“That was foolish,” muttered Fatima, parting her hair to braid it. “He might have been killed.”
“He might’ve been, but instead he followed the tracks to a sort of hollow, he called it, full of bones. Bones, and this.” Here she held up a battered length of leather, cracked and soiled and very obviously a boot.
Fatima took it from her silently. The leather was water-stained and the crest of each fold was bleached from long exposure to sun and air. She studied it, bending it this way and that in her hands until the creases thinned and buckled, and instructed herself not to panic.
“What does it mean?” pressed Mary. One of the jinn, a tiny thing that, when visible, took a batlike form, had climbed up on her shoulder and sat gazing at Fatima with an identical expression of pleading and desperation. Fatima turned away and gritted her teeth. They all looked at her that way eventually, when they were frightened enough, and it never failed to make her angry.
“I asked for this,” she said aloud to herself. “When the sultan asked me what I wanted, I told him I wanted this. And now here I am.”
“When God really wants to test you, He gives you exactly what you desire,” muttered the returning Gwennec, slapping dirt off his hands. He smelled of horse. “At the end of the story of Job, he gets all his wealth back again, and God leaves. Remember that.”
“Are you going to help, or just dispense these little pearls of wisdom?” snapped Fatima.
“I haven’t decided yet.” Gwennec sniffed conspicuously and made off in the direction of the washhouse.
Fatima looked again at the weathered boot in her hand. She knew what it meant but didn’t dare say to Mary or the jinn, who were still looking at her with expectant upturned faces. Instead, she told them what she had discovered on the beach.
“Time isn’t passing properly here the way it is in the rest of the world,” she said. “Luz and the horse—they went into the water at the same time Gwennec and Hassan and I did. Weeks have gone by here, or months even, but only moments have passed in the world we left.”
Mary considered this for a minute and then lifted her chin.
“That’s not so bad,” she said stoutly. “Is it? It’s the sort of thing you expect from an enchanted island. Avalon was said to be the same way, in the mists, with the High King waiting as young as ever.”
“It’s not that simple.” Hassan appeared behind Fatima’s shoulder and took the boot from her, turning it in his hands. “Time doesn’t pass, at least not in the sense you mean. It just is. All of it, all at once. The past, the present, the future. Fate exists within time, but the master of fate exists outside it.” He hesitated and gave Fatima another unfathomable look.
“What?” she said.
“There’s a fellow here,” said Hassan quietly, addressing the boot. “A Jew from Córdoba. He says the Spanish have issued a proclamation ordering all Jews out of Iberia. His family boarded a ferry to Morocco that overturned in bad weather. That’s how he got here.”
Fatima felt sweat break out on her upper lip and dashed it away with the back of her hand.
“And?”
“When we left, you and I, I mean, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had issued no such proclamation. The man says—Fa, he says he left Spain two years after the fall of Granada.”
Humidity had saturated Fatima’s brocade robe: she longed to take it off and send everyone away and bathe with her familiar view of the sea, lead-colored now under the mottled clouds.
“You’re very calm about this,” she said.
“I ought to be. I brought us here. We’re no longer a where, so we’re no longer a when either. Time is moving as it always has in proportion to those who perceive it. Nothing is wrong.” He smiled crookedly. Days spent walking and working under the sun had burnished him until his skin was nearly the same red-brown as his hair; he stood square, his courtly slouch gone. Vikram was right: Hassan, in his own odd way, had always been the braver one, if for no other reason than that his very existence was a sort of trespass. Now, here, he had become an immutable version of himself, who knew by instinct what others could only guess.
“Why are you telling me this?” Fatima asked him.
“So you won’t be afraid,” said Hassan, smiling again, a pleading smile. “You’ve done so well, and I haven’t told you, because it’s been—” He stopped and caught his breath. “You haven’t asked about Deng and me, but I can tell you’ve—I didn’t expect you to be jealous, is what I mean. We’ve been friends for so long, and I’ve had lovers now and again when I could manage it discreetly, which surely you must have known, and you’ve never been jealous before, so—”
“It was different before,” said Fatima, louder than she intended. She didn’t want to have this particular argument in front of other people, but it seemed impossible to stop. “This was meant to be about you and me. Not about other people. You and me and to hell with the rest of the world—let them find their own way if they can.”
“Well it damn well is about other people now, isn’t it?” Hassan gestured angrily at Mary and the little jinn, who were pretending not to listen. “And it has been for some time. There are all the people who only came here because we opened the way, and all the jinn, and there’s our Gwen, who doesn’t even want to be here—and all of them, all of them, look to you for guidance. And right now they’re terrified because there are two Castilian warships on the horizon and we’ve got no weapons aside from a few handmade spears and some cutlery.”
“Rufus has a crossbow,” said Mary helpfully. “Though only a few bolts to go with it.”
“We are not without means,” said the little jinn on Mary’s shoulder, its voice no deeper than a cricket’s. “If need be, we will fight alongside our cousins.”
Fatima regarded the tiny creature with skepticism: it looked as though it would be overmatched by a determined squirrel. Nevertheless, there was no help she could afford to turn away.
“Gather everyone on the green,” she said, lifting her chin. “And every stick and stone heavy enough to be called a weapon.”
It was all managed soon enough. There was pitifully little to manage at all: twenty able human beings, not counting Asher and his brothers, who were too young to be asked to fight; and nearly as many jinn, though not all came when called and others were difficult to perceive in the best of circumstances. They stood in the tiny green and arrayed themselves for war as best they could, amid the squabbling chickens, who resented the incursion into their pasture. Stupid, who regarded both chickens and spears with suspicion, watched them from a patch of clover, his mouth green with grazing. The sight of it was more pastoral than martial. Among them, only Rufus, a broad, well-muscled man who sweat profusely, had ever been in battle, though many could hunt and fish well enough to aim a spear. It was just as it had been in the Alhambra during the long siege: the walls and cliffs would keep them safe for a time, but when those were breached, by men or by hunger, no one inside stood a chance.
“We must find a way to close up the gate,” said Fatima, standing before them. The wet wind took her words and muddled them, making her sound even younger than she was. “Whatever door was there rotted away long ago. Carts, crates, old boards—we must block the entryway as best we can. Then we stand on the walls and make life difficult for them when they try to breach the gate. They may decide it’s not worth their trouble if their own supplies are low, which they must be after this long at sea. It’s the best we can do.”
“The walls are thick, but they’re not high,” said Rufus, leaning on his spear. The crossbow Mary had spoken of so glowingly was slung over one shoulder, pointing at the ground, shiny from overuse. “It wouldn’t take more than a few siege ladders to put men on top and avoid the gatehouse entirely.”
“They will have walked uphill for two hours by the time they get here,” said Fatima, concealing her irritation at having been contradicted. “They won’t go up the stone stairs from the beach—they’d need to go single file and we could pick them off one
by one from the clifftop. Which means they’ll have to go all the way around the harbor. And they don’t know the paths as we do—they may get lost or turned around in the forest. They won’t be in any state to put up siege ladders.”
“Some of us will hide along the paths,” said one of the jinn, a slim, glistening thing like a blue candle flame who seemed to speak with two voices at once. “We might kill a few, and we will certainly frighten the rest.”
“Perhaps the island will help us,” said Sona. Her big eyes glistened with fear or desperation. She was cradling Asher’s youngest brother against her shoulder: the child would nap only when someone held him. Fatima didn’t want to dash her hopes, but she needed every person sharp and ready, and hope did not make a person sharp.
“The island doesn’t help,” she said, thinking of the worn boot. “The island just is. We have only ourselves to rely on.”
“Then we will make our stand,” said the frog-man, belling out his throat pouch. “We may be few, but we are defending our home. There are forces at work in the world hidden even from the jinn, and they will be on our side.”
The sun was low before work on the gate was finished. The empty houses that had not yet been pillaged for every nail and scrap of wood were picked over until nothing of use remained; the resulting barricade, a mess of stacked boards and crates packed with earth and stones to make them heavier, filled the empty gate nearly to its peaked arch. When everyone was covered in dirt and splinters and starting to snap at everyone else, Fatima dismissed them all to the washhouse, and though she was as sore and dirty as any of them, took herself back up the hill to the palace to see whether Luz was still alive.
She found the inquisitor laid out upon a pallet near the fire, asleep, dressed in a linen nightdress that looked very much like Fatima’s. Her own black gown was drying in a patch of fading sunlight. Fatima pursed her lips. Deng was squatting over his mortar and pestle on the far side of the fire pit, frowning in concentration.
“I’m making a poultice for her eye,” he said before Fatima had a chance to ask. “I’ve never seen a wound like that before. I’m not certain she’ll keep her sight.”
“She was possessed,” said Fatima, unblinking. “Are there herbs for that?”
Deng looked up at her. He seemed tired: the grooves around his mouth were finely drawn.
“I treat the patient,” he said. “I’m a doctor, not an exorcist.”
Fatima swallowed the retort that sprang immediately to her lips. Walking past Deng, she stood in the eastern arch of the keep and peered toward the horizon, squinting in the rosy dusk. The two ships were larger now, their fat prows fully visible: they might make landfall by morning.
“We’ll need an archer here,” she said to no one in particular. “In case they get ambitious about those stairs.”
“Where would you like me?” asked Deng.
“Exactly where you are,” said Fatima, turning toward him again. “You’ll have many more patients before this is over.”
“Exactly where I am?” Deng stood, wiping his hands on a clean scrap of linen. A green smell emanated from him when he moved: the tang of willow bark and sweet rushes and camphor.
“He speaks of nothing but you,” Deng said in a quieter voice. “No—that’s not quite true. He speaks of many things, but you are part of each of them. Of the palace and his apprenticeship there, and your sultan, and the stories you told each other as children. I don’t mean to step between you. Only—he would be happier, he would allow himself to feel more happiness, if the hold you have on one another were a little less.”
Fatima felt heat rise in her face until it seemed as though even her scalp was blushing.
“I wouldn’t have said anything,” Deng continued, “but we’re never alone, you and I, and we may all die in the morning.” He let the scrap of linen fall and smiled wanly. “War! War and more war, even here. Destroying a body is far easier than fixing one, yet there are two dozen of you to do the destroying, and only one of me to do the fixing.”
He was trying to end the conversation. Fatima, who had contributed little to it, turned away and hurried out of the keep through the western arch and down into the city to count spears and set a watch.
Chapter 24
No one slept. The inevitability of the ships, the ambiguity of time, the ripe humidity that had settled over the coast all conspired to keep man and beast and jinn awake: they huddled in twos and threes on the green or practiced with their spears by firelight to keep themselves occupied. Fatima sat on the cliff under the moonlight with a pile of stones beside her, teaching herself to use a leather sling; Rufus’s crossbow was too heavy for her and Rufus himself was needed at the gate. There were no other archers among them. It was calming to load stones into the leather pouch and think of nothing but swinging her arm and loosing the pouch at the correct moment to send her burden whistling into darkness. She aimed at a flowering vine that clung to a step halfway down the cliff, its white blossoms ghostly in the night air. For some time all her shots missed, but as the night drew on they began to land on the step, and then to hit the vine itself. It was only when a shadow slid across the cliff, darker than the nighttime, that she put her sling down and stood.
“Vikram,” she called. Her voice echoed off the limestone. The shadow stopped and turned.
“You’re leaving,” said Fatima accusingly. “You’re sneaking away.”
“I told you I would,” said Vikram, his voice small.
“But we’re going into battle.” Fatima sat down again, feeling undone. “We need everyone. Even the frog-man and the little jinn the size of a soup bowl are fighting. And you’re the—” Her breath caught in her throat.
The shadow sighed and ambled up the steps toward her, resolving, at the last moment, into something like the dog-man she had first met, something with a recognizable configuration of arms and legs, or legs and legs, though not in any order in which either a dog or a man might possess them. Fatima reached out to touch him and felt him lean into her hand.
“You’re not meant to rely on me,” said Vikram almost gently. “It’s not good for you. It isn’t good for me either. The rules by which the world was made don’t allow for it.”
“I don’t care,” said Fatima, “I want you here. I don’t care about whatever silly rules you think you have to follow. You’re terribly orthodox for a jinn. I am king, and I say you stay.”
A grin appeared in the darkness. Vikram leaned forward and pressed a kiss against her forehead: it left no mark but burned even after he pulled away.
“You won’t win by throwing rocks with that little sling,” he said, gliding down the stone steps. “But you already know that, just as you already know why the leviathan hoards bones and boots. You never needed me, little friend; I don’t make the wheels of fate, I just oil them a bit, and that only when it suits me.” He began to hum his odd melody, the outline of his limbs evaporating little by little until it was possible to see the horizon through his body. “Besides, I don’t fancy being trapped here when you close the way again.”
“What does that mean?” called Fatima. She stood. “Vikram! What does it mean? Can you see the future?”
“Not exactly,” came his voice, faintly. “Though I can see you well enough.”
Fatima called again and received no answer. Only the horizon remained. The Castilian ships were so close that the crosses made by their masts and booms punctured the harbor on either side. Fatima heard, or thought she heard, voices calling across the dim water. She gathered up her skirts, observing absently that brocade was a poor fabric for warfare, and rushed inside the keep, where Deng was changing the poultice on Luz’s eye.
“They’re here,” she said.
Deng folded a piece of linen with slow, precise movements, so that it was perfectly square, and placed it just below Luz’s brow bone. She looked up at him, her visible eye drunk with pain or fatigue but struggling to focus, as if Deng, frowning above her, was the whole of the universe.
&nb
sp; “It’s all right,” Deng said to her. “We’re not going anywhere, you and I. Let them fight—we’ll be quite comfortable just as we are. Would you like more water?”
Luz shook her head almost imperceptibly. Fatima watched them together, tethered by the particular tenderness of patient and physician, and thought that there was goodness in the world of a sort she couldn’t fathom.
“He was the only person I ever chose,” she blurted, confessing. “Everyone else was forced on me, one way or another. I don’t want him to be unhappy. It’s just that he was my only friend.”
Deng looked up at her, his face impassive.
“He’s not your only friend anymore, Fatima,” he said, and turned back to his patient. There was noise from the western archway: shouts and one halfhearted attempt at a battle cry. Fatima palmed her sling. Mary came running into the main hall, barefoot but wearing a clever leather vest, a sort of hauberk, which she appeared to have made from pieces of a disused saddle; her familiar followed behind her, flapping its tiny wings in the encroaching dawn. Fatima wanted to laugh.
“We’ve got no chance whatsoever,” said Gwennec, coming to stand beside her.
“None,” she agreed. The monk grinned without humor. He was still wearing his habit and had made no attempt to array himself for war: standing among the rest of them, dressed either in makeshift armor or in the fanciful garments Mary had created, he looked like a visitor from some other, starker reality. Fatima felt silly beside him. They had been playing at kingdoms, at kings and courtiers, and now their play would come to a swift and ludicrous end.
“They would probably take you back,” she hazarded. “Especially if you went now. There’s no reason you should have to die for all this. You’re a cleric. They can’t blame you for what’s happened.”
Gwennec stared at her as if she had spoken in tongues.
“How could you possibly say such a thing?” he said. “How could you say that to me, after everything we’ve been and done?”
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