The Bird King Page 7

  Fatima was not often afraid. She had never known a time without war; when it was not outside on the battlefield, it was inside on the birthing bed, or in the winters when the very young and the very old and the very ill died in their sleep without a sound. Yet now she had a sick feeling, as though she were looking off the edge of a tower. She swallowed to keep from gagging.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “What does that letter mean? What does it mean about Luz?”

  Lady Aisha resumed her lunch, scooping up a quivering mass of mutton fat with a fragment of bread.

  “It means that Luz was sent by the Inquisition,” she said.

  Chapter 5

  The moon rose early that night. It lay fat and red in the clear sky, a solitary blemish unattended by stars. Fatima found Luz in the courtyard staring up at it. The garden was softened by lamplight, its straggling roses and withered palms rendered less offensive than they seemed in daylight hours, when the neglect was palpable. Fatima felt a strange, dislocated ache. Even the things with which she had grown impatient—this courtyard, this garden, the many restless hours she had spent there—seemed precious now that she knew she would lose them. The back of Luz’s golden head, made pale by the dim evening, mocked her. No kindness was ever freely given: each followed from its own secret ambition. Fatima knew this, yet somehow Luz, who was so unlike Nessma and the others, had caught her off guard. There was a chill in the garden, a finality, as if the diminutive figure in black had drawn all the warmth from it, and all the memory of warmth. Fatima felt her lip tremble. No one was coming to save them. No one was coming to save them.

  Luz’s hair was plaited for the evening. She played with the frayed end of her braid, looking so like a little girl that Fatima hesitated, biting back the furious speech she had prepared in her mind.

  “What do you call the game you play with Hassan?” Luz asked, as if continuing a conversation she had begun in her head. She held out her hand for Fatima. “The one with the naming of birds.”

  “It’s not a real game,” said Fatima after a baffled silence. “It started as a joke. There’s a long poem by Al Attar about a party of birds who go on a journey to find their lost king. Lady Aisha bought the first few pages. We could never find the rest. So we’ve been making it up as we go.”

  “A shame,” said Luz, half to herself. “It’s always helpful to know how things end.” She looked over her shoulder with a puzzled frown. “Why are you standing so far away?”

  To her horror, Fatima felt tears prick her eyes.

  “You’re an inquisitor,” she said.

  Luz looked back at the moon. “Only priests can be inquisitors,” she murmured. “I have no title.”

  “But you’re still …” Fatima had begun to shake. She wrapped her arms around herself to keep it from showing. “You said we should think of you as a friend. An advocate. Those were the words you used. You were lying.”

  Luz turned, wide-eyed, and crossed the courtyard to Fatima. Gently, she unclasped Fatima’s hands and took them in her own, rubbing them as if to make them warm.

  “I am your friend,” she said. “That wasn’t a lie. It’s because I’m your friend that I want—more than anything in the world—for you to accept your Savior, the Son of God. I can’t bear the thought of you in hell, Fatima. I would do anything to prevent it.”

  Fatima had no adequate response.

  “What are you going to do to us?” she asked. “When the city falls?”

  “Nothing,” said Luz firmly. “A forced conversion is unworthy of Our Lord. I only want to remove certain bad influences—certain people who might stand between you and salvation. There are those who, through no fault but their own human weakness, have fallen under the sway of the Enemy, and they must be dealt with. Delicately, if possible.”

  “You torture people.”

  Luz released her hands and shrugged, as if the suggestion was tiresome.

  “With heresy so widespread, unfortunate methods have become necessary,” she said. “Even according to your own faith, the student of religion—a talib, I think you call him?—has a duty to spread his knowledge to those who have gone astray. And that’s what we are. Yes? Simple talub.”

  Fatima shook her head. She couldn’t think; there seemed no rational thing to say, no retort, for Luz’s argument depended on its own impenetrable logic. Luz held out her hand again. She was smiling now: an upturned slash of sympathy as fixed as a corpse’s. It made the fine hairs on Fatima’s arms stand up.

  “Don’t touch me,” said Fatima. “Never touch me again.”

  The smile faltered. Fatima felt a pang of guilt and no notion of how to relieve it. What could she say? She could not envision a God who demanded such particularity of belief, whose mercy and forgiveness were confined to such a precise segment of humankind. Nor, if it came to that, could she fathom hell, which seemed a somewhat contradictory place: you could be sent there for behaving in the right way but believing in the wrong God, or for believing in the right God but behaving in the wrong way. And that, in turn, threw heaven into disarray, since those who both believed and behaved rightly were invited to indulge in the very pleasures for which those who behaved wrongly had been sent to hell. If Luz was right, she would be punished for failing to acknowledge that God had a son; if the imam who grumbled from the minbar in the royal mosque was right, she would be punished for even considering such a proposition. Belief never seemed to enter into anything: it was simply a matter of selecting the correct system of enticements.

  “Please say something,” said Luz. “I don’t want this to be the last conversation we ever have.”

  Fatima considered her words carefully.

  “If you love someone, you don’t think of them in hell,” she said. “If you can imagine someone in hell, it means you hate them.”

  Luz shook her head.

  “No,” she said softly. “Hate and love aren’t like that. Hate is a false feeling. You can stop someone from hating something. Love is much more dangerous.”

  The air was smoky: this was the time when each household banked its cooking fire for the night. The entire city would exhale in one great acrid breath, making the darkest hours thick and cold and heavy on the tongue. Fatima wanted to crawl into bed beside Lady Aisha as she had done when she was a small child; to feel, if not safe, then at least protected by someone whose orders were always obeyed. Yet it was not to be: the sultan’s little messenger had appeared in the lamplight at the edge of the courtyard, putting an end to the conversation.

  “Mistress Fatima,” he piped. “The sultan—”

  “Fine, all right,” said Fatima, feeling her cheeks go hot. She didn’t want Luz to witness this particular interaction, this blunt prelude to the nights she spent with her master. She stole a glance at the silent inquisitor and found her looking back, her face ashen in the dark.

  “You could be free of this,” said Luz with a pleading lilt in her voice. “Say the word and I will make you free. My masters are more powerful than your sultan will ever be.”

  Though the night air had only just begun to cool, Fatima’s teeth were chattering.

  “Are you free?” she asked. “You can’t even call yourself what you are because you’re not a man. You have masters, you just said so. How can you make me free if you’re not free yourself?”

  Luz didn’t answer. The sultan’s boy was fidgeting in the colonnade, struggling, no doubt, to understand what they were saying.

  “I have to go,” said Fatima, turning toward him. “Good night.”

  “I didn’t want to be your enemy,” said Luz to her back. “Things are going to happen very fast, and when they do, remember that.”

  Abu Abdullah was still dressed in his court clothes when Fatima arrived at his quarters. He had removed his turban, however, and the weight of it had left an unflattering crease in his hair, like the nipped ring of a monk’s tonsure. Though he had called for her, he barely registered her presence, absorbed in a long document that hung from his finger
s and was written, or so it seemed, in Latin.

  “What is that?” Fatima asked uneasily after a full minute of silence. Abu Abdullah looked up at her in surprise, as if she were unknown to him.

  “The Castilians have laid out their terms,” he said when he recovered. “This was delivered less than an hour ago.”

  “Terms of surrender?”

  “Yes.” Abu Abdullah threw the paper at his night table, where it landed with a loud clack. “Terms of surrender.” He looked at her with the eyes of a lost thing. “I am going to be the last sultan of Granada, Fatima. Last and least. Ridiculous poems will be written about me and my reign. I’ll become some awful metaphor. They want me to kiss their hands, these Spanish monarchs. It’s right there. Kiss their hands! They know we don’t bow, yet—” He ran a hand through his hair, doing nothing to correct the crease. “It seems I am to be humiliated.”

  Fatima plucked the treaty from the night table and examined it. It was a useless gesture; such a thing would take her hours to translate, and only with the help of someone fluent. A lump formed in her throat.

  “Why do they hate us so much?” she asked.

  “I’ll tell you,” said Abu Abdullah, pulling off his long coat. “It’s our fault. We’ve given everyone too much freedom. Our poets write odes to their male lovers. My mother spent half her fortune on a university for heretics and alchemists. Muslims and Jews and Christians mingle and live alongside each other, and here we are—weak and indulgent, just as the Castilians say. And they see you—” Here he crossed the room and cupped Fatima’s face in both his hands. “The most beautiful woman in all of Europe, and I keep you openly, and you are not my wife. They hate me because I do in the daylight what their own kings are ashamed to do in the dark. They have concubines, just as I do, but in their religion these women are adulteresses damned to hell, their children bastards. That’s not our way. Our sons will be princes, our daughters will marry into the finest families, and none of them will be bastards, because there is no shame in what we do. And for that, they call me a libertine.”

  Fatima pulled away, declining to point out that the freedoms of which Abu Abdullah spoke did not extend as far as the woman in front of him.

  “Maybe they don’t hate us for our freedoms,” she muttered. “Maybe they hate us because we’ve been harrying their lands for decades.”

  Abu Abdullah’s mouth hardened. He took the paper from her hands and began rolling it up.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Listen—I asked you here because they want something that will upset you, and I wanted you to hear it from me first, so that you would be prepared.”

  Fatima was baffled. She sat down on Abu Abdullah’s bed, twisting her hands in the hem of her tunic.

  “All right,” she said. “Tell me.”

  “Hassan. It’s Hassan.”

  Fatima had to repeat the name silently in her head before she was convinced she had heard what she had heard.

  “I don’t understand. What do they want with Hassan? What is he to them?”

  “A sorcerer.” Abu Abdullah smiled without humor and began to pace. “Presumably they’ve discovered his talents—and perhaps his weakness for dark-eyed young men, though if that’s what appalls them, I could provide them with twenty more such, starting with my own vizier. As I understand it, they intend to hand him over to the Inquisition for questioning.” He laughed helplessly. “Hassan, a sorcerer! The man couldn’t make soup out of an onion and a pot of water. What do they imagine they’ll get from him on the rack?”

  The sting of this caught Fatima in a place she could not locate: when she thought of her head, her head hurt, and when she thought of her heart, her heart hurt too. She had delivered her friend to Luz like an offering. She could see him being led away, could imagine the look of bewildered panic on his face, and because she loved him, she could feel them break his beautiful hands as clearly as if her own had been shattered. Fatima covered her eyes and whimpered. How could the poets write about love so lightly, as if it was something pleasant? Love was terror and loss. Love was appalling.

  “I’ll slit her throat,” she whispered. “That smiling bitch.”

  “What?”

  Fatima looked up and into Abu Abdullah’s face without blinking.

  “You won’t let them take him,” she said firmly. “Of course.”

  “I don’t think you understand, Fatima. It’s already been agreed. They’ll come for him tonight, quietly, before the treaty is announced and the date for the transfer of power is set.”

  The tiles on the floor seemed to swim, rearranging themselves into shimmering patterns that Fatima could not read.

  “You can’t do this,” she croaked, her mouth dry. “They’ll kill him. Don’t you see? He doesn’t know anything—he can’t tell them what they want to hear, because he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know why he can do what he does. They’ll kill him. Master—”

  Abu Abdullah stopped pacing and put his head in his hands.

  “You’re not the only one who cares about Hassan.” His words were muffled in his palms. “He’s been here since he was a boy—since I was a boy. The only reason we have survived this long is thanks to his damned maps. But I have no choice, Fatima, surely you can see that. His life will save thousands of others.” He looked up from his hands and met her gaze, his eyes bleak and wild. “They’ll give me back my children, Fatima. My sons, my little daughter—my God, she’s probably forgotten me by now. When you have your own, you’ll understand. All your grand ideas about justice and fairness die when your children are born. There is no life so precious that you would not sacrifice it for theirs.”

  Fatima wanted to strike him and to weep with him and could not tell which impulse was the greater.

  “It’s not right,” she said, suppressing an urge to stamp her foot as well. “You know it isn’t. Ask them to spare Hassan. There’s still time. You should never have agreed in the first place.”

  This was the wrong thing to say. Abu Abdullah raised himself to his full height, which was considerable. “You have no right to question my judgment,” he said quietly. “I am the master here, not you. You’ve overstepped yourself once too often. Go back to the harem until I send for you.”

  Fatima clenched and unclenched her fists. Then she remembered that she, too, was tall, and pulled herself up, lifting her chin. When she stood straight, without bowing her head, she was only a finger-breadth shorter than her master. She knew she ought to apologize, to lower her head again and murmur some excuse, but she did not.

  “I’ll go now,” she said. “Since you have no use for me.”

  Abu Abdullah stepped back, his face lined with sudden grief.

  “You’re always so angry,” he said. “I don’t understand. You have pretty clothes, entertainments, food when others go hungry. You have the love of a sultan. What else could you possibly want?”

  Fatima licked the dry, taut line of her lips.

  “To be sultan,” she said.

  He was suddenly someone else. Fatima flinched before she could stop herself, wondering if this would be the moment he raised his hand to her and undid whatever uneasy affection existed between them, as was his right by law. But he did not. Instead, he turned his back on her, fading into the umber shadows of his room.

  “Get out,” he said.

  The palace was quiet as Fatima skittered from one dark corridor to the next. Her feet would not take her back to the harem: she knew where she must go instead. She was so heady with the thrill of disobedience that she lost her way once, turning right when she should have turned left, and was forced to retrace her steps. Everything she did felt too slow. She had no way of knowing when the Castilians might come for Hassan, whether each minute she fumbled might bring a rap on his door, toward which he would stumble, possibly drunk, unaware of what waited for him. She wanted to run but was wary of making too much noise: there were muffled voices on the second-floor loggia above her head, and they were not speaking Arabic. Instead she dance
d along on tiptoe, racing through the intersections of hallways until she was out of breath and the strong green scent of the Court of Myrtles enveloped her.

  Fatima crossed the grassy court, skirting the reflecting pool, leaving a muted trail through the newly fallen dew. Hassan’s workroom was dark, but the door to his sleeping chamber was lined with firelight. Fatima jogged up the stone steps and past Hassan’s mess of papers and pounded on it, hoping belatedly that he was alone.

  The door swung open. Hassan squinted out at her, adjusting to the dark.

  “Fatima?” His voice was an incredulous rasp. “What the hell are you doing here at this hour?”

  “We have to go,” said Fatima, slipping past him and shutting the door behind her. “Now, now, now.” A canvas sack, such as tradesmen and itinerant clerks carried from city to city, lay sprawled at the foot of his bed: she opened it and began to grab robes and hose and sashes from the bright piles heaped on the floor.

  “What are you talking about? Go where? I’m exhausted and famished! Before you turned up, I was debating whether I was too hungry to sleep, or too sleepy to nip down to the kitchen for some bread.”

  “Hassan.” Fatima plopped down on the floor and looked up at him, pleading. “Listen to what I’m saying. The Castilians want to take you away. They’re going to give you to the—anyway, you’re part of the peace treaty. They’re coming for you—now—and no one is going to stop them, because the sultan has already said yes.”

  Hassan’s blotchy, unassuming face was drained of color. He sat down and looked at his hands as if to accuse them of something.

  “I was going to perform the late prayer,” he said. “In the courtyard, since the stars are out. I like to. Can we wait that long?”

  “Wait?” Fatima twisted her lip. “The Inquisition is looking for you, and you want to sit outside to do the late prayer? The late prayer. It’s not even one of the mandatory ones.”

  Hassan’s eyes widened.

  “Did you say the Inquisition?”

  “It’s my fault,” said Fatima, trying not to cry. “It was Luz. She smiled and simpered and made us all like her, and I thought—” Here she was forced to admit something that she did not like. “I thought I was smarter than she is. But I’m not.”