The Bird King(23)

“Get out,” he said.

The palace was quiet as Fatima skittered from one dark corridor to the next. Her feet would not take her back to the harem: she knew where she must go instead. She was so heady with the thrill of disobedience that she lost her way once, turning right when she should have turned left, and was forced to retrace her steps. Everything she did felt too slow. She had no way of knowing when the Castilians might come for Hassan, whether each minute she fumbled might bring a rap on his door, toward which he would stumble, possibly drunk, unaware of what waited for him. She wanted to run but was wary of making too much noise: there were muffled voices on the second-floor loggia above her head, and they were not speaking Arabic. Instead she danced along on tiptoe, racing through the intersections of hallways until she was out of breath and the strong green scent of the Court of Myrtles enveloped her.

Fatima crossed the grassy court, skirting the reflecting pool, leaving a muted trail through the newly fallen dew. Hassan’s workroom was dark, but the door to his sleeping chamber was lined with firelight. Fatima jogged up the stone steps and past Hassan’s mess of papers and pounded on it, hoping belatedly that he was alone.

The door swung open. Hassan squinted out at her, adjusting to the dark.

“Fatima?” His voice was an incredulous rasp. “What the hell are you doing here at this hour?”

“We have to go,” said Fatima, slipping past him and shutting the door behind her. “Now, now, now.” A canvas sack, such as tradesmen and itinerant clerks carried from city to city, lay sprawled at the foot of his bed: she opened it and began to grab robes and hose and sashes from the bright piles heaped on the floor.

“What are you talking about? Go where? I’m exhausted and famished! Before you turned up, I was debating whether I was too hungry to sleep, or too sleepy to nip down to the kitchen for some bread.”

“Hassan.” Fatima plopped down on the floor and looked up at him, pleading. “Listen to what I’m saying. The Castilians want to take you away. They’re going to give you to the—anyway, you’re part of the peace treaty. They’re coming for you—now—and no one is going to stop them, because the sultan has already said yes.”

Hassan’s blotchy, unassuming face was drained of color. He sat down and looked at his hands as if to accuse them of something.

“I was going to perform the late prayer,” he said. “In the courtyard, since the stars are out. I like to. Can we wait that long?”

“Wait?” Fatima twisted her lip. “The Inquisition is looking for you, and you want to sit outside to do the late prayer? The late prayer. It’s not even one of the mandatory ones.”

Hassan’s eyes widened.

“Did you say the Inquisition?”

“It’s my fault,” said Fatima, trying not to cry. “It was Luz. She smiled and simpered and made us all like her, and I thought—” Here she was forced to admit something that she did not like. “I thought I was smarter than she is. But I’m not.”

Hassan was quiet for several minutes as Fatima stuffed the canvas sack with clothing.

“Oh, Fa,” he said at last, his voice very small. “Where are we going to go?”

“I don’t know,” said Fatima, wiping her wet eyes angrily with the back of one hand. “Away.”

Hassan rose. He opened a small cupboard and began to remove sheaves of paper, charcoals, gum arabic, brushes, ink. These he arranged, with more care than Fatima had ever seen him put into anything, in a buckled case of boiled leather with a carry-strap sewn from end to end, which he looped over one shoulder.

“You don’t have to come with me,” he said. “Stay here, where it’s safe. They’ll give the sultan a snug estate somewhere, or he’ll cross the Strait to Morocco. Go with him.”

Fatima shook her head.

“They’ll know I helped you get away,” she said. “It won’t be any safer for me here than it is for you.”

“But sweeting”—he knelt next to her and plucked at her tunic, like a child seeking attention—“you don’t own a pair of shoes.”

Fatima looked down at her naked feet. It had not occurred to her that one might need things outside the palace that one did not need inside it. A sense of profound, infuriating helplessness overcame her, and she began to sob in earnest.

“Lend me some,” she sputtered. Hassan leaped to his feet and began to rummage through a wooden chest, pulling out various small items and rejecting them, until, with a cry of triumph, he produced a pair of much-worn leather boots. Kneeling, he slipped them onto Fatima’s feet with melancholy tenderness, tightening the drawstrings around her calves.

“There,” he said. “Your first pair of shoes. May you live to wear a hundred nicer ones.”

Sniffling, Fatima stuck out one foot and wiggled it experimentally. The boots were too big, far heavier and clammier than the quilted silk slippers that kept her feet warm in winter or the wooden clogs she wore to and from the stool chamber. Yet the weathering of the heels and the bend at the ball of the foot suggested they had carried Hassan many miles, and might do the same for her. That, at least, was something.

“Here!” Hassan was up again, clattering in a corner of the room, and turned around with a pair of daggers in steel-studded leather sheaths, which he held up, one in each quivering hand, like an improbable assassin. “Defensive measures! The captain of the infantry gave me these after the battle of Zahara—which I helped win, you know, even though I wasn’t actually there—and I just chucked them into the corner. Whoever thought I’d need them? Here, take this one and put it in your sash.”