The Bird King(16)
“Please call me by my given name,” pleaded Luz. “I’m no more a baronesa than Fatima is. We’re both servants who own nothing—I serve Our Savior as she serves your house.”
“Very well. Luz.” Lady Aisha’s voice was getting dangerous. Fatima cast about herself for something to do or say. “I’m relying on your honesty.”
Luz considered Lady Aisha’s face for a moment, her own expression inscrutable. “I’m here on behalf of Queen Isabella, just as the general told you,” she said finally. “She wanted to send you a personal emissary, queen to queen, mother to mother, as a show of good faith. I hope you’ll consider me your advocate, even your friend. You will need friends in the weeks ahead, if you’ll forgive my candor.”
Lady Aisha threw her book at the ground. Fatima seized her arm.
“Would you like to see the rest of the palace?” she asked Luz, her voice louder than she had intended. “It’s very large, and you should see it while the light is good.”
Luz hesitated only a moment. “Of course,” she said brightly. “If Lady Aisha will allow it. Are you permitted to leave the harem, then?”
“She may, and often does, provided she is chaperoned and guarded,” said Lady Aisha, disengaging her arm. “I will trust you to chaperone her—as for the guards, they are just outside the doors, probably sleeping. Only the oldest and most lethargic soldiers are assigned to the harem. We like to avoid unrequited love stories when possible.”
Luz took Fatima’s hand.
“Do we have to bring guards?” she asked. “How likely is an assassination attempt in the next hour and a half? It’s so hard to appreciate a view when there’s a man with a pike standing behind you.”
Lady Aisha pursed her lips.
“Take her to see the pretty gardens and the fountains and the baths,” she said to Fatima in Arabic. “But keep her away from the Mexuar. Keep her away from my son.”
The heat of the day intensified. Fatima longed for one of Hassan’s maps, so she could take Luz somewhere unseen, preferably with good shade and scenery that would keep her occupied. She felt pensive, and when she was pensive she was silent; Luz seemed to understand this and did not press her for conversation. Fatima led her through one set of corridors and then another, and then a portico, making for the tower they called the Captive, where, according to legend, a particularly possessive sultan had marooned his favorite wife.
On the way, they passed the private rooms of those high functionaries and royal cousins lucky enough to be quartered in the palace itself and not down the hill in the city. Knots of men congregated in the shade, fanning themselves with the ends of their turbans, their quilted outer coats discarded beside them. Their voices were low and tense. Here and there was evidence of a distressed bureaucracy: papers carrying official seals lay in shredded heaps on the ground or burned in braziers, the smoke jutting up toward the cloudless sky in plumes. Conversation ceased when Fatima and Luz passed, and some men, the obsequious ones, pressed their hands to their hearts and bowed their heads.
“They treat you with a great deal of respect,” Luz observed quietly.
“They treat me with caution,” said Fatima. “I might be carrying the sultan’s child, in which case I’m very important, especially if it turns out to be a boy. Or the sultan might sell me tomorrow, in which case I’m not important at all. They hedge their bets.”
“He wouldn’t really sell you, surely.”
“No, he wouldn’t. But he could.” Fatima shouldered open a brass-studded door at the far side of the portico. “This way.”
The Captive loomed above them, square and unsympathetic. No one lived in it now. Fatima had played in the shabby rooms near the top as a child, watching the swallows that roosted in the eaves shed dander and droppings on stacks of discarded furniture from grander eras. She could hear them now, the males trilling in their nervous way, the chicks that had fledged in the spring darting up and down through the air, preparing to abandon their parents.
“What place is this?” asked Luz.
“The nicest prison in Al Andalus,” replied Fatima. “But it’s empty now. I’m not sure why I brought you here, to be honest. I used to play at the window where those swallows are diving. Sometimes the princes would come too—Ahmed and Yusef. They were only a few years younger than I am.” She sniffed and rubbed her nose with the back of one hand. “You have them now, of course. As hostages.”
“They’re quite well,” said Luz gently. “They and little Aisha. I saw all three of them at court just before I left. They want for nothing—you can tell their father that.”
“He loves his children,” said Fatima, feeling suddenly hostile. “He wants to see them, not hear about them from me.”
“It is within his power to bring them home,” said Luz, looking up at the Captive’s empty-eyed windows. “You can tell him that as well.”
Fatima, unprepared to enter into a negotiation, kept silent. The tower before her exhaled its peculiar fragrance of dust and lost time, communicating nothing.
“Show me something else,” said Luz abruptly. “Show me your favorite place.”
Fatima chewed her lip and tried to decide whether it was wise to take this request literally. There were plenty of charming porticoes and courtyards, though many of them had accrued a permanent veneer of dirt in recent months. And there would be men in all of them, lawyers and secretaries and clerks, possibly burning more papers, or removing valuables, or doing any of the other things men do when faced with the end of an empire. Perhaps after all it was safer to do as Luz asked.