The Bird King

by G. Willow Wilson

  “They’re older than me, these pools,” said Vikram, gliding out of the shadows that clung to the edges of the room. “Or very nearly.”

  “Where have you been?” Fatima demanded. “You sneaked away without saying good-bye.”

  “I prefer empty places. Yours was filling up quite quickly. But when I do leave, it will be in the same way, so don’t expect a grand, tearful exit.” He loped across the floor toward the square of light where the door was. “There are buckets over here.”

  Fatima collected them: they were ancient and cracked in places, and she wondered dubiously whether they would hold any water at all. Nevertheless, she wrapped her fingers around the stiff rope handles and carried them out the door into the sunlight. Vikram followed her down the narrow main street with its silent press of houses and out through the walls, passing from the angular, treeless outworks of human endeavor into the flower-strewn meadow beyond.

  Looking past it, Fatima expected to see the forest she had wandered through the day before. She did not. Instead, she was confronted by the sloping outline of a hill covered in heather and moss, its top oddly flattened, a little stream with ferns tumbling down one flank to pool in the meadow below.

  “But this is unmanageable!” said Fatima, setting her buckets down. “If the island rearranges itself every time we turn our backs, how are we to find our way between one place and another?”

  Vikram galloped toward the pool, which was hung about with mist from the falling water, and threw himself in with a yelp.

  “You’re thinking about it all wrong,” he called across the meadow. “You don’t find anything here. The things you want find you. You set off with the intention of fetching water for the cistern, and here is this lovely waterfall a few steps from the city gates. Fill your buckets! You’ll be at this all day if you want that cistern full.”

  Torn between offense and curiosity, Fatima hoisted the buckets and picked her way among clumps of goldenrod and violets and orange poppies toward the pool. It had no defined edge; water seeped out among the flowers and made them seem to float, their vibrant faces doubled on the surface of the pool. Fatima waded in and filled her buckets to the brim, watching Vikram, who seemed, with the little waterfall leaping behind him, like the reflection of something that wasn’t there.

  “Are you happy?” the reflection asked her. Startled, Fatima looked at him, and then at the floating flowers, and over her shoulder at the gray walls of the city, and above them, the milky sky.

  “I’m afraid of being happy,” she confessed.

  “You mustn’t be. Joy is one of the most powerful weapons your race possesses.”

  “Joy I feel,” said Fatima, closing her eyes against the bright air. “Joy comes in moments. Happiness is supposed to last. Whenever I feel it, I’m afraid something will take it away, and it won’t come back again.”

  “Little old woman! You’re wise, and wisdom often makes people unhappy. But you’re more afraid of happiness than you were of the leviathan you met on that cliff. Have you already forgotten what I told you when I pulled you out of the sea? You must be without fear: of the leviathan and of yourself.” He hauled himself out of the pool and shook, sending a halo of droplets into the air. Fatima shouldered the heavy buckets and began to make her way back through the flowers unsteadily.

  “Strange,” she said, listening to the receding sound of water. “I’m meant to be the king of the birds, yet I haven’t seen a single bird since I came here.”

  “Don’t be dense. You’ve seen birds aplenty—the two you brought with you and another two who washed ashore as soon as the way was open. And more will come besides.”

  Fatima stopped where she was.

  “What do you mean more will come?” she called. But Vikram did not seem to hear. He scampered ahead, keeping to the grassy track she had made on her way out. Fatima opened her mouth to call again and then thought better of it. The scent of the flowers was so thick and sweet that worry was impossible. Fatima shouldered her buckets, but she did not hurry. Vikram was a dark smudge against the verdant field, like a devil in heaven, cavorting among hillocks of grass. The air, thick as it was, carried with it the sound of familiar laughter from the city walls. Fatima felt a heaviness settle in her limbs, not unpleasantly; it pressed down on her with the sun like a blanket of light, inviting repose. Fatima let her shoulders go slack. At the end of the track of dew and crushed grass, Hassan stood in the empty city gateway, laughing, clad in green velvet, and Gwennec, who had summited the walls, waved to her with flowers in his hair.

  Their days quickly took shape and assumed a pattern. Fatima rose first, when the sun had barely colored the eastern windows of the keep, and remade the fire. Quite alone, she climbed to the second floor and exited through a door that opened onto the perimeter wall, then wound her way between the battlements and walked the length of the city until she reached the city gate. The meadow was nearly always just outside, but what lay beyond it changed day by day: sometimes it was a forest of autumn birches, sometimes a grassy plain, once the blue unyielding ledge of a glacier shouldering its way through the landscape toward the sea. Once, the meadow stretched so far toward the horizon that Fatima caught a glimmer of the spring at the center of the island and the mountain that rose above it. There was always water close by, a lake or a stream or a bank of melting snow, and if the cistern looked low, Fatima would spend the rest of the day filling it again. She found herself working harder than she ever had at the Alhambra, but minding it less: she worked to feed and water herself and her friends, and looked with pride upon the calluses that quickly covered her hands.

  The others each took up the tasks to which they found themselves best suited. Within days, Mary had cataloged all the linen in the keep, and a week after that, she presented Fatima and the others with new tunics and gowns and hose cut from remnants of the embroidered velvets and silks. She commissioned Gwennec to build her two great wooden tubs from the old boards and disused doors that he had found about the city and then installed them in an outbuilding adjacent to the cistern, with a fire to heat the water. Here they washed their clothes when these were dirty and themselves too, bathing with soap Mary made from ash and salt and rendered fish fat, using handfuls of violets and flowering linden collected from the meadow to disguise the smell. Deng and Hassan fished and foraged; Deng taught them all the names of the medicinal plants and roots he collected on his walks, and what to avoid and what to eat, and hung bunches of herbs from a beam along the north side of the main hall to dry.

  Gwennec, for his part, rummaged until he found a hammer and saw and began to collect all the nails he could find that had not rusted through. He built the two tubs for the laundry and a third, smaller one for Fatima after she confessed to missing the baths in the Alhambra: this he set in the eastern archway of the main hall, so that Fatima could bathe with a view of the sea. He built a lap desk for Hassan with pigeonholes for his quills and charcoals and bottles of ink, and Hassan, who had no land left to map, began to map faces instead. Sketches appeared around the hall, propped against columns or tucked next to sleeping mats like the gifts of a bashful child: Mary sewing, her head thrown back in laughter or song; Gwennec with the sleeves of his habit rolled up as he wove a reed basket; Fatima bathing in the empty archway, her head turned toward the sea.

  When they were not at work, they wandered together along the coast, taking with them lunches of dried fish and acorn flour cakes baked in the embers of the cooking fire. Hassan always brought his map. Water-stained though it was, he rolled it up in its carrying case with a few charcoals and quills, hoping to add to it, but the interior of the island remained as opaque to him as it did to the others: he would stand on a bluff or a ledge he had bloodied his knees to reach and pause for a moment and then invariably begin to laugh.

  “It’s like drinking too much wine,” he said on one such expedition. “I look west and see a forest. Then I turn and get a headache. Then I look back and the forest is a desert, or marshland covered in fog
. My fingers are blind. I don’t think the island wants to be mapped.”

  “Then don’t try,” Fatima had replied, feeling nervous. “Vikram says it’s not a proper place at all, only an idea with a location. Perhaps we shouldn’t upset it. Or—I don’t know. Misconstrue it.”

  “You’re starting to sound like him. Full of convenient little notions.” But Hassan had acquiesced, and though he still brought the map with him on their walks, he no longer took it out every time they paused to rest, and once in a while, when the landscape faded or shifted, Fatima caught him smiling a little bitterly at it, communing with the only place that would not bend to his fingers and yet had saved his life.

  The coastline, at least, remained as Hassan had drawn it: an hour’s walk south along the beach brought them around the first of the tiny harbors to the second of the seven cities, which was, as Vikram had said, little more than a short, square tower with several houses crowded around its feet, their wooden roofs fallen in and desiccated. As they turned northward again, the beach widened, bordered by dunes rather than chalk cliffs; two subsequent towers were visible together, set on the westward side of the island, gazing toward one another from across a green lagoon. Continuing northward along the beach for another hour brought them to another tower, which leaned precariously toward the sea on a poor foundation and had mostly tumbled down. Then came a jagged loop around the northernmost point of the island, where the beach was reduced to a thread of sand so narrow that it was necessary to walk single file past a lonely outpost that loomed on fangs of slate over their heads. The final city was only half built: a square hole in the ground lined with stone blocks, abandoned so hastily that chisels and mallets and plumb lines lay discarded inside, all of which Gwennec happily appropriated and carried back to Con in the folds of his habit.

  All told, it took less than a day to walk the entire shoreline of the island and arrive back where they began: if they left Con shortly after dawn and rested on the beach for an hour at midday, they would arrive back at twilight, while there was still some light left in the sky.

  At night, they sang. It was in singing that they realized they had no common language: Hassan wondered aloud how Mary had come to know songs in Arabic, and she told him, baffled, that she was singing in the language of her own damp corner of Cornwall. Deng lapsed into his mother tongue without thinking as he taught them rounds learned in childhood on the red plains below the Nile, yet Fatima understood him just the same; Gwennec tried Latin and then Breton and sounded as he always had.

  Fatima, tentatively, began to re-create a melody she had last heard when she was barely old enough to stand, a song learned at Lady Aisha’s feet, when Vikram was still just a dog she could look in the eye when he was crouched on all fours. The memory, never more than an impression, became vivid now, the words to the song second nature. It was about a tree whose roots curled among the bones of the ancestors buried there: when Fatima sang it again now, she had to excuse herself and went out to the steps cut into the chalk cliff and wept.

  She sat longer than she meant to, long enough for all the light to vanish from the sky and a white band of stars to appear overhead. Someone had banked the fire. When she made her way back inside toward her sleeping mat, she discovered that the place next to hers was empty. Hassan had moved away from the fire, into a darker corner of the hall, and Deng was slumbering next to him, under the same blanket.

  Fatima sat awake a while longer and watched Hassan breathing. He slept with his lips slightly parted, the rise and fall of his chest mimicking the waves on the beach below. The firelight picked up the copper in his hair and beard and brightened them to a giddy hue, a red as vivid as autumn bracken. Only when he stirred and murmured did Fatima look away. The embers of the fire pulsed and flickered, their colors fading: she stared into them, past them, letting her eyes lose focus, watching blue slide into orange and red, unable to determine the precise instant at which one became the next.

  The others began to arrive the next morning. On the first day, the tide brought in a tiny rowboat containing a lone Romani woman, a basket of chickens, and one half-drowned rooster. The woman’s name was Sona: she had a mass of white hair as curly as Fatima’s own and blue lines tattooed on her chin, beneath the fullest part of her lip. She had fled in the little boat, stolen from a fisherman’s pier, when her family’s caravan was attacked by Ottoman soldiers while they summered on the shore of the Black Sea. A few days later, the jagged remains of a raft, barely more than a few planks of water-gray wood lashed together, were spotted offshore: four boys were huddled upon it, their identical auburn heads pressed together, their skin blue. The eldest was named Asher and he was twelve years old: he volunteered this much, and no more, when he and his brothers had been fed, given dry clothes, and warmed before a fire. The youngest was no more than five and did not speak at all but stared up at Fatima with wide brown eyes from which childhood had been wiped clean.

  It continued this way, the boats arriving in a stuttered succession, filled with the last hopes of people for whom the sea offered, if nothing else, a quieter and more dignified death than the land would have given them. They arrived surprised to find themselves among the living. The wariness took days to fade, sometimes longer; it took the first undercooked fish or poorly chosen mushroom, something that sent them retching into the bushes, to remind them they still had bodies. After that, they would begin to smile. Sona, when the glassiness left her eyes, set about establishing her chickens in the small abandoned green at the center of the city, building them a coop made from scrap wood: in a week, there were eggs as a change from the monotony of fish meals. Not long afterward, Asher and his brothers began to speak in full sentences and to apply themselves to small tasks without being asked: collecting soiled linen for Mary’s washhouse, whittling stakes to make a fence around the poultry run, dispersing into the empty houses to salvage nails when Gwennec’s supply ran out. If they were encouraged to play—Hassan made them toy knights and horses from river clay and almost begged them to leave off the little round of chores they had invented for themselves—they would only grimace and slip away or shake their heads with unnerving emphasis. They would live, they would smile again, but they would not laugh, and no amount of pleading by adults would make them into children.

  Other things arrived as well. It was always during the fragile hour between sunset and full dark, the time between prayers, when the colors of the sky were haunted: shadows came, cast by nothing and speaking in whispers; slender trees that walked and did not speak at all; and things that looked like cats or jackals but went on two legs instead of four. One evening brought a fat, jolly creature that stood no taller than Fatima’s knee and looked, to her eyes at least, like a frog that had undergone several additional metamorphoses on its journey from tadpolehood; if it wanted to talk to someone, it would climb onto the nearest rock or hillock or stair to look its companion in the eye and then hold forth at length, with extraordinary vocabulary, about the weather or the tides or any other subject that happened to catch its interest.

  They emerged, it seemed, from the air itself, fleeing from shores unknown to the island’s earthly inhabitants, and took up residence alongside their human neighbors in the empty houses and sheds that lined the cobbled main street of the city. The street was full of sound now at all hours of the day, full of jokes and arguments and the protests of Sona’s rooster; and sometimes, when unknowable conditions were met, some of the jinn could be persuaded to sing. Fatima took to sitting in the western arch of the keep at twilight, warming her feet on the stone steps still radiating the heat of the day, and listening to the noises that persisted after the light had died. They suffused the extraordinary landscape with what was small and tender and banal: the anxious muttering of hens settling down to roost, the sound of washing water poured into basins, the gentle unmelodic snores of those who slept. Civilization was, Fatima realized, something very simple; it was the right of these small rituals to perpetuate themselves in peace. As king, she did very
little but witness it. There were no lands to conquer, no riches to hoard, no rivals to dispatch; there were only water buckets to carry and boats to meet on the beach. The others called her the king when they were alone and Fatima when she was with them, for so she was: king of all and master of none.

  Chapter 22

  Hassan and Gwennec had taken to rising together before dawn so that Gwennec could pray lauds and Hassan could pray fajr, and afterward they could both join Fatima as she walked the walls of the city: it was on one of these occasions that they spotted a horse on the beach.

  “Is that what I think it is?” said Hassan, peering over the ramparts that ran along the roof of the keep toward the brownish object treading through the sand below. “A horse? Have there been any boats?”

  “Not for days,” said Fatima. She stood on tiptoe and looked where Hassan was pointing. The horse was moving slowly, staggering like a drunkard, its track a jagged line along the beach behind it. It was wearing a rope halter but bore no other sign of human ownership; its shaggy mane and tail streamed water, as though it had only just emerged from the surf, a nautical oddity, divorced from any craft that might reasonably carry it.

  Fatima watched the sun illuminate a familiarly dappled shoulder and went still. Without speaking, she turned and hurried back into the keep, running lightly down the curved stone staircase that led to the main hall on the first floor and exiting through the eastward archway. The day was gray and windy: wet air slapped against her face as she made her way down the cliff steps and finally stumbled onto the beach. The horse pricked its ears at her approach and stopped, raising its boxy head. Fatima halted likewise and caught her breath.

  It was Stupid. Foam dripped from the stout gelding’s mouth, and he was breathing heavily but seemed otherwise unharmed. He bobbed his head when he recognized Fatima, shuffling toward her to press his nose against her chest. Fatima stroked the animal’s wet flank. A numbness crept up from her fingertips, which registered the warmth and damp of the horse’s coat only remotely.