The Bird King(4)
The antechamber was just as Hassan had described it, though Fatima had trouble imagining why he had ever set foot there himself: buckets and rags were piled in one whitewashed corner along with stoppered jugs of vinegar and a tub of congealed soap. An arched passage tiled in blue and gold led to the common room of the harem itself. All these things were familiar. The small door set in the right-hand wall was not.
The door was half of Fatima’s height and whitewashed, like the walls; a crossbeam cut across it diagonally, giving the impression of a cupboard or closet. She opened it, expecting stacks of bed linen. Instead she saw a flight of narrow stone stairs. Grinning to herself, Fatima ducked through the door, ascending the steps two at a time, pleased by the soft scuffing noise her feet made on the flecked stone. The edge of each step was worn to a fine polish, as if the staircase had been traversed by hundreds of pairs of feet, yet there was no sound save from her own movements, no hint that anyone else was near. There was strong light coming from somewhere; squinting upward, Fatima thought she saw a window or perhaps an empty arch. She put one hand on the wall—wide blocks of red-brown stone, in all respects a proper old wall like all the proper walls of the old palace—and crept along, stepping gingerly on each unknown surface until she reached the top. Her last step was only a half step: there were an odd number of stairs, which pleased her. They ended in a sort of parapet, a small, square tower room with a narrow window in each wall. Fatima picked one and stuck her head out.
She was greeted by a blast of wind. It smelled of dry hay and cold water: the summer heat would not last much longer. Fatima took several deep breaths, enjoying her own dizziness, blinking in the sharp-shadowed afternoon as the objects below her resolved themselves. She was in a southeast corner of the palace. Her window overlooked the low roof of the Mexuar and the wide lawn beyond, burned yellow now as it always was by summer’s end. The hill spilled away beneath it, cloaked in dark elms, tapering off at the smoke-clad medina in the valley below. There were the red-tiled roofs of villas; the cramped knot of houses that formed the Juderia. She could see tiny green squares of garden in innumerable courtyards; below these, in the lap of the valley, the shallow river that supplied them.
In the distance, where the ground flattened out, there was the wide plain of the Vega de Granada, smudged here and there with plumes of smoke and dotted with the skeletal remains of siege engines. Beyond these human outworks were the shoulders of the mountains that receded south in a humid haze, as ambivalent toward their Catholic rulers as they had been toward their Muslim ones, their pelt of pines and grasses unfurling toward a pale and factionless sky. They ended in nothing, for Fatima’s knowledge of the world did not extend as far as the sea. Yet standing there, she thought she detected the faint, damp scent of salt carried on the wind from the south. Hassan had tried his best.
Fatima pulled her head back inside with a feeling of regret. Lady Aisha had undoubtedly awoken by now and gone to bathe; her bondswoman’s absence would be noted. She turned away from the window and hurried down the echoless stairs, her footfall landing strangely in her ears, emphatic, like a kind of speech. At the bottom, she lifted the latch on the little unassuming door and passed through, shutting it behind her as softly as she could.
She stood on tiptoe in the antechamber with Hassan’s map in her hands. If she misplaced it, she would forget: the location of the door would grow indistinct in her memory, and she would confuse it with other doors that led to other rooms. She had, on occasion, attempted to find her way back to the places Hassan marked for her without a map, and inevitably got herself turned around or found familiar rooms rendered suddenly alien. It was unpleasant to be lost in your own house. She did not intend to repeat the experience.
Fatima folded the map and tore it along the crease, then folded it and tore it again, until she was left with a pile of tiny fragments. These she let flutter to the ground. Straightening, she smoothed her tunic and trousers, setting off down the tiled hallway that led into the harem itself. She did not look back: she knew well enough what she would see. The wall would fold up without a sound, as if it was made of ether, and the door would vanish, leaving no trace of itself but motes of dust suspended in the light.
The hall leading off the antechamber ended in a modest courtyard. It was ragged now with the remains of summer roses, their hips gone bulbous and discolored for want of pruning. When Fatima passed, Lady Nessma, the sultan’s half sister, was sitting on a pile of cushions in a shaded annex, strumming a lute that was slightly out of tune. Her hair was loose, spooling on the cushions like a crumpled skein of black silk. It was her great vanity. She was surrounded by a gaggle of cousins from the countryside whose families had deposited them at the palace, siege notwithstanding, to procure husbands. They had been talking when Fatima approached, but hushed when they saw her, averting their eyes and stifling giggles.
“Girl! Where have you been?” demanded Nessma. She rose, her plump, pretty form snug against the green silk robe that confined it, and handed her lute to the air. It was snatched with dogged promptness by an overdressed girl sitting at her feet. “My stepmother went to the baths alone, cursing you the entire way.”
“I was in the antechamber,” said Fatima truthfully. “There was a stain on my tunic, and I went looking for some soap.”
Nessma pursed her lips. Fatima knew she was weighing the satisfaction of demanding to see the treated stain against the risk that Fatima would complain to the sultan in bed.