With nothing else to do, Fatima prayed. She made ablutions in the dust, bargaining with the unseen to spare that beloved body, those beloved hands, that fine and vulnerable mind. She would give up many things in return: she would give up her own beauty, which had served others far better than it had served her. She would give up anything in return for some sign that Hassan was safe.
But no sign came. There was only a light bobbing toward her through the twilight, and when it paused at the threshold of the tent, Fatima saw that it was Luz, cloaked in black and carrying an oil lamp.
Fatima shrank from her instinctively. Luz entered without a word and set her lamp on the table near the center of the room, where it threw light on the peaked canvas overhead. She pulled a stool from where it sat near the table and settled herself upon it, tucking the skirts of her dress out of the way.
“You look thinner,” she said to Fatima in her ringing voice.
Fatima swallowed and said nothing.
“You assaulted the general,” said Luz, one eyebrow arching toward the feathery gold of her temple. “He wants to hang you.”
“He assaulted me,” protested Fatima. “I was only defending myself.”
Luz smiled without humor.
“Your virtue is safe,” she said. “I’ve seen to that.”
Fatima knew she probably expected a show of gratitude but could not bring herself to thank Luz for something that should have been hers by right.
“And Hassan?” she ventured.
Luz didn’t answer. She studied Fatima in the shallow lamplight with pursed lips. The spot in her left eye, the dark spot Fatima had seen from her hidden vantage point on the road south, was still there, gleaming beneath the blonde fringe of her lashes: not a speck of dust, then, but perhaps an injury, though what sort of injury, Fatima couldn’t guess. Looking at it for too long made her uneasy, and she stared instead at her own feet.
A fat serving man in a stained tunic came panting through the door with a plate of food and set it on the ground near Fatima’s hand. Fatima fell upon it like a hawk, scooping up hot fragments of leek and mutton and watery almond pottage with her fingers and licking each one clean.
“There’s a spoon,” said Luz drily. “If you want it. We don’t normally eat so well, but today is the Feast of Saint Verena. She’s said to watch over young girls on long journeys. She was born in Egypt and traveled all the way to Switzerland to evangelize the pagans there a thousand years ago. Perhaps it was she who saved you from being despoiled.”
“I saved myself,” muttered Fatima around a mouthful of leek.
“Well. You called for me, anyway, and I came.” Luz smiled again. Her face and hands, the only parts of her visible in the dark, seemed to glow with an internal luminescence between the folds of her black gown, so that she appeared like the shrouded icon of some saint. Fatima withdrew instinctively, pulling her feet beneath the spattered hem of Gwennec’s cloak.
“What happens now?” she asked.
Luz spread her hands.
“You tell me,” she said. “We can have a short conversation in which you accept your Savior, the Son of God, and confess, in writing, the sins you have witnessed and participated in with the sorcerer Hassan ibn Haytham of Granada. Or we can have a longer conversation in which I extract those things from you piece by piece. It’s entirely up to you.”
The magnanimity in her voice, the little ironic thrum of laughter, turned the food to a solid, indigestible lump in Fatima’s mouth. If Luz had been slow-witted and humorless, or without affection, Fatima could have hated her, but Luz was none of those things, and it was this, the richness of her smile, the ample evidence of a tender heart and a lively mind, that made something in Fatima recoil with dread.
“The sultan will be furious when he finds out you’re holding me here and letting your men lay their hands on me,” Fatima hazarded.
Luz laughed.
“The sultan has repudiated you,” she said. “You have no friends left, Fatima. Even the monk whose cloak you’re wearing has learned better. Soon enough, Hassan will come to realize his own errors, and when he does, as I’ve promised you and I promise you now, he will be spared. So will you, if only you humble yourself and examine your heart.”
Fatima examined her heart. Might she do as Luz asked? It was only a matter of words. She could, she thought, adopt an air of convincing sincerity. She was used to pretending. She could kneel and profess an alien faith and maybe even shed a few tears, and make up a story or two in which Hassan’s powers were the gift of the Devil. But then there was the troublesome possibility that Hassan might tell different stories, or might, for all his nervous sensibilities, prove the stronger character in the end, and insist upon his own innocence, even in the face of death.
“Can I think about it?” she asked in a much smaller voice.
Luz’s eyes went wide. She left her seat to kneel at Fatima’s feet and take the younger woman’s hands between her own, kissing the tips of her fingers.
“Of course you can think about it,” she said. “You don’t know how happy it makes me to hear you ask.” She leaned closer, until Fatima could smell the oil of her hair and the honeyed scent of rose water rising from her bodice.
“Can I tell you a secret?” she whispered.
Fatima didn’t dare reply.
“God speaks to me,” said Luz. “He has favored me with His insight. I see things that are a vast distance away, in time and in space. I saw you on your stolen ship. I saw the place where you would dock. And I saw you before, on the road, when you hid in the ditch at my feet, but God told me it wasn’t yet time. He told me that if I were patient, you would lead me back to the sorcerer Hassan. And it all happened, didn’t it? It all happened just as the Lord showed me it would.” Her breathing had grown rapid. Fatima tried to free her hands and found she could not. Luz’s face was tense, elated, the chapped corners of her mouth pulled taut. As Fatima watched, the speck in her left eye began to wriggle.
“Let me go,” she begged, but Luz seemed not to hear her. The speck squirmed, swimming against the white of Luz’s eye, a feeble horror, a worm culled from some other earth. With all her strength, she wrenched her hands from Luz’s grip and wiped them on her tunic.
“You’re afraid,” said Luz placidly. “Don’t be. I’ve been praying for you, Fatima. And for Hassan, grievous though his sins may be. No one is beyond God’s mercy. You need only repent. A new world is coming—I have seen that too. The banner of the Savior will fly over lands undreamed of by old men in their cassocks. Isabella of Spain will reign over an empire so vast that the sun will rise on its easternmost shore before it sets on the westernmost mountain. The sins of the world will be cleansed with blood, as salvation was bought with the blood of the Son. You could share it with us, Fatima. You could stand by my side, by the side of my queen, and joy unending could be yours.”
The speck had writhed its way across the surface of Luz’s eye and lodged just beside her iris, a parasitic moon orbiting a convex host. Fatima’s ears were ringing; the ground seemed to fade and run beneath her. She leaned heavily on her hands to steady herself.
“I thank you for your prayers,” was all she could think to say. Luz smiled and rose to her feet.
“You’ll be safe here,” she said. “Eat and rest. I’ll come and see you in the morning, after you’ve had some time alone.” She hesitated at the tent flap and smiled again, and then was gone, succeeded by an eddy of cold air.
Fatima lay down on the furs that covered the floor of the tent and hugged her knees to her chest. Luz had left her lamp behind: it cast an uneven circle of light on the little table and the ground, and across Fatima’s feet, leaving everything beyond it obscured. She heard a small noise, like a cry, from somewhere outside, and held her breath to listen, thinking it might be Hassan, but it did not come again, and she was left to imagine who or what had made it.
Through the tent flap, she watched a filament of stars progress across the sky and let herself fall into a stu
por. She thought of Luz, whose hair was the color of the lamplight, and felt the imprint of her kisses upon her fingertips, and wondered whether she was wrong after all, and this was what goodness looked like. She spoke like goodness. It would be easy, thought Fatima, if Luz was right: if Luz was right, one need never bother about the wreckage left in the wake of these holy wars, about the lives lost and enslaved, for the wreckage was cleansed by the horrors visited upon it. She fell half asleep thinking about how easy it was. Yet against her lids, she saw the little speck, the worm, burrowing its way across Luz’s field of vision, and knew, in a way she knew very little else, that whatever had spoken to her was not God.
Something warm and soft pressed against her and brought her back to consciousness. It rumbled happily, smelling of the pine woods: it was the tortoiseshell cat, the tiny queen that had been and gone in the afternoon, and it was blinking at her companionably in the dark. Fatima rolled onto her back and held out her hand: the cat rubbed its cheek against her fingers. But the little creature was after the remains of the meal Luz had brought her, and soon abandoned Fatima to lick mutton fat from the edge of the bowl. Fatima sat up to stretch her stiff legs. The cat twitched its tail and made small satisfied sounds as it ate, indifferent when she caressed it. It felt good to touch something so artlessly affectionate, something that neither promised nor demanded anything. Whether Fatima lived long enough to set foot outside the encampment or not, there would still be black-and-gold cats, and sparrows, and the matted grass she could feel beneath the furs that covered the ground, and though her time among them might be brief, the knowledge that these simple things would persist comforted her.
“Look at you, so small and neat. You’re very pretty,” she told the cat.
“So are you,” said the cat, raising its head and licking its whiskers, “though my brother says you’ve heard it so often that the compliment annoys you.”
Fatima fell backward onto her hands.
“You’re not friendless,” the cat continued. “The forces you see are working against you, but some you do not see are working on your behalf.”
“The forces I see,” repeated Fatima dully. The cat fluffed out its tail and shook its paws like a woman fussing with her skirts, and suddenly Fatima did see a woman, or the reflection of a woman, clothed in furs and in her own thick black-and-gold hair, which sparkled with fragments of ribbon and small jewels. She was angular, all sloping jaw and skewed brow, and her eyes were large and yellow in a face the color of temple smoke. On her feet were a pair of jeweled slippers sewn with thread-of-gold, like those a palace woman might wear.
“What are you?” Fatima whispered.
“You already know,” said the woman.
Unthinking, Fatima reached out to touch the woman’s hair, expecting to encounter only air and silence, but instead found her fingers tangled in warm, heavy tresses that gave off the scent of living wood. The woman closed her eyes and smiled with undisguised pleasure, offering the side of her neck for Fatima to stroke. In a stupor, Fatima let her fingers trail over the feverish skin, as soft as something newly born, and felt as though she had fallen backward, so that the woman and the world itself loomed over her.
“Are you frightened of me?” the woman asked. When Fatima didn’t answer, she shifted, half shrugging, and Fatima’s fingers slipped down a length of jeweled chaos to rest against the flat of her belly. Fatima was seized by something that was emphatically not fear, but frightened her nonetheless.
“I haven’t decided yet,” she said, her mouth dry.
The woman laughed and pulled away. Fatima felt her face go hot. She retreated again into Gwennec’s cloak and palmed the grip of her knife.
“What do you want?” she demanded. Her voice sounded harsh and silly in her own ears, like that of a child pretending to be big. The woman must have thought so too, for she shook her head, making a dozen tiny bells dance and giggle in her hair.
“Why have you come?” asked Fatima in a humbler tone. “A week ago, I’d never met a jinn in my life, and now I can’t seem to avoid you.”
“You’ve met plenty of jinn,” the woman replied, stretching her velvet limbs. “You’ve passed us in the twilight and in the empty places. If you didn’t see us, it’s because you lived between safe, well-lighted walls. Now that you’re out in the dark, your fear makes you see more clearly.” She smiled. The lamplight glinted on a double row of pointed teeth as bright and closely packed as shards of glass. Fatima fought the urge to run.
“But as for your questions,” the woman continued, “my brother sent me. He says he told you to expect me, but that you might not remember.”
Fatima searched her mind and could indeed remember nothing.
“Your brother,” she repeated.
“You were dreaming,” said the woman in a patient voice. Fatima sat up straighter.
“Vikram,” she said. “I dreamed of Vikram on the ship.”
“You didn’t dream of him. You dreamed, and he visited your dreaming.”
“Then he really is alive? Why didn’t he come himself?”
“We don’t heal as neatly as you do. He can’t come to you in any form you could understand. If you saw him now, it would drive you mad. We’re not meant to have these little conversations, your people and mine, sitting in the same room, in the same moment, and every time we do, it requires an effort of the will.” The woman rose and drew Fatima to her feet also. “My name is Azalel,” she whispered, her voice merry, leaning toward Fatima as if relaying a secret. “I’ve been all about the camp, looking and listening. Your ship is still in the harbor. Walk with me now and you might reach it. These men are used to looking at girls without seeing them. It would take very little to convince them you aren’t important. It would take very little more to convince them you aren’t even here.”
Fatima looked out at the quiet camp, the ghostlike peaks of canvas where men were sleeping.
“I’d never make it,” she said. “There are too many of them. And I wouldn’t try, not without Hassan.”
Azalel tilted her head, and Fatima once again saw the cat, its ears translucent with the light behind them.
“Why not? Isn’t saving yourself better than saving no one at all? Your death won’t prove a point—and even if it did, you won’t be around to enjoy the satisfaction.”
Fatima could smell newly fallen dew on the trampled grass, the bloom of sweet water over the tang of the sea.
“I’m tired of being told no,” she muttered. “Especially tired of being told no by make-believe beasts who are supposed to say yes to things that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. I won’t leave without Hassan. I’m not trading one prison for another.”
Azalel flopped on the furs and stuck out her lower lip.
“This isn’t a proper adventure,” she said. “My brother never told me you’d make speeches about prisons. I wouldn’t have come if he had.”
Fatima lay down also and let her arms fall outward. She remembered what Vikram had said about jinn not loving very much, or very often, and wondered what they felt instead.
“Vikram told me he had a sister,” was all she said. “But he never mentioned your name.”
Azalel turned on her back with a smile.
“Vikram only talks about nonsense. We’ve known each other so long that neither of us can remember what we are, so brother and sister is what we call each other. We lie together sometimes, so perhaps we’re really something else. Who can tell? When you’ve been alive a very, very long time, you learn to forget certain things. There’s a great deal in this world that one is better off not knowing.”
Fatima turned on her side. Azalel’s face was close to hers, and no longer so terrifying, or at the very least, less terrifying than the florid leer of the general that interposed itself over her vision at odd intervals, rendered unspeakable by its very ordinariness. A glass-toothed jinn was simply the most frightening thing she could think of: the general and, for that matter, Luz were something far worse.
�
�Do you really—you and Vikram—do you really lie together?” she found herself asking.
“Once in a while.”
“How?”
“Would you like me to show you?”
“No! No. I only meant—” Fatima paused, frustrated at her own lack of subtlety, at the dissembling that seemed to come instinctively to everyone but herself. “Half the time you look one way, and half the time you look another way, and it made me wonder how you’re born and how you die and how you do all the other things people do in between.”
Azalel studied her with puzzled admiration.
“I see it now,” she announced.
“See what?”
“Why he likes you.” She sighed and gathered Fatima into the crescent of her body as though curling around a kitten. Fatima went limp, stupefied by the heat of Azalel’s arms and not inclined to resist their invitation. If she wasn’t going to run, she might as well rest: her rest had been stolen from her too often.
“The way we want,” said Azalel, stroking her hair. “We do all those things the way we want.”
Chapter 16
Fatima awoke when the lamp burned out. At the sudden intrusion of darkness, she sat up, as alert as if she had slept for days, and reached instinctively for her knife. Azalel was standing in the opening of the tent, her ivory claws illuminated by starlight.
“Hush,” she whispered. “What do you hear?”
Fatima strained to listen.
“Nothing,” she replied.
“Yes, yes, exactly. The night has been quiet. The men assigned to the last watch have fallen asleep around their campfire. You’ll get no better chance than this.”
Fatima wiped the sweat from her cheeks with the sleeve of her robe. Every garment she wore smelled ripe; she thought with regret of the hot bath and the rose water and the gowns and the praise that would be hers if she could only give Luz what she wanted.
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