Fatima felt something harden in her chest. She drew away from him by inches until she could no longer feel the warmth of his body beside hers.
“Am I one of those things to you now? Something askew?”
“You?” Gwennec’s eyes widened. “Because we had a tumble once, after you’d saved my life and we were all giddy to be alive? I’m as askew as you are, if that’s true, and more so, seeing as you’ve broken no vows. Lord, Fa, if I told you what sins some men drag with them, even monks—especially monks, I sometimes think. We oughtn’t to have done it and we won’t do it again, but it was so lovely that I haven’t even repented of it yet, because I’d be lying if I said I was filled with remorse. I’m waiting until I can muster some proper humility.”
Fatima relaxed; the warmth returned, transmitted between their shoulders.
“I was worried you’d go funny afterward,” she said.
“I don’t go funny, generally speaking, though if I do, I’ll warn you first.” Gwennec grinned again and Fatima found she didn’t mind it so much. Then he glanced back, over the sternmost railing, and the smile slid from his face.
“Fa,” he said hoarsely.
Fatima scrambled to her feet. The mist was thinning: water was visible again, as calm and milky as a lake. Rising up from it was the darker outline of the carrack, close enough for them to count the muffled booms of each sail.
“Wake Hassan,” shouted Gwennec, leaping down the steps to the main deck. “Get him up here!” He rushed past Stupid; spooked, the gelding squealed and clattered sideways. Fatima raced down one set of steps and then another, emerging into the murky half-night of the hold, where Hassan lay prone in a bunk, his long body still fitted around the emptiness where Gwennec had lain.
“Hassan,” said Fatima, shaking him by the arm. “They’ve caught up.”
Hassan’s eyes flew open. Without a word, he rose and stumbled across the hold, smoothing his shaggy hair with one hand. Fatima followed him up to the deck. Gwennec had adjusted the sails: a brisk current of air pulled at their clothing and battered their faces when they emerged into daylight. The sun, formerly a colorless, half-hidden disk, was burning through the fog, throwing weak shadows below the sails and the agitated figures of Gwennec and the gelding.
“What happened?” shouted Hassan. Gwennec swung down from the ratlines and landed in front of him.
“We lost the wind last night,” he said, pulling at a series of ropes that ran from the deck rail up to the mast. “Not Fatima’s fault—she was at the helm, nothing she could have done. We needed two awake, and we had two asleep, like a pack of fools.”
“Not Fatima’s fault,” muttered Hassan as the monk continued his inspection. “Nothing will ever be Fatima’s fault again, I suspect.”
Fatima looked around for something to fling at him but saw nothing suitable.
“Don’t pretend you wouldn’t have done exactly the same thing if he’d looked at you the right way,” she spat.
“Ah, but he didn’t look at me the right way, did he? Nor will he—nor will any of the men we meet from now on, if we live long enough for it to matter. They’ll look at you.”
They stared at each other for a long moment. Then the cog pitched abruptly, sending everything that was not bolted to the deck careening sideways. Fatima heard herself scream. She collided with Stupid and clung to his springy mane, but the gelding was no more sure-footed than herself, and soon they were both pinned against the rail. Water rose up before Fatima’s eyes, eclipsing the sky and the horizon. With a groan, the cog rolled back. Fatima found herself looking straight up. Above the fog, the sky was an opaque, mineral blue: the color of early autumn. For a moment, everything was weightless. Then the cog came crashing down, sending up a curtain of spray on either side of the prow, soaking Fatima in frigid brine. Voices were calling her name. She reached out and felt Hassan’s arms lift her away from the railing.
“I thought you’d fallen overboard,” he said, terror bright in his voice. “Oh God! I thought you were dead.”
Fatima pressed her face into the curve of his neck: Hassan, half sobbing, kissed her forehead, where her hairline mingled by feathered degrees into her brow. It was not exactly an apology, but Fatima pretended it was, and let herself sink against him as the cog heaved again.
“What is this?” she heard him shout.
“A rogue wave,” came Gwennec’s voice from atop the mast. “There may be more where that came from. The Dark Sea is nothing but fog and violence, damn it all, and this cog wasn’t built for open water.”
“And the carrack?”
“Still there, though we’ve a bit more room between us now. Christ Jesus, don’t just stand there—someone get on the tiller before I lose my mind.”
Fatima looked up and attempted to steady herself. The cog was still rolling, though the angle was no longer so acute. Stupid was on his knees against the rail, showing the whites of his eyes; foam spattered from his mouth. Something fluttered on the table beside the tiller: it was the map, still pinned by its quartet of stones, struggling like a bird caught in a hunter’s trap.
“Hassan,” said Fatima. “I have an idea.”
Chapter 18
He didn’t like to let go of her hand. Gwennec found him a crate to sit on near the little table on the stern castle, but it was Fatima he wanted beside him, his right hand clutching hers as he sketched with his left. She rose every so often to check their course, though the compass, and the gimbals in its orbit, went oddly still after Hassan began to alter the map. Fatima imagined the compass had been a living thing and was now dead: they had killed it, and the halos and half spheres of metal constituted a corpse.
The fantasy was so vivid that she found herself unwilling to look at the compass after a time, focusing instead on the movement of Hassan’s fingers, the darkening circles beneath his eyes. He was working in ink now, not in charcoal: he had selected a blue bottle from the innards of his leather case and mixed powders and oils to create a color that reminded Fatima of the ship, a red-brown, water stained, earthy hue, each drop of which pulled them closer to the king of the birds.
“What’s moving?” Gwennec asked at one point, hovering over Hassan’s shoulder. “Us, or the island, or the sea?”
“Nothing is moving,” murmured Hassan. “I’m just shortening the distance between us and what we want.”
“You know the sun’s gotten confused,” pressed Gwennec. “I’ve been up the mast, watching it tick around in a circle. It’s as if this cog is the still point at the top of the world, where they say there is no darkness.”
“You’re awfully calm about it,” said Fatima.
“I don’t know what else to be. I don’t know what else to do. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Fatima untangled her fingers from Hassan’s, kissing his head when he made a noise of protest. She straightened and stretched her back. The fog had returned; or rather, the horizon had vanished, and the carrack, if it still followed them, was hidden in a gray blur.
“I’m tired,” she announced.
“Go sleep,” said Gwennec. “I’ll stay with him.”
“I don’t want you,” muttered Hassan.
“You’ve not got much choice. It’s me or Stupid, and Stupid shits every twenty minutes. I notice neither of you refined gentlefolk has bothered to clean up.”
“You clean it up, since you’re the least domesticated.”
“Oh, I see how things lie. Shall I wipe your ass as well, while I’m about it?”
Fatima left them to bicker and went belowdecks. Her shoulders ached from being too long in one position: there was pressure in her temples that blinking did nothing to dispel. She crawled into the bunk where Hassan and Gwennec had slept and breathed their mingled scents. Before her eyes, the grain of the oak trees that had become the hull of the ship slid along from plank to plank, as solid as ever. Everything around her seemed too real: surely she was asleep, or she had gone overboard in the rogue wave, or she was back in the palace
, dreaming, and had never left at all. Nothing real could follow from desires like hers. They were adrift in what was surely no longer the waking world; fate did not reward such recklessness. If you climb too high, Lady Aisha had once told her, the angels will come down and ask you where you’re going. Yet the hull, as she touched it, was rough and sturdy and shifted almost imperceptibly beneath her fingers to accommodate the motion of the water. The ship was still real, still hers.
“Qaf,” she whispered, tracing invisible letters on the hull. “Antillia.” Perhaps the difference didn’t matter; perhaps it was only the escape that mattered. And she had escaped: she was free, and though freedom was neither happiness nor safety, though it was in fact a crueler and lonelier thing than she could have imagined, it was real, just as the ship was real, and like the ship, it was hers.
She fell asleep with her finger pressed against the hull. A jostle and the scent and heaviness of a warm body half woke her sometime later—when exactly, she couldn’t tell; the light had not changed when Hassan collapsed beside her with a sigh.
“Move over,” came Gwennec’s voice, whispering.
“Not big enough for three,” muttered Hassan.
“Then turn sideways, you radish. I’m freezing out here. Move, move.”
Fatima found herself pressed between Hassan and the slope of the hull.
“No one is sailing this ship,” she murmured.
“Nothing to sail,” said Gwennec. “No wind, no landmarks, compass dead.”
“Is that it, then? We wait here to die?”
“No,” came Hassan’s voice. “I think we’re close now. I think this is how it’s meant to look. Hidden in the fog. That’s what the story says.”
Fatima was about to correct him—surely they had added that detail themselves—but stopped herself. She could no longer remember what they had read and what they had written. Sleep pulled at her again. Gwennec’s breath was already deepening; beside her, she felt Hassan twitch in the violent prelude to dreams. She rested her cheek against his.
She dreamed of a white shoreline. Hills of thick, pale grass, flattened by wind, leading down to the sand; small trees, their trunks like warped silver, hanging over the cresting hillsides, their branches straining backward, like the grass, as if a strong gale had swept over the whole of the landscape. The air was heavy with the smell of rain. Fatima sensed rather than saw the figure standing beside her, yet even before she turned to look, she knew what she would find.
The Bird King did not touch the ground. He hung in the air, held aloft by currents Fatima could not feel, silently beating his great wings. She could look at him only in pieces. He had no face, at least none in any sense that Fatima could describe, but he was clothed in feathers: crimson, blue, gray, glass-green, dark ocher. There were colors that were not colors but memories: the rosy-edged white of a winter sunrise and the mottled red and green of earth blending into water, and here and there a blue-black parted by gold like the quiet dawns in which Lady Aisha had touched her shoulder and asked if she would rise to pray.
He was too frightening to be truly beautiful. There was a remoteness about him, a terrible, unrelenting kind of mercy, the kind that could meet good and evil with equal tenderness. Yet Fatima reached for him with both her arms, saturated with relief and bawling like a child.
I’m here, she said. I’ve come. I crossed the Dark Sea to find you, and now I’m here.
The Bird King folded his wings around her shoulders. She expected him to speak, to communicate something infallible, a tidy ending for the story she and Hassan had begun, but he was silent. The landscape around them dimmed, and Fatima felt a little thrill of doubt. In that doubt, she saw Luz, or rather, the spot in Luz’s eye, which seemed, in the jumbled logic of dreaming, to contain a vast stretch of time in which all the failures of men were chronicled. It pulled itself toward her, closing the rupture of moments and miles between them, until it was so close that it filled her sight.
Hurried footsteps thumped over her head; the space where Hassan and Gwennec had slept was cold. The ship had begun to pitch again. Across the hold, water rose and sank beyond the little row of portholes, each wave knife-edged, crowding against the white sky. Fatima clenched her teeth to fight the nausea that swelled in her gut each time the cog heaved upward. She made her way across the hold and up the steps, swaying like a drunkard, and looked past the stern at what she knew she would find there.
The outline of the carrack was sharp and solid in the pale nothing behind them. Shouts came from the deck. Fatima could see men pointing toward the cog; a dog’s bark cracked through the chill air; a loud blast sounded on a horn.
“We failed,” said Hassan, appearing beside her. “I failed.” His skin looked sallow in the odd light, the skin beneath his eyes as dark as a bruise, as if the effort of altering the map had bled his strength. He looked at Fatima for absolution. “I thought surely they couldn’t follow if I bent things a little. They don’t have the map. But perhaps they have something better.”
“Whatever they have, it isn’t better,” said Fatima. “It’s something worse. Something awful can work as well as something wonderful. That doesn’t make it better.” She stroked his hand with its dirty, ink-stained bandages. “It was my idea, anyway. If anybody’s failed, it’s me.”
Hassan looked at her in surprise.
“I’m not sure I know you at all anymore,” he said. “That sounded almost like an apology.”
The deck of the carrack seethed with activity. Within the scrum of men, clad in black, Fatima saw, or thought she saw, a woman with brassy hair. But the slender figure was quickly eclipsed by the lead hooks of arquebuses as they were propped upon the deck railing, the dull thunk of metal audible across the water. Fatima watched the guns and wondered whether she might still be asleep. That an idea of her own, an idea so clever, the only logical continuation of their excellent luck, might fail so profoundly, had rendered her dull, and she watched with indifference as the row of scarlet-clad fusiliers opposite her loaded shot into each arquebus. Then there was a sudden flare. The sound came a moment later, and a moment after that, a hot breeze stung her neck, too close.
“Get down!” screamed Gwennec. “You madwoman!”
Fatima threw herself onto the deck. Stupid, less easily reasoned with, was on his feet, lathered in sweat, galloping back and forth between the railings. The cog heaved and dipped over rolling water. Fatima braced herself against the rail and gritted her teeth.
“Another rogue wave?” she asked.
Gwennec looked into the surf.
“No,” he said after a moment, “too regular. It’s more like—like a tide coming in. Waves breaking somewhere close.”
“Which means what?”
“Land. It means land.”
Fatima stood, ignoring Gwennec as he shouted at her to keep down. She turned in a circle, looking for some sign, but there was only fog and the carrack and the fading echoes of voices.
“I don’t see anything,” she howled.
“You think I can explain this?” said Gwennec. “You think I can explain any of this? It looks like a tide breaking, that’s all I know. So for the love of Christ, get down before an arquebus catches you straight in the neck.”
Fatima shrank as another volley of lead popped and sang against the flank of the hull. There followed a moment of quiet as the smell of gunpowder dissipated. The cog began to list ominously.
“We’re sinking,” said Fatima.
“Well of course we’re sinking,” shouted Gwennec. “How much fire do you think a ship of this size can take? Someone has gotten off a lucky shot and punctured the hull below the waterline. It was only a matter of time.”
The waves beyond the railing of the deck had become a steady, rolling surf, loud enough to muffle the groaning of the cog as it began to buckle. Fatima sat with her legs sprawled in front of her. An empty barrel bounced across the width of the deck and lodged against the lowest point of the rail, where salt spray was already licking at the de
ck. Fatima realized with dismay that Stupid was gone. The pitch of the waves, the listing of the ship had carried him overboard without a sound, one small life claimed by water. Hassan was kneeling where the horse had been, his robe pooling around him in the rising foam, communing in silence with what had been. Tears stung Fatima’s eyes. She looked toward the carrack, which filled one half of the sky like a mountain under sail.
There was nothing left to do; or rather, there was only one thing left to do. Rising, she climbed the short steps to the stern castle and leaned into the tiller. It resisted her, and as she threw her weight against it, she heard a corresponding groan from deep within the ship. Slowly, the prow began to swing around, until the bowsprit pointed, needlelike, at the exposed hull of the carrack.
“What the hell are you doing?” called Gwennec.
“Take Hassan,” replied Fatima. “I think that barrel stuck against the railing over there will float, don’t you?”
“What do you mean? What are you saying?”
“If you get away, it’s not suicide,” she said, half to herself. “If we all die, it’s just silliness and dramatics.”
Gwennec looked from the tiller to the carrack and back again.
“You mean to ram them,” he said incredulously. “You’ll never get up enough speed, Fa. Not with us listing like this.”
“I don’t care. If one little hole can sink us, then one little hole can sink them. Now shut up and take Hassan and do as I say.”
Gwennec slammed his closed fist against the step nearest him, then pulled his hand back and slammed it down again twice more.
“You’re selfish,” he spat. “Hassan was right. Everything must be done your way, on your say-so. I’ll be damned before I cling to some barrel to save my own wretched life and let an unarmed girl go down with the ship.”
“I’m selfish,” muttered Fatima, pressing the bones of her hips into the sluggish tiller. “If I were a man, you’d call me a hero. Instead, you want to argue with me because I’ve reversed the order in which honor demands we must die.”
The Bird King Page 26
