The monk’s rough, guileless face went still. He watched Fatima intently, as though awaiting her judgment. Fatima reached out to touch the bruising on his wrists. He let her. She could feel his expression change with the pressure of her fingertips, though she was looking at his wounds and not at his face, and she smiled, for he was a man after all. Gwennec shook himself and drew away. He pulled his cowl up against the persistent breeze and leaned against the railing to look past the stern at the lacy, white-foam wake they left behind them.
“Look there, Fa,” he said, pointing. “That’s what happens next.”
Fatima looked where he pointed. Far behind them was a square of silver against the milky sea: the mainsail of a much larger ship. Atop its foremast, Fatima saw a glimmer of red.
“They’re following us,” she said flatly.
“Well of course they’re following us,” snapped Hassan. “They weren’t about to shrug their shoulders and go home empty-handed.”
“We’ve the benefit of a head start,” said Gwennec. “But not for long. A smaller ship is easier to maneuver, but a ship under so much sail can make better time. They’ll eat up the distance between us, bit by bit, especially since, no offense meant, they’ve a more experienced crew.”
Fatima tensed and relaxed her fingers on the railing, judging the distance to the Castilian carrack. It was no use: her mind still reeled at so much space, at the absence of walls and doors.
“How long?” she asked. “How long until they catch up?”
Gwennec narrowed his eyes and thought for a moment.
“Two days at most,” he said. “Maybe less.”
Fatima turned and looked past the bow. They were drawing near the foot of the great mountain: she could see waves breaking white along its rocky shore. The pinnacle was so far above them that the lights of the fortress had vanished, obscured by the sheer mass of rock overhead. The sun had dropped below the horizon: looking ahead no longer hurt Fatima’s eyes. The water was deceptively still, a pane of glass hinged to the sky. She felt warm breath on her hip: the gelding, still hungry, had abandoned Hassan to snuffle at her pockets. She stroked its musty-smelling head to calm herself.
“I thought horses were afraid of boats,” she said, trying to sound jocular.
“They are,” called Gwennec, who was leaning over the bow to check the spritsail below.
“This one is a brave fellow,” said Hassan, patting its mottled flank. “Aren’t you? A brave bitty pony.”
Gwennec snorted. “It’s not brave. It’s just too stupid to realize it stands inches from a watery death.”
“Poor Stupid. Don’t listen to the monk. You saved his life and now he insults you. You can have his share of the apples. Come along now.”
Hassan made for the hold. The gelding pricked up its shaggy ears and clopped after him like a large dog, filling the mouth of the stairwell with its head and shoulders as Hassan ducked below to uncrate their supplies. Fatima looked back over the bow. The spritsail belled and waned; the cog surged forward, leaving her weightless for a moment. She gasped, laughing, as it subsided gently into the water again.
“Do you ever get used to it?” she asked Gwennec. The monk straightened and ran a hand through his damp hair.
“I never did,” he said. “I got to liking it, though.” He followed her gaze out toward the remains of the sunset. They stood in silence for several minutes, watching the sky turn from copper to gray.
“Look,” said Gwennec softly, nudging Fatima with his foot. Fatima blinked. There was a line in the water below, as clean and straight as if it had been cut with a knife by some unseen hand. On one side, the water was green and mild; on the other, it was a blunt, threatening color, a blue so cold and deep that Fatima’s teeth ached when she looked at it. The seas met and parted without intermingling, a thin ribbon of foam between them the only sign of trespass. As she watched, the cog lifted a little and then settled, passing from one world into another.
“So that’s that,” she said wonderingly.
“That’s that.” Gwennec grinned. “And thus did the Lord part the waters.”
“I never imagined it would be like this—one so distinct from the other. I thought water was water.”
“The Dark Sea is sweeter than the Middle Sea. You can tell we’re already riding lower than we were. The blev’ruz’s ears’ll be popping down below.”
“What’s that word you keep calling him?” asked Fatima. “Blev’ruz.”
“What? Redhead, of course. What else would I call him?”
Fatima smiled and leaned over the rail again, watching the border of the two seas recede behind them.
“Hostis,” said Fatima. “Even the seas are enemies.”
“No.” Gwennec shook his head, his ragged voice softening. “Not hostis. Not the seas, nor we. I should never have used that word. I meant hospes.”
“A guest from a foreign land. Certainly you did.”
“I did, I did.” Gwennec smiled lopsidedly. “I meant amicus. I meant intimus.” He paused, his color heightening. “I thought for sure you’d let me hang after what I’d done and the way we left things.”
“Hassan wanted to leave you behind. But you looked too sad. I couldn’t.”
Gwennec’s face immediately twisted itself into the expression that had prompted her sympathy.
“It’s never going to be put right,” he said. “It’s all over and done with, my life is. My abbot, my cell, the view down to the hay fields—I’m never going to see those things again.”
Fatima saw no reason to give him hope where none existed.
“I’m sorry,” was all she could think to say.
“Don’t you miss your home?” he pressed. “Won’t you miss it?”
“No.”
“Odd that you shouldn’t miss a palace, yet I’m half dead with grief for a bare room in a monastery. I wonder what it means.”
“It means you can’t choose what makes you happy.”
Gwennec gave a sharp little sigh, and for a moment, Fatima thought he might start crying. She gave in to an impulse and stroked his fingers, one after the other, each knuckle white and taut against the deck railing.
“Do you really believe in him?” asked Gwennec. There was a note of pain in his voice. “In your bird king? Is he worth all this?”
Fatima thought about it. She no longer knew what she believed, but she knew what she was, and this, oddly, amounted to the same thing. She knew now what parts of her persisted when the things that didn’t matter were stripped away: the embroidered slippers, the quiet routines, the room in which she slept, her few possessions. Those were not her; they formed no integral part of her personality, though they had defined her for so many years. What remained was slight but strong, and what remained, believed.
“I don’t know whether I believe in him or not,” she said. “But I believe he is worth all this, yes.”
Fatima thought Gwennec might mock her for giving such a strange answer, but instead he looked out of the corner of his eye with puzzled respect.
“That makes me feel a little better,” he said, “though I don’t see why it should.” He had made no attempt to withdraw his hand as she stroked it, and now turned his palm up as if in supplication. His eyes, too, pleaded silently, like those of a man who is drowning. Fatima withdrew her fingers and wrapped them in the rough wool of his habit. She pulled him close, seeking his mouth with her own. He made a small sound, a whimper, as though from fear or need or both, and suddenly she felt his hands in her hair and on her face, as if he wanted to touch all of her at once.
She almost laughed: his ardor, so different from the sultan’s, was at once clumsy and impossible to resist. Then his lips strayed from her mouth to her jaw, her throat; he whispered her name into the curve of her neck again and again as if in prayer. The laughter left her. There was too much cloth, yards of it, habit and robe and cloak and shift. Fatima pressed her hands against her face in frustration.
Gwennec cursed and tore something
at the seams. Finally she felt the warmth of his skin against hers, the pressure of him, the counterpressure of the railing against the small of her back. A wail slid from her lips: she was hungrier than she thought.
“No?” panted Gwennec.
“Yes,” she reassured him, “Yes, yes.”
When she woke, she saw Hassan outlined in lantern light on the lip of the hold, his face unreadable. She jerked upright, unaware she had fallen asleep. Gwennec was out cold, his body curled protectively around hers, his habit bunched about his knees.
“It’s your watch,” said Hassan.
Fatima pulled herself to her feet. There was an ache, not unpleasant, in the tendons of her legs; a corresponding ache in her lower back. The deck was silent, dark except for the ring of light where Hassan stood. Even the horse was drowsing: a bulky lump wedged against the rail in the widest part of the ship. Fatima swayed toward the ring of light, rubbing her arms to warm them. The chill in the air had deepened. It was her shift that had torn: she could feel air on her sides, where her tunic was slit, sending gooseflesh up the ladder of her ribs.
“Hassan.” She reached instinctively for his hand. He turned away.
“I need to sleep,” he said. “I’m the only one who hasn’t slept.”
“Sleep, then.” But they both remained where they were, saying nothing.
“I didn’t mean—” began Fatima, “or at least, I didn’t plan—”
“No, it’s all right.” Hassan sniffed and rubbed his nose. “Naturally it’s you he wants. It’s not as if I’m surprised. Only after that little speech you gave me when I said I wanted him, and you pretended to be shocked, I would have thought—no, I don’t know what I would have thought.” He sniffed again. “Never mind, it doesn’t matter.”
Fatima breathed on her hands to warm them and willed Hassan to look at her.
“Do you love him?” he asked.
It was this that stung.
“No,” said Fatima flatly. “I barely know him. I’ve only ever loved one person.”
Hassan finally met her eyes. His face was pinched, as if he was in pain.
“Sometimes I look at you and I think, ‘There goes my heart, walking outside my body,’” he said. “And yet—oh, Fa. How can this end any way but in a mess? Where are the princes with their legendary swords and white steeds, who love where they ought and fight what they ought? Why is it only us, all muddled up?”
She reached out: she touched his brow, his cheekbone, the fringe of coppery lashes above each eye.
“You smell like him,” said Hassan, brushing away her hand. “I’m going below.”
“Take Gwennec with you,” begged Fatima. Hassan glanced at the bundle of slumbering black wool and made a derisive noise.
“He seems fine where he is.”
“It’s freezing up here. Hassan, I’m serious—take him with you.”
Hassan gave her a withering look out of the corner of his eye but did as she bade him, walking toward the monk and toeing him lightly in the side. Gwennec groaned.
“Let’s go, my Breton brother,” said Hassan. “She whose word is law says you’re not to sleep out in the cold.” He looped Gwennec’s arm over his own shoulders and pulled him upright.
“Hassan,” muttered Gwennec, stumbling beside him, “I’ve done something.”
“Oh, I heard all about it. Come on.”
Fatima watched them disappear into the hold, the blond head drooping against the reddish one. A light flared up from the stairwell and wavered a little before extinguishing itself: Hassan must have lit a lamp to make his way in the dark and then shuttered it. On deck, Stupid shifted in his sleep and whuffed through his stubbled nostrils. His breath hung in the air for a moment before dissipating. Fatima climbed to the stern castle and surveyed the quiet ship, feeling unwontedly satisfied. The cog was small and she had stolen it, but it felt like hers in a way nothing else ever had. Happiness, she decided, came only in pauses, neither regularly nor predictably. She breathed in and out, savoring the faint taste of salt and resin.
The tiller was warmer than the air and twitched as she pressed her hands against it. Fatima straightened and squinted at the compass. They had drifted northward a little: Fatima put her weight into the tiller and pushed until the compass needle swung west again. Hassan’s map, weighted under stones, trembled in the lamplight. Hassan had added something while she slept: now there were faint, parallel dashes in the emptiness of the Dark Sea, pointing northwest. Tracing them with one finger, Fatima realized they must represent the prevailing current that had been pulling them gently northward. She marveled at the little charcoal ticks and at the fingers that had drawn them, rendering a great force into a small mark with such economy. And for this, Luz wanted Hassan dead.
Fatima turned and leaned out over the sternmost rail. In the pitch black, the carrack that followed behind them had been reduced to a flickering dot, like a star that had alighted on the water. Fatima suddenly felt as though she were somewhere else, somewhere familiar, observing a series of events that had already happened. Luz was aboard that ship, and was staring at her from across the mute water, just as she was staring back at Luz. The thought grew so emphatic that Fatima began to rub her eyes as if to clear them of sleep. Perhaps the carrack would turn back. The pursuers would abandon their intention when they realized their quarry meant to keep sailing west. Fatima repeated this to herself until she was calmer. She did not look at the lights of the carrack again.
Piloting a ship that jerked and shied like a living thing was enough to keep her occupied until the sky began to pale in the east. In the hours before dawn, she lost the moon, and everything outside the circle of lamplight on the table beside her fused with the darkness; she kept her eyes fixed on the needle of the compass and her hands wrapped around the tiller, and remained there, unmoving, until the muscles of her arms began to ache and the stars began to fade. She heard the sails flap and drag, beating themselves rhythmically against the mast, and knew the wind had changed, but she didn’t dare leave the stern castle to examine them. Only when she heard a heavy tread in the hold below did she relax her fingers on the tiller and slump down to rest her head on her knees.
“We’re losing the wind,” came Gwennec’s voice. Fatima heard him cross the deck and grunt as he pulled himself up the ratlines. She knew she should say something to him, something appropriately poignant, yet she was too tired to summon the words. She was nearly asleep when she felt him throw himself down beside her with a sigh.
“We need to set proper watches,” he said. “Two awake, one asleep, eight hours on, four off, so that everyone overlaps. I wish I could tell how much distance that damned carrack made up overnight, but there’s too much damned fog this morning to see a damned thing.”
Fatima looked up: a weak, gray light had penetrated the gloom, revealing nothing. The air beyond the cog was wreathed in white. Gwennec’s breath ascended around his chapped face in puffs of vapor, giving him a haloed appearance, like a weary seraph. He was looking at her uneasily, waiting for her to speak.
“What are the chances there’ll be a baby?” he asked. His voice was low, as if he worried they might be overheard.
“Not good, I don’t think,” murmured Fatima, unwilling to admit the things she had done to prevent this possibility. In spite of all that had happened, he still felt unfamiliar; his gestures, his accent, the profound blue of his eyes, everything about him was too blunt. “I haven’t—I’ve never—”
“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to tell me,” said Gwennec, sounding relieved. He found her hand and laced his fingers with hers. “Fa—”
“We don’t need to have this part of the conversation,” said Fatima, closing her eyes.
“I want to. Only to say—well, all right, have it your way. My heart belongs to someone else and so does yours. But we both know that already. So perhaps there’s nothing to be said after all.”
Fatima opened her eyes again.
“Who does yours
belong to?” she asked sharply.
“Who do you think?” Gwennec gave her one of the lopsided smiles that were already beginning to irritate her. Fatima sat up straighter to get a better look at him. He seemed no different from how he had been the night before, only a little more rumpled, his cheeks golden with a day’s growth of stubble.
“You can’t mean—” She meant to say God but laughed instead.
“I can and I do.” Gwennec looked into the fog, his face altering. “I eloped when I went to the abbey, more or less. There’s a part of the Mass when the priest holds up the Host, like this”—he demonstrated, loosing her fingers to lift his rough hands—“and one Easter, as I was watching, I felt this—I don’t know what it was. All I know is I couldn’t stand it. It was as if all the beauty of the world was bound up in one gesture. I saw the body of God in the priest’s hands. And that was that. I never went home again.”
Fatima didn’t know where to set her eyes. She felt faintly embarrassed, as though she had intruded on something private, next to which their night together seemed rather feeble. She had taken him for a fisherman who happened to become a monk; she saw now that she had reversed the order of things. A wariness crept over her, throwing suspicion on the little artless gestures and smiles that had made him so appealing.
“I don’t see how you can believe what she believes and yet be so different,” she muttered.
“She?”
“Luz.”
“Ah.” Gwennec gave a grunting laugh. “I think about this, when I’m alone. Luz isn’t the worst. I’ve met others since I’ve been in the abbey who are—well, I shouldn’t say, since they’re trying to put themselves right. Some ideas are so beautiful that even evil people believe in them. I thought the abbey would be full of saintly folk, but it wasn’t. Isn’t. It used to depress me. But I’ve come to realize that I must share God with the things that God has set askew.”
The Bird King Page 25
