The Bird King(44)
“What does that mean? What’s common?”
Vikram handed the map back to Hassan and shifted Fatima on his back.
“All children of the banu adam are born with a bit of the First Speech,” he said. “The language spoken by the angels and the beasts and the jinn before the birth of humankind. Incorruptible knowledge. Helps you see the intersections of things. You call it fitrah in your faith. In nearly all cases, it fades as the child grows up, but for a very few, it doesn’t.”
“Does that mean you know what it is?” asked Fatima, sitting up straighter. “Is there a name for what Hassan does?”
“Oh, undoubtedly. It’s a miracle.”
“Don’t make fun of me,” protested Hassan.
“Who’s making fun of you? I’m as serious as I ever get.”
“But Hassan isn’t a holy man,” said Fatima. The image of Hassan as a wandering ascetic, with a long beard and a short robe and a pious scowl, was so comical that she almost laughed.
“Neither are most miracle workers,” said Vikram. “Most are ordinary men and women with all the usual flaws and hypocrisies. People would rather call them witches and burn them than acknowledge that miracles are bestowed upon the world with glorious, unfathomable generosity, because people are idiots.”
Fatima studied Hassan’s long fingers, occupied now in stowing the map in his satchel. They did not appear miraculous. Or if they did, so did everything else: the trees exhaling in the darkness, insensible of any danger Fatima might face; the halo of distant stars overhead, more insensible still. The matter that populated the world seemed bound together by nothing, yet it all persisted nonetheless: trees, stars, foxes, corpses, Castilians and Berbers, jinn and men and slaves. Fatima was hungry and dirty, but somewhere far behind her, Lady Aisha was clean and well fed, and perhaps thinking of her at that very moment, just as she was thinking of her old mistress. Perhaps the real miracle was that the world could support so much contradiction. Next to that, Hassan’s talents seemed rather modest.
“A miracle,” said Hassan from the darkness beside her, his voice small. “I never had the courage to think of it that way. People always thought it was funny that I still pray, in spite of being—well, being the way I am. The imam who gives the Friday sermon at the Alhambra told me I needn’t bother. To my face, Fa! As if I had no right to pray, as if one must be perfect before one sits on a prayer mat. Yet I have always prayed. As a child, I asked for so many things. I would kneel and ask and ask and ask. It was the only time I ever felt as though someone heard me. I never got most of the things I prayed for. But I did get this.”
He lapsed into silence. Fatima reached out and took his hand and held it up against the sky, and through his fingers saw the starlight winking. The cave Hassan had coaxed out of the rock looked small as they approached it, a simple confluence of sandstone blocks to which a few young pines were clinging: when Hassan stood upright, his head brushed the ceiling; and when Fatima climbed down from Vikram’s back and limped toward him, she had to duck to fit inside. Nevertheless, it was dry and level and several strides long, tapering downward as it merged into the rubbly hillside. Fatima lowered herself to the ground with a moan, curling her knees up toward her body.
“Give me your feet, little sister,” said Vikram. “And chew on this lovely thing I picked as we were walking.” He pressed something flat and damp into Fatima’s hand. It was a length of pale tree bark, its greenish underside glistening with sap. Fatima popped it into her mouth. A bitter, herbal flavor burst over her tongue. She chewed obediently, trying to ignore the stabs of pain as Vikram bent her foot from side to side.
“What a mess,” he said. “Hassan—choose the least offensive of those gaudy sashes you’ve got in your sack and give it to me.”
Fatima heard Hassan sigh as he riffled through the canvas bag.
“That’s three robes and two sashes you owe me now,” he told her.
“I saved your life,” said Fatima.
“When we’re stashed in a nice little cog on its way to Tunis or Timbuktu, with a hot plate of food and one snug berth apiece, I will thank you properly,” said Hassan. “For now, I’ll keep a tally of my clothes.”
“You’re so sweet,” Fatima muttered. Hassan lay down next to her and flung his arm across his face, kicking off his own boots and wiggling his toes in the night air.
“I really am grateful,” he said in a different voice. “It’s an awful thing, you know, to be tolerated—everyone needs you, nobody wants you. There was a time when I thought the sultan—” He paused with the smallest catch in his voice. “He was always very pleasant to me, except for once or twice. He never seemed afraid or disgusted. I know he has to do what he thinks is right, but I never imagined that he—that I could be taken from my own room in the middle of the night, and he would say nothing. That I could mean so little in the end.”
Fatima found Hassan’s hand and stroked it, unsure of what to say. The willow bark was doing its work: the pain in her feet, though persistent, was no longer at the forefront of her mind. Vikram was a surprisingly delicate nurse, winding one half of Hassan’s sash around her heel and tucking the end in with a gentleness that did not seem possible for a set of talons. Looking down, Fatima saw two neat bundles of blue cloth where her feet had been. The effect was somewhat ridiculous.