The Bird King Read online

  “What place is this?” asked Luz.

  “The nicest prison in Al Andalus,” replied Fatima. “But it’s empty now. I’m not sure why I brought you here, to be honest. I used to play at the window where those swallows are diving. Sometimes the princes would come too—Ahmed and Yusef. They were only a few years younger than I am.” She sniffed and rubbed her nose with the back of one hand. “You have them now, of course. As hostages.”

  “They’re quite well,” said Luz gently. “They and little Aisha. I saw all three of them at court just before I left. They want for nothing—you can tell their father that.”

  “He loves his children,” said Fatima, feeling suddenly hostile. “He wants to see them, not hear about them from me.”

  “It is within his power to bring them home,” said Luz, looking up at the Captive’s empty-eyed windows. “You can tell him that as well.”

  Fatima, unprepared to enter into a negotiation, kept silent. The tower before her exhaled its peculiar fragrance of dust and lost time, communicating nothing.

  “Show me something else,” said Luz abruptly. “Show me your favorite place.”

  Fatima chewed her lip and tried to decide whether it was wise to take this request literally. There were plenty of charming porticoes and courtyards, though many of them had accrued a permanent veneer of dirt in recent months. And there would be men in all of them, lawyers and secretaries and clerks, possibly burning more papers, or removing valuables, or doing any of the other things men do when faced with the end of an empire. Perhaps after all it was safer to do as Luz asked.

  “This way,” said Fatima, turning back the way they had come. She slipped through the open door, past the pyres of burning deeds and letters, and led Luz toward the Court of Myrtles.

  Hassan was dozing when they arrived at his workroom. He lay draped on a mound of cushions with his tunic open and a wedge of charcoal dangling from his fingers, as if he had fallen asleep in midsentence. Fatima rapped on the wall to wake him. He jerked upright, his eyes wide and red, and looked from Fatima to Luz with dazed incomprehension.

  “I wasn’t asleep,” he said.

  “Of course not,” said Fatima, coming into the room. She sat on the balustrade and drew her feet up beneath her. “I’ve brought you someone. She doesn’t speak Arabic, so far as I can tell.”

  Hassan stared hard at Luz, blinking, as if trying to determine whether she was real.

  “What have you been speaking to her?” he asked finally.

  “Castilian,” said Fatima. “We should probably behave ourselves. She’s almost a nun.”

  “Then why is she dressed like an Arab courtesan? What’s going on? Who are you? Where are we?”

  “Fatima tells me you’re the court mapmaker,” said Luz, pulling out a cushion and sitting down. The sound of her voice made Hassan sufficiently serious. He crossed his legs, gesturing with a hospitable smile at the cushion to which Luz had already helped herself.

  “Please sit,” he said. “Welcome to Granada. I hope Fatima hasn’t promised you anything grand—I could tell you my workroom isn’t usually such a mess, but I would be lying.”

  “You have a superb view,” said Luz, her eyes sliding charitably past the heaps of paper and sooty pencil cases. “The Alhambra lives up to its reputation. But how does a mapmaker come by such a large and well-situated room in a palace like this?”

  Hassan shot Fatima a nervous glance. She shifted on the balustrade, unsure of what to say. She had not expected Luz to ask a real question.

  “I’m very good at what I do,” said Hassan. He tilted sideways, as if making a joke.

  “You must be,” laughed Luz. “The royal mapmaker at Toledo works in a closet, I think. So! You’re Fatima’s friend. I didn’t know that was allowed.”

  “It’s not,” said Hassan, glancing again at Fatima. “Not since Fatima came of age, anyway. We met when we were children. Ten years ago, it must have been—I was fourteen when I was sent here to begin my apprenticeship. Fa was still only a tiny thing.”

  “I used to steal Hassan’s charcoals,” supplied Fatima. “To draw.”

  “The master cartographer—he’s dead now—would have absolute fits. But he couldn’t go into the harem, so all little Fa had to do was run there and hide in Lady Aisha’s skirts. She got away with everything. Still does.”

  Luz laughed again, tilting her head back to expose a white throat delicately crisscrossed in blue. Fatima wondered for a moment whether she was flirting with Hassan. Hassan seemed to be wondering the same thing, for he became very interested in a stray thread clinging to the sleeve of his tunic, picking at it with his thumb and forefinger.

  “Was she as beautiful a child as she is a woman?” coaxed Luz.

  “Who? Fatima?” Hassan looked up again. “Not that I noticed.”

  “Are you saying I was plain?” demanded Fatima, throwing a wad of paper at him.

  “She was a skinny little tyrant,” Hassan said with a grin. “Always alone, or if not alone, then bossing the princes around. ‘You! Ahmed! Fetch the milk.’ That sort of thing. Never playing with the other girl children, or not that I ever saw, anyway. And then one day, it seemed, there was this siren swaying down the hall, who had grown half a foot overnight and could stop men in their tracks just by looking melancholy. And that was the end of the raids on my charcoal.”

  A silence fell that was not entirely comfortable. Fatima tapped her foot to make her anklets jingle.

  “It’s sad,” said Luz. Fatima tensed, guessing what might come next. She was not prepared to accept another woman’s pity.

  “What’s sad?” asked Hassan, oblivious.

  “This,” said Luz, gesturing with her hand. “All this is going to vanish in the next few weeks. The last summer of the empire of Al Andalus. I don’t mind admitting to you—you’ve all been so kind—that I will mourn it when it falls. I wasn’t expecting to be so taken with this place, or the people in it.”

  “We’re not going away,” said Hassan with a forced laugh. “Right? Your masters don’t intend to put us all to the sword, do they? They could’ve done that at any time in these past ten years, since they conquered the last of our territories, but they haven’t.”

  “No, of course not,” Luz assured him. “My masters are hoping to avoid further bloodshed. That’s why they sent the general—and me. Everyone would like to see a just end to this awful war.”

  “Then why—” Hassan tugged at his collar, looking pale. Fatima tried in vain to catch his eye. “Why should you mourn anything? What will be so different? Power will change hands—the key to the city will hang on one neck instead of another. But the rest of us will go about our lives as we have been—only we will pay taxes to someone else, with different coins. The era of sacks and sieges and slaughter is over. Yes?”

  Deep, sympathetic lines had appeared on Luz’s forehead.

  “I wish it were that simple,” she said. “Truly I do.”

  Fatima thought it best to put the conversation out of its misery.

  “Come,” she said, sliding off the balustrade. “They’ll be serving lunch in the harem any minute, though it’s likely to be bread and olive oil again.”

  Luz smiled, regaining her good humor, and reached for Fatima’s hand. “You’re in for a surprise, then,” she said. “We brought a wagonful of cured mutton and apples and wheels of cheese.”

  Hassan’s eyes went wide.

  “Is there any for mapmakers?” he asked. “Or is it just for insolent concubines?”

  “I’ll have some sent here especially,” promised Luz. She shook the dust from her clothes and turned away. As she did, the hem of her tunic caught one of the leaves of paper hanging over the worktable and pulled it free, sending it fluttering to the ground like a flag of surrender. In a moment, as if snatched from a dream, Fatima saw precisely what was about to happen.

  “I’ll get that,” said Hassan, bolting up. But Luz had already bent to retrieve it. She held it in her fingers a moment too long.
r />   “What is this?” she asked. Her voice was so different—lower, coarser, as if she had descended several rungs in rank and breeding—that Fatima felt a physical thrill of alarm. She reached for the map, but Luz held it away.

  “What is this?” she asked again.

  “It’s a map of Zahara,” Hassan said quietly. “In Cádiz.”

  “I can see that,” said Luz. “But what are these?” She pointed to several snaking lines near the map’s perimeter. Hassan gave Fatima a desperate look.

  “Let’s go,” said Fatima, tugging on Luz’s arm. Luz didn’t budge.

  “They’re tunnels,” said Hassan.

  “Tunnels.”

  “Yes.”

  “Under the streets.”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever been to Zahara, Master Hassan? You’re clearly no soldier, and you would have been almost a child when—during that awful battle to reclaim it. I would like to understand how you could possibly know what you know. Please illuminate me.”

  Hassan rubbed his eyes. “Why did you bring her here, Fa?” he said in Arabic. “You know how terrible I am at keeping secrets. Especially my own.”

  Fatima began to comprehend the enormity of her mistake. In keeping Luz away from the sultan and the viziers and their burning papers, she had inadvertently taken her somewhere yet more tender. There was nowhere safe. Perhaps that was the point.

  “Please,” said Luz. Her voice was gentle again, pained. “My late husband was at Zahara. We never knew how you—it was thought, we all thought, that the Moorish forces couldn’t possibly prevail, and yet—”

  “I make maps,” said Hassan. Fatima watched him, her breath fast in her throat.

  “I know,” said Luz with a terse smile. “That much is clear.” When Hassan said nothing more, she leaned forward and touched his knee with her fingers, her eyes like river stones, the weight of her gaze heavy.

  “You can tell me,” she said in a half whisper. “The more I know, the more I can help. I do so want to help. Aren’t we all on the same side now that peace is inevitable?”

  “You make peace sound like a threat,” said Hassan with a fluttery laugh. Luz laughed too.

  “Only for the very wicked,” she said. “Let me be of use to you, Hassan. If I don’t know what you’re hiding, I can’t intercede for you.”

  “Intercede with who?” Hassan asked, his voice trailing off. But Luz didn’t answer. Instead she waited, and Fatima saw in Hassan’s expression a fatal innocence. He never had his guard up; he had no guard at all.

  “I make maps of things I’ve never seen,” he said. “And sometimes of things that don’t quite exist, except when I need them to. That’s what I do.”

  Luz licked her lips. She set the map back on the worktable and smoothed its edges with her fingers.

  “It’s funny,” she said. “For years, we wondered how Granada managed to survive while cut off from absolutely everywhere—to find new supply routes, to slip communications past our forces. We assumed you had an army of excellent spies. It never occurred to us that you might be using more arcane methods.” She laughed. It was a merry laugh, a forgiving laugh. Fatima dared to hope that things could still be all right.

  “How did you come by this talent?” asked Luz, riffling the uneven stacks of paper on Hassan’s desk into neat piles. She wasn’t looking at him; her voice was light, as if they were all friends. “If talent is the right word.”

  Hassan began to chew vigorously on his beard.

  “It’s all right,” said Luz with a little smile.

  “I don’t know,” said Hassan. “I’ve never been lost, and I’ve always liked to draw. That’s as much as I understand. It’s just something I do, something that happens.”

  “And the sultan has been protecting you.”

  “I don’t know what that means. As long as I’m accurate, he leaves me alone.”

  Luz sighed and straightened, her face cheerful again.

  “Please don’t look so frightened,” she said. “Secrets don’t matter now—the war is over, or will be very soon. You caught me by surprise, that’s all. I don’t know what to think or whether I should be frightened.”

  “We all learned to get used to it,” murmured Fatima. “To Hassan being Hassan. You might try that.”

  Luz took her arm.

  “So practical,” she said, following Fatima out of the room. “Not an ounce of romance in you.”

  Fatima led Luz back to the harem without speaking. Either something terrible had happened or nothing had happened at all; she couldn’t decide. What Hassan did had never seemed strange to her. She couldn’t remember a time when he had not inhabited that room, scribbling away with his eternally darkened fingers. People in the palace understood him in their own particular ways: the sheikhs understood that his abilities were too valuable to be blasphemous, the servants that he was uncanny and a little high-strung. He was needed, and that made him familiar.

  Yet Luz’s silence worried her. She was uncanny herself: Fatima felt as if she had known Luz for years, long enough to make such silences feel like intimacy, yet they had been together for less than a day. She had an odd impulse to kiss the woman walking next to her, to thank her for handling the shock so gracefully. Perhaps, after all, Luz was telling the truth: perhaps she was here to help. Perhaps Lady Aisha ought to have been kinder to her.

  Fatima leaned over and brushed Luz’s cheek with her lips. Luz put her golden head against Fatima’s shoulder. The maidservant, Catalina, ample and sweating, appeared in the doorway of Luz’s room as they approached, observing their intertwined forms with an air of disapproval. The scent of boiling mutton perfumed the breeze and the sound of giddy laughter came from the courtyard; someone close by was playing a feast-day song on the lute. Fatima allowed herself to relax.

  “You’ve been asked for, senora,” said Catalina to her mistress. “By the lady Nessma.”

  “I’ll be there in a moment,” said Luz. She looked tired, as if the morning’s exertions were too much for her. “I think I want my coif—it’s so hot that I can barely stand to have my hair against my neck like this.”

  “I’ll get it for you,” said Fatima, “if you tell me where to look.”

  She was rewarded with a beaming smile.

  “Thank you, sweeting,” said Luz. “It’s in my trunk—it should be near the top.” Twisting up her hair in one hand, she followed Catalina across the courtyard toward the sound of voices. Fatima ducked into the shuttered cool of her room. Catalina had unpacked Luz’s dresses—all black and plain, some with ornamental lace along the sleeves—and hung them in the wardrobe, tucking the leather trunk neatly into one corner of the room. Fatima knelt and opened it. There was a clever tray fitted into the top for smaller items: pins for hair and brooches for cloaks, a gold wedding band in need of polish. Her coif was folded up on one side. Fatima lifted it out and held it up to her face: it smelled of Luz’s hair. She folded it again and tucked it into her sleeve.

  As Fatima closed the trunk, her eye fell on a square of paper with a red wax seal that had been concealed beneath the coif. It was emblazoned with a crest she didn’t recognize: a cross flanked by a leafy branch and a sword. Underneath it was written a phrase in Latin letters:

  TRIBVINAL DEL SANTO OFICIO

  Fatima sounded out the words beneath her breath. She could speak Sabir and Castilian well enough, but reading them was tedious. Lady Aisha was constantly imploring her to improve her comprehension, but since the Andalusian translation schools had long since rendered all the great Hellenic works into Arabic, Fatima had never seen the need. Now, in the grip of a powerful curiosity, she regretted it.

  The serving woman was calling everyone to lunch. Fatima rose and left the room, wincing as the tiles underfoot went from cool to hot. She tiptoed across the courtyard in order not to scald herself. Lady Aisha and the other women were sitting in the common room beyond, leaning on cushions and rugs, a great brass platter of cooked meat and rice between them. Fatima felt her mo
uth water. She slipped in and sat down beside her mistress.

  “How was she?” asked Lady Aisha in a low voice, handing Fatima a bowl of food.

  “Fine,” said Fatima. “She was fine. Only—”

  “What?”

  “She knows about Hassan.”

  Lady Aisha popped a piece of mutton into her mouth and chewed with noisy relish.

  “That’s unfortunate,” she said. “But possibly inevitable. Did she speak to anyone else? A clerk, one of the secretaries?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” Lady Aisha wiped her mouth with a handkerchief. “We may be all right, then.”

  Fatima scooped up a mouthful of rice with her fingers. It was redolent of sheep fat and sea salt. She licked each finger clean. She wanted to tell Lady Aisha that Luz had behaved well, that she had been nothing but eager and kind, but thought better of it.

  “What’s a tribunal del santo oficio?” she asked instead. Lady Aisha froze with a piece of bread halfway to her mouth.

  “Where did you hear that?” she demanded.

  “I read it,” answered Fatima, startled. “It was on a letter in Luz’s trunk.”

  Lady Aisha said nothing for several moments. She set down her bowl and began to clean her fingers.

  “Tribunal of the Holy Office,” she said lightly, dipping her hands in a dish of rose water nearby.

  “What’s that?”

  Lady Aisha picked up her bowl and set it down again, as if she couldn’t decide whether or not she was hungry.

  “I never used to underestimate people,” she said. “I must be older than I think I am. She’s very clever, this Queen Isabella of Spain—or if she isn’t, there are very clever people advising her. I assumed the general was their hawk—that they sent their military man to bully our military men. But they know us better than we know ourselves, it seems. They know my son does not love his viziers or his generals. The people he loves are here, in the harem. They sent their dove to the men. The hawk, they have sent to us.”