The Bird King(45)

“Why do we have to run?” she burst out, suddenly exhausted. “We were on the bottom of the heap anyway. We haven’t started any wars. Why should we be chased into the sea when we haven’t done anything wrong?”

No one saw fit to answer her question. Hassan was rapidly falling asleep, his breathing softer and more regular. Vikram had arranged himself at Fatima’s feet with his back pressed gently against her aching heels. Suffused with warmth, Fatima felt her body go heavy.

“I wish we were running toward something,” she murmured, “instead of away.”

“Would you like to hear more about the journey of the birds?” asked Vikram from the vicinity of her toes. “Something you haven’t heard before?”

“You’re offering to tell me a story?”

“Yes, I am. I feel you’re about to do something stupid and I’m trying to delay you.”

“Why can’t you ever be nice?”

“I thought you were grown-up enough to prefer honest counsel. Do you want to hear the story or not?”

“Fine,” said Fatima. “Tell me something I haven’t heard before.” A thought occurred to her. She propped herself up on her elbows, eyes widening.

“Vikram,” she said. “Do you know how the poem ends? The real poem, the one Lady Aisha bought from the bookseller all those years ago?”

Vikram raised one eyebrow, or perhaps it was just a smoky crest of fur; the sleepier Fatima was, the more difficult she found it to distinguish between what he was and what he appeared to be.

“I do know how the poem ends,” he said. “But your poem, the one you and Hassan have been telling to one another, has diverged from it so profoundly that it doesn’t matter. There is no longer any real poem, or rather, one is now as real as the other.”

“There is so a real poem,” said Fatima, annoyed. “The real Conference of the Birds was written by someone, by a real person. He had certain intentions. I want to know what they were. He wrote the poem for a reason, and the reason matters.”

“Does it?” Vikram stretched his toes, revealing a row of claws as black as obsidian. “Once a story leaves the hands of its author, it belongs to the reader. And the reader may see any number of things, conflicting things, contradictory things. The author goes silent. If what he intended mattered so very much, there would be no need for inquisitions and schisms and wars. But he is silent, silent. The author of the poem is silent, the author of the world is silent. We are left with no intentions but our own.”

His voice, the least frightening part of him, as mirthful and resonant as a piece of music, sounded so unhappy that Fatima reached out instinctively to stroke his head. She had no notion of how she had blundered; the conversation had seemed safe enough. Yet Vikram was disinclined to tell her whatever it was he had intended to say, lapsing instead into purposeful silence.

“Tell me one thing, then,” she pleaded. “Tell me about the king of the birds.”

Vikram was silent a moment longer, and Fatima began to think he wouldn’t answer her.

“The king of the birds is a simorgh,” he said finally. “A phoenix.”

“What does he look like?”

“What a silly question. What do I look like?”

“You look like a lot of things, depending on how I look at you.”

“Well. Perhaps I’m not the only one.”

Fatima was too tired to press him further. She turned on her side, nestling against Hassan’s warmth, the skin on her neck prickling with eddies of air, warm and cool, warm and cool, as he breathed out and in again. She thought she might like to tell him that she loved him. It seemed a shame to wake him up, yet she did not often have such an uncomplicated impulse and could not let it pass.

“Hassan,” she whispered, nudging him with her shrouded foot.

Hassan made a small, high sound, like a child, and did not stir.

Fatima woke again in the bluest part of the night. Habit roused her: in the Alhambra she nearly always awoke to the voice of the palace muezzin as he called for the daybreak prayer. His invitation, melodious though it might be, was heeded only by the most pious of the women, among whom Fatima did not number. Lady Aisha was different: her shrewdness was tempered in those lucid hours by a more spiritual impulse, which caused her to rise, cloak herself in a plain shawl, and go to the courtyard to kneel. For Fatima, it was simply an interruption: she would wake and yawn and sigh, and relieve herself in the chamber pot, returning to her bed in a half-conscious state of protest. Lady Aisha had once said, “You might join me one day,” to which Fatima replied, “I might not,” and there the conversation had ended. Yet it seemed the continual summonses of the muezzin had done their work: she was awake now, called by a voice she could no longer hear but still heeded.

Extracting herself from Hassan’s limp arms, Fatima stood, hissing as she put weight on her feet. She was surprised to discover she could walk well enough if she wasn’t too hasty about it: Vikram’s bandages were wrapped so tightly that they diffused much of the pain. Vikram himself had disappeared. Stepping gingerly toward the mouth of the cave, Fatima retrieved her boots and levered her feet into them by careful degrees. They were snug now, but they would serve.

The birds were waking as she stepped out onto the mountainside. A little snow star nestled between the rocks just beyond the mouth of the cave, its pink blossoms incongruous in their bed of nettles. Farther downslope, dwarfish pines twisted out of the steep gradient and turned toward the sun at right angles, taking on a dizzy, scattered appearance, like a forest tipped on its side. Fatima squatted against one of them and pulled up her robe. She found herself looking downhill, past streams of gray rubble that merged and split like water as they descended toward the bottom of the ravine. There was movement below her: the glossy shoulders of a crow stretching its wings in the boughs of a woody rosemary. It croaked bitterly to itself, as though the riot of songbirds had disturbed its rest. Fatima laughed. The crow cocked its head and looked up at her. In a burst of black feathers, it leaped into the air, rising steadily until it cleared the pine tops, and then turned south, disappearing into a damp and still-dark sky.