The Bird King(106)
“Not exactly,” came his voice, faintly. “Though I can see you well enough.”
Fatima called again and received no answer. Only the horizon remained. The Castilian ships were so close that the crosses made by their masts and booms punctured the harbor on either side. Fatima heard, or thought she heard, voices calling across the dim water. She gathered up her skirts, observing absently that brocade was a poor fabric for warfare, and rushed inside the keep, where Deng was changing the poultice on Luz’s eye.
“They’re here,” she said.
Deng folded a piece of linen with slow, precise movements, so that it was perfectly square, and placed it just below Luz’s brow bone. She looked up at him, her visible eye drunk with pain or fatigue but struggling to focus, as if Deng, frowning above her, was the whole of the universe.
“It’s all right,” Deng said to her. “We’re not going anywhere, you and I. Let them fight—we’ll be quite comfortable just as we are. Would you like more water?”
Luz shook her head almost imperceptibly. Fatima watched them together, tethered by the particular tenderness of patient and physician, and thought that there was goodness in the world of a sort she couldn’t fathom.
“He was the only person I ever chose,” she blurted, confessing. “Everyone else was forced on me, one way or another. I don’t want him to be unhappy. It’s just that he was my only friend.”
Deng looked up at her, his face impassive.
“He’s not your only friend anymore, Fatima,” he said, and turned back to his patient. There was noise from the western archway: shouts and one halfhearted attempt at a battle cry. Fatima palmed her sling. Mary came running into the main hall, barefoot but wearing a clever leather vest, a sort of hauberk, which she appeared to have made from pieces of a disused saddle; her familiar followed behind her, flapping its tiny wings in the encroaching dawn. Fatima wanted to laugh.
“We’ve got no chance whatsoever,” said Gwennec, coming to stand beside her.
“None,” she agreed. The monk grinned without humor. He was still wearing his habit and had made no attempt to array himself for war: standing among the rest of them, dressed either in makeshift armor or in the fanciful garments Mary had created, he looked like a visitor from some other, starker reality. Fatima felt silly beside him. They had been playing at kingdoms, at kings and courtiers, and now their play would come to a swift and ludicrous end.
“They would probably take you back,” she hazarded. “Especially if you went now. There’s no reason you should have to die for all this. You’re a cleric. They can’t blame you for what’s happened.”
Gwennec stared at her as if she had spoken in tongues.
“How could you possibly say such a thing?” he said. “How could you say that to me, after everything we’ve been and done?”
Fatima was immediately sorry. She did not have time to apologize, however, for as soon as she reached for the monk’s threadbare sleeve, a sound she had never heard before lit up her ears, growing louder and louder until it became a mechanical scream and buried itself in the cliff beneath her feet. The keep shuddered. White dust bloomed in the air: chalk pulverized finer than snow.
“What was that?” shouted Fatima, her ears ringing.
“That’s a cannon,” called Rufus. “That’s a bloody big cannon.”
“On a ship?”
“On a ship, and probably not the only one.”
Another shriek and tremor punctuated his words. Someone screamed. Out of the corner of her eye, Fatima saw Deng move to shield Luz from the white dust, covering her with a fold of his robe.
“They mean to win this battle without ever setting foot on land,” said Fatima to the drifting powder.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” said Hassan, sweeping through the main hall to stand on the cliff. “Here comes a longboat.”
Fatima pushed through the crowd that had gathered around her, her fingers sliding past leather and velvet and the slick poreless exterior of a jinn, all covered in the same white dust, as though prepared for some unknown sacrament. Outside, the air was clearer, the new sun baleful and hot in a sky from which the clouds and haze of yesterday had disappeared. Hassan was right: a dark shape was cutting through the water toward the beach, propelled by the amphibian dip and pause of oars. Wood scraped against sand and echoed between the punctured cliffs.
In the hall, the anxious press of men and women and children and jinn was silent. Fatima saw Asher’s youngest brother standing at her knee. His hair was white with chalk, transforming him into an old man with an old man’s heavy gaze. Fatima stroked his shoulder. He turned without speaking and pressed his wan face into her hip.
A braying squeal broke the silence. Fatima flinched as batlike wings brushed her face and Mary’s jinn swept through the eastern archway and down the face of the cliff. It soared along the stone stairs, gathering speed as it dropped, then veered across the thin strip of beach toward the men in the longboat, who fell back, frightened, tumbling across each other onto the sand like poorly made toys, only to be engulfed by the tiny jinn, which was suddenly all mouth, and gone as quickly as if they had never arrived at all.
The empty longboat rocked gently on its keel and settled sidewise into the sand with a thud.
In the keep, there was a stricken pause. Then the noise began, howls and yelps of bewildered celebration, and Fatima found herself carried toward the stair by a fevered wave of bodies.