The Bird King(107)
“Stop!” she called, but it was too late: the thrill of their advantage was upon them, and they rushed down the chalk steps toward the beach. Another scream filled the air; the cliff shook. Fatima heard the shrill creak of stone splitting behind her. There was another scream, a human scream, and a body fell past her too quickly to be identified. Sweat poured down her back. She tried to turn but found herself half lifted by the pressure of limbs and forced onward. Panic overcame her, a visceral panic that made her want to claw at the faces around her, faces she knew and cherished that were now simply objects in her path. She fought it, planting her heels in the yielding chalk.
“Stop!” she called again.
“Can’t—no—not here,” came a voice, possibly Gwennec’s. “We’ve got to get below that cannon fire now, go, go—”
Fatima felt sand beneath her feet. She tumbled onto the beach, landing on her shoulder, and found herself staring at a thin spatter of blood, almost discreet, smelling faintly of bile: Mary’s familiar buzzed overhead like a distended horsefly, its belly stretched tight and shining. On her back, Fatima saw an inverted tide through which another longboat was cutting toward them, upside down, the men already drawing their rapiers. Her own forces’ good luck would not last through a second onslaught. She rolled onto her knees and spat sand from her mouth. A spear flew overhead: a fishing spear, one of the greenwood sort that Deng had taught them to make, barely hardy enough to kill its intended prey, let alone a man in armor. Yet it did fly, glancing off a polished hauberk and landing uselessly in the surf.
The second longboat scraped up on the sand. There was a wild cry and a man flew past her toward it, brandishing a club: it found purchase beneath the jaw of a soldier standing in the bow, who fell with barely a cry. The others were quicker. The man with the club—Bruno, Udolfo; Fatima could not remember his name—went down under the hilt of a rapier and did not rise again. Fatima fumbled for her sling. She watched her first stone fly with dispassion, as though someone else had loosed it, and was almost surprised when it caught one of the soldiers beneath his curved half helm. He reeled backward with a shriek, one hand to his face. Fatima loosed another stone and then another, but these missed their mark and went soaring wildly past the boat into the ill-defined gloss where the sun met the sea.
She was almost certain it was Gwennec who shoved her, for she saw his sandal as she went down. She swore at him as she fell, but he didn’t hear her: his face was panicked and unseeing. Around him were identical faces, bodies pressed too close, a certain noiselessness, features not of battle but of chaos. Fatima curled up and protected her face with her hands. Through her fingers, through the forest of limbs and sand, she saw the water, and in the water, the coils of the mote.
Fatima held her breath. The mote rose from the froth, gathering about itself its shreds of wood and viscera, and though it had no features aside from the legless spiral of matter upon which it sat, it turned and looked at her.
Who is your master?
Fatima screamed, writhing to free herself from the miasma of limbs and metal, pressing her hands over her ears to block out the voice between them.
Who is your master? the voice repeated.
An opening appeared in front of her. Fatima lunged for it, scrambling to her feet. As she rose, she felt something fall from her sash: it was the boot her hunter had found in the den of the leviathan.
Who is your master?
She snatched it from the sand and ran, unthinking, across the beach, gasping for air amid the powdered chalk and the sulfuric scent of cannon fire. It was only when she was well away that she turned and looked back.
The horror sat atop the waves, many times the size of the Spanish carrack, slowly unfolding itself coil by coil. Though it lay very close to the beach, the men in the longboats never glanced at it, and instead looked past it, or through it, at the meager force confronting them upon the sand.
“They don’t see it,” said Fatima to herself. “They can’t see it.” A cannonball smashed into the cliff above her head. One or two of the ancient steps had come away, leaving gaps in the staircase that led to the clifftop, not too wide for someone as tall as Fatima or Hassan to jump across, but much too wide for Mary or for Asher’s young brothers. The possibility of retreat was no longer certain. Fatima looked down at the boot in her hand. It could not end here, it must not end here, yet no other end was evident. They would end as the bishops had; they would end as boots, as a city hastily abandoned, tools left where they lay, for there was some secret to surviving a happy ending that they did not possess.
Something flickered overhead, a shadow that momentarily interrupted the sun. Fatima looked up. The leviathan, the dragon as Mary called it, was crouched on the clifftop, looking down at the battle below. The noise must have roused it, or perhaps the scent of blood. Fatima could see Deng standing in the arch of the keep and watching it in his imperturbable way. Luz was upright now, hanging behind him in Fatima’s bleached shift, her hair a snarl of gold around her shoulders.
Fatima looked again at the boot and found it didn’t move her. She left it in the sand and pelted toward the chalk stairs, taking them two at a time, heedless of the cannonballs that shrieked and shuddered around her. The leviathan swiveled its head. Its eyes fixed on hers and a smile bloomed on its supple mouth, unsheathing the rows of teeth. Fatima stopped on a step that ended at nothing, at a powdery crater where the next step had been, and wheeled her arms to keep the momentum from pulling her over. The leviathan slid down the cliff toward her. She could hear her own breath whistling in her throat and ignored it, looking into the face of the dragon, into the greenish, human eyes, until it was so close that she could smell the reptilian sweetness of its hide.