The Bird King

by G. Willow Wilson

  “Oh don’t be such an ass! I didn’t say anything about honor! Only I can’t stand the idea of you drowning, Fa, it’s a horrible way to die. You’re awake and in pain ‘til the very end—”

  Fatima turned to look at him. He was on his knees on the steps with his face turned up toward her, blond stubble obscuring his jaw, his eyes flat and blue and full of horror. She stooped and pressed one hand to his roughened cheek and bent to kiss his brow.

  “Help me,” she said. “Hassan has to live. If he dies, then I don’t believe in anything. God loves him, if God loves anyone at all. He’ll take care of Hassan, and if you’re together, He’ll take care of you too.”

  “Then you go with Hassan. It’s you he needs, not me. I’ll stay with the ship. I’m the only real sailor between us, anyhow. Don’t ask me to leave you behind, Fa.” His eyes flickered at hers, pleading. Fatima saw that he would not be persuaded. She disengaged herself from the tiller and came down the steps, helping Hassan up from where he knelt near the railing. The empty barrel was already floating in the bed of foamy water that had swamped the lowest part of the deck.

  “What are you doing?” asked Hassan. “What are—where—”

  Fatima ignored him. She darted up the stairs to the stern castle and grabbed the map, bundling it into Hassan’s carry case, which swung by its strap from the table. Below her, Gwennec had taken off his cord and lashed it around the thickest part of the barrel; he took one of Hassan’s hands and curled it around the slender rope, as if teaching a child how to hold a spoon.

  “You don’t let go,” he said. “No matter what, you hold on for dear life, because that’s what this is.”

  “Don’t treat me like an idiot,” Hassan snapped. “We’re not abandoning ship, surely. What’s the point? We’ll drown in any case.”

  “We are abandoning ship,” said Gwennec. “All three of us. The tide will take us to shore or to paradise, or to hell, but at least we’ll arrive together.” His habit ballooned in the surf, not yet sodden enough to sink. Quickly, while he wasn’t looking, Fatima pulled at one edge, wrapping it under the cord, against the water-fattened wood of the barrel. Then she looped the strap of Hassan’s carry case over his shoulder and put her arms around his neck. She kissed his cheeks and the bridge of his nose and rested there for a moment with her forehead pressed against his. The pain she had felt, the small losses and slights, the lonely silences were all hallowed by memory: they had led her to this choice, this end, in which she might finally do something beautiful.

  “I love you,” she said, and shoved the barrel into the surf.

  Gwennec yelped when he realized his habit had pulled him overboard. He called her name, but she had already turned away toward the stern. He began to shout, to curse, to weep, and then the sound of the surf overpowered all human noise. Fatima allowed herself to look back. She saw a red head and a yellow one borne up on the crest of a wave and carried toward some unseen shore where the insistent tide was breaking.

  Fatima returned to the tiller: it swung stiffly, catching on something in the bowels of the ship. The bowsprit was pointing past the carrack now, as if flinching before a larger foe. Fatima bit her lip until she tasted blood and threw all her weight against the tiller. Wood screamed and splintered. The cog heaved, pointing out toward the carrack’s rolling hull. Gwennec was right: she would never get up enough speed to damage the bigger vessel; at best, she would glance off the hull, at worst she might be pulled beneath it by the sheer force of the water rushing past.

  Yet the carrack must sink. Love made some lives more precious than others. Fatima draped herself over the tiller and closed her eyes.

  “Three people and a horse,” she muttered. “That’s all I wanted to save. And the horse is gone. And one person must make sure the other two get away safely. So two people. That doesn’t seem like very much to ask.” The sound of the surf intensified. It occurred to Fatima to be afraid. She clung to the tiller, telling herself she would not cry.

  When the noise stopped, she lifted her head. Before her was a hill made of blue. White lace dappled its edges, and within it, as if under glass, she saw a frightened school of iron-colored fish and a long, furred tangle of water weeds. Atop the hill rode the carrack. It was leaning hard, falling on one side, and across the glassy water Fatima heard screaming. The sound of the surf returned. It built to a roar so loud that something popped in Fatima’s ear, and suddenly the great swell of water fell in upon itself.

  Fatima was flung across the deck and hit the far railing. The cog snapped as cleanly as kindling. Water surged into the open hull, flooding up the steps and around her knees. Above her, the carrack groaned. The mast splintered, bearing down on the wreckage of the cog in a mass of pulverized beams and canvas. The world reversed itself. The sky was made of wood and water, and below Fatima was only air. Then the sky collapsed.

  Fatima was in the dark. There was no sound but streams of air struggling to reach the surface. It was blessedly cold. She felt a blade of bright pain travel across the length of her face, and then nothing: not the ominous nothing of the fog, but the end of a sentence, the little moment when a deed is finished and is succeeded by silence.

  Chapter 19

  Someone was humming.

  Too wet down here, came a bright-dark voice. Not enough air, or not enough for you, at any rate.

  A mouth closed over her own, gently.

  Breathe, said the voice.

  Fatima breathed. The mouth withdrew; she sputtered water.

  All right, now stop breathing. Little idiot! Do I have to explain everything?

  Fatima’s lungs ached. She reached out blindly, clawing at the dark water.

  More? You are a persistent creature.

  Warmth encircled her; lips pressed against hers again, coaxing her mouth open. Fatima gasped and gasped, thirsty for air. She tasted salt and sulfur.

  Vikram, she thought.

  Who else would I be? Don’t try to speak. In fact, don’t open your eyes. The surface is still some distance away.

  Fatima curled her limbs around the radiant heat and let it carry her upward. She only half believed the evidence of her senses, and felt at the edges of the darkness, searching for something familiar, encountering long hair, the ligament of a shoulder, a furred back.

  In other circumstances, this would be an unspeakably pleasant reunion, came Vikram’s voice drily.

  I thought I was going to die, said Fatima.

  You still could, if that’s what you want. But it’s unnecessary.

  Light bloomed, slow but persistent, before her eyelids, and the feeling of weight above her lessened. Fatima opened her eyes. Above, a rosy sky glistened through a film of clear water; below, in the darker gradients, she saw shadows with long fins slipping through the gloom.

  Sharks, she thought with alarm.

  Worse, said Vikram cheerfully. Sea folk. Nasty, smelly, half-intelligent things with glass teeth. If that one gets much closer, I’ll eat it whole.

  There was a muffled squeal in the dark, and one of the shadows darted away.

  That’s right, you ugly eel-spawn. I’ll strip out your fishy guts and suck them clean.

  Fatima’s head broke the surface. She pulled away from Vikram and arched her back, drawing air into her lungs so fast that they began to burn. A wave scooped her up and carried her forward, rolling her like a log. It deposited her on a slope of warm sand.

  Fatima tried to move and couldn’t. She heard Vikram emerge from the surf, muttering and shaking water from his pelt. She tried to focus on him and found she couldn’t do that either: he was a mere suggestion of himself, a blot in her eyesight, like ink suspended in water.

  “You’re different,” she croaked, her throat raw.

  “I’m not,” said Vikram indignantly. “I’m exactly the same. You’re different. Or rather, you’re seeing things differently.”

  “But you don’t look anything like yourself. Not like a dog, or like a man, or—”

  “I’m not any of thos
e things. I never was. Those are corpses I carry around for convenience’s sake. Every hunter has his camouflage.”

  Fatima repeated this to herself, testing it for some deeper meaning she was too exhausted to detect. She began to shiver violently. The coil of dark fire that was Vikram interposed itself between her and the velvet sky. Though he had no expression, she could tell he was uneasy.

  “You’re hurt,” he said.

  “I’m not,” said Fatima. “I’m only a little tired.”

  “You’re hurt, though.” He bent down and Fatima felt pressure on her face. Then Vikram straightened and spat a stream of blood into the sand.

  “What are you doing?” cried Fatima, shielding her face with her hands.

  “Cleaning the wound and sealing it. I don’t know whether there’s anything here that could make you septic, but it’s best not to take chances.” He bent again, straightened, and spat more blood. Fatima closed her eyes.

  “Where’s here?” she murmured.

  “Where do you think?”

  Fatima’s eyes flew open. The sky was a buttery yellow, fading along the edges into blue and pink; in places a few radiant stars were visible. It might have been dawn or dusk or anything in between. Fatima was reminded of the long late afternoons of high summer, when light left the sky with reluctance. She knew where she was. She cried out and reached toward Vikram, impatient with her own weakness.

  “Take me to him,” she begged.

  “What, now? To the Bird King? You’re hardly fit to walk.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She wriggled her fingers, the only part of her body still under full control. “He knows me and I know him.”

  “Yes, I expect you do. All right, little beast! You always get your own way in the end. Hold on.” Furred arms lifted her. Fatima found she could still feel the delineation of Vikram’s body, or corpse, though it was no longer visible to her. She threaded her fingers through his hair and held on as he carried her, like a cat with a kitten, away from the beach.

  Trees cut through Fatima’s view of the sky. The sound of the surf was replaced by the hiss and rustle of leaves and the steady drip of dew, and high, curious animal sounds that Fatima could not identify. The trees, too, were not any sort she had seen before, not elm or cypress or oak or pine, but graceful, thin-limbed things with rough silvery bark. Fatima let one arm drop to caress the ground. Mosses slid beneath her fingers. She could hear running water, and soon enough she touched it: a stream, bitingly cold, lined with smooth stones. She lifted her hand again and sucked on her fingers, tasting water that was sweet and rich with some tart mineral.

  “It tastes like silver,” Fatima murmured, half drunk.

  “It tastes like rocks,” said Vikram. “Like the quartz vein that runs along the streambed, which you’d see if you looked down. This island is halfway between your country and mine. Where you find quartz, you’ll find the jinn.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know why. Why do the banu adam love gold? We were all made to covet one thing or another. Rest, if you can. You’re hurt and there’s still a bit of a walk ahead.”

  Fatima closed her eyes obediently, and for several minutes, Vikram’s hunched, loping gait lulled her into a light sleep. But the air changed, growing steadily colder, and when she felt her breath begin to freeze on Vikram’s fur, Fatima opened her eyes again.

  The ground before her was covered in snow. The forest had given way to a sloping hillside fringed with winter grass. The air was soundless, hanging over the blue earth in one chilled breath, and leading away over the crest of the hill was a line of forked footprints made by a creature much larger than anything Fatima had ever laid eyes upon. She clung to Vikram in a panic.

  “What made those?” she demanded, struggling to climb onto his back. Vikram shifted to accommodate her.

  “If your people ever had a name for it, it’s long been forgotten,” he said. “But listen to me, little friend—stop clambering around and listen. You have only one natural enemy here, and that is fear. Nothing in this place can hurt you, no matter how large its footprints. But if you give in to your terror of the unseen, those very same things will devour you and leave not one bit of gristle behind.”

  Fatima pressed her face into Vikram’s pelt and began to relax the muscles of her back, one after another. It was the effort itself that calmed her.

  “You might eat me too,” she muttered.

  “I might, but I only eat when I’m hungry. You banu adam eat whenever the mood strikes you, whether you’re hungry or not. Judge for yourself which impulse is more reliable.”

  “And the thing that made those tracks? When does it eat?”

  “Whenever it senses opportunity. Ah, here we are. Look, Fatima. You’re the first of your kind to lay eyes on this place in many hundreds of years.”

  Fatima lifted her head. Vikram had taken them to the summit of the snow-covered hill. They stood looking down its far slope, where the snow faded by gentle gradients into yellow sand. A series of mounded dunes led down into a shallow valley, at the bottom of which was a cluster of trees whose thick fronds threw shade over low, flowering bushes; all were suffused with ambient light, as if the sun shone on the little oasis from beneath. In the middle, ringed by the sharp-shadowed trees, was a small lake.

  It was perfectly round, the lake was, and a shade of blue that was not reflected in the many-colored twilight of the sky above. Fatima was sure she had seen it before. But she had not: the lake was part of Gwennec’s story, and she had committed its image to memory.

  “Is this Antillia?” she asked, startled. “Are we not in Qaf after all?”

  “Perhaps it’s time to consider the possibility that it doesn’t matter,” said Vikram. “The place remains, regardless of what you want to call it. Go! Go down and see the king.”

  Fatima slid from his back. Her feet landed in a borderland between sand and snow, where the ground was frozen on top but warm underneath. She hurried down the face of the dune, her steps kicking up sheaves of fine sand until she was forced to slow down

  and shield her face. The haze before her settled. The lake came into view, nestled in its bed of palm trees. It was not so much a lake, she realized, as a pool or a spring: some ancient race had enclosed it with a low wall of limestone that might once have been white but was now water stained and spackled with lichen. Fatima rushed toward it and pressed herself against the warm stone, searching the curvature of the wall, the thicket of flower-strewn thornbushes, the face of the rosy limestone hill that emerged abruptly from the desert just beyond the oasis.

  Nothing stirred except a little current of air through the dry fronds of the trees. Fatima heard Vikram pad toward her and come to a stop, sniffing the air.

  “There’s no one here,” she protested.

  “Certainly there is,” he said. “We’re here.”

  “But where is the king?”

  “Where do you suppose? Look into the water.”

  Fatima looked down. The surface of the spring was preternaturally calm. Peering into it, she saw only herself. None of the copper and silver mirrors in the Alhambra had reflected images so precisely. She found herself surprised by the sight of her decisive jaw, the skeptical curve of her brow. They belonged to someone older and more intent than she had been when she last saw herself; someone who had gone without food and could take a life if the need arose. But her features were interrupted by something that had not been there before: a thin seam cut diagonally across her face from forehead to chin, traversing her nose at its widest point, less a wound than a fracture, like cracked glass. She touched her face, startled.

  “I fixed what I could,” said Vikram, sounding almost apologetic. “You’re lucky you didn’t lose an eye. But the line will always be there, I’m afraid. Will you mind? You look as though you might mind.”

  “I don’t mind,” said Fatima, running one finger along the seam. “I was only thinking that people have been telling me how beautiful I am for as long as I can remember,
and I’ve always hated them for it. But they were right. I am beautiful.”

  Vikram threw his head back and laughed. The sound echoed off the chalky hill on the far side of the spring and bounced back again, doubling itself.

  “Come along,” he said. “Let’s go back—it’s too hot in this part of the island.”

  Fatima sat on the edge of the little wall and watched Vikram amble away.

  “I want to see the Bird King,” she called after him, feeling something had gone wrong.

  “You’ve been looking at the Bird King for the last five minutes,” said Vikram.

  Fatima looked into the water again. Her own face stared back at her. All the moments that had come before, the things she had remembered and forgotten, arranged themselves into a straight line. She could look back along it to the yellow room in the palace where she had been born and see how they had each proceeded, one after the other, to the wild place in which she found herself, though she could not have imagined at the beginning where the end would be.

  “I am the king of the birds,” she whispered to herself.

  “Yes, you are,” came Vikram’s voice. “Get up, Fatima. Rise, oh King of the Birds.”

  Chapter 20

  Fatima took off her boots and left them by the lip of the spring, and walked back up the canted dunes in her bare feet.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.

  Vikram was hunched over beside her, a dark blur above the sand containing eyes and teeth and little else she could identify. Yet there was nothing about him that frightened her anymore: she knew, in some real sense, what he was, and more than that, she knew what they were to each other.

  “There was nothing to tell,” he said. “To find the Bird King, you needed to rid yourself of all the parts of you that were not the Bird King. I had nothing to do with it, and neither, for that matter, did anyone else. If you had made your choices differently, you might be in Morocco now, comforting a deposed sultan; or in Castile, crowning an empress; or in the Empty Quarter, sitting at my sister’s feet. You could have clung to hope. Instead, you chose something more radical.”