The Bird King(104)
“It was different before,” said Fatima, louder than she intended. She didn’t want to have this particular argument in front of other people, but it seemed impossible to stop. “This was meant to be about you and me. Not about other people. You and me and to hell with the rest of the world—let them find their own way if they can.”
“Well it damn well is about other people now, isn’t it?” Hassan gestured angrily at Mary and the little jinn, who were pretending not to listen. “And it has been for some time. There are all the people who only came here because we opened the way, and all the jinn, and there’s our Gwen, who doesn’t even want to be here—and all of them, all of them, look to you for guidance. And right now they’re terrified because there are two Castilian warships on the horizon and we’ve got no weapons aside from a few handmade spears and some cutlery.”
“Rufus has a crossbow,” said Mary helpfully. “Though only a few bolts to go with it.”
“We are not without means,” said the little jinn on Mary’s shoulder, its voice no deeper than a cricket’s. “If need be, we will fight alongside our cousins.”
Fatima regarded the tiny creature with skepticism: it looked as though it would be overmatched by a determined squirrel. Nevertheless, there was no help she could afford to turn away.
“Gather everyone on the green,” she said, lifting her chin. “And every stick and stone heavy enough to be called a weapon.”
It was all managed soon enough. There was pitifully little to manage at all: twenty able human beings, not counting Asher and his brothers, who were too young to be asked to fight; and nearly as many jinn, though not all came when called and others were difficult to perceive in the best of circumstances. They stood in the tiny green and arrayed themselves for war as best they could, amid the squabbling chickens, who resented the incursion into their pasture. Stupid, who regarded both chickens and spears with suspicion, watched them from a patch of clover, his mouth green with grazing. The sight of it was more pastoral than martial. Among them, only Rufus, a broad, well-muscled man who sweat profusely, had ever been in battle, though many could hunt and fish well enough to aim a spear. It was just as it had been in the Alhambra during the long siege: the walls and cliffs would keep them safe for a time, but when those were breached, by men or by hunger, no one inside stood a chance.
“We must find a way to close up the gate,” said Fatima, standing before them. The wet wind took her words and muddled them, making her sound even younger than she was. “Whatever door was there rotted away long ago. Carts, crates, old boards—we must block the entryway as best we can. Then we stand on the walls and make life difficult for them when they try to breach the gate. They may decide it’s not worth their trouble if their own supplies are low, which they must be after this long at sea. It’s the best we can do.”
“The walls are thick, but they’re not high,” said Rufus, leaning on his spear. The crossbow Mary had spoken of so glowingly was slung over one shoulder, pointing at the ground, shiny from overuse. “It wouldn’t take more than a few siege ladders to put men on top and avoid the gatehouse entirely.”
“They will have walked uphill for two hours by the time they get here,” said Fatima, concealing her irritation at having been contradicted. “They won’t go up the stone stairs from the beach—they’d need to go single file and we could pick them off one by one from the clifftop. Which means they’ll have to go all the way around the harbor. And they don’t know the paths as we do—they may get lost or turned around in the forest. They won’t be in any state to put up siege ladders.”
“Some of us will hide along the paths,” said one of the jinn, a slim, glistening thing like a blue candle flame who seemed to speak with two voices at once. “We might kill a few, and we will certainly frighten the rest.”
“Perhaps the island will help us,” said Sona. Her big eyes glistened with fear or desperation. She was cradling Asher’s youngest brother against her shoulder: the child would nap only when someone held him. Fatima didn’t want to dash her hopes, but she needed every person sharp and ready, and hope did not make a person sharp.
“The island doesn’t help,” she said, thinking of the worn boot. “The island just is. We have only ourselves to rely on.”
“Then we will make our stand,” said the frog-man, belling out his throat pouch. “We may be few, but we are defending our home. There are forces at work in the world hidden even from the jinn, and they will be on our side.”
The sun was low before work on the gate was finished. The empty houses that had not yet been pillaged for every nail and scrap of wood were picked over until nothing of use remained; the resulting barricade, a mess of stacked boards and crates packed with earth and stones to make them heavier, filled the empty gate nearly to its peaked arch. When everyone was covered in dirt and splinters and starting to snap at everyone else, Fatima dismissed them all to the washhouse, and though she was as sore and dirty as any of them, took herself back up the hill to the palace to see whether Luz was still alive.
She found the inquisitor laid out upon a pallet near the fire, asleep, dressed in a linen nightdress that looked very much like Fatima’s. Her own black gown was drying in a patch of fading sunlight. Fatima pursed her lips. Deng was squatting over his mortar and pestle on the far side of the fire pit, frowning in concentration.