The Bird King(37)

“Thank you, Vikram, for saving me from the brigand who would have killed me where I slept,” the dog-man suggested with a leer. “That’s what you meant to say.”

“But did you have to eat him?”

Vikram pretended not to hear. He began to wipe his face with his hair, removing the crimson paint, returning himself to his usual late-afternoon color.

“Did you know that lions once lived in the Vega?” he asked. “Many, many centuries ago. The banu adam hunted the last one in the days of your long-ago grandfathers. They were big, these lions, with short, pale manes. They ruled over this whole plain, from foothill to foothill. But even the noblest predator must die, and when he does, he becomes food for the jackal.” Vikram finished his toilette and shook himself, ruffling out his coat, looking suddenly like a dog again. Watching him was like looking at a robe of translucent silk: opaque in some lights, yet quick to reveal the body underneath when the sun struck it. “I’m the jackal. I get hungry too.”

Hassan could marshal no counterargument and lapsed into dazed silence. Fatima stared at the Castilian’s feet, the only part of him that had escaped their encounter unscathed: ordinary feet in ordinary shoes of soft-soled leather, crowned by bloodless ankles. Perhaps, after all this bother, life was only a choice between two kinds of brutality: the wretched sort that lay on the ground before her, and the civilized sort she had left behind.

“Who was he?” came Hassan’s voice, cautiously. Vikram made a purring noise and peeled back the blood-reddened collar of the Castilian’s doublet. Sewn inside was a crest embroidered on a piece of linen: a cross flanked by a palm frond and a sword.

“I’ve seen that before,” said Fatima, wiping her brow with her unbloodied hand. “It was on a letter in Luz’s trunk.”

“The crest of the Holy Office,” said Vikram. He let the Castilian’s collar drop. “This man was a scout. They travel fast, your hunters—very fast.” He rocked back on his furred heels and frowned. “Too fast.”

“What does that mean?” Hassan pressed.

“I’m not sure,” said Vikram. “For now, it means we must move on.”

“Move on? Now? No—Fa has had a terrible shock. She needs rest. We both do. Our feet will fall off. We haven’t had a real sleep. Or a meal. Some of us aren’t made of fire or shadow or whatever it is you are.”

“Do you have another solution?” snapped Vikram, clacking his teeth. “If this man has reached us, more will follow. There is only bare earth between us and the southern pass, unless you can coax a well-fortified castle out of the ground with your little talents.”

Hassan, inclined to be literal, bit his lip and surveyed the landscape.

“No,” he said finally. “There’s not enough here. I can make little shortcuts—little rearrangements. Not whole houses or hills. The last time I tried that, there was a real—” His lip twitched. “A real mess.”

Fatima knew what he meant, though she looked away and pretended she did not. It had been a day in midwinter, the year the princes and little Aisha had gone into Castile and not come back. Fatima had been carrying water from the kitchen to the harem. Her fingers were rigid from the chill and the weight of the buckets suspended from her hands. She had been furious. The serving women—there had been several back then, before the siege—usually performed these menial tasks, but now that the princes were gone, they looked at Fatima and saw a slave instead of a royal playmate.

As she hefted the buckets—water sloshing on her slippers, on the hem of her trousers—she rehearsed the impassioned complaint she planned to make to Lady Aisha as soon as her task was finished. The injustice of it filled her so completely that she set the buckets down again in order to better arrange her thoughts. In the silence, she heard Hassan sobbing brokenly somewhere nearby.

He was still a beardless apprentice then and had not yet grown into his large hands. He was sitting in the entryway of the sultan’s private quarters, quite alone except for the sultan himself. The sight of her master made Fatima stop and hold her breath. The sultan was almost a boy that winter, though already several years a husband and father; he was also, Fatima remembered somewhat wistfully, at the height of his pale-lipped, dark-eyed beauty, though she had been too young to understand what this meant. Instead, she had ducked behind a pillar, filled with the kind of anxiety that comes from witnessing something one is not meant to see.

“Make it work,” the sultan was saying to Hassan in a low voice. “Try. Try, Hassan, for your king’s sake.”

“I can’t.” Hassan was bent over a lap desk. Fatima could hear his charcoal scraping across a sheet of paper. “Please don’t ask me. There are so many walls, so many miles—it doesn’t work this way.”

“How does it work?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m not a magician, sire. I can’t simply open a portal. It’s too far. It’s two hundred miles, more than two hundred miles. Sire—”

“I need my children.” The sultan’s voice was shaking. “My wife is half dead with weeping. Make a map. Close the distance. Do something, or I will run mad.”

There was a scuffle. Fatima could not see exactly what was happening, but as far as she could guess, the sultan had seized Hassan’s hand, or perhaps his arm, as if to direct the strokes of his pencil. Hassan made a wild, despairing sound. It was then that the corridor in which Fatima stood, water pooling at her feet and bloating her slippers, went dark. She turned around and around in dismay. The windows had vanished. They had been swallowed by the walls, or so it seemed; there was only stone where there had once been wooden latticework and open air. The door at the end of the corridor had also disappeared. Fatima was standing in a long stone tomb that was sealed at both ends. She heard terrified screaming leaching up from the floors and through the walls.