The Bird King(17)

“This way,” said Fatima, turning back the way they had come. She slipped through the open door, past the pyres of burning deeds and letters, and led Luz toward the Court of Myrtles.

Hassan was dozing when they arrived at his workroom. He lay draped on a mound of cushions with his tunic open and a wedge of charcoal dangling from his fingers, as if he had fallen asleep in midsentence. Fatima rapped on the wall to wake him. He jerked upright, his eyes wide and red, and looked from Fatima to Luz with dazed incomprehension.

“I wasn’t asleep,” he said.

“Of course not,” said Fatima, coming into the room. She sat on the balustrade and drew her feet up beneath her. “I’ve brought you someone. She doesn’t speak Arabic, so far as I can tell.”

Hassan stared hard at Luz, blinking, as if trying to determine whether she was real.

“What have you been speaking to her?” he asked finally.

“Castilian,” said Fatima. “We should probably behave ourselves. She’s almost a nun.”

“Then why is she dressed like an Arab courtesan? What’s going on? Who are you? Where are we?”

“Fatima tells me you’re the court mapmaker,” said Luz, pulling out a cushion and sitting down. The sound of her voice made Hassan sufficiently serious. He crossed his legs, gesturing with a hospitable smile at the cushion to which Luz had already helped herself.

“Please sit,” he said. “Welcome to Granada. I hope Fatima hasn’t promised you anything grand—I could tell you my workroom isn’t usually such a mess, but I would be lying.”

“You have a superb view,” said Luz, her eyes sliding charitably past the heaps of paper and sooty pencil cases. “The Alhambra lives up to its reputation. But how does a mapmaker come by such a large and well-situated room in a palace like this?”

Hassan shot Fatima a nervous glance. She shifted on the balustrade, unsure of what to say. She had not expected Luz to ask a real question.

“I’m very good at what I do,” said Hassan. He tilted sideways, as if making a joke.

“You must be,” laughed Luz. “The royal mapmaker at Toledo works in a closet, I think. So! You’re Fatima’s friend. I didn’t know that was allowed.”

“It’s not,” said Hassan, glancing again at Fatima. “Not since Fatima came of age, anyway. We met when we were children. Ten years ago, it must have been—I was fourteen when I was sent here to begin my apprenticeship. Fa was still only a tiny thing.”

“I used to steal Hassan’s charcoals,” supplied Fatima. “To draw.”

“The master cartographer—he’s dead now—would have absolute fits. But he couldn’t go into the harem, so all little Fa had to do was run there and hide in Lady Aisha’s skirts. She got away with everything. Still does.”

Luz laughed again, tilting her head back to expose a white throat delicately crisscrossed in blue. Fatima wondered for a moment whether she was flirting with Hassan. Hassan seemed to be wondering the same thing, for he became very interested in a stray thread clinging to the sleeve of his tunic, picking at it with his thumb and forefinger.

“Was she as beautiful a child as she is a woman?” coaxed Luz.

“Who? Fatima?” Hassan looked up again. “Not that I noticed.”

“Are you saying I was plain?” demanded Fatima, throwing a wad of paper at him.

“She was a skinny little tyrant,” Hassan said with a grin. “Always alone, or if not alone, then bossing the princes around. ‘You! Ahmed! Fetch the milk.’ That sort of thing. Never playing with the other girl children, or not that I ever saw, anyway. And then one day, it seemed, there was this siren swaying down the hall, who had grown half a foot overnight and could stop men in their tracks just by looking melancholy. And that was the end of the raids on my charcoal.”

A silence fell that was not entirely comfortable. Fatima tapped her foot to make her anklets jingle.

“It’s sad,” said Luz. Fatima tensed, guessing what might come next. She was not prepared to accept another woman’s pity.

“What’s sad?” asked Hassan, oblivious.

“This,” said Luz, gesturing with her hand. “All this is going to vanish in the next few weeks. The last summer of the empire of Al Andalus. I don’t mind admitting to you—you’ve all been so kind—that I will mourn it when it falls. I wasn’t expecting to be so taken with this place, or the people in it.”

“We’re not going away,” said Hassan with a forced laugh. “Right? Your masters don’t intend to put us all to the sword, do they? They could’ve done that at any time in these past ten years, since they conquered the last of our territories, but they haven’t.”

“No, of course not,” Luz assured him. “My masters are hoping to avoid further bloodshed. That’s why they sent the general—and me. Everyone would like to see a just end to this awful war.”

“Then why—” Hassan tugged at his collar, looking pale. Fatima tried in vain to catch his eye. “Why should you mourn anything? What will be so different? Power will change hands—the key to the city will hang on one neck instead of another. But the rest of us will go about our lives as we have been—only we will pay taxes to someone else, with different coins. The era of sacks and sieges and slaughter is over. Yes?”