The Bird King Read online

  “You joke, but you may be more right than you realize,” he murmured, climbing a rise to get a better view. “Falcons are curious birds. They’ll follow anything that interests them. As long as it trails us, anyone hunting you will know there is movement here in the foothills.”

  “Can’t we make it go away?” asked Fatima, peering up at it. The bird crossed in front of the hazy sun; she closed her eyes and saw its double.

  “I don’t speak with birds,” said Vikram, jumping down into the dry streambed in which they had been walking. “Birds can walk and swim and fly and augur the future, so they’re more like my kind than they are like yours. There’s a certain mutual suspicion.”

  Fatima looked back up at the falcon. It floated in the thick air, tracing a series of oblong shapes against the clouds. Several times as they walked, Fatima had thought she heard the muffled howl of a dog, sometimes far off and sometimes nearer, though the hills to their left and the rise and fall of the ground made it difficult to tell where the sound was coming from. Vikram, for his part, never gave any sign of alarm. He trotted along on all fours across the broken terrain and growled like a madman, absorbed in his own opaque thoughts. Fatima told herself that if he was unafraid, she had no reason to be otherwise, and fought the upswells of anxiety when they came. But the falcon was different: it was neither pursuer nor friend, and the ambiguity made Fatima uneasy.

  “Maybe we can distract it with something,” she said. “Don’t birds like baubles and shiny things?”

  “Good idea,” laughed Hassan. “What a shame we’ve left our diamond cuffs, golden necklets, and ropes of pearls in the Alhambra. They would be so handy just now.”

  Fatima glanced down at her wrists. She had, in fact, possessed a pair of gold cuffs, a gift from the sultan when they started sharing a bed. They were beautiful, beaten into a thousand facets and polished so that they caught the light. But Lady Maryam had seen her wearing them in the courtyard one day—it was before she had retired to her own room and stopped receiving anyone—and appraised her silently for a moment that went on far too long. Fatima put the cuffs away in a box. She wore no jewelry now except for her anklets.

  “Wait,” she said, coming to a halt. “Wait, wait. I do have something.” Bending down, she unlaced her damp boots and withdrew one foot. The anklet clung to her flesh, its double row of tiny silver bells silent. She unclasped it and peeled it off, holding it up triumphantly for Hassan and Vikram to see.

  “How resourceful it is,” said Vikram with a toothy grin. “Well, well. Throw your pretty bells away, as hard and as high as you can, and we’ll see whether they make any difference.”

  Fatima hurled the anklet toward the yellow flank of the hill alongside which they had been walking. The bells twinkled for a moment before vanishing into the scrub, landing with a merry sound. The falcon folded its wings and dived after them.

  “Well done,” said Hassan, clapping Fatima on the back. “All that shrieking was driving me mad. What would you bet that’s a tame bird? Some wealthy merchant probably set it loose before fleeing across the Strait. It’s lonely and hungry, poor thing—just like us.”

  Fatima said nothing, regretting the loss of her anklet. She could hear it jingling in the scrub as the falcon pecked at the bells.

  “Can we get it back?” she asked. “After the bird has gone?”

  Vikram laughed at her.

  “It wants its pretty things back. Be glad, Fatima! Better the bird should make noise and draw the dogs and you walk a little lighter in your boots.”

  “Don’t laugh at me,” muttered Fatima, scuffing the dust with one foot. “I only own three things, and that’s counting the ring Lady Aisha gave me. That bird is half as rich as I am now.”

  “You have many things more valuable than those bells, or even the borrowed ruby on your finger,” sang Vikram, loping onward down the shallow crater of the streambed. “Youth, intelligence, health, strength of will, surpassing beauty, and now, freedom. Your anger, too, would be a gift, if you would only decide to harness it. There are many men in this world who have bells aplenty, yet are not half as rich as Fatima.”

  Fatima set her jaw, formulating a response. She did not have the opportunity to try it, however, for a moment later there came the baying of not one but several hounds, very close by. The sound echoed off the barren hillside and landed in Fatima’s ears with a loud crack.

  “How silly we’ve been,” whispered Hassan, his face as white as the bleached stones under their feet. “Standing here making all this noise.”

  Vikram said something in a language Fatima had never heard before, a pair of harsh syllables like a cross between a growl and a log splitting open in a fire.

  “Come,” he murmured, taking one of their hands in each of his. “Stay close.”

  Fatima felt a tug on her wrist. Dazed, she stumbled to follow, breaking out into a run when the pressure increased, taking longer and longer steps until it seemed her feet barely touched the earth. The banks of the streambed blurred around her, becoming a tangle of stone and scrub and stunted trees tinted yellow where the sun struck them and blue where the shadows of the hills fell. Her lungs ached. Beside her, Hassan was a blot of red hair and green felt and heavy breathing. Fatima felt unconsciousness pressing out from behind her eyes. She struggled against it until the banks of the stream began to go dark, as if night were falling.

  If you faint, I will get angry, came a voice in her head. If you faint I will have to leave you behind, and then you will die, and I will have broken my promise.

  Fatima forced herself to breathe more deeply. She counted each breath in Arabic and in Sabir and in Castilian and in Latin. She counted until she ran out of numbers.

  “Stop,” she begged, her voice ragged.

  The world began to slow. The pressure on Fatima’s wrist relaxed. Gasping, she fell to her knees and pressed her forehead against the earth. A bitter tang rose up in the back of her throat. She tensed, retching.

  “That’s right,” came Vikram’s voice, tinged with amusement. A clawed hand thumped her across the shoulders. “Get it all up.”

  “It” was water and bile, for there was nothing else in Fatima’s stomach. She coughed and sputtered and rolled onto her back. Images came into focus around her. Above, the sky was golden, the morning mist burned away. They had left the streambed behind and passed into open country. There was dry grass beneath her; beside her, the humming of cicadas in a lone willow. Hassan passed in front of her eyes, his hair a windblown halo about his face.

  “Let’s never do that again,” he muttered.

  Fatima attempted to sit. The ground tilted at a nauseating angle. Moaning, she lay down again and dug her fingers into the earth. The sweet tang of grass and dust pooled in her nose and the back of her throat and soothed her.

  “Look at the horizon,” instructed Vikram. “It will help.”

  Fatima blinked to bring the distance into focus. The Sierra Nevada began at her head and ended somewhere past her feet, pulling back in the middle as if out of modesty, like a lady drawing her veil across her shoulders. At this distance, the mountains were profoundly blue, succeeded at the tree line by an icy color as the snows that lay on the highest peaks surged upward toward their birthplace in the sky.

  Between Fatima and the mountains, the ground was flat. Great squares of it were furrowed in preparation for crops that had never been sown. The willow tree under which she lay was the only upright thing in sight, aside from a charred, boxy shape a little way off that might be the ruins of a farmhouse. A path of packed earth led up to it before trailing away toward some long-disused high road. Everything was empty: the plain, the fields, the path, the skeletal house. It was vicious, somehow, the emptiness, as if the Vega was waiting to strike at them for the war that had left it fallow and burned.

  Fatima grasped at the knobby trunk of the willow and pulled herself up.

  “Why did you bring us here?” she asked, her voice feeble. “A baby could spot us from miles away.”
>
  “I had very little choice,” said Vikram. He launched himself at the trunk of the tree and scuttled up into its thicket of branches. “The Vega bends eastward here and must be crossed in the open. The is no more shelter in the foothills, and anyway, the black-cloaks will be looking for you there. They too must come this way, for they have horses and dogs to water and rest, but with any luck they will not be here before dawn, and by then we will have moved on. Tomorrow we cross the Dúrcal River and make for the pass through the southern mountains.”

  “Keck to all that,” muttered Hassan, throwing himself down at the foot of the willow. “When do I get to sleep in a bed? That’s all I want to know.”

  “A bed?” Vikram sounded amused. “Forget your beds. You’ll be sleeping on rocks and roots for days yet.”

  “A fire, then,” said Hassan with a pleading lilt in his voice. “Or I will begin to value my life very lightly.”

  “It wants a fire,” snorted Vikram, shaking the branches as he dropped down from the canopy. “A lone fire on the Vega would be visible for leagues and leagues. You might as well use yourself as tinder. But don’t worry. Your old uncle Vikram will keep you warm.”

  “Are you flirting with me?”

  “Maybe a little. Children! Listen closely. I am going away to fetch your dinner. Do not leave the shadow of this tree while I’m gone. Nod your head if you understand.”

  Fatima rolled her eyes. Apparently satisfied, Vikram cantered away across the tilled earth, leaving no footprints. Fatima watched him for as long as she could. He became a dot, and then a shimmer of air, and then nothing, leaving behind the uncomfortable impression that he had never existed to begin with. Shivering, Fatima pressed herself into a hollow between two of the willow tree’s sloping roots. The ground at its base was littered with oblong yellow leaves that curled in the heat like tiny rolls of parchment. Fatima withdrew her feet from her boots and pushed the leaves around in the dust, enjoying the familiar sensation of air and earth against her toes. The haze had vanished and the sky was the deep cloudless color of late afternoon. Pulling her hands inside the sleeves of her robe, Fatima closed her eyes.

  “Do you really think we’re going to make it?” came Hassan’s voice, heavy with fatigue. “I mean honestly. You can tell the truth now that it’s—he’s—gone.”

  “Of course we’re going to make it,” murmured Fatima. She was too tired to offer anything but platitudes.

  “By all means, you sleep,” said Hassan flatly, when it was clear no more encouragement was forthcoming. “I’ll keep watch.” She heard him shift his weight and lift himself to his feet with a groan. Fatima curled her knees against her chest and did as he suggested, falling asleep so fast that slumber came like a physical blow.

  She dreamed of footfalls. Lady Aisha was moving about the room in her soft way, unspeaking, as she had done when Fatima was a small child and slept in her mistress’s bed. Lady Aisha had always been careful not to wake her. She had strong opinions about uninterrupted sleep. She was sewing, or so it seemed to Fatima, who did not feel inclined to open her eyes: she could hear her mistress’s bone needle rasping back and forth through a piece of raw silk. The mending was Fatima’s responsibility now that she was grown. Lady Aisha was silent, but later she would purse her lips and drop the finished work into Fatima’s lap as a reprimand. She should wake, then, wake and finish the work herself to avoid an ugly scene.

  Her fingers twitched in the grass and reminded her she was somewhere else. There would be no more mending; no one in the harem save Lady Aisha was mourning her absence now. The other girls were probably gossiping, tittering to each other, spreading the news in whispers until it reached the serving woman, who would tell the washerwoman, who would bring the juicy tidbit down the hill into the city itself along with her sacks of dirty linen: the sultan’s concubine has run away. Nessma was probably comforting her brother even now, massaging his shoulders as she bent to whisper in his ear: That girl was no good. I always said so. So haughty, so ungrateful—she never loved you. She never loved any of us.

  And the sultan? Try as she might, Fatima couldn’t imagine his reaction to her flight. It was not his way to shout and break things. He might have one or two of the harem guards flogged, but only for form’s sake; it must be immediately known that any lapse in duty would be punished. Would he send for the blonde Provençal war captive and console himself with her? Perhaps not. Perhaps he would finally cross the courtyard of the harem to knock on Lady Maryam’s door, and stand before her, and talk, haltingly, about their children.

  The rasping sound began again. Fatima opened her eyes. Twilight had fallen over the Vega: the sky was dark overhead and pale on the soft hills that formed the western horizon. Beside her, Hassan was asleep sitting up, his head lolling against the trunk of the willow, his mouth slightly open. The soft steps, the quiet rustling sounds, came from a man crouched on the far side of the tree, rifling through their bags.

  Fatima screamed. The man looked up at her with a startled, savage expression, his eyes milky in the dark. He was wearing a black wool doublet over a shirt that might once have been red; his face, too, was sun-reddened, stubble running riot over lopsided features. They stared at one another for a moment. Then the man lunged.

  Fatima’s head knocked against a root and for a moment she could see nothing but bursts of light. There was a great weight on her chest. She struggled to free herself, to scream again, but a dirt-perfumed hand clapped over her mouth and pressed her head back against the bony foot of the tree. The pain in her skull was so great that Fatima thought it might crack open, that this sorry, furtive wriggling was what death felt like.

  Hassan was awake now and scrambling to his feet: she heard a cry of dismay and then a grunt as he kicked the man hard in the ribs. The pressure on her mouth relented for a moment. Gasping, Fatima squeezed her hand down along her side, drew her knife, and pointed it up.

  Hot liquid gushed over her knife hand. The man made a choked, frightened sound and rolled away. Hands wrapped themselves beneath her shoulders and pulled her upright, and then she was in Hassan’s shaking arms.

  “Are you all right?” he panted. “Is any of that yours?”

  Fatima looked down: the front of her robe was soaked in blood.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. Her feet went out from under her; Hassan tightened his grip.

  “Are you sure?” he pressed. “Your face is this awful color that I can’t quite explain. Say something, Fa, for God’s sake.”

  “I haven’t cut her.” The man was lying on his back, his own face an awful color, one fist stuffed against the spreading wet spot on his doublet. He was speaking Castilian. “Though the little bitch has cut me pretty well.”

  Fatima was still holding her knife. She felt no desire to let it go. She held it up in front of her, though the man at her feet was hardly in a position to rise again. There seemed to be no connection between the things that she saw: the knife, the blood, the labored breathing of her assailant. Something else must have happened, something benign; there had been a terrible misunderstanding.

  “Do you know what this is?” The fingers of the Castilian’s free hand twitched, gesturing at his sopping doublet. “This is a gut wound. It takes a long time. Hours.”

  Fatima did not understand. She looked from her bloody knife to the man and back again.

  “Do the right thing,” he snapped, phlegm rattling in his throat. “The soldierly thing, since you’ve got a soldier’s knife.”

  Fatima’s knife hand began to shake.

  “You want me to kill you?” Her Castilian came out blunt and accented. The man gave a horrible laugh.

  “You’ve already done that,” he said. “I’m asking you for mercy. Mercy is a virtue, yes? Even for an infidel like you.”

  “I can’t.” Fatima let the knife slip from her hand. “I can’t. I’m sorry.” To her horror, she felt herself begin to cry. “I’m very sorry.”

  There was a rush of air at her back. Vikram boiled
up beside her, snarling. He tossed a brace of freshly gutted rabbits at the roots of the tree.

  “What is this?” he barked. “Can’t I leave you alone for an hour without coming back to a mess?”

  The Castilian stared up at Vikram in horror.

  “Ave Maria,” he wheezed, “gratia plena, Dominus tecum, benedicta tu in mulierib—”

  Vikram fell on the man’s throat with his teeth bared. The world around Fatima grew dim with screaming; she smelled blood, and then something worse than blood, and then the man went abruptly silent. Fatima could hear her own breathing. It came in high, whistling gasps she could not control, as if some exterior force was pushing air into her lungs and just as quickly withdrawing it, leaving her desperate for more.

  The calls of insects returned to fill the quiet. Their trills were punctuated every now and then by the stony crunch of teeth through bone and another more unspeakable sound, the slip and hiss of viscera being separated from itself. Vikram ate methodically. His long hair, matted with gore, obscured his face; his arms and legs were pulled beneath him, bent at angles no human limbs could form.

  When he looked up again, his face was painted crimson, a color that was almost beautiful, the same shade as the dark ruby adorning Fatima’s finger. She stared at him and saw the gardens and baths and orderly days of her former life grow faint and irrelevant, something that only imitated what was real, a simulacrum tiled in blue and white. Vikram saw her watching and gave a smile that was almost sad.

  “You should have done it,” he said. He picked Fatima’s dagger out of the dirt and began to clean his talons with it. “Then the poor idiot’s last vision of this world would have been the face of a lovely girl, not a nightmare like me.”

  Fatima wanted to sit down. The Castilian’s blood was stiffening on her hand; she wiped it on her robe, futilely, and succeeded only in smearing her forearm with more of the tacky substance. There seemed nothing left to do but cry and let the ground hold her up.

  “Give me my knife back, please,” she said to Vikram between sniffles, holding out one hand.