The Bird King

by G. Willow Wilson

  She closed her eyes and thought again of the king. She saw, no longer a bird or a phoenix, but an outline of an unnamed creature that stood, dark and luminous at once, between her and the sun. It had no features, no limbs that she could see, yet it was feathered—crimson, green, blue, black pricked with starry gold, white tinged with copper and pink, like daybreak in winter. Fatima reached for it; it lay just beyond her grasp, and when she reached a little more, it moved a little farther beyond that. Help me, she begged. Help me now.

  A thump woke her. The cog rocked back and forth indignantly. Another thump followed, then a third.

  “Over there,” came Hassan’s voice in Castilian. He had affected a broad, halting accent—Gwennec’s accent, Fatima realized, or rather a sloppy approximation. She laughed soundlessly in spite of herself. Two men in linen shirts and mud-spattered hose were rolling great barrels across the width of the ship, making for the entrance to the hold below.

  “Put them against the hull with the others,” instructed Hassan, waggling one finger in the appropriate direction.

  “Put them against the hull with the others,” repeated one of the men, his voice high and mincing. The other man snickered and elbowed him.

  “Hush up, he may hear you.”

  “He doesn’t hear, he’s a Breton. Look at him, dumb as a post. Fish and beer and cow manure are all they know. Not proper Frenchmen, nor proper Celts—they barely understand each other, let alone—”

  “Quiet, you idiot.”

  The men disappeared into the hold and reemerged without their cargo, slapping their dirty hands against their breeches. Hassan, who had heard quite well, deposited a number of coins in their outstretched hands without a word and waved them off.

  “Salted beef, hard cheese, that awful crusty bread—but oranges and lemons, too, to prevent mouth-bleeding. Those cost some money.” His head was level with the lip of the stern castle at her feet; she saw only a hood of nubbly blue. “We’re to eat some fresh and dry the rest so they don’t spoil, then soak them in water when we need them.”

  “How much do we have?” Fatima asked. “How many days of food?”

  “Two or three weeks, I think,” said Hassan. “If we haven’t spotted this damned island by then, we might as well throw ourselves overboard in any case.” He put back his hood. Fatima resisted the urge to stroke his coppery hair: the possibility that he would push her away was too terrible.

  “It’s nearly dawn,” he said. “The tide will be going out soon.”

  “Then let’s go.” Fatima left the tiller and went down to the railing to untie the ropes that secured them to their mooring. Hassan climbed into the rigging with the hem of his robe between his teeth. The cog rocked back and forth like a horse that has seen the pasture gate, the sail dancing and shivering as Hassan pulled the boom up the length of the mast, hand over hand. Fatima returned to the helm. The light was turning blue, preluding dawn; at her fingertips, the map waited. She took a breath and looked out at the water, expecting to see the uninterrupted plane of turquoise that would lead them out of the Middle Sea, through the Strait.

  Instead, she saw ships.

  There were three of them, large carracks that loomed like a forest of masts and sails over their own little cog. They had arrayed themselves in a half circle at the mouth of the harbor, their broadsides toward the wharves, blocking the passage out. Their colors unfurled in the early dawn. With dread, Fatima watched them, though she knew already what she would see: the red-and-gold counter-quartered flags of Aragon and Castile. Fatima seized the rail of the stern castle, weak-kneed.

  “Hassan!” she called, her voice high and shaking. Hassan dropped to the deck, landed wrong, and cursed, limping to the rail to look where she was pointing.

  “God and His angels and all the prophets,” he said, awestruck. “I was right, Fa. They’ve followed us.”

  “How?” For a moment, Fatima thought her disbelief might be enough to dispel the ships and send them back to wherever they had come from. “How, how?”

  “Does it matter?” Hassan was pulling her away from the railing. Fatima followed vacantly, balancing step by step down the wobbly plank that bridged the gap between ship and pier, and found herself on dry land.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, bewildered.

  “What does it look like? We have to hide—we can lose them in town and wait until dark, then go—I don’t know where—I’ll make a new map—”

  Fatima halted.

  “We’re not going anywhere,” she said. “We’re getting on that ship, Hassan, and we’re leaving and never coming back again.”

  He laughed at her.

  “You should never have listened to me. I’ve gone witless. We can’t be children about this anymore. There is an empire out there, Fa. And it wants us dead, and we are not going to escape it in a tiny little cog, even if we had a king’s ransom in terrible cheese and terrible salted beef.” He spread his arms, a tall premonition in the tepid dawn, and gestured to the mud, the salt-warped wood, the indifferent sky. “This is it. This is all there is. There is no king of the birds.”

  Fatima sat down. The damp soaked through her cloak and into her robe, chilling her legs. He was saying only what she herself had thought half a hundred times since they left Husn Al Munakkab, yet it hurt to hear.

  “You can’t say that,” she told him. “You made the map. I don’t understand why you’re like this, why what Gwennec said upset you so much. You believed it all until he told that silly story about the seven bishops—you made me want to believe it when I doubted. I don’t understand.”

  Hassan grinned hysterically.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said in a different voice. “It wasn’t the story, it wasn’t that. It was when you counted up those odd little inlets on the island. I knew it was over then.”

  Fatima pulled her knees up and hugged them in an effort to stay warm.

  “It might not mean what Gwennec says it does,” she countered, though softly. “They could be anything, those marks.”

  Hassan shook his head. “I know what it means. It means I can’t run. The Inquisition and the Castilians—they’re not just out there, they’re in my head. Your head, too. They’re inside the only thing that was ever really ours. Even our stories are not our stories. We tried to tell our own, Fa, and all we did was end up telling theirs.”

  Fatima reached for his hand. He took it and flung himself into the mud beside her. She wanted to disappear, to fuse with the familiar scent of his clothes, his hair. She searched her mind for some means of escape they hadn’t yet considered and could think of nothing. Birds had wings, but they did not, and so they were left at the mercy of lesser kings. Fatima looked up at the sky and saw that the day would be cloudless: the sky was a smoky azure from horizon to horizon, tinged in the east by pink and gold. She looked down again when she heard the unmistakable sound of hoof beats.

  A row of horses in full regalia cantered down the furrowed high road that led toward the wharves, ridden by men wearing plate and helms and armed with a ludicrous show of weapons: pikes and heavy oak-shouldered arquebuses and even a few swords. Fatima struggled to her feet in her mud-sodden robe.

  “All this for us?” she marveled. “For two people with only a couple of knives between them?”

  “Let them overcompensate,” said Hassan miserably. “Last time they tried this, we had Vikram. For all they know, we’ve got an army of jinn at our disposal. I’m a sorcerer, after all.”

  “How?” said Fatima again. “How could they know so precisely where—”

  She stopped when Hassan gripped her arm in what felt like a spasm of pain. He was staring into the mass of horses and men at a dark, unarmored shape bobbing unsteadily atop a gray gelding. It was a monk’s habit. As Fatima watched, the monk’s cowl fell back, revealing a head of bright blond hair.

  “Gwennec,” she breathed.

  “That lying pig-eater,” said Hassan incredulously. “This is how they knew. He must have found a way to signa
l them from the boat while we were sleeping. That’s why he was always scuttling up the mast and messing about with the ship’s colors. He’s betrayed us.”

  Chapter 15

  The horses bore down on them so fast that Fatima could feel the rhythm of their hoof beats in her feet, through the shuddering earth. She turned in a circle, looking for a path of escape: to her right, a cluster of low, plaster fishing huts streaked with lichen and moss; to her left, a row of merchant stalls and money-changing houses atop a stone seawall, flanked by weary-looking palm trees. Between the fishing huts, there were narrow alleys cluttered with remnants of old gear: moldy rope and buckets of lime and the half-finished errata of boat carpentry. These, perhaps, held promise. Fatima ran toward the closest opening, dragging Hassan behind her. They splashed through a puddle that was deeper than it looked and soaked themselves up to their calves, Hassan swearing loudly all the while. Then there was a sound, a hiss, and something rippled the surface of the water: it was a crossbow bolt, quivering where it had lodged in the mud. Fatima shrank back, panting.

  “You can stop there,” came an amused, accented baritone. “Unless you want a bolt in the back as well.”

  Fatima turned. She couldn’t tell who had spoken: the voice had come from one of the innumerable steel helms, rendering the speaker as anonymous as a woman in a veil. The only bare head was Gwennec’s. He was close enough now for Fatima to see his face: he looked stricken and pale, his usual ruddy color confined to a stripe of sunburn across his nose and cheeks. He stared at her with a trapped, wide-eyed expression that might have been guilt. Fatima felt a profound desire to spit in his face, but since he was mounted and she was on foot, the angle was inconvenient.

  “Well,” said the baritone. “This is a happy meeting.” A stout man on a large, dappled charger removed his helm. The face beneath was familiar, sun-darkened and square: it was, Fatima realized with some surprise, the general who had come to the Alhambra with Luz under a flag of peace. He handed the reins of his horse to the man beside him and dismounted, landing in the mud with a solid, wet sound.

  “Do you remember me, Fatima?” he asked. Fatima said nothing. He ambled toward her, smiling, as though they had met by chance on some pleasant outing. “No? You once served me bread with your dirty little foot.” He balled one gauntleted hand into a fist.

  “Fatima,” came Gwennec’s voice, trembling. “Fatima, listen to me—”

  Fatima collapsed. For a moment, she couldn’t catch her breath: it was only after she had air in her lungs that she felt the pain radiating out from her middle and realized the general had punched her in the gut. Pricks of light obscured her vision, and she heard, rather than saw, the sound of steel colliding with flesh, twice, while Hassan howled in agony.

  “Send word to the baronesa,” said the general, his feet squelching in the mud as he walked back toward his horse. “Tell her the situation is resolved. Take the girl back to my tent. On second thought—take the sorcerer too. Why not? Both of them, one after the other. We’ll see who likes it better.”

  Fatima tasted blood in the back of her throat. Someone was dragging her to her feet: she resisted for only a moment before she began to wheeze again and the pain overtook her. She told herself she must find her footing and reached out with her toes, digging them into the mud to keep herself upright. The boat—their boat—rose and sank beyond the throng of men, tethered to the wharf only by the gangplank the dockmaster had left there, its sails struggling to catch the rising air. Fatima watched it with regret.

  “It’s not fair,” she slurred, swaying into the steel-plated man who held her arm.

  “No,” came the general’s voice, which sounded, at least to her, sympathetic. “It isn’t fair. These things never are. But, my dear, this is the only possible outcome when a couple of unarmed civilians confront a superior force with heavy weaponry. You can count, can’t you? This is about numbers. You should never have run in the first place. Not even your demon familiar can help you, unless he can conjure ten thousand men and arm them with pikes.”

  “He wasn’t a demon,” said Fatima, shaking.

  “Of course you’d say so. You moon-worshipping sodomites are as backward about the unseen as you are about everything else.” The general inhaled noisily and spat a gob of phlegm at her feet. Before him was a row of tents forming a bivouack in the mud a short distance from the western edge of town, where the red-roofed houses gave way to pigsties and pastures. The largest, a circular tent of white canvas upon which the Castilian arms were painted, was open, the tent flap drawn back to reveal an interior as well appointed as a palace room: there were furs and a brazier with coals glowing inside, and a wooden table covered with charts and missives. To one side was a pallet on a low platform; it had been slept in recently, the blankets crumpled around the absent form of the sleeper. Seeing it, Fatima bent forward and gagged.

  “You’re making this too easy,” said the general drily. He dismissed the man who held her arm, and taking her by the collar, shoved her through the open tent flap. She stumbled, landing on the carpet of furs inside. Behind her, she could hear the general begin to unbuckle his breastplate. A numbness crept up her legs, making them heavy, as if she had spent too long in a hot bath. She fought it, knowing it was surrender, her mind abandoning her body to save itself from what came next.

  Fatima told herself she would not weep in front of this man. She flinched as his breastplate landed on the furs beside her: a well-made but battered cuirass, tattooed with an intricate design of flowering vines encircling the arms of his house. It had seen mauls and pikestaffs and probably more than one arquebus; it had known combat longer than Fatima had known life, yet here it was, on the ground, unnecessary for this particular act of violence. Fatima marveled vacantly at the discarded steel, at the quieter brutality that came on the heels of warfare, and wondered how many women had been dragged into how many tents, perhaps even this tent—how many men, even, for Hassan would not be spared.

  “Why?” she asked her captor, shielding her eyes against the sun that streamed through the open tent flap. The question seemed to baffle him. He paused with his hand on his belt and twisted up his mouth.

  “Why? Are you without shame?”

  “I want to know.”

  The general laughed incredulously.

  “This is what happens in war. Sometimes, even when the losing side is on its knees, it doesn’t yet understand it’s been defeated. So you take from it the only thing it has left to give. Then it understands.” He kicked her knees apart and knelt between them. Behind him, past the tent flap, the morning had become intensely bright, the sky a peerless shade of blue: sunlight stung Fatima’s eyes, breaking the stupor that had overtaken her. Without realizing what she was doing, she drew her knife, hidden beneath Gwennec’s cloak, and pressed it against the general’s throat as he leaned toward her. The edge was so fine that a thin seam of blood sprang up immediately on his stubbled neck, beading along the dagger like the embroidered hem of a sleeve. He cried out, struggling to back away, and toppled over, leaving Fatima with her knee on his chest and her fingers slick with his blood.

  “Whore,” he spat at her.

  “If I’m a whore for resisting you,” she said through her teeth, “what would I have been for giving in?”

  “Whore,” he said again. The sight of him belly-up, his belt undone, scrambling with his feet, filled Fatima with a tepid disgust. Little men had waged this war. Together they could muster enough steel and gunpowder to be formidable, but singly they were soft, wretched things, squinting in the sun. Fatima levered herself to her feet and withdrew her knife, replacing it with the heel of her boot, which she pressed against the general’s bleeding neck.

  “You’re not going to touch me again,” she said. “You’re not going to touch Hassan at all.”

  The general laughed at her.

  “You think you can give me orders? You’re dead as soon as I’m on my feet, and I’ll do what I like with the sorcerer.”

 
Fatima leaned harder on his neck.

  “Get Luz,” she told him. “Ask her what will happen if you hurt me.”

  The general had begun to wheeze with the effort of laughing. At some point he had lost a tooth to battle or bad food; a gap showed in his taut grin.

  “You’re a fool if you’re more afraid of me than you are of her,” he said.

  “Get Luz,” Fatima repeated. She removed her boot: the general climbed unsteadily to his feet, one hand on his neck, the other clutching his breeches, his face mirroring her own contempt. Yet he was wary now: she had invoked a name he did not dare contradict.

  “Whore,” he said a third time, and stepped out of the tent.

  Fatima slid to her knees. She felt as though she were still at sea, unmoored and buffeted by surf, losing what little control she had possessed over her own trajectory. Why had she said Luz’s name? Luz was worse than any general, for she could reproduce wide-eyed innocence so well that it was likely she had convinced herself of her own virtue.

  Fatima wiped her dagger on the skirt of her robe, and despite the heat, hugged Gwennec’s cloak about herself. The smell of incense comforted her. She sat, rigid, looking at the flap of the tent and the sun for what felt like hours, watching the light move across the ground and touch her feet and pass on. Her only visitor was a cat, a little black-and-gold tortoiseshell that danced into the tent as if there had never been war or death in the world and rubbed itself against Fatima’s back. When it found no food about her, it left again, taking with it the last of the sunlight.

  Torches were lit elsewhere. Fatima could hear men calling to one another across the encampment. There was woodsmoke and the scent of herbs and fat rendering in a pot nearby; Fatima felt her mouth water and remembered she had eaten nothing since the previous day. She strained to hear Hassan’s voice, or to catch a glimpse of him through the tent flap, but she saw no sign of him. Fear came in waves: perhaps the general had made good on his threat and would deliver Hassan’s head to her in a basket, as the Prophet Yahya’s was given to Salome; or perhaps, having been thwarted in his own tent, he would take his anger out on Hassan in other ways.