The Bird King(103)
“My king,” she panted, “there’s been news.”
“I’ve heard,” said Fatima, pulling back her own hair and binding it with a leather thong. “If you expect me to say something inspiring about banding together against a much larger foe, I haven’t thought of anything memorable yet.”
“It isn’t that,” said Mary. “Only Rufus—he’s the Venetian man-at-arms who arrived last week—he was out hunting in that savanna that appeared outside the gate this morning, and took a few hares, and saw the tracks of the leviathan and decided to trail it to its den, or wherever it might lodge.” She paused for breath.
“That was foolish,” muttered Fatima, parting her hair to braid it. “He might have been killed.”
“He might’ve been, but instead he followed the tracks to a sort of hollow, he called it, full of bones. Bones, and this.” Here she held up a battered length of leather, cracked and soiled and very obviously a boot.
Fatima took it from her silently. The leather was water-stained and the crest of each fold was bleached from long exposure to sun and air. She studied it, bending it this way and that in her hands until the creases thinned and buckled, and instructed herself not to panic.
“What does it mean?” pressed Mary. One of the jinn, a tiny thing that, when visible, took a batlike form, had climbed up on her shoulder and sat gazing at Fatima with an identical expression of pleading and desperation. Fatima turned away and gritted her teeth. They all looked at her that way eventually, when they were frightened enough, and it never failed to make her angry.
“I asked for this,” she said aloud to herself. “When the sultan asked me what I wanted, I told him I wanted this. And now here I am.”
“When God really wants to test you, He gives you exactly what you desire,” muttered the returning Gwennec, slapping dirt off his hands. He smelled of horse. “At the end of the story of Job, he gets all his wealth back again, and God leaves. Remember that.”
“Are you going to help, or just dispense these little pearls of wisdom?” snapped Fatima.
“I haven’t decided yet.” Gwennec sniffed conspicuously and made off in the direction of the washhouse.
Fatima looked again at the weathered boot in her hand. She knew what it meant but didn’t dare say to Mary or the jinn, who were still looking at her with expectant upturned faces. Instead, she told them what she had discovered on the beach.
“Time isn’t passing properly here the way it is in the rest of the world,” she said. “Luz and the horse—they went into the water at the same time Gwennec and Hassan and I did. Weeks have gone by here, or months even, but only moments have passed in the world we left.”
Mary considered this for a minute and then lifted her chin.
“That’s not so bad,” she said stoutly. “Is it? It’s the sort of thing you expect from an enchanted island. Avalon was said to be the same way, in the mists, with the High King waiting as young as ever.”
“It’s not that simple.” Hassan appeared behind Fatima’s shoulder and took the boot from her, turning it in his hands. “Time doesn’t pass, at least not in the sense you mean. It just is. All of it, all at once. The past, the present, the future. Fate exists within time, but the master of fate exists outside it.” He hesitated and gave Fatima another unfathomable look.
“What?” she said.
“There’s a fellow here,” said Hassan quietly, addressing the boot. “A Jew from Córdoba. He says the Spanish have issued a proclamation ordering all Jews out of Iberia. His family boarded a ferry to Morocco that overturned in bad weather. That’s how he got here.”
Fatima felt sweat break out on her upper lip and dashed it away with the back of her hand.
“And?”
“When we left, you and I, I mean, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had issued no such proclamation. The man says—Fa, he says he left Spain two years after the fall of Granada.”
Humidity had saturated Fatima’s brocade robe: she longed to take it off and send everyone away and bathe with her familiar view of the sea, lead-colored now under the mottled clouds.
“You’re very calm about this,” she said.
“I ought to be. I brought us here. We’re no longer a where, so we’re no longer a when either. Time is moving as it always has in proportion to those who perceive it. Nothing is wrong.” He smiled crookedly. Days spent walking and working under the sun had burnished him until his skin was nearly the same red-brown as his hair; he stood square, his courtly slouch gone. Vikram was right: Hassan, in his own odd way, had always been the braver one, if for no other reason than that his very existence was a sort of trespass. Now, here, he had become an immutable version of himself, who knew by instinct what others could only guess.
“Why are you telling me this?” Fatima asked him.
“So you won’t be afraid,” said Hassan, smiling again, a pleading smile. “You’ve done so well, and I haven’t told you, because it’s been—” He stopped and caught his breath. “You haven’t asked about Deng and me, but I can tell you’ve—I didn’t expect you to be jealous, is what I mean. We’ve been friends for so long, and I’ve had lovers now and again when I could manage it discreetly, which surely you must have known, and you’ve never been jealous before, so—”