The Bird King(41)

“Do you think they will?” asked Fatima, looking up at him. He was a dark blot against the sun. “Do you think we’re that important?”

“I think you’re that distinctive,” said Vikram, leaping off the edge of the well and landing in a soft puff of dust. “All one would have to do is put out the word that a Circassian girl is making her way south with a red-haired scribe for a companion, and make it clear that anyone who helps them will run afoul of the Holy Office. How many travelers fit that description, do you suppose?”

Fatima looked down at her hands and said nothing.

“Besides,” said Vikram in a quieter voice, “that woman—the golden-haired one—she has a vicious streak in her. Do you know she broke two of my ribs that night in the harem garden? Crunch, with that little white foot, right here.” Vikram gestured to his side, where the broad chest of a man blended shade by shade into the dappled pelt of a beast. “It’s difficult to hurt something like me. You couldn’t manage it, Fatima, because you don’t like to cause pain, even at the height of your fury. You could kick and kick without making a dent. No—to hurt me, you’d have to enjoy it.”

Fatima didn’t like to remember that evening. The thought of Luz made her chest tighten unexpectedly. She rose and shook the dust from her bloodied robe. A breeze had kicked up and was dancing down the valley, buffeting her face; it smelled of the sap and oil of the olive groves, the warm untended earth. A lone sheep-bell clanked tonelessly somewhere nearby, rattling with the breeze and then going silent when it died down, only to start up again when the air roused itself. Fatima followed the sound into the shadow of the abandoned house, now more a carapace of stone than anything resembling a dwelling: everything made of wood had been looted or burned, leaving the doorways empty and the windows unshuttered, the slanted roof open to the sky. Fatima ducked through the remains of the front door to stand inside.

The house was generous. It had been two full stories once and a stone staircase still ran halfway up one wall, ending at nothing. Fatima was standing in what must have been the kitchen. There was a blackened hearth in a tiled niche; a domed clay oven sat above it, unraked coals still inside. The floor was filthy, covered in a thin layer of dried mud and rushes and signs of animals bedding down at night. An animal smell lingered too. Near Fatima’s foot was the unmistakable imprint of a man’s boot, the toe pointing toward the center of the room like the tip of a spear: the smallest suggestion of violence.

A bell began to clank again, so close that Fatima jumped. The sound was coming from a far corner of the room, where, draped across the steps leading down to a weedy garden, lay the skeleton of a ram. Its skull, all jawbone and hollow eyes, was flung back, as if the beast had offered itself up for sacrifice. The bell Fatima had heard hung from the sinewy remains of its neck and swayed back and forth in an invisible current. Fatima stared at it, transfixed. How quickly the earth and air reclaimed the dead, stripping fur from flesh and flesh from bone, leaving behind only an outline, a tailor’s pattern, pinned together with vertebrae. Fatima felt as though she was intruding on something sacred. It was as if a tailor was there in the room, unstitching the work of man, returning the house and the beasts to rubble and loam, and Fatima was not meant to see.

A sudden flash of red made her gasp. There was something moving behind the ram, extricating itself from the nest of bones in a rippling mass of fur. Fatima groped at her knife. The mass made a small chittering sound and sprouted a pair of tufted ears. It was a fox. Fatima sighed with relief and sat down hard on her tailbone, her legs weak and sweating.

“You scared me,” she told the fox. It looked at her with round yellow eyes, baffled.

“I thought you were a jinn,” she said. “Some horrible thing with too many teeth, like Vikram.”

Indifferent, the fox flicked its tail at her. It slipped down the garden stairs on tiny black feet and disappeared into the weeds. Fatima took several long breaths, fanning her face with one hand.

“You shouldn’t be here alone.” Vikram appeared beside her as if summoned and sat on his haunches, his own yellow eyes following the trail the fox had left behind in the swaying grass. “It’s not safe.”

Fatima wiped her face on her sleeve.

“I like to be alone sometimes,” she said. “This isn’t an evil place. Evil things have been done here, that’s all.”

“You try very hard to be brave. Well and good. You can be as brave while walking as you can while sitting. The sun is high, it’s time to go—and you’ve got to change first. If you’re spotted in that butcher’s apron, someone might think you’ve killed a man.”

Fatima looked down at the blood-stiffened embroidery along the front of her robe. Beneath it, her skin felt tacky; she had not yet washed.

“Is the whole world like this?” she asked, half to herself. “Full of endings? Does anything begin anymore? Are there places where people laugh?”

“Why should it matter to you?” Vikram picked himself up and shook the dust from his pelt. “You don’t laugh much.”

“Sometimes I think I might like to.” She watched as he ambled into the sunshine on all fours, growling incoherently.

“Vikram,” she called after him. “I’m serious.”

He turned and considered her.

“This isn’t the end of the world, little Fatima,” he said in a voice that was almost kind. “It’s only the end of the world you know.”