The Bird King(33)

“Such powers of perception it has. Of course I know Lady Aisha. How many hours have we spent together in the courtyard while she played the lute and you moped about in corners, pretending to mend the linen?”

“I mean you know her particularly,” said Fatima, exasperated. “You aren’t just a dog, and she wasn’t just playing the lute. You must have met her somehow.”

“Ah.” Vikram smiled. “Well. That is a good story. Once upon a time, when Lady Aisha was simply Aisha, not yet the wife of one sultan and mother to the next, I stole a pair of jeweled slippers from her.”

“Why?”

“I wanted her to run away with me.”

“Run away with Lady Aisha?” Fatima laughed. “Why would you want that, and why would you steal her slippers if you did?”

“She was bewitching as a girl,” said Vikram defensively. “She still is. Not pretty in the profound sense that Fatima is pretty, but compelling and sly and maddeningly aloof, like Scheherazade or Cleopatra. Everyone was dying of love for her. She would have none of it, of course. She wanted the most powerful man in Granada, and by God, she got him. It was he who gave her the slippers as an engagement gift. I thought that if I stole them and she was found to be without them, there would be a scandal, and the engagement would be called off.”

“That’s not a very nice thing to do to someone you love,” muttered Hassan, shifting his bags from one shoulder to the other.

“I’m not nice, as it happens. And anyway, this was not precisely love. Jinn don’t love very often, or very much. We are prone to mild obsessions, however, which is what this was.”

“What happened? I can’t imagine Lady Aisha in a torrid love triangle with a jinn. She’s always seemed so remote and forbidding to me. This is entirely new information.”

“There was no torrid love triangle, so you’re excused from imagining it. No, Aisha didn’t care for me in the least, and told me so frequently. A day came when her betrothed—presently to become your master’s father, Fatima—visited her in her father’s villa, expecting to see her wearing his costly gift. She appeared before him barefoot, which was a shockingly intimate thing to do with a man to whom she wasn’t yet married. She told him she’d given the slippers to a beggar who had no shoes in exchange for his blessing upon their marriage. Her fiancé left even more pleased with her than when he’d arrived, and the wedding was pushed forward by a month. Thus ended my pursuit.”

“What did you do with the slippers?” asked Fatima.

“I gave them to my sister in the Empty Quarter. I’ve spent much of the last four decades paying off my debt. Which is why we are all here together. What a happy coincidence.” With that, Vikram put his head down and trotted onward on all fours, resuming his private monologue. Fatima and Hassan struggled after him and lapsed into silence.

They walked until midday without seeing any sign of life. The foothills to their left turned white and shimmered in the heat, exhaling some internal luminescence. When the sun was highest, a lone falcon began to circle above their heads. It cried piteously and without cease, as if pleading for some response.

“That thing is eerie,” Hassan said, stopping and huffing to catch his breath. Walking over the uneven ground had made his cheeks as florid as his hair. “Why is it making such a racket? Could it be a Castilian spy?”

Vikram looked up at the bird and knit his brows.

“You joke, but you may be more right than you realize,” he murmured, climbing a rise to get a better view. “Falcons are curious birds. They’ll follow anything that interests them. As long as it trails us, anyone hunting you will know there is movement here in the foothills.”

“Can’t we make it go away?” asked Fatima, peering up at it. The bird crossed in front of the hazy sun; she closed her eyes and saw its double.

“I don’t speak with birds,” said Vikram, jumping down into the dry streambed in which they had been walking. “Birds can walk and swim and fly and augur the future, so they’re more like my kind than they are like yours. There’s a certain mutual suspicion.”

Fatima looked back up at the falcon. It floated in the thick air, tracing a series of oblong shapes against the clouds. Several times as they walked, Fatima had thought she heard the muffled howl of a dog, sometimes far off and sometimes nearer, though the hills to their left and the rise and fall of the ground made it difficult to tell where the sound was coming from. Vikram, for his part, never gave any sign of alarm. He trotted along on all fours across the broken terrain and growled like a madman, absorbed in his own opaque thoughts. Fatima told herself that if he was unafraid, she had no reason to be otherwise, and fought the upswells of anxiety when they came. But the falcon was different: it was neither pursuer nor friend, and the ambiguity made Fatima uneasy.

“Maybe we can distract it with something,” she said. “Don’t birds like baubles and shiny things?”

“Good idea,” laughed Hassan. “What a shame we’ve left our diamond cuffs, golden necklets, and ropes of pearls in the Alhambra. They would be so handy just now.”

Fatima glanced down at her wrists. She had, in fact, possessed a pair of gold cuffs, a gift from the sultan when they started sharing a bed. They were beautiful, beaten into a thousand facets and polished so that they caught the light. But Lady Maryam had seen her wearing them in the courtyard one day—it was before she had retired to her own room and stopped receiving anyone—and appraised her silently for a moment that went on far too long. Fatima put the cuffs away in a box. She wore no jewelry now except for her anklets.