“I’d rather not,” he said. “I’d rather be done with this and part ways at the dock, if it’s all the same to you. I’ve kept you from drowning—that’s my right as a man in holy orders. I’m allowed to show compassion to the enemy. Any more than that and it starts to look like treason.”
Hassan let his hand drop. Gwennec had used a Latin word, hostis, instead of the Frankish enemi, as if to take the sting out, or perhaps to make himself sound important, or because he was ignorant; Fatima couldn’t tell which. She had almost forgotten what the monk was: he had become a part of the ship and the sea itself, as far removed from politics as a water spirit. But he was none of those things. He was a man, and he had a man’s allegiances.
“That’s fine,” she said coolly. “Do what you want. Take your things and go, with the enemy’s blessing.”
Gwennec’s face fell.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said. “Damn it all, this is my second language, and I barely speak my first one proper. Fa—”
“You don’t call her that.” Hassan, with great energy, was checking the ropes that secured the boom of the sail to the railing.
“But that’s her name,” said Gwennec.
“No, that’s not her name. That’s what I call her.” He hurried toward the prow with his head bent. Gwennec stood for a moment without moving.
“We need to slow down,” he said in a different voice. “I’ll take the sail in. You keep us pointed at that string of lights.” He clopped off toward the mast, his sandals flapping against the deck in a graceless rhythm. Fatima stiffened her back. The wind had slackened, but the tide was pulling them now, and the tiller jerked restlessly against her hands. She steadied it with some effort. The ship, at least, had a single purpose, loyal only to the one who stood at its helm.
They drew close enough to the wharves to hear voices. Smoke curdled the air, redolent of sheep’s tallow. It made a dense haze around the torches that lined the mooring closest to them, creating the illusion of fog. Fatima was grateful for it. The cog was not large, and in clear weather, she would be plainly visible from the wharf: a girl in Arab dress in a place where she had no reason to be. As it was, Gwennec approached her with a wary look and his arms full of cloth: a cloak made of nubbly, poorly dyed wool and cut in a northern style, with a brass brooch at the neck.
“Put this on,” he said. “There’s one for the blev’ruz too. You shouldn’t be seen in those clothes.”
“Whose are they?” asked Fatima, plucking at the fabric.
“Mine,” said Gwennec curtly. “Keep the hood close around your face.”
The cog ghosted up alongside a stout wooden pier, its salt-cracked surface wavering in the torchlight. There was a man, or several men, standing a little farther along: Fatima heard a burst of laughter and the bright jingle of what might be a coin purse.
“That’ll be the dockmaster,” murmured Gwennec. “He’ll want a fee for mooring your boat, and a name and a point of origin for his logs.”
“What should we do?”
Gwennec thought for a moment and let out a sharp sigh.
“I’ll take the blev’ruz with me and get him past the coin-jangler over there. You stay here with the boat
. I’d say scream if there’s trouble, but I don’t know that it’d do much good.” The monk looked hawkish in the firelight, his eyes shadowed beneath his brow, his face unreadable. Fatima knew she should say good-bye, or at least something that sounded final, yet all she could hear was hostis, hostis, and it stopped her.
“I wish we’d met some other way,” said Gwennec, trying to smile.
Fatima looked away. “You’re a monk from Brittany and I’m a freedwoman from Granada,” she said. “This is the only way we could have met.”
Gwennec sniffed and rubbed his nose with the back of one hand. The men on the pier were approaching, calling to them in Castilian, lowering a wooden plank against the lowest point of the deck railing. Gwennec flipped his cowl over his head and hurried down the steps of the stern castle, looking suddenly clerical. He pulled Hassan, incongruous in the borrowed cloak, with him, and then they were both gone, lost in the shadows of the men on the pier and the billowing smoke of their torches.
Fatima stood where she was, her hands on the tiller. Her cloak smelled of the man to whom it had belonged: wool that was more sheep than cloth, the sweat of physical labor, the sea, and beneath it all, a hint of precious resins, amber and oud and frankincense, the stamp of hours spent in prayer behind a censer. She pulled it around herself, rubbing her cheek against the folds of the hood. Perhaps the scent of Gwennec’s prayers was worth something, and God, if God was listening, would look kindly on her by virtue of sheer proximity. Fatima hoped so, and waited.
The pier remained mostly empty. A few stray dogs, their ribs bulging, meandered up and down and sniffed for scraps; a man stumbled past and leaned against a piling to piss. Fatima didn’t dare make a sound. The tiller grew slick beneath her hands: she dried them on her cloak and gripped the tiller again. It would make no difference: she would never be able to get the cog under way by herself, if it came to that, but standing at the helm gave her something to do besides worry.
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