The Bird King(21)
“Don’t touch me,” said Fatima. “Never touch me again.”
The smile faltered. Fatima felt a pang of guilt and no notion of how to relieve it. What could she say? She could not envision a God who demanded such particularity of belief, whose mercy and forgiveness were confined to such a precise segment of humankind. Nor, if it came to that, could she fathom hell, which seemed a somewhat contradictory place: you could be sent there for behaving in the right way but believing in the wrong God, or for believing in the right God but behaving in the wrong way. And that, in turn, threw heaven into disarray, since those who both believed and behaved rightly were invited to indulge in the very pleasures for which those who behaved wrongly had been sent to hell. If Luz was right, she would be punished for failing to acknowledge that God had a son; if the imam who grumbled from the minbar in the royal mosque was right, she would be punished for even considering such a proposition. Belief never seemed to enter into anything: it was simply a matter of selecting the correct system of enticements.
“Please say something,” said Luz. “I don’t want this to be the last conversation we ever have.”
Fatima considered her words carefully.
“If you love someone, you don’t think of them in hell,” she said. “If you can imagine someone in hell, it means you hate them.”
Luz shook her head.
“No,” she said softly. “Hate and love aren’t like that. Hate is a false feeling. You can stop someone from hating something. Love is much more dangerous.”
The air was smoky: this was the time when each household banked its cooking fire for the night. The entire city would exhale in one great acrid breath, making the darkest hours thick and cold and heavy on the tongue. Fatima wanted to crawl into bed beside Lady Aisha as she had done when she was a small child; to feel, if not safe, then at least protected by someone whose orders were always obeyed. Yet it was not to be: the sultan’s little messenger had appeared in the lamplight at the edge of the courtyard, putting an end to the conversation.
“Mistress Fatima,” he piped. “The sultan—”
“Fine, all right,” said Fatima, feeling her cheeks go hot. She didn’t want Luz to witness this particular interaction, this blunt prelude to the nights she spent with her master. She stole a glance at the silent inquisitor and found her looking back, her face ashen in the dark.
“You could be free of this,” said Luz with a pleading lilt in her voice. “Say the word and I will make you free. My masters are more powerful than your sultan will ever be.”
Though the night air had only just begun to cool, Fatima’s teeth were chattering.
“Are you free?” she asked. “You can’t even call yourself what you are because you’re not a man. You have masters, you just said so. How can you make me free if you’re not free yourself?”
Luz didn’t answer. The sultan’s boy was fidgeting in the colonnade, struggling, no doubt, to understand what they were saying.
“I have to go,” said Fatima, turning toward him. “Good night.”
“I didn’t want to be your enemy,” said Luz to her back. “Things are going to happen very fast, and when they do, remember that.”
Abu Abdullah was still dressed in his court clothes when Fatima arrived at his quarters. He had removed his turban, however, and the weight of it had left an unflattering crease in his hair, like the nipped ring of a monk’s tonsure. Though he had called for her, he barely registered her presence, absorbed in a long document that hung from his fingers and was written, or so it seemed, in Latin.
“What is that?” Fatima asked uneasily after a full minute of silence. Abu Abdullah looked up at her in surprise, as if she were unknown to him.
“The Castilians have laid out their terms,” he said when he recovered. “This was delivered less than an hour ago.”
“Terms of surrender?”
“Yes.” Abu Abdullah threw the paper at his night table, where it landed with a loud clack. “Terms of surrender.” He looked at her with the eyes of a lost thing. “I am going to be the last sultan of Granada, Fatima. Last and least. Ridiculous poems will be written about me and my reign. I’ll become some awful metaphor. They want me to kiss their hands, these Spanish monarchs. It’s right there. Kiss their hands! They know we don’t bow, yet—” He ran a hand through his hair, doing nothing to correct the crease. “It seems I am to be humiliated.”
Fatima plucked the treaty from the night table and examined it. It was a useless gesture; such a thing would take her hours to translate, and only with the help of someone fluent. A lump formed in her throat.
“Why do they hate us so much?” she asked.
“I’ll tell you,” said Abu Abdullah, pulling off his long coat. “It’s our fault. We’ve given everyone too much freedom. Our poets write odes to their male lovers. My mother spent half her fortune on a university for heretics and alchemists. Muslims and Jews and Christians mingle and live alongside each other, and here we are—weak and indulgent, just as the Castilians say. And they see you—” Here he crossed the room and cupped Fatima’s face in both his hands. “The most beautiful woman in all of Europe, and I keep you openly, and you are not my wife. They hate me because I do in the daylight what their own kings are ashamed to do in the dark. They have concubines, just as I do, but in their religion these women are adulteresses damned to hell, their children bastards. That’s not our way. Our sons will be princes, our daughters will marry into the finest families, and none of them will be bastards, because there is no shame in what we do. And for that, they call me a libertine.”