The Bird King Page 12

  “Ha!” Vikram wiped the blade clean on his own shadowy pelt and handed it back to her, hilt first. “Of all the things you could have said, that was the most impressive. Here, take your weapon. Little murderess! My God, what a day.” He squatted beside what remained of the Castilian, prodding the shredded arm of his doublet.

  “Was that necessary?” quavered Hassan, leaning against the tree, his face waxy. His own knife was out, Fatima noticed, balanced between his long fingers like a very sharp quill. “Was that fair? Did you have to—did you have to—”

  “Thank you, Vikram, for saving me from the brigand who would have killed me where I slept,” the dog-man suggested with a leer. “That’s what you meant to say.”

  “But did you have to eat him?”

  Vikram pretended not to hear. He began to wipe his face with his hair, removing the crimson paint, returning himself to his usual late-afternoon color.

  “Did you know that lions once lived in the Vega?” he asked. “Many, many centuries ago. The banu adam hunted the last one in the days of your long-ago grandfathers. They were big, these lions, with short, pale manes. They ruled over this whole plain, from foothill to foothill. But even the noblest predator must die, and when he does, he becomes food for the jackal.” Vikram finished his toilette and shook himself, ruffling out his coat, looking suddenly like a dog again. Watching him was like looking at a robe of translucent silk: opaque in some lights, yet quick to reveal the body underneath when the sun struck it. “I’m the jackal. I get hungry too.”

  Hassan could marshal no counterargument and lapsed into dazed silence. Fatima stared at the Castilian’s feet, the only part of him that had escaped their encounter unscathed: ordinary feet in ordinary shoes of soft-soled leather, crowned by bloodless ankles. Perhaps, after all this bother, life was only a choice between two kinds of brutality: the wretched sort that lay on the ground before her, and the civilized sort she had left behind.

  “Who was he?” came Hassan’s voice, cautiously. Vikram made a purring noise and peeled back the blood-reddened collar of the Castilian’s doublet. Sewn inside was a crest embroidered on a piece of linen: a cross flanked by a palm frond and a sword.

  “I’ve seen that before,” said Fatima, wiping her brow with her unbloodied hand. “It was on a letter in Luz’s trunk.”

  “The crest of the Holy Office,” said Vikram. He let the Castilian’s collar drop. “This man was a scout. They travel fast, your hunters—very fast.” He rocked back on his furred heels and frowned. “Too fast.”

  “What does that mean?” Hassan pressed.

  “I’m not sure,” said Vikram. “For now, it means we must move on.”

  “Move on? Now? No—Fa has had a terrible shock. She needs rest. We both do. Our feet will fall off. We haven’t had a real sleep. Or a meal. Some of us aren’t made of fire or shadow or whatever it is you are.”

  “Do you have another solution?” snapped Vikram, clacking his teeth. “If this man has reached us, more will follow. There is only bare earth between us and the southern pass, unless you can coax a well-fortified castle out of the ground with your little talents.”

  Hassan, inclined to be literal, bit his lip and surveyed the landscape.

  “No,” he said finally. “There’s not enough here. I can make little shortcuts—little rearrangements. Not whole houses or hills. The last time I tried that, there was a real—” His lip twitched. “A real mess.”

  Fatima knew what he meant, though she looked away and pretended she did not. It had been a day in midwinter, the year the princes and little Aisha had gone into Castile and not come back. Fatima had been carrying water from the kitchen to the harem. Her fingers were rigid from the chill and the weight of the buckets suspended from her hands. She had been furious. The serving women—there had been several back then, before the siege—usually performed these menial tasks, but now that the princes were gone, they looked at Fatima and saw a slave instead of a royal playmate.

  As she hefted the buckets—water sloshing on her slippers, on the hem of her trousers—she rehearsed the impassioned complaint she planned to make to Lady Aisha as soon as her task was finished. The injustice of it filled her so completely that she set the buckets down again in order to better arrange her thoughts. In the silence, she heard Hassan sobbing brokenly somewhere nearby.

  He was still a beardless apprentice then and had not yet grown into his large hands. He was sitting in the entryway of the sultan’s private quarters, quite alone except for the sultan himself. The sight of her master made Fatima stop and hold her breath. The sultan was almost a boy that winter, though already several years a husband and father; he was also, Fatima remembered somewhat wistfully, at the height of his pale-lipped, dark-eyed beauty, though she had been too young to understand what this meant. Instead, she had ducked behind a pillar, filled with the kind of anxiety that comes from witnessing something one is not meant to see.

  “Make it work,” the sultan was saying to Hassan in a low voice. “Try. Try, Hassan, for your king’s sake.”

  “I can’t.” Hassan was bent over a lap desk. Fatima could hear his charcoal scraping across a sheet of paper. “Please don’t ask me. There are so many walls, so many miles—it doesn’t work this way.”

  “How does it work?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m not a magician, sire. I can’t simply open a portal. It’s too far. It’s two hundred miles, more than two hundred miles. Sire—”

  “I need my children.” The sultan’s voice was shaking. “My wife is half dead with weeping. Make a map. Close the distance. Do something, or I will run mad.”

  There was a scuffle. Fatima could not see exactly what was happening, but as far as she could guess, the sultan had seized Hassan’s hand, or perhaps his arm, as if to direct the strokes of his pencil. Hassan made a wild, despairing sound. It was then that the corridor in which Fatima stood, water pooling at her feet and bloating her slippers, went dark. She turned around and around in dismay. The windows had vanished. They had been swallowed by the walls, or so it seemed; there was only stone where there had once been wooden latticework and open air. The door at the end of the corridor had also disappeared. Fatima was standing in a long stone tomb that was sealed at both ends. She heard terrified screaming leaching up from the floors and through the walls.

  It had lasted only a minute. Through the wall, Fatima could hear the sultan’s muffled voice shouting orders. Hassan had become hysterical. She would never know what passed between them, but it had the desired effect: after an instant of pressure, a rapid condensation of air, the windows and doors were there again. The sultan walked back into his quarters with a curse. Hassan was left alone, bawling over his lap desk. Fatima did not go to comfort him. She was too frightened of the sound of grief.

  “Never mind,” said Vikram. He slapped Fatima on the shoulder, startling her. “Your thoughts are naked enough. I understand what you are afraid of. Here is what we’ll do: I will drag this dead fellow away for the crows to play with. If we’re lucky, the main force following behind him will find the body and realize you are not as defenseless as you may have seemed. You will rest up here in the boughs of the tree—it’s so thick near the crown that you will be invisible to human eyes, though not, unfortunately, to a dog’s nose. Do your eating and sleeping. I will walk around and see how close the hunters are. We’ll move out in the dark hour before dawn, unless I need to wake you earlier.”

  Hassan gave a sigh that was almost happy. Vikram pressed a rabbit into his hands and gave him an encouraging pat on the bottom.

  “Up you go,” he said. “Vikram will give you a boost.”

  “Am I supposed to eat this raw?” asked Hassan, waving the rabbit.

  “Up,” said Vikram. “As high as you can.” He put his hands out for Hassan to step on and half threw him into the lowest branches of the tree, where Hassan landed with a shriek, clinging to the wide trunk with both arms.

  “You next,” said Vikram to Fatima. “Have a ra
bbit. It’s perfectly clean and tender. You must eat the heart and the liver. You’re a predator now.”

  Fatima did not see fit to respond. She took the rabbit with as much dignity as she could muster and climbed into the fat lower branches of the willow tree. She could hear Hassan shaking the limbs above her, his awkward half leaps raining ashy bits of bark down on her head.

  “Up here,” came his voice. “There’s a sort of V where we can sit without falling off, or at least I hope so.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Fatima held her rabbit between her teeth and hauled herself farther into the crown of the tree. Hassan sat with his legs draped over one of its uppermost branches. The long, whip-thin fingers of the willow splayed out around them in a pungent wreath, obscuring the world outside. The only identifiable object was the young moon, which was cut into pieces just beyond Fatima’s head. She settled onto the branch next to Hassan’s, which did indeed grow outward at a convenient angle, allowing her to wedge herself next to him as a kind of counterweight.

  Hassan was tearing the flesh off his rabbit with his teeth, separating muscle from bone with a wet, adhesive sound. Fatima was suddenly ravenous and began to do the same. The meat of the rabbit was soft and not at all bloody; the taste was like grass and iron and earth. She finished off the little ribs and flanks, and when she was done, fished in the expertly gutted cavity of the creature’s chest with one finger to remove its heart, which she popped into her mouth, eyes shut, the single, metallic burst of sweetness flooding over her tongue like dark honey.

  Chapter 8

  Vikram returned when the moon was high. Fatima did not wake when he arrived but rather saw him in her sleep: a dark mass of fur and teeth and eyes that ascended the tree in darting motions and settled across her knees like a grotesque lapdog. Being asleep, however, Fatima was not afraid, only grateful for the feverish warmth that radiated from the creature’s body.

  “Are we safe?” she asked.

  Vikram was silent for a time.

  “They know things they shouldn’t know,” he said finally. “Your pursuers. That woman. And I’m not sure how, or why.”

  “Should I be worried?”

  “Yes. But don’t wake up. There’s very little you can do about it, at least for now. Sleep is the best medicine for you.” Vikram sighed and rolled on his back, closing his own eyes.

  “Tell me a story,” begged Fatima.

  “What kind of story?” muttered Vikram.

  “A nice one. Without dead things in it.”

  “All stories have dead things in them eventually, assuming they start out with live ones. But very well. Choose a bird.”

  Fatima smiled without waking.

  “You know about our game,” she said.

  “I was present for your birth, little sister. I know most things about you. So choose.”

  “Falcon,” said Fatima automatically. Vikram snorted.

  “You’re predictable in your sleep. I sometimes forget that dreams are where you banu adam sort out your waking lives. Very well, I’ll sort it for you. Once upon a time, all the birds of the world gathered at a secret meeting place for a great moot.”

  “I know this part,” said Fatima.

  “Shut up and listen. For many years, they had been without a king. They were beginning to forget the ancient paths through the air and water and could no longer understand the First Speech of the angels and the jinn. Times had grown desperate. As the wren and the crow quarreled over seating arrangements and the peacock insisted he must speak first, the hoopoe, with her striped crest and sacred words carved into her beak, stepped forward. ‘My friends!’ she said. ‘I have good news. The Bird King lives. He is hidden beneath an ancient mountain called Qaf, which sits on an island far across the Dark Sea. If we marshal all our strength, we may yet find him and restore our race to greatness.’ Many of the birds scoffed at her, but they all died of cowardice long ago, so they aren’t important. A smaller band, thirty birds in all, believed the hoopoe, and pledged to follow her. And so the party set off toward the sea, following the red crest of the hoopoe, who flew ahead. The autumn mists were gathering. The birds were uneasy, but the hoopoe led them on, following her secret sense.

  “They had been flying for several days when the falcon grew restless. Why did the king have to live so far away? It seemed a very unreasonable distance to travel. Spotting something glimmering in the grass below, the falcon veered away from the party and swept down to investigate. There, wedged between the rocks and tufts of dry reeds, was a bracelet of beaten gold.

  “‘Oh,’ cried the falcon. ‘Come back, come back, look what we almost missed.’ The other birds turned back and flew down when they heard the falcon’s cries. The falcon wrapped her talons around the bracelet and fluttered her wings, trying to wrench it free. The bracelet was stuck fast between the rocks.

  “‘Why do you delay us?’ asked the hoopoe. ‘We have no time for baubles and bracelets. The king is waiting.’ But the falcon was adamant.

  “‘It would be a crime to leave something so valuable lying on the ground,’ she said. ‘Why should we pass up a chance like this?’ The falcon pulled and pulled at the bracelet until the other birds became uneasy and pressed on without her. The falcon was so consumed by her task that she barely noticed their absence. Finally, as the sun set, she realized she was alone and began to grow frightened.

  “‘What a fool I’ve been,’ she lamented. ‘For one bracelet, I missed my chance to meet the king of the birds. Oh, hoopoe! How sorry I am!’ Just then, she saw a flash of red in the deepening gloom. It was the hoopoe, come back to fetch her companion. The falcon was so happy to see the hoopoe that she let go of the bracelet and pushed off into the air, beating her wings. In the commotion, the bracelet rolled free and tumbled down the rocks, ringing as it fell.

  “‘Look, falcon,’ said the hoopoe. ‘Your bracelet is free at last.’ But the falcon shook her head. ‘It was never mine,’ she said. ‘It was only weight, and I am glad not to carry it.’ And on they flew.”

  “Are your stories always so moralizing?” murmured Fatima.

  “No,” said Vikram. He yawned and for a moment she saw the muzzle and lolling tongue of a dog. “But this isn’t my story.”

  He ambled along the thick branch where Fatima was sitting and lay down across the tapering end, where it thinned into innumerable little leaf-clad fingers, draping his limbs on either side like an indolent leopard. Just past him, the topmost branches were split, revealing a fragment of sky. False dawn had turned it the color of smoke; only the brightest stars were still visible. Fatima watched them wink and grow indistinct as they faded into the light of the hastening sun. She felt alert and clearheaded, though disinclined to move.

  “I’m awake,” she said.

  “You’re asleep,” said Vikram. “You’re still asleep.”

  “Hsst! Fa!”

  “See? She looks dead to me. Poke her with a stick to make sure.”

  “She’s not dead, you animal. Fa! Wake up.”

  The cicadas were riotous, their heady thrum nearly drowning out the sound of voices. Fatima tried to rouse herself and succeeded only in twitching her eyelids. Her stomach was a pit of fetid water. Even the smallest movement brought up the taste of blood and flesh and a sour, boggy feeling: a bodily bad omen. Moaning, Fatima reached out and felt herself lifted in furred arms and then set down again. A matted mound of yellow grass as dry as paper came into focus beneath her feet.

  “If you’re going to be sick, don’t do it here,” came Hassan’s voice, alarmed. Fatima forced herself to straighten, breathing slowly to keep her bowels in check. The sun was bright and hot: it was late morning.

  “Why did you let me sleep so late?” she demanded. “I thought we were going to leave at dawn.”

  “We did leave at dawn,” said Vikram, flashing his teeth. “I’ve been carrying you like a baby for most of the way. You slept like a baby, too, with your fingers curled up in my pelt to keep yourself from falling.”

&n
bsp; Fatima flushed and turned in an unsteady circle, attempting to orient herself. The tree that had sheltered them at night was nowhere to be seen. They had passed from the flatlands into the gentle hills that made up the southern reaches of the Vega. Fatima was standing on the edge of a loamy, terraced slope with rows of thick-bellied olive trees marching from end to end. A packed dirt path led down the hill and into a valley toward a stone house with no roof. The trees had not been pruned in several years and had a feral look about them: their leaves were parched and silver, but some of them had fruited in spite of their neglect, and clusters of small green pips were visible among the branches. Hassan had availed himself of this modest bounty and was seated between the roots of the largest tree with a pile of olives in his lap, his shoes off and overturned in the dust.

  “They taste awful,” he said cheerfully, spitting out a pit. “A raw olive is a different animal from a cured one, apparently. God bless the man who first taught the world how to cure olives. He and the man who invented cheese are two unsung pillars of civilization.”

  “They were probably women,” muttered Fatima, fanning her face with the sleeve of her robe. “If they were men, we would remember their names.”

  “You’re in a good mood this morning. Here, have an olive. It’s no worse than what we ate last night, tastewise.”

  Fatima winced and shook her head. In front of her, Vikram was bounding along the dirt path down the hillside, his black hair trailing behind him like a tattered flag. In the strong light, he looked quite human: like a hermit perhaps, or a dervish, a man long alone in the wilderness, but a man nonetheless. When he reached the bottom of the hill, he made for a stone circle with slats of wood piled on top that sat a little distance from the empty house, ringed with clumps of grass that looked very green against the parched landscape that surrounded them.

  “Come down,” called Vikram. “I’ve found a well.”

  Hassan got to his feet with a groan and shuffled into his shoes. Fatima followed him, still dazed, her limbs heavy with the heat and the protests of her stomach. Vikram was pushing the slats of wood off the mouth of the well, singing wordlessly and clacking his teeth for percussion. The scent of sweet water wafted up from the exposed stone.