Muffled shouts reached her over the rolling of the surf. Hassan and Gwennec skittered to a stop just short of her, incredulous and laughing.
“It is Stupid!” crowed Hassan. “I told you, Gwen! What other horse have you ever met with a face like a brick? What a good boy”—here he reached out to rub water from the creature’s mane—“What a good boy.”
“Hassan,” said Fatima, preparing herself to ask the question whose answer she dreaded. “How long have we been here?”
“Weeks,” said Hassan.
“Months, surely,” said Gwennec. “Four months, I think.”
“That long? No—I say ten weeks at most.”
“It’s been four months,” insisted Gwennec. “I keep track because I know how long it takes me to build things. A big tub for the washhouse takes three days, including salvaging wood and nails, and so on. It’s been four months.” He paused. “At least, I think it has.”
Fatima shook her head. Her mouth was dry, despite the constant press of wet air, and she licked her lips.
“Stupid couldn’t have survived nearly that long in the water,” she said. “How long can a horse keep itself afloat by swimming? A day? Less? Look at him, look at how he’s breathing, look at the way he recognized us—it’s as if he only just went overboard.”
Hassan’s face, every inch of which had grown freckled from long hours in the sun, fell into an expression of dismay.
“What are you saying?” he asked in a very different voice.
“I’m not sure,” said Fatima. Driven by something she could not describe, she continued down the beach, walking at first, and then, when she caught sight of a black lump rolling in the surf at the waterline, breaking into a run.
The lump was a bundle of sodden velvet, a black dress collapsing under its own weight, and inside, like a corpse washed and shrouded for burial, was Luz.
Fatima stopped so fast that her momentum nearly carried her over. For a few moments she wasn’t sure whether Luz was alive or dead, but then she heard a little moan, as low and grating as an animal’s, and Luz, shaking, propped herself up on her hands. Her hair hung over her face and trailed onto the sand, the blonde waves stained green with seawater. A stream of bright blood leached toward the surf from a wound Fatima could not see.
Luz began to cough. The sound of it made Fatima’s stomach turn: it was deep and full, a grotesque, efficient spate of productivity, and with it, Luz brought up shards of wood and glass. Fatima found her legs would no longer hold her and dropped to her knees. It was as if Luz had swallowed the wreckage of her ship: she was returning it to the sea splinter by splinter, upholding some unspeakable bargain, her own body a borrowed vessel embalming the dismembered wood and metal in a rush of blood. Fatima watched, stupefied. The sea pulled everything toward itself in its insensible rhythm. In no more than a minute all was gone, wood and blood and metal, and Luz lay silent on the beach.
It was in this state that Gwennec and Hassan found them. They hovered behind Fatima’s shoulder and stared, their mouths identically slack. Fatima realized she should offer some explanation, or at least some description, but words had deserted her and instead she reached for Hassan’s hand. She had resisted touching him, or even looking at him more than was necessary, since he had moved his sleeping mat away from the fire; she sensed that this hurt him, though she would not allow herself to meet his eyes long enough to confirm it. Now she needed to remind herself that he was solid, that the island was solid, that there had been victory and peace, for if this was true, the crumpled figure on the beach was not, as she feared, the end of everything.
Hassan gripped her hand with a little cry that told her he had missed her. Sensing she would not have another chance, Fatima turned to look at him and say the things she should have said weeks ago, when a cleaner understanding was possible. Love was awful; this she had always known, but it was other things as well. It was real enough to thwart empires, to summon land out of the barren sea, even when the sentiment of it was entirely used up, even when the pleasure of it was gone, even when it was no longer a feeling at all, but a purpose. And she still loved him.
But she said nothing, for Gwennec shouldered past her with a howl, drew his foot back, and kicked Luz in the stomach with such force that Fatima could feel the impact in the sand.
Luz convulsed, coughing more blood. Gwennec raised his fists and brought them down on her slack body over and over again, the sound of it terrifying, at once too muffled and too loud. Hassan let go of Fatima’s hand to wrap his arms around the monk, straining to pull him away.
“What’s wrong with you?” he bellowed, half lifting the shorter man off the bloodied sand. “Damn it, Gwen, what are you doing?”
Gwennec struggled in Hassan’s arms, sobbing.
“She’s killed the things I love,” he quavered, lunging again toward Luz. “She and her Holy Office. A holy office! They mutilate and terrify and shame and say they do it out of love. But they’ve killed love. They will burn down the Church itself so they can rule over the ashes. I will never see my abbey again, I will never see the Sacrament in my life, I will die unshriven, but that’s not enough—no, like a pestilence, she raises herself from the dead so she can poison more lives, even in this place at the end of the very earth.” He lunged again, but Hassan’s arms, no longer those of a hunched scribe, held him fast; defeated, he collapsed against Hassan’s shoulder and went slack, giving himself to his grief.
“It’s all right, you silly boy,” murmured Hassan, speaking, or so it seemed, into the monk’s matted hair. “You think Luz has decided to be a particularly awful sort of person, and if you kill her, the evil will go away. But it’s not like that. Plenty of ordinary, peaceful men and women think someone like me ought to be murdered, even if they’d never dream of doing it themselves. Get enough of them together and the Inquisition will spring into existence all by itself, as if called from the very air.” He stroked Gwennec’s hair, untangling one of the many knots that had formed in it, and looked over his head at Fatima with an expression she couldn’t read. “But she’s alone here. Just a half-dead inquisitor, cut off from all that ordinary evil. We have the king of the birds. She can’t hurt us.”
The confidence with which Hassan made this pronouncement caused Fatima to startle and stare at him, certain he wasn’t serious. She had no power: she had done nothing but look into a pool of water. If she had stared down a leviathan, it was only because the sun had intervened; if she had opened the way to the island, it was only by throwing a mapmaker overboard. It seemed to her that she had acted in the only way she could have: there was nothing kingly about that. The others looked to her for leadership because they needed it. It did not follow that Fatima could wage a war, or keep a peace that did not want to be kept.
Luz stirred at their feet. A hand as bloodless as the chalk cliffs reached out to touch the instep of Fatima’s foot. Fatima didn’t dare move. With effort, Luz raised her hand a little more and clutched the sodden hem of Fatima’s robe, the robe Mary had made for her from the purple brocade: a royal robe, she had called it. Fatima wanted to turn away, to leave Luz there on the beach where she would certainly die. She deserved as much. She would do nothing but disrupt the quiet order of things in Con, the little rituals that shaped their days; even when she was cut off from the source of her power, her faith was the sort that loomed over the lives of others. Yet the hand that clung to Fatima’s robe was clenched like a child’s.
Fatima snarled in frustration. Bending down, she put her hands beneath Luz’s elbows and sat her up. It was only then that she saw her face, and her eyes. Her mouth was raw and cracked, as well it might be after expelling the better part of a wooden ship, but it was her eye, her left eye, that made Fatima sway on the balls of her feet. The spot was gone. There was a fine wound, a thread, running along the white of Luz’s eye toward her pupil, as if the spot had been torn out by force. The wound was red and sunken and the effect was singular: it looked as though Luz’s eye had very nearly been cut in
half, slashed, like the mark a merchant might leave on old goods condemned to the scrap heap.
“Kill her,” begged Gwennec, rocking in Hassan’s arms. “Leave her for the sea. Don’t bring her back to Con with us. She can’t build anything, Fatima, she only knows how to tear down the things her betters have made.”
Fatima wanted nothing more than to do as Gwennec asked, but Luz’s hand was still wrapped in her skirt. She sat down on the sand next to the white-faced inquisitor and looked out toward the sea. Waves rose and fell, littered with the debris of Luz’s ship, casting the spars up and down, up and down, as they bore them back into the east. Then a little movement, running counter to the motion of the water, made Fatima sit up straighter. It came again, bulging along the crest of a wave and subsiding into a foamy wake. Fatima stood. The spars gathered themselves together, pulling up foam and oily water and the dark ebbing liquids of Luz’s own body, and rose up to crouch on the surface of the sea.
No one spoke. Fatima could hear the ragged pull of Gwennec’s breath and the high keening of Hassan’s; and her own breath, deeper, thundering along her limbs and returning again to her chest. The vision rose farther out of the water, twisting around itself like the coils of a serpent. The motion was familiar in a way that the vision itself was not, and in a moment, Fatima knew, though she could not exactly say how, what was gathering itself before her eyes.
“Hassan,” she whispered.
“I see it,” came Hassan’s voice, strained and high. “The—the thing we set loose in the dark beneath the Alhambra. It’s here. It’s followed us.”
Fatima felt a stab of guilt. It was her anger, in the end, that had freed the coiled horror in the water: anger she had turned on Hassan instead of toward some useful end.
“It was I,” she said. “I set it loose, not you. Never you, love.”
Hassan’s fingers found hers and intertwined themselves against her palm. The thing in the water was looking at her, through her, though it had no eyes; she felt its gaze in her spine, as though it was peeling away each layer of her to appraise what lay at her core.
“Look, Luz,” Fatima whispered. “There is the voice you thought was God.”
Luz raised her head and looked silently, her eyes deadened and unreadable. Vikram had warned them that the thing would attach itself to someone, but in the panic of her flight, Fatima had never imagined it would settle in the very person pursuing her. A mote in the eye of the Deceiver, he had called it, yet Fatima had failed to recognize it for what it was. It had seemed so small. Now it unfurled, surging upward until it loomed over the beach, eclipsing the pale sun. Fatima didn’t move, couldn’t move; her feet were sunk in the wet sand, the earth itself shrinking from the abscess of bile and wood that crouched upon the waves.
She could only stand, so she stood. She planted her feet between her friends and the wretched Luz and the thing in the water, and waited. The vision rushed toward her. She could feel the salt spray on her face and smell it, mingled with the copper of blood and some other unwholesome scent, like a boneyard. At the last moment, when she was sure it would engulf them all, it suddenly collapsed, subsiding once again into wood and water to be pulled apart by the sea.
Fatima swayed where she was, afraid she might cry, feeling unwontedly lonely, less like a king than like a child in borrowed clothes who was about to be found out.
“Is it gone?” quavered Hassan.
“Gone?” Fatima looked around herself without seeing. “It was never gone to begin with. It’s been with us the entire way. Of course it isn’t gone.”
Luz, childlike herself, tugged at Fatima’s sodden hem. Reaching out, she began to write in the sand with one finger, laboring over each letter until the message was whole.
More will come, it said.
Chapter 23
By the time they reached Con, the first of the Castilian ships had already been sighted from the city walls. The little frog-man, who liked to make himself important, had been standing watch ever since the king had left the keep, and bellowed an alarm from his half-inflated throat when a sail appeared on the horizon.
“A ship, a ship,” he croaked, leaping down from the wall to spread the news. “Where is the king? Make ready our armaments and our supplies, for who is to say whether this vessel carries friend or foe? Have we no archers, no infantry? Like Darius and Alexander, we shall put all our strongest men on our left flank, for if it comes to open battle, the lines will drift—”
Fatima was, at that moment, near the top of the chalk stairs to the keep, with Luz leaning heavily on her arm. She could have seen the sail herself if she had looked over her shoulder, but her focus was on the inquisitor, who stared vacantly at the steps before her as if she did not perceive them. It was all Fatima could do to keep her from swaying too far in one direction and falling to her death, for neither Gwennec nor Hassan offered help. Instead, they led the horse, coaxing it when it balked at the narrow stairs, for the only other route from the beach to the keep took the better part of two hours to traverse. She could feel them both staring at her as they climbed, their sandaled feet scuffing reproachfully on each step.
“I should let you fall,” she murmured to Luz. “I should let you be dashed to pieces against the sand. It would make those two happy. It would make me happy too, for that matter.”
Luz made a rough, strangled noise; it was the only sound she appeared capable of producing. As the eastern arch of the keep came into view, Fatima had a profound urge to do exactly as she threatened. The sun had burned through some of the mist and lit the remaining clouds to a troubled, golden hue; here and there rays of light struck the gray stone, making it seem as though the world had been reduced to two rich but indeterminate shades of metal. She could see her bath, the wooden tub Gwennec had made with his own hands, sitting at an angle in the archway, a wadded scrap of velvet hanging over one edge to pillow her head. She did not want to bring Luz into this place.
Deng stuck his head around the archway as Fatima mounted the last stair and released Luz to sit on the verge of the white cliff.
“Hello, is that a horse? Where have you been? Our friendly frog has raised the entire city, claiming there are ships on the—” He stopped when he saw Luz. His face settled into an expression Fatima had come to know well: a fixed, bright focus, through which one could sense him assessing the vast catalog of his knowledge. He swept his robe out of the way with a practiced hand and knelt at Luz’s side. Looking at him made Fatima momentarily queasy: it was lovely to watch him, to see the economy of movement in his physician’s hands, and she knew Hassan had marked this and that it had stirred in him a desire and a kinship she couldn’t match. Hassan himself was at Luz’s side a moment later. He brushed past Fatima to squat beside Deng, stroking the older man’s wrist with the back of his fingers in wordless greeting. Fatima watched this tableau, the two men bent solicitously over Luz’s slack body, and found herself blinking back tears.
“You were right, Gwennec,” she said. “I should have left her on the beach.”
Gwennec only grunted and led Stupid into the keep, where the gelding’s hooves rattled against the flagstones and made him skitter.
“I’m taking Stupid to the common to graze,” he said. “He can fight with the chickens for the best spot. If we’re under siege by the time I get back, it won’t be my fault.” He pulled up his cowl, obscuring his face, and strode across the short length of the keep to the western archway, Stupid trailing behind him.
Noise came from the city below. Fatima could hear the frog-man bellowing and human voices answering him and the rattle of the crude spears they used to hunt small game. Remembering Deng’s remark about the ships, she hurried back to the eastern archway of the keep in alarm. Luz was sitting up with Deng’s hands to steady her. The horizon was still and bright, a milky silver under the tentative sun, and there, due east, half hidden by the curvature of the earth, were the topsails of two massive ships.
“How many?” Fatima demanded, turning on Luz. “How m
any are there? Just those two? Or are there more following behind?”
Luz opened her mouth to speak, but only a rasp emerged. Grimacing, she reached out to write in the chalk, digging her nail into the yielding stone.
We were three set out from Andalusia, she wrote.
“Counting yours?” pressed Fatima. “The one that was destroyed in the great wave along with mine? How long were you adrift before you washed up on our beach?”
Luz looked up at her helplessly.
“I can barely feel her pulse,” said Deng, baffled. “You’re being awfully hard on her. We all got here the same way, we were all half dead when we arrived, and we’ve always fed and clothed—”
“This is the woman who wanted Hassan stretched on a rack,” snapped Fatima. “And those two ships on the horizon carry men who’d like to put him there still.” She gathered up her still-damp skirts and walked away before Deng could respond. She had no desire to witness his dilemma. Mary, trailed by the frog-man and the small coterie of variously shaped jinn who seemed to think she was delightful, was coming toward her through the western arch of the keep, red-faced, her hair plastered against her temples.
“My king,” she panted, “there’s been news.”
“I’ve heard,” said Fatima, pulling back her own hair and binding it with a leather thong. “If you expect me to say something inspiring about banding together against a much larger foe, I haven’t thought of anything memorable yet.”
“It isn’t that,” said Mary. “Only Rufus—he’s the Venetian man-at-arms who arrived last week—he was out hunting in that savanna that appeared outside the gate this morning, and took a few hares, and saw the tracks of the leviathan and decided to trail it to its den, or wherever it might lodge.” She paused for breath.
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