“What? What did I choose?”
“Faith.” Vikram galloped ahead, racing toward the top of the dune, where a breeze that smelled of amber and oud-wood was lifting eddies of sand and mingling them with the snow that covered the far side of the slope. Fatima thought his choice of words odd—she had been filled with doubt every step of the way, and had, in fact, disbelieved in the Bird King at the very moments when it seemed most necessary to have faith. Yet she had continued anyway, and had somehow imparted faith to Hassan and Gwennec when theirs had waned, so perhaps it amounted to the same thing; perhaps after all it amounted to belief.
“Say I had chosen differently,” pressed Fatima, struggling to keep up. “Say I had gone to Morocco. Who would be the Bird King now?”
Vikram danced on the knife-edge of the dune, a darkness that mingled all colors, and grinned down at her with disembodied fangs.
“You won’t like the answer!” he sang. “It’s a jinn answer. The Bird King would be the Bird King. The Bird King is, and has always been. The Bird King doesn’t change.”
Fatima made a face at him.
“You see? I told you you wouldn’t like it. Come along, let’s see to your subjects. They’re all gathered on the beach not far from where I found you, waiting for someone with enough sense to tell them what to do.” He tripped down the far side of the dune into the snow, where the light softened and grew richer, throwing rose and purple shadows into the gentle swells of the landscape and gilding the bare-branched trees. Fatima set her foot on the frozen earth and felt a small thrill of delight. She would not wear ill-fitting shoes again: she would feel heat and cold and earth against her bare skin, or she would have shoes made for her, tailored to her own feet and worn by no one else. She walked across the snow as lightly as Vikram, and laughed, propelled by joy so intense that it verged on something entirely different. When she caught up to him, she took him by the claw and danced in a circle, leaving a stuttering track on the white ground.
The island, as they made their way back toward the beach, never arranged itself into a memorable pattern. There was a forest, but not the forest she remembered passing through on the way to the spring at the center; in this forest, it was autumn, and great straight-limbed oaks shed their yellow leaves over the silent, trackless ground. Fatima saw a deer, or something like a deer, drinking from a stream: it paused and lifted its head when it heard them approach, revealing a dry little smile in a face that was almost human. It stared at Fatima with its luminous eyes, slit like those of a goat, holding her gaze not like a frightened animal, but like a traveler on a road, curious and cautious. Fatima froze where she stood.
“Fear only God,” murmured Vikram, pulling her onward. “Not man, nor beast, nor jinn, nor death: fear only God and you will be safe.”
Fatima forced herself to continue. As she walked, she repeated Vikram’s words until her thoughts echoed the rhythm of her footfall: fear not, fear not, fear not. She watched her feet too, until the yellow leaves upon which she walked thinned into rippling grass and then abruptly to blocks of stone. Fatima looked up, startled. Before her rose the wall of a city, or what had once been a city: the wall had tumbled down in places, revealing an empty street paved with river rock and lined with dark-windowed houses, the style and character of which Fatima couldn’t place. The city was not Moorish, certainly, and not Spanish either: the stout, square houses were made of rough-cut stones with no mortar between them, the windows tiny and vaulted, as if to defend the edifice against siege or bad weather. No, not Spanish, but human enough to stand at odds with the wild, unsettled land around it. Fatima reached out and touched the wall, and felt within it the rumble of a waxing tide.
“Are we close to the sea again?” she asked.
“Nearly. If you walk along this main road, you’ll rapidly come to a cliff with a tidy little fortress perched over it, and below that, a sort of harbor, though no ships have docked there in centuries.” Vikram climbed a pile of rubble and surveyed the vacant street, the color of his shadowy pelt mimicking that of the stone around him. Fatima struggled up the rubble behind him. The city, as she looked at it, began to feel familiar, like an image from a dream or the pressure of a memory. Inhaling sharply, Fatima realized where she had seen it before.
“The map,” she said. “Hassan’s map. Seven harbors. Seven cities for seven bishops—that’s what Gwennec’s story said.”
“He was right enough,” said Vikram, leaping from stone to stone until he stood in the street below. “Though ‘city’ is a generous term. Most of them are little more than a few houses clustered around a watchtower. This is the largest.”
Fatima touched the wall again. The rumble of the invisible surf pulsed through her hand, as though the wall were breathing in a labored way, in and out.
“Con,” she said. “This is Con.”
Vikram smiled.
“The king knows her kingdom,” he said, loping along the street. “Let’s walk this way. There are steps cut into the cliff below the fortress, which will lead us down to the beach.” He trotted off, casting no reflection on the polished stones. Fatima hurried to follow. The emptiness of the street was profound: nothing moved; no sound came from the crowded houses, the doors and shutters of which had long since rotted away; even Fatima’s footsteps made no echo, as though the air itself consumed her passage.
“What happened here?” she asked. Without thinking, she dragged her fingers along the stone wall, as she had done in the corridors of the Alhambra, learning the vertical terrain of the place with the most fundamental of her senses. “What happened to the people who built this city?”
“Do you think I know everything? I imagine they died from a failure of imagination. They probably tried to build a road into that forest and never came out again. Or perhaps they left in their ships, intending to return, and couldn’t find their way. This place—” Vikram paused and sniffed the air as if for answers. “No, it isn’t a place at all. Only an idea with a location. Unless you’re a jinn, or something else created in the First Age, you’re not likely to visit it twice.”
“Unless you’re Hassan,” corrected Fatima. “And you have a map.”
“Unless you’re a miracle worker with perfect faith,” said Vikram drily. “He could go anywhere he liked and the unseen would gather to clear his path. But it was you who took the final steps, little friend, when there were no more maps to guide you.”
Fatima pressed her palm against the doorway of a small house built into the hillside at a slant, the keystone at its peak suspended like a pendulum above the empty space where a door had once been: an invitation or a warning or something more indecipherable. Its hinges were still there, rusted but expectant, angled toward the darkness of the interior rooms.
“This feels like something Hassan could have made,” she said, more to herself than to Vikram. “Like one of the rooms he used to make for me in the palace when I was bored. They were always empty. There was something—I don’t know—muffled about them. But I always had the strongest feeling that other people had been there before. If there was a staircase, the steps were worn. If there was a windowpane, the latch was scuffed, as if it’d been lifted and locked a thousand times. But I never saw a single other person.”
Vikram studied her face and made no reply. The thought of Hassan, the memory of his ink-stained fingers, landed in Fatima’s chest and settled there, halting her where she stood and draining the glamor from the scene around her, a feeling disconcertingly like waking from a dream. Had Hassan and Gwennec reached the island, or had the wave that bore them away carried them somewhere else? Her kingdom, if such it was, was without meaning if Hassan had not survived to see it, and Gwennec, for whom her heart spared a small cry—if they were gone, then her victory had been bought at too high a price. The air felt suddenly close and oppressive, as if the silent city had been shut like a disused wardrobe until the moment Fatima set foot in it. She took great, hollow-feeling breaths that did nothing to relieve her. Fatima began to hurry alo
ng the street, craving sunlight. Vikram called out to her, but she ignored him, pelting across the rippled pavement toward the crest of the hill, past stone houses pressed tightly against each other, until she came to a squat little four-walled fortress, an ancient sort of keep, with only sky behind it.
She could see straight through the arched entryway and out the other side. A second arch, the twin of the entrance, revealed a hazy line of clouds and a fringe of sea grass that wandered indoors through the cracks in the paving stones. Between the two arches was a square, high-ceilinged room hardly as large as the courtyard of the harem in the Alhambra, bare of any decoration, a mere interruption between the city and the sea. Breathing raggedly, Fatima stumbled inside.
It was like standing inside a seashell: within the main hall, the thrum of the waves was constant and the light from the open archways lacquered the walls in yellow and pink. Fatima paused, swaying. To her right and left, stone stairways spiraled up toward an invisible second floor; in the middle of the hall was a recessed pit still blackened by the remains of ancient fires. But it was the sky and the grass that called her, and she ran past the fire pit through the archway on the far wall and stood on the extreme verge of a cliff.
Beneath her was a drop of several stories: the stone below was white and soft, limestone perhaps, and long ago some enterprising person had cut into it rough steps at amateurish intervals. Adorned here and there with more pale grass, the steps ended at a thin strip of beach where the outgoing tide sucked and worried at shoals of well-worn sand, and it was there that Fatima saw the monster.
She saw its feet first: they were forked and covered in a kind of yellowish scale and as long as Fatima was tall, and looking down at them, she knew at once that they had made the unearthly tracks she had seen in the snow. They were attached to well-muscled limbs that doubled back on themselves like the legs of a cat, but they were hairless and speckled, supporting a barrel chest the size of a small house. Ribs slid beneath the thin flesh, causing a crest of water-stained spines to sway along the creature’s back; it was moving, weaving back and forth as a snake or a monitor might, its slender tail suspended above the sand behind it, its head bobbing in an awful rhythm. It was the face, though, that filled Fatima with horror: as with the deer, there was something human about it, about the eyes set forward in the skull and focused intently on a single point; the mouth full and small and ready to speak. It advanced along the wet sand, a survivor from a time when the sundering of something from nothing required an act of divine violence.
She knew it immediately. She had seen it night after night as she lay flat on her back, watched it swim through an ocean of ink on the far wall of the sultan’s bedchamber: it was the sea serpent, Hassan’s serpent, freed now from its paper confines, a thing too fearsome to be taken in with a single glance.
Screams broke Fatima’s trance. There were other figures on the beach, she now saw: two in identical dark, spattered cloaks and two more in varied states of disarray; one, a child, appeared to be wearing nothing more than a nightdress. The cloaks, the same as the one Fatima herself wore, and the windblown, salt-lightened heads of red and blond hair above them, sent her to her knees and tore a noise from her throat that sounded as though it came from somewhere else.
The monster whipped its head toward her and looked up into her eyes. Terror racked Fatima’s body like heat, pulling at her sinews, begging her to flee. It was a displacing, disorienting fear, one that upset the hierarchy of things. If the creature below her was made from the same matter as Fatima, it was possible that God was not entirely on her side; if the thing below her was real, then God was also on the side of the monsters. The world, in all its upheaval, was not partisan, and might raise her up only to strike her down with luminous indifference.
“I am the king of the birds,” she whispered to herself. “I am the king of the birds.”
The monster—the thing, the leviathan—twisted itself into a crouch and leaped, sinking its claws into the white cliff. Fatima heard something scrabbling across the paving stones of the hall behind her: Vikram, a smaller darkness, had caught up and was howling piteously, like a dog.
“I am the king of the birds,” Fatima repeated. The leviathan pulled itself up toward her along the cliff face, sending fragments of chalk down on the sand below, its supple mouth pursed—not a nightmare, she thought absently, but a challenge, a reminder that the dominion of mortal men and women was circumscribed, even here at the end of the earth.
The leviathan hauled its heavy body onto the ledge of the cliff. It smelled of hot metal or of summer sun on bare earth, like Vikram, and Fatima wondered if it, too, was a jinn, something made of fire, more akin to the stars than to herself. It made no difference: she would die or she would live, but the thing would acknowledge her. She stood before it and dug her toes into the yielding chalk and lifted her chin.
“I am king here,” she said, and though it sounded forced in her ears, her voice didn’t waver. “And you will answer to me.”
The creature tilted its head. Its lips parted in a slit, behind which was elemental darkness.
“I am king here,” it said, mimicking her tone, her inflection. “And you will answer to me.”
Fatima hesitated. Was it mocking or threatening her, or, like a parrot, could it only repeat the things it heard? In the moment it took her to consider, the monster lunged.
Fatima was thrown backward on the chalk cliff and felt her teeth rattle. Light blinded her. It didn’t fade when she blinked, and she pressed her eyes with the palms of her hands, fearing that she had lost her sight. But the light intensified: it was amber and gold and almost thick, and warmed the cliff beneath Fatima’s back. It was, she realized, the sun, which had declined far enough to shine straight through the entrance of the keep behind her and out the other side, striking the monster full in the face.
It winced and gave a choked cry. The pressure on Fatima’s legs receded. She kicked blindly, hitting air at first and then something more solid. The monster grabbed uselessly at the grass and the brittle chalk and cried again and fell, and the piercing light fell likewise, its glory fleeting, eclipsed by the stone parapets of men.
Fatima saw the shapes of birds. A hoopoe hovered over her, its red crest and barred wings in disarray; beside it, a crow hooded in black was making a rasping, mournful sound. A sparrow, too, flitted into and out of her vision and chirped and fussed, and a dark-headed heron snapped and spread its blue-and-white wings.
“Stay back,” the heron commanded. “She hit her head on that ledge. The bones in her neck may slip if we move her.”
“To hell with you,” wailed the hoopoe. “Give her to me. Fa! Please open your eyes—”
The crow stroked her brow and muttered prayers beneath its breath.
“I told you I knew where we were!” chirped the sparrow. “It is the isle of Avalon! And this is the High King who can make light spring from the ground and drive out the serpents—”
“This is a girl, though, not a king.”
“A queen, then.”
“No,” muttered Fatima, alarmed at this suggestion. She thought of Lady Aisha, who ruled from inside a courtyard; and farther away, Luz’s queen, whose lands were vast but who was outranked by her sullen husband. “Queen is a terrible job. Don’t want that job. Want to be king.”
“Bless me, she speaks!”
Fatima opened her eyes. The face of a man interposed itself between her and the milky evening: a blue-black face, marked with a triple chevron of thin scars that spanned the breadth of his forehead and met between his brows. It was a long, settled face, the jaw deliberate, the eyes large and watchful: the sort of face that bore age gracefully, leaving Fatima with no indication of how old the man might be aside from a certain gray cast about his temples. He was studying her face with evident surprise, touching the seam across the bridge of her nose with practiced fingers.
“You’re quite human,” he said. “When I saw you on the cliff, I could have sworn you were something else
.”
Fatima sat up too suddenly. The sky reeled: the scarred man clucked his tongue and steadied her head between his hands.
“That was foolish,” he said. “What if one of your small bones had slipped out of place? You might never walk again.”
Fatima sank back, but did not quite lie flat, for in the next instant, Hassan had his arms around her and Gwennec was planting stubbled kisses on her cheek.
“Thank God,” cried Hassan, half sobbing. “I told you, Gwen, I told you I’d know if she were dead. I knew it wasn’t so, I knew it in my soul—”
There was a little shriek. The scarred man rose to his feet and groped for a piece of driftwood, and a moment later, a shadow landed in a spray of sand and thrust itself in Fatima’s face.
“Have you gone entirely mad?” roared Vikram. “Do you realize what that thing could have done to you?”
“Who’s this now?” piped the sparrow’s voice. “Why’s it shouting at the king? What is it, anyway?”
“I’m the king’s fairy godmother,” snapped Vikram. He prodded Fatima, lifting and dropping her arms and legs until, apparently satisfied with the state of her health, he subsided into the sand with a long-suffering groan. Fatima struggled to sit unaided, blinking until the beach, the sky, the faces gathered around her came into clearer focus.
The sparrow’s voice came, not from a child as she had first thought, but from a woman of very small stature; she was not in a nightdress after all, but in a man’s linen undershirt, which fell nearly to her ankles. Her face, like Gwennec’s, was ruddy and lined from the sun, and her hair was as straight and straw-like, but nut-brown whereas Gwennec’s was blond. Her limbs, though short, were well muscled and bore the emblems of hard work: chapped hands and sinews that stood out across her wrists and forearms. Standing behind her, the scarred man seemed almost a giant, his white robe and blue linen coat catching the air and floating around him like the flag of some unknown country.
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