The light had yellowed and dimmed as the sun grew heavy, softening the awful cast on Gwennec’s face until he looked like an effigy of himself; his eyelids translucent, his mouth set in a soft line that was not quite a smile. Fatima kissed his forehead and one sunburned ear and the unsettled frontier between his brow and hair. He did not stir.
“It’s over,” said Deng gently.
Hassan continued to stroke the monk’s hair as though he had not heard.
“There are graves to dig,” pressed Deng. “Our duties to our friends don’t end in death.”
Hassan began to weep like a child, his blood-caked hands still entangled in Gwennec’s bright hair. Fatima took an unsteady breath.
“Who is left to read his funeral prayers?” she asked.
“I will,” said Luz, “if you can bear to hear me speak.”
Thanking her was out of the question. Fatima stood without bothering to conceal the tears that marked her cheeks, and forced herself to look out across the beach. Mary was there, the clever armor she had made for herself overturned in the sand like an abandoned shell. The boys were with her, Asher and his three brothers, covering the bodies that lay upon the beach in linen, the auburn of their hair lost in the glow of the sun. And there was the beast coming out of the surf, its hide streaming, gilded by the afternoon and not quite tame: it walked past Mary and the boys without looking at them and stretched itself along the base of the cliff, basking in what heat the day had left.
Fatima pulled her hair back in a leather thong and prepared to be the king once more. Her breath would come only in gasps, long stuttering things that burned her throat, but she took them, one after another, agreeing with each one to live a while longer. She made her way across the beach toward the stairs, looking only once at the leviathan, which raised its head as she passed, and blinked its eyes, and smiled.
Chapter 26
They buried the dead in the center of the island the following morning, beside the palm-encircled spring, where the shadow of the mountain of Qaf would lie over them. It was the only place, Fatima reasoned, that would stand still long enough for a proper burial; the only place where they could return to mourn and to sweep the graves. She did not speak, though the others looked to her to say something final and profound: the sight of so many shrouded bodies stopped her. They buried the Spanish soldiers alongside their friends, for doing otherwise seemed ominous. Luz recited the funeral prayers in her broken voice, and Hassan said the janazah, and afterward they covered the bodies in sandy earth, smoothing the graves until the only evidence that remained of death was a few dark smudges on the ground. Asher and his brothers grew bored and collected palm fronds from the blue shadows beneath the trees, swatting halfheartedly at pale butterflies that sunned themselves at the edge of the spring.
“Will there be no peace for us?” Mary asked when it was all over. “Even here? We won’t survive another attack. It were only thanks to you and that beast that we survived this one. How shall we manage?”
Fatima looked around herself at the faces assembled under the palm trees and beside the spring, slack with the heat of midday and the effort of digging so many graves. A numbness had returned: the fear of living that had marked them all as they arrived half drowned on the shores of the island. Fatima sighed, shutting her eyes; the afternoon was cloudless and windless.
“Vikram said something before he left,” she said. “Something about leaving before the way was shut. I didn’t understand, but I think perhaps I should.”
Hassan, his face wary, came toward her, wiping his hands; he had made his ablutions in the spring, and his arms and face glistened. He was wearing a clean robe that was too wide at the shoulders: Fatima realized, with a pang, that it was one of Deng’s.
“I think I may have a notion,” he said quietly. “But it isn’t one you’ll like.”
Fatima reached out and touched his damp fingers. The nails on his left hand had grown back evenly; the only evidence that remained of the horror inflicted upon them was slight variations in the color of the skin beneath, where brown gave way to scarred pink and blue, as though the inks he used to draw had made their way into his bloodstream. He took her hand and pulled her to himself. Fatima breathed the scent of his hair and neck and let her head fall against his shoulder.
“I’ve missed you,” she confessed to the folds of his collar.
“I never left,” said Hassan. “My love, my love. Listen—it was my map that brought us here, so I think—I’m fairly certain—it was my map that brought the Spanish here too.”
Fatima lifted her head to look at him.
“So we destroy it,” she said. “We tear it up. Just as I used to do with the maps you made for me at the Alhambra—I would tear them up, and the rooms you had made for me would disappear.”
There was a pause in which Hassan looked steadily into her face with an expression she found unsettling.
“We tear it up,” he said finally. “But it mustn’t be done here, on the island itself.”
“What do you mean? Why not?”
“Because we don’t want to destroy the territory. Only the way.”
“But—” Fatima searched his face, which had hardened with resolve in a way that filled her with dismay.
“No,” she said firmly. “You’re not leaving. You’re not, Hassan. You’re needed here.”
“I’m not needed anywhere. I have done one wonderful thing—I’ve brought us here. And now I can do one more wonderful thing to keep us safe. That’s two more wonderful things than most people get to do in their lifetimes.”
Fatima’s eyes filled with tears. “You’re meant to live,” she said. “Why did we leave the palace in the first place? I could have stayed. I could have gone on to Morocco and borne the sultan’s children and died a rich old woman, just as you said. But I didn’t, because I love you more than I love any of those things.”
“Fa—”
“I will go.”
The low hum of conversation around the pool ceased, and a dozen pairs of eyes looked up at her.
“I will go,” Fatima repeated, standing straighter. “I will take one of the longboats out with the tide, into the mist, and destroy the map there.”
“But you’re the king,” protested Mary, rising from where she sat on the lip of the pool.
“I’m not,” said Fatima. “Or I am, but so are you. And Hassan, and all of us, and none of us. The Bird King is not a person, the Bird King is—” She broke off, lacking the vocabulary to continue. The sun shone on the surface of the pool, which reflected nothing but a bright glare. It was not the darkness that would annihilate all things in the end; it was the light.
“You can’t go!” cried Mary, looking around herself for support. “Despite all your fine philosophy. We couldn’t get on without you. None of us are angry enough to keep living, not in so strange and wild a place.”
Fatima could think of nothing to say. Deng, who had been tidying the earth mounded over each of the graves, wiped his hands on the hem of his coat and caught Fatima’s eye warily.
“If destroying the map would hide this island from the Spanish, presumably it will also hide it from anyone else with a mind to find it,” he said in a quiet voice, tilting his head toward Asher and his brothers, who were running back and forth nearby, chasing one another with palm fronds. “No more boats. No one else saved from the sea.”
Fatima wrapped her arms around herself and wished powerfully for Gwennec, willing the island to send him back. She wanted to lift her eyes and see him walk out from between the shadowed dunes with his lopsided smile, his sunburned brow, and say, as he always did, the right things.
“We can’t save everyone,” she whispered.
“We can save many more than we have. Many more.”
She turned to face him. Sweat stood out on his brow from heat and effort; he was, as they all were, leaner now than he had been when they arrived on the island, the lines of his jaw were more pronounced, and the sinews of his forearms were vis
ible. He pleaded with her silently, anxious grooves drawn around his downturned mouth.
“Say we save a hundred more,” said Fatima. “Or a thousand or two thousand? What good will it do if the Spanish come back and we lose them all to cannons and pikes? How many more graves must we dig?”
Deng sighed and turned to look over the dunes at the line of the sky.
“We will fade here,” he said. “Out of time and memory. We will leave nothing, no legacy. There will be no record of what we have built. What is a kingdom if no one remembers it?”
Asher’s middle brother shrieked and darted away from the hiss of a palm frond, dancing on his toes and grinning through the gaps in his baby teeth.
“It must be enough,” said Fatima. “This must be enough. This, us, each other. It matters that we lived.”
“You really mean to go, then.”
Fatima wiped her eyes. Asher’s youngest brother came and pressed himself against her legs in silent protest. She bent and kissed the top of his curly head, still lush with the scent of infancy. Her heart ached as much now that it was full as it had when it was empty, but the ache was sweeter, and would, she thought, carry her through her fear of death.
“A king must not ask anything of her subjects that she wouldn’t do herself,” she said. “I must go.”
There was a sigh behind her. Luz stood, less pallid now after hours standing in the sun, and cleared her throat.
“Enough of this,” she rasped. “The ground is already choked with martyrs. I will go.”
Fatima spat out a laugh.
“Please,” pressed Luz. “I can’t stay here. It would be unbearable. You don’t trust me enough to let me stay.”
“I don’t trust you enough to let you leave,” said Fatima. Luz laughed soundlessly and turned away. The air picked up strands of her hair, the same color as the sand, and played with them, lifting them lightly with the sleeves and hem of her borrowed dress, so that she seemed to float, half dead already.
“Why would you do this for us?” Fatima asked in a different voice. “What about your queen and your empire and all the rest?”
Luz was silent for a moment, looking at her own feet.
“I will never see that empire,” she said. “I thought I was saved. But I was looking for proof. That isn’t faith. I thought Hassan disproved everything I believed was true. I needed to destroy him so I could believe again. Instead—” She paused, following Deng’s gaze out toward the far horizon. “Let me have this one thing. Let me choose the way it ends.”
They prepared the longboat as if for a lengthy voyage. Mary folded blankets and cloaks and bundled them into the keel; there was a packet of dried fish wrapped in palm leaves and a basket of berries the boys had picked, and several jugs of water. Luz protested that there was no need for them to waste their supplies, yet it was too terrible to acknowledge she would not use them, so they packed the boat full. It was early evening before they were finished. The day had remained cloudless: each gradient of color was visible across the sky, blue and yellow and rose, as perfect and distinct as the first moment color was born. Fatima could not take her eyes off the sky. She did not help load the boat but stood beside it, her foot on the keel, keeping it still in the restless water. Luz, overtired, sat on the sand and watched her.
“Are you afraid?” Fatima asked the sky.
“I don’t think so,” said Luz after considering for a moment. “I’m not certain of anything now. I don’t love God as much as Hassan does, nor any living person as much as you love Hassan. I’m only biding time.” She smiled a little bitterly and rubbed her eyes. “It’s all right, Fatima. You needn’t waste your energy hating me. There’s very little left to hate. There’s very little left at all.”
Fatima examined the pale inquisitor. In the brilliant light, she looked almost translucent, as though the sun passed through her without interruption.
“Thank you,” she forced herself to say. Luz shook her head.
“I should thank you,” she said. “I’m only safeguarding your life. You’re safeguarding my afterlife.”
Fatima smiled in spite of herself. The tide had crested and begun to go out, pulling at the boat that leaned against her foot. She reached out and helped Luz to her feet. The map was folded inside a pouch that hung at her sash; she took it out and pressed it into Luz’s hands. Luz unfolded it, tracing the rhumb lines, the outline of the coast she would never see again.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. “Like everything he does.” She drew a shuddering breath. “Will you help me into the boat?”
Fatima pulled the prow onto the beach to steady it. She put her shoulder beneath Luz’s and half lifted her over the edge of the boat, surprised by how little the older woman seemed to weigh, by how cold she felt. When Luz had settled onto a plank seat at the stern, Fatima pulled out one of Mary’s cloaks and wrapped her in it, fastening it beneath her chin. Luz smiled.
“Good-bye, King of the Birds,” she said. “I don’t suppose we’ll meet again.”
“Perhaps in your afterlife,” said Fatima. “If there’s room.”
Luz laughed at this. She folded the map and tucked it under the cloak, into the bodice of her gown. “I’m ready,” she said.
Fatima put her shoulder against the stern of the boat and pushed. The water slid past her ankles, lifting the prow over an eddy of foam, and in an instant the boat weighed nearly nothing, and belonged to another realm. Fatima pushed until the water reached her waist and then fell back, shivering in her sodden robe, and stumbled onto the beach. The tide pulled the boat into itself and hid it from view. Taking up her heavy skirts, Fatima jogged across the sand toward the chalk steps; the leviathan was sleeping in the newborn shadows, its ribs rising and falling with the waves.
Fatima mounted the stairs. She could see the boat again, farther out, its sole passenger visible only as a dark blot in the stern. A pale arm was raised. Fatima raised hers in return, waving until the current carried the image from view. Then she let her arm fall and continued up the stairs toward the clifftop, balancing over the plank Deng had laid between the missing steps. She could hear Hassan and Mary arguing good-naturedly over dinner; Asher calling to one of his brothers. The wind dropped upon her from above, warm with the scent of a cooking fire, carrying with it the laughter of children.
Acknowledgments
With thanks to Warren Frazier for his unwavering faith in this book, Amy Hundley and Dhyana Taylor for their editorial insight, and Professor S.J. Pearce for her profound historical acumen.
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