The Bird King Page 2

  Fatima shrugged. “The sultan knows what you are.”

  “Still, I’m not allowed to speak to you alone. It doesn’t look proper. And there is a vizier coming in half an hour who wants a map of the Castilian military encampment at Rejana. So.” He pressed a kiss into the palm of her hand. “Go look at your view.”

  Fatima touched the map beneath her shirt: it crackled under her fingers.

  “What kind of view is it?” she asked. “Is it very pretty? Is it possible to see the sea from there?”

  Hassan was bent over his work again.

  “The sea is miles and miles to the south, across the mountains,” he muttered. “Not even I can give you a view like that.”

  Fatima left the way she had come. There were no guards posted in the Court of Myrtles, situated as it was near the heart of the palace, away from the bustle and heat of the Mexuar, where the sultan heard petitions with his viziers and lawyers and secretaries. Yet it was summer, and the black-green bushes for which the courtyard was named were in full bloom, attracting a throng of beardless students set loose from their daily lessons. Fatima could see their skullcaps bobbing above the flowery hedge. She pressed herself against a pillar in the arched colonnade that framed the veranda and held her breath. There was a volley of laughter from among the myrtles. One of the students began to recite his lesson, half singing a few rhymed verses of the aqeeda in an unsteady tenor. Other voices joined his, growing softer as the students drifted away toward the shade of the interior rooms.

  Fatima pressed her cheek against the tepid stone and forced herself to relax. The door by which she had entered the courtyard stood nearby: it was not quite closed, so that she would make no noise when she returned. She passed through it on light feet and shut it behind her. The hall was plunged into darkness. She felt her way by memory, breathing the austere reek of dust and disuse, until she came to a meager strip of light on the ground that signaled the door to the harem’s antechamber. Here she paused. No noise came from beyond it, no footfall interrupted the light beneath it. Fatima found the latch with her hands and pushed the door open.

  The antechamber was just as Hassan had described it, though Fatima had trouble imagining why he had ever set foot there himself: buckets and rags were piled in one whitewashed corner along with stoppered jugs of vinegar and a tub of congealed soap. An arched passage tiled in blue and gold led to the common room of the harem itself. All these things were familiar. The small door set in the right-hand wall was not.

  The door was half of Fatima’s height and whitewashed, like the walls; a crossbeam cut across it diagonally, giving the impression of a cupboard or closet. She opened it, expecting stacks of bed linen. Instead she saw a flight of narrow stone stairs. Grinning to herself, Fatima ducked through the door, ascending the steps two at a time, pleased by the soft scuffing noise her feet made on the flecked stone. The edge of each step was worn to a fine polish, as if the staircase had been traversed by hundreds of pairs of feet, yet there was no sound save from her own movements, no hint that anyone else was near. There was strong light coming from somewhere; squinting upward, Fatima thought she saw a window or perhaps an empty arch. She put one hand on the wall—wide blocks of red-brown stone, in all respects a proper old wall like all the proper walls of the old palace—and crept along, stepping gingerly on each unknown surface until she reached the top. Her last step was only a half step: there were an odd number of stairs, which pleased her. They ended in a sort of parapet, a small, square tower room with a narrow window in each wall. Fatima picked one and stuck her head out.

  She was greeted by a blast of wind. It smelled of dry hay and cold water: the summer heat would not last much longer. Fatima took several deep breaths, enjoying her own dizziness, blinking in the sharp-shadowed afternoon as the objects below her resolved themselves. She was in a southeast corner of the palace. Her window overlooked the low roof of the Mexuar and the wide lawn beyond, burned yellow now as it always was by summer’s end. The hill spilled away beneath it, cloaked in dark elms, tapering off at the smoke-clad medina in the valley below. There were the red-tiled roofs of villas; the cramped knot of houses that formed the Juderia. She could see tiny green squares of garden in innumerable courtyards; below these, in the lap of the valley, the shallow river that supplied them.

  In the distance, where the ground flattened out, there was the wide plain of the Vega de Granada, smudged here and there with plumes of smoke and dotted with the skeletal remains of siege engines. Beyond these human outworks were the shoulders of the mountains that receded south in a humid haze, as ambivalent toward their Catholic rulers as they had been toward their Muslim ones, their pelt of pines and grasses unfurling toward a pale and factionless sky. They ended in nothing, for Fatima’s knowledge of the world did not extend as far as the sea. Yet standing there, she thought she detected the faint, damp scent of salt carried on the wind from the south. Hassan had tried his best.

  Fatima pulled her head back inside with a feeling of regret. Lady Aisha had undoubtedly awoken by now and gone to bathe; her bondswoman’s absence would be noted. She turned away from the window and hurried down the echoless stairs, her footfall landing strangely in her ears, emphatic, like a kind of speech. At the bottom, she lifted the latch on the little unassuming door and passed through, shutting it behind her as softly as she could.

  She stood on tiptoe in the antechamber with Hassan’s map in her hands. If she misplaced it, she would forget: the location of the door would grow indistinct in her memory, and she would confuse it with other doors that led to other rooms. She had, on occasion, attempted to find her way back to the places Hassan marked for her without a map, and inevitably got herself turned around or found familiar rooms rendered suddenly alien. It was unpleasant to be lost in your own house. She did not intend to repeat the experience.

  Fatima folded the map and tore it along the crease, then folded it and tore it again, until she was left with a pile of tiny fragments. These she let flutter to the ground. Straightening, she smoothed her tunic and trousers, setting off down the tiled hallway that led into the harem itself. She did not look back: she knew well enough what she would see. The wall would fold up without a sound, as if it was made of ether, and the door would vanish, leaving no trace of itself but motes of dust suspended in the light.

  The hall leading off the antechamber ended in a modest courtyard. It was ragged now with the remains of summer roses, their hips gone bulbous and discolored for want of pruning. When Fatima passed, Lady Nessma, the sultan’s half sister, was sitting on a pile of cushions in a shaded annex, strumming a lute that was slightly out of tune. Her hair was loose, spooling on the cushions like a crumpled skein of black silk. It was her great vanity. She was surrounded by a gaggle of cousins from the countryside whose families had deposited them at the palace, siege notwithstanding, to procure husbands. They had been talking when Fatima approached, but hushed when they saw her, averting their eyes and stifling giggles.

  “Girl! Where have you been?” demanded Nessma. She rose, her plump, pretty form snug against the green silk robe that confined it, and handed her lute to the air. It was snatched with dogged promptness by an overdressed girl sitting at her feet. “My stepmother went to the baths alone, cursing you the entire way.”

  “I was in the antechamber,” said Fatima truthfully. “There was a stain on my tunic, and I went looking for some soap.”

  Nessma pursed her lips. Fatima knew she was weighing the satisfaction of demanding to see the treated stain against the risk that Fatima would complain to the sultan in bed.

  “You shouldn’t be so careless about your things,” said Nessma finally, having decided upon a line of attack. “You think that because you’ve ensnared my brother, you can walk around with your nose in the air like a lady and dirty the clothes we give you, but if you ruin your tunic, I will see to it that you don’t get another. We’re at war, in case you haven’t noticed. We can’t afford to keep idle slaves in silk.”

  Fatima wonder
ed whom Nessma was trying to impress. She lifted her chin. She had discovered that by walking softly and deliberately and keeping her eyes fixed on the person to whom she was speaking, she could inspire an odd kind of terror in whomever she chose. It came, she supposed, from her own ambiguity: she was something the sultan owned, not dissimilar from the weary-looking pair of trained cheetahs that had come home with him from Genoa, along with Fatima’s mother, when Fatima was still a secret tucked inside her mother’s womb. Yet Fatima too might be carrying a secret, as far as anyone knew. If that secret were viable and male, it would catapult her over all the other women of the palace and place her on a par with her own mistress, the sultan’s mother. She could be despised, but not dismissed.

  “Do you have anything else to say?” she asked Nessma. Nessma flushed a little brighter. Her lower lip, pink and slick with whatever she had been eating, quivered slightly. Fatima reached out and wiped it clean with her thumb. She almost wished they would come to blows, giving her an excuse to rake her nails across the exposed column of the smaller girl’s neck. It seemed more honest. But Nessma only gritted her pearly teeth and trembled. Satisfied, Fatima turned on her heel and walked across the courtyard, through the weedy roses.

  “Her heart is as black as her eyes,” came Nessma’s voice in her wake, much too loudly. “She will never learn obedience, poor thing—she hasn’t got enough wits to know what’s good for her.”

  Fatima forced herself not to pause or give any sign that she had heard. She walked on stiff legs through the common room on the far side of the courtyard, where the flyblown remnants of lunch were waiting for the last of the harem’s serving women to clear them away. Here she steadied her breathing. A glossy, neglected dish of olive oil caught her eye: it was startlingly green, the first pressing of the season, and so heady with the scents of fruit and sap that it perfumed the room. A fly had succumbed to its temptations and was slowly drowning, wheeling in frantic half circles with its swamped wings. Fatima picked up the dish. It was glazed in contrasting shades of blue, which merged with the green of the oil and lent it a subterranean aspect, like a mountain spring she could hold in her hand. She plucked out the drowning fly by one wing.

  “Sorry, little fellow,” she said, flicking it away. “You’ve got to fight or flee like the rest of us.”

  The fly landed on the tiles at her feet and hobbled onward. Fatima stepped over it and made for the baths.

  Lady Aisha was soaking in a hip-deep stone tub when Fatima arrived. Her white hair, still thick, was gathered into a knot at the top of her head; her eyes were closed, as though she had fallen asleep. Fatima’s eyes lingered on the knobs of bone that protruded from her mistress’s shoulder and spine, demarcating the flesh that hung upon them, giving her body a weightless, fragile appearance. It would be easy enough to lean on that shoulder, or to wrap her hand in the ample white hair and watch the bathwater close over it. A scant minute would suffice, for how long could an old woman hold her breath? A far more cynical kind of violence had been waged to procure Fatima’s mother, whose parents had sold her, screaming and wailing, to a Genoese man when starvation loomed, yet the thought of such a brisk, tidy end to Lady Aisha’s life filled Fatima with sudden exhaustion. She could not act in the way she had been acted upon, and wondered, as the steam escaped from a star-shaped skylight overhead, whether this made her nobler than her keepers, or simply less decisive.

  “Sit,” came Lady Aisha’s voice, still clear and deep. She patted the edge of the tub without opening her eyes. Fatima sat, avoiding the wet spot left by her mistress’s hand.

  “Lady Nessma says you came in here cursing me,” she said. Lady Aisha clucked her tongue.

  “Nessma exaggerates as usual. I may have cursed you once, but not continually.”

  Fatima rolled up her trousers and put her feet in the steaming water. It was strewn with lavender buds and dried linden, which clung in sticky clumps to the flesh of her calves. The task of cleaning the tub was, thankfully, not hers.

  “You went to see our cartographer friend,” observed Lady Aisha. Fatima no longer wondered how she knew these things. Lady Aisha had eyes everywhere, though how this was achieved remained a mystery.

  “I like Hassan,” said Fatima. “He isn’t afraid of me.”

  “He ought to be.” Lady Aisha opened one veiny brown eye to scrutinize her bondswoman. “If you like him, you shouldn’t compromise his reputation—or your own, for that matter—by lurking about his rooms. A man of his peculiar gifts and inclinations can’t afford scandal.”

  Fatima sighed and beat her head lightly against the flank of the stone arch behind her.

  “I don’t see why it should be a scandal,” she muttered. “Everyone knows he doesn’t like girls.”

  “You miss the point. For the sake of his dignity, we all assume he does like girls. That way, no one need make a fuss when men come and go from his quarters. But there must be a fuss if my son’s own concubine visits him alone. It ruins the symmetry of the arrangement.”

  Fatima thought of arguing, then remembered where she was. The bathing room was built entirely of white stone and shaped so that a whisper carried all the way across it; secrets were exchanged elsewhere. She slumped, letting her legs slide farther into the water. For several minutes, neither spoke.

  “How old am I?” Fatima asked, breaking the silence.

  “Seventeen, my love. No—eighteen. No, I was right the first time. Your mother gave birth when the full moon of Ramadan fell on the first of May. That I remember distinctly.”

  “How old was she when she had me?”

  Lady Aisha shifted in the bath, considering the question. A lock of white hair had come loose from the knot atop her head and trailed damply across her breasts, flattened by age and a succession of children.

  “She must have been a bit older than you are now. Poor thing, what a muddle that was—solemn as the rain from the moment she arrived, and didn’t tell anyone she was pregnant until it was obvious. Never spoke a word about your father. I imagine he was the Italian merchant who bought her in the first place. Though who knows? Perhaps she secretly took some handsome soldier for a lover on the journey between Sochi and Genoa. You must get your height and your temper from somewhere. Whoever he was, he was long gone by the time she arrived at the Alhambra.” Lady Aisha frowned up at Fatima. “Why all these questions now, sweeting? Are you pregnant? Is that what this is about?”

  “No!” Fatima clutched the edge of the tub reflexively. “No.”

  “That’s a shame,” sighed Lady Aisha, closing her eyes again. “I hope you’ll conceive before that silly cow Hurriya does. She’s desperate for a boy. Imagine her horror if her future glory was displaced by the son of a slave girl. Second wives, my dear! Second wives need keeping down.”

  Fatima kicked one foot restlessly. She wanted to reply that she desired no children, that the line between her own childhood and the role she occupied now was still unclear to her, but she knew better than to adopt this line of reasoning with her mistress. Still less could she admit to the little packet of herbs she had stolen from the apothecary and swallowed, in the dead of night, after she had failed to bleed during one particular moon, or to the upheaval that had come afterward, and the drying-up that had come after that. Instead, she kicked again.

  “Don’t, please, you’re splashing me. Be a sweet thing and scrub my back.”

  Leaning across the tub, Fatima retrieved a sponge from a copper dish and squeezed it in the milky water.

  “I hear rumors from the North,” murmured Lady Aisha, pillowing her head on Fatima’s knee.

  “What rumors, Lady?”

  “King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella have begun to expel the Jews of Seville and Córdoba and their other reconquered territories. They say there are priests riding about the countryside, lurking at the windows of those Jews and Muslims who converted to Catholicism in order to save their lands and fortunes.”

  Fatima rubbed Lady Aisha’s shoulders with the sponge, careful not t
o chafe her delicate skin. Her mistress had aged rapidly in recent years. She was still slim and straight, her waist enviable, but a yellow pallor had settled on her face, and much of the anger had gone out of her.

  “Why lurking?” Fatima asked, doing her duty to the conversation.

  “To catch them in a lie, of course,” said Lady Aisha. She gestured damply with one hand. “The priests wait for the poor fools to refuse a dish of pork or a glass of wine or to keep the wrong sort of sabbath. And then they burn them as heretics, leaving their lands and fortunes most conveniently unattended. They’re calling it an inquisition, though I’m told the new pope looks very unfavorably upon the whole enterprise. It does no good to fake a conversion of faith. Remember that, my love. The people who want to burn you alive will find a reason to do it, whether you pretend to agree with them or not.”

  Though it was warm and stifling in the bathing room, Fatima felt a stealthy chill. The sponge in her hand was still on Lady Aisha’s shoulder, dripping perfumed water into the pool below drop by drop.

  “What’s troubling you?” Lady Aisha asked in a voice that was almost kindly. “You came in here like a thundercloud and you’ve been frowning ever since. You’ll get lines between your brows at this rate, and then where will you be?”

  Fatima hesitated. Lady Aisha often invited confidences, but it was not always wise to indulge her. She thought of relaying Nessma’s insults, but to Lady Aisha, who had never known how it felt to occupy a body that could be priced and sold like that of a goat or a tame leopard, it might look like whining. She thought of telling her mistress the truth, of attempting to describe the feeling that sent her to Hassan and his maps every day. Yet she didn’t trust her own vocabulary. Whenever she tried to be poetic or philosophical, she ended up saying exactly what she meant in the plainest possible language.