Fatima was immediately sorry. She did not have time to apologize, however, for as soon as she reached for the monk’s threadbare sleeve, a sound she had never heard before lit up her ears, growing louder and louder until it became a mechanical scream and buried itself in the cliff beneath her feet. The keep shuddered. White dust bloomed in the air: chalk pulverized finer than snow.
“What was that?” shouted Fatima, her ears ringing.
“That’s a cannon,” called Rufus. “That’s a bloody big cannon.”
“On a ship?”
“On a ship, and probably not the only one.”
Another shriek and tremor punctuated his words. Someone screamed. Out of the corner of her eye, Fatima saw Deng move to shield Luz from the white dust, covering her with a fold of his robe.
“They mean to win this battle without ever setting foot on land,” said Fatima to the drifting powder.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” said Hassan, sweeping through the main hall to stand on the cliff. “Here comes a longboat.”
Fatima pushed through the crowd that had gathered around her, her fingers sliding past leather and velvet and the slick poreless exterior of a jinn, all covered in the same white dust, as though prepared for some unknown sacrament. Outside, the air was clearer, the new sun baleful and hot in a sky from which the clouds and haze of yesterday had disappeared. Hassan was right: a dark shape was cutting through the water toward the beach, propelled by the amphibian dip and pause of oars. Wood scraped against sand and echoed between the punctured cliffs.
In the hall, the anxious press of men and women and children and jinn was silent. Fatima saw Asher’s youngest brother standing at her knee. His hair was white with chalk, transforming him into an old man with an old man’s heavy gaze. Fatima stroked his shoulder. He turned without speaking and pressed his wan face into her hip.
A braying squeal broke the silence. Fatima flinched as batlike wings brushed her face and Mary’s jinn swept through the eastern archway and down the face of the cliff. It soared along the stone stairs, gathering speed as it dropped, then veered across the thin strip of beach toward the men in the longboat, who fell back, frightened, tumbling across each other onto the sand like poorly made toys, only to be engulfed by the tiny jinn, which was suddenly all mouth, and gone as quickly as if they had never arrived at all.
The empty longboat rocked gently on its keel and settled sidewise into the sand with a thud.
In the keep, there was a stricken pause. Then the noise began, howls and yelps of bewildered celebration, and Fatima found herself carried toward the stair by a fevered wave of bodies.
“Stop!” she called, but it was too late: the thrill of their advantage was upon them, and they rushed down the chalk steps toward the beach. Another scream filled the air; the cliff shook. Fatima heard the shrill creak of stone splitting behind her. There was another scream, a human scream, and a body fell past her too quickly to be identified. Sweat poured down her back. She tried to turn but found herself half lifted by the pressure of limbs and forced onward. Panic overcame her, a visceral panic that made her want to claw at the faces around her, faces she knew and cherished that were now simply objects in her path. She fought it, planting her heels in the yielding chalk.
“Stop!” she called again.
“Can’t—no—not here,” came a voice, possibly Gwennec’s. “We’ve got to get below that cannon fire now, go, go—”
Fatima felt sand beneath her feet. She tumbled onto the beach, landing on her shoulder, and found herself staring at a thin spatter of blood, almost discreet, smelling faintly of bile: Mary’s familiar buzzed overhead like a distended horsefly, its belly stretched tight and shining. On her back, Fatima saw an inverted tide through which another longboat was cutting toward them, upside down, the men already drawing their rapiers. Her own forces’ good luck would not last through a second onslaught. She rolled onto her knees and spat sand from her mouth. A spear flew overhead: a fishing spear, one of the greenwood sort that Deng had taught them to make, barely hardy enough to kill its intended prey, let alone a man in armor. Yet it did fly, glancing off a polished hauberk and landing uselessly in the surf.
The second longboat scraped up on the sand. There was a wild cry and a man flew past her toward it, brandishing a club: it found purchase beneath the jaw of a soldier standing in the bow, who fell with barely a cry. The others were quicker. The man with the club—Bruno, Udolfo; Fatima could not remember his name—went down under the hilt of a rapier and did not rise again. Fatima fumbled for her sling. She watched her first stone fly with dispassion, as though someone else had loosed it, and was almost surprised when it caught one of the soldiers beneath his curved half helm. He reeled backward with a shriek, one hand to his face. Fatima loosed another stone and then another, but these missed their mark and went soaring wildly past the boat into the ill-defined gloss where the sun met the sea.
She was almost certain it was Gwennec who shoved her, for she saw his sandal as she went down. She swore at him as she fell, but he didn’t hear her: his face was panicked and unseeing. Around him were identical faces, bodies pressed too close, a certain noiselessness, features not of battle but of chaos. Fatima curled up and protected her face with her hands. Through her fingers, through the forest of limbs and sand, she saw the water, and in the water, the coils of the mote.
Fatima held her breath. The mote rose from the froth, gathering about itself its shreds of wood and viscera, and though it had no features aside from the legless spiral of matter upon which it sat, it turned and looked at her.
Who is your master?
Fatima screamed, writhing to free herself from the miasma of limbs and metal, pressing her hands over her ears to block out the voice between them.
Who is your master? the voice repeated.
An opening appeared in front of her. Fatima lunged for it, scrambling to her feet. As she rose, she felt something fall from her sash: it was the boot her hunter had found in the den of the leviathan.
Who is your master?
She snatched it from the sand and ran, unthinking, across the beach, gasping for air amid the powdered chalk and the sulfuric scent of cannon fire. It was only when she was well away that she turned and looked back.
The horror sat atop the waves, many times the size of the Spanish carrack, slowly unfolding itself coil by coil. Though it lay very close to the beach, the men in the longboats never glanced at it, and instead looked past it, or through it, at the meager force confronting them upon the sand.
“They don’t see it,” said Fatima to herself. “They can’t see it.” A cannonball smashed into the cliff above her head. One or two of the ancient steps had come away, leaving gaps in the staircase that led to the clifftop, not too wide for someone as tall as Fatima or Hassan to jump across, but much too wide for Mary or for Asher’s young brothers. The possibility of retreat was no longer certain. Fatima looked down at the boot in her hand. It could not end here, it must not end here, yet no other end was evident. They would end as the bishops had; they would end as boots, as a city hastily abandoned, tools left where they lay, for there was some secret to surviving a happy ending that they did not possess.
Something flickered overhead, a shadow that momentarily interrupted the sun. Fatima looked up. The leviathan, the dragon as Mary called it, was crouched on the clifftop, looking down at the battle below. The noise must have roused it, or perhaps the scent of blood. Fatima could see Deng standing in the arch of the keep and watching it in his imperturbable way. Luz was upright now, hanging behind him in Fatima’s bleached shift, her hair a snarl of gold around her shoulders.
Fatima looked again at the boot and found it didn’t move her. She left it in the sand and pelted toward the chalk stairs, taking them two at a time, heedless of the cannonballs that shrieked and shuddered around her. The leviathan swiveled its head. Its eyes fixed on hers and a smile bloomed on its supple mouth, unsheathing the rows of teeth. Fatima stopped on a step that ended at nothing, at a po
wdery crater where the next step had been, and wheeled her arms to keep the momentum from pulling her over. The leviathan slid down the cliff toward her. She could hear her own breath whistling in her throat and ignored it, looking into the face of the dragon, into the greenish, human eyes, until it was so close that she could smell the reptilian sweetness of its hide.
It was death; Fatima knew this, but if she could occupy the leviathan, Hassan and Gwennec and Mary and all the others, her friends, might have a little more time.
The beast blinked. Its eyes were still and glassy, like the surface of the spring at the center of the island. Fatima looked into them, expecting to see herself. But the reflection of the sun on the water below was too bright, and she saw instead a diffuse radiance, a light in which more light was enthroned, blotting out mere images.
“I’m sorry,” she said to it.
The leviathan opened its mouth.
“Gwennec said something,” said Fatima. “He said we have to learn to live with the things that God has set askew. I thought that meant that we had to learn to live with things like you, but I think perhaps it means that you must learn to live with things like us.”
The breath of the beast was so hot that Fatima felt her hair lift and float around her. Down on the beach there were shouts, a scorched smell, and the dull sound of wood splintering on metal. She was shaking, not from fear but from the sheer pressure of time, the moments passing there on the white steps while death waited. The expression on the leviathan’s face had changed: it stared at her no less intensely, but with as much curiosity as malice.
“You are the Bird King,” she said to it. “I am the Bird King. Hassan is. Even Luz. We all are, none of us are. Nothing is so frightening or evil that it doesn’t come from the same thing that made the stars.”
The beast roared and lunged. Fatima closed her eyes.
“We are the king of the birds,” she whispered. But the end didn’t come; instead, it leaped past her down the cliff, its claws puncturing the chalk, and hurled itself into the coils of the mote.
Fatima stood and watched it, dazed. It was only the howl of the mote, the demon, if such it was: a sound that seemed to draw all the air with it, that propelled her to move. She turned and ran, tripping over her sand-caked robe in her haste to rush down the stairs. The leviathan was tearing at the translucent coils that rolled across the water, rending shadow from blood and splinters, its own oily hide raked by jagged spars that heaved in the surf. The mote screamed again. It had an angry cry, vicious, as high and shrill as the cannon that was still firing from the deck of the Spanish carrack. Then, suddenly, it rose up, becoming a spiral, then a line, and then a mote again, a speck of sooty dust, to be carried away by the wind.
The leviathan threw back its head and bellowed in triumph. Those left alive on the beach scattered before it, the soldiers throwing themselves into the surf wearing their heavy armor, panic making them heedless of the weight they carried. With a hiss, the leviathan galloped over them into the water, crumpling breastplates beneath its forked feet. The cannon sounded; a ball flew toward the creature and missed. Out of the waves it leaped, slamming into the broadside of the carrack, which rocked and threw a sheet of foam high into the air. The cannon smashed through the railing of the deck and slipped into the sea, a weapon no longer; its iron barrel, still hot, disappeared in a eulogy of steam.
Chapter 25
The beach went quiet. Fatima sat down where she was, soaked in seawater and blood—someone’s—and her own sweat. The churned-up sand came into focus only slowly: she saw figures lying prone in dark pools and twisted, unmoving shadows that could only be the bodies of jinn. Fatima pushed herself to her feet and began to walk, though where or for what purpose, she did not know. The ordinary sounds of the tide and the wind through the beach grass returned to fill the stifled air. Then came other sounds: a cry, a frantic inquiry. Hassan’s voice.
Fatima broke into a run. Hassan was kneeling beside a cascade of white rock near the far foot of the cliff, where the sheer wall reached into the sea and left only a thin strip of sand to walk upon. He was hunched over a body. Fatima saw a rough, tanned foot shod in a sandal, the dirtied folds of a white habit, a black scapular. It seemed as though the air around her turned dense, slowing her steps: she found she could no longer run, and approached the sandaled foot with a heavy tread.
Gwennec’s head was pillowed on Hassan’s lap. His face was greenish, all its high color gone; his breath rattled in his throat. His eyes, though, were the eyes she remembered, and they settled on her face, blinking up at her as she came into view.
“Caught a spear in the side,” he croaked. His fingers twitched. Fatima knelt next to Hassan and pulled back the monk’s scapular: underneath, on his left side, a stain like a poppy bloomed, brighter than it had reason to be. Grief assaulted her, grief and guilt, and she felt her face begin to burn.
“Oh my darling,” she quavered, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I said such an awful thing to you earlier and I don’t even know why. I know you wouldn’t have left us, I know you didn’t want to, but I thought I was being—I don’t know, I don’t know. Generous.”
“Cold,” said Gwennec, and grinned. Then his face changed, tightened, and he gave a stuttering gasp. “I need a priest.”
“You’ve only got us heathens,” said Hassan, stroking the monk’s hair with a hand that shook. “Which is why you’re not to die, Gwen. You’re to live. Perhaps if we never manage to fetch a priest, you’ll live forever. Look! Deng is coming. I see him on the stairs. He’s even brought a plank with him to bridge the gap where the cannons blew a step away. What a clever fellow. He’ll make it all right, you’ll see.”
Gwennec laughed soundlessly. He reached up with two fingers, his hand marbled in blood and dirt, and touched Hassan’s beard.
“My friend,” he said, “my brother. Still an innocent, even after all this.”
“Don’t patronize me,” said Hassan, his voice breaking. “I can’t stand to hear you all solemn just now. You can’t leave us, Gwen. Who will patch the roofs and tubs and doors, and who else is such a good fisherman?”
“There are others who can do all that,” said Gwennec. “Fa—”
Fatima took his free hand and kissed it.
“When you bury me, someone must read the Rite of Committal,” he said, panting between his words. “Someone on the island will know it, someone—one of the Italians—”
Fatima did not see fit to tell him that half of the men and women he had greeted in the morning were dead. She had not counted the human corpses but guessed there to be between ten and a dozen—a third of the island’s visible inhabitants—and perhaps half as many jinn. Farther away, the leviathan was lolling in the surf, sloughing spars of wood and spearheads from its hide. The day had turned bright and clear; the wind carried the scent of wildflowers and mingled it with the salt of the sea.
“Everything will be done exactly as you say,” she said to Gwennec. Her lips lingered on his coarse palm. “I swear on anything.” She felt a hand on her shoulder and looked up to see Deng standing over her. Without speaking, he squatted down and tossed a satchel into the sand beside him. Opening it, he produced a slim knife and cut a slit in the side of Gwennec’s habit, where the poppy bloomed.
“Well?” demanded Hassan, watching as Deng frowned and probed the wound gently. Gwennec whimpered.
“Well?” said Hassan again, louder this time. “You’re hurting him.”
Deng sighed and rocked back on his heels, his fingers glistening with blood.
“I can give him something to ease the pain,” he said. “He should be kept warm and given water until he stops asking for it. There’s no point in moving him now.”
Hassan stared at his lover. His own hands were painted an emphatic red, along with the skirt of his robe and the sand beneath him, but he seemed not to realize how much blood it all amounted to, or what it meant.
“Can’t you do anything at all?” he said. “What good is all your exqu
isite learning if the only thing you can say is keep him warm?”
“Curse you all, don’t fight on my account,” muttered Gwennec. “I’ll not be held responsible. Only don’t go anywhere, any of you, and keep petting my hair or whatever silly thing it was that you were doing, it feels nice—” He broke off and closed his eyes, as if the effort of keeping them open pained him. Fatima lay down on the sand and whispered in his ear, proclaiming things that startled her even as she said them: she loved him, she would miss him all her life, she couldn’t bear it, she loved him. And though saying so shocked her, she knew it to be true. One could love many people. The heart was not a divided thing. Though part of hers would walk abroad into the unseen with Gwennec, it would not die. She nestled her face against his white wool shoulder and wept, as much for the things she now knew as for the man lying still and quiet beside her.
She couldn’t tell how much time had passed when she heard unsteady footsteps coming toward her across the beach. Luz was still wearing Fatima’s nightdress and had wrapped herself in a blanket, her hair loose, her mouth a raw wound. For one delirious moment, Fatima imagined she was the angel of death and half rose to send her away; it was only when Gwennec moaned that she sat again.
“Shall I go?” asked Luz. Her voice was unearthly, so ragged that it registered as neither male nor female in Fatima’s ear. She looked shrunken and hollow. Yet Fatima could not pity her.
“Yes, go,” she said, lying down again beside Gwennec.
“No, stay,” whispered Gwennec. “Hear my confession.”
Luz hesitated.
“I’m no priest,” she said.
“Not asking you to absolve me. Only to listen.”
Luz looked at Fatima warily. Fatima realized she would have to give up her place in order for Luz to hear the monk’s fading voice and was seized by a sudden, visceral sense of betrayal. Yet she bit her tongue and stood, moving aside as Luz sank to her knees and bent her ear toward Gwennec’s lips. She would never know what Gwennec said, but she saw Luz smile suddenly and then press her hand to her mouth, her eyes full of tears.
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