The Bird King(46)
Alone again, Fatima shook out her robe and began climbing back up the mountainside. Going up was more difficult than coming down: the angle hurt her feet and the rubble that had been so compliant while she was going downhill slid about when she put weight on it, giving her no purchase. It was noisy too. Cursing in a whisper, Fatima dug her fingers into the earth and pulled herself along, glad there was no one to witness her fumbling. After a few minutes of this, she cursed in earnest, and leaned against the roots of a dead tree to reorient herself.
She could not see the cave. The rocks, the bent trunks of the pine trees, all these looked familiar, but then again, they all looked alike. Turning in a half circle, Fatima couldn’t determine where she had gone wrong. She thought she recognized a ledge of sandstone some distance above her, yet there was nothing below it but rocks and dirt. Fatima climbed a bit farther and tried not to whimper. Something pink trembled just beneath the hem of her robe: she teetered to avoid it, startled.
It was the snow star. Fatima’s limbs went wooden.
“Hassan?” she called, as loudly as she dared. No one answered. The songbirds had fallen into a syncopated rhythm, each melody filling the silence left by the one that preceded it, making the air dense with sound. Fatima called for Vikram, willing him to frighten her, to pop out of the ether near her elbow as he seemed to like to do, but wherever he was, the opportunity did not tempt him. Fatima felt as though she were hovering over the crown of her own head, observing herself with the dispassion of an undertaker.
She had left without the map.
It had not occurred to her to do otherwise. The cave seemed profoundly unremarkable: chilly, shallow, perfumed by loam and the chalky scent of sandstone, as banal a place as Fatima had ever seen, except for the fact that it hadn’t existed before she and Hassan set foot in it. It felt unfair: she had gone out unthinkingly, with every intention of returning. She had walked only a dozen paces downhill. Surely a little convergence of stone and earth, even one Hassan had created, could not be so far outside the ordinary scheme of things that it couldn’t be found if sought. It was as if Fatima had been snubbed. For a moment she was envious of Hassan, not for his talents, but for the way the silent, visceral elements of the world seemed to love him and conspire on his behalf, to the exclusion of others.
Fatima turned in a circle, scanning each little undulation of rock for some sign. She found none, and began to make her way down the mountainside again, in what she hoped was a southerly direction. Light was beginning to break on the narrow valley below, illuminating tangles of gorse still pricked with yellow flowers. The wind carried hints of smoke; the campfires she had seen in the night would be out by now, leaving her with no way to guess where the men who had lit them were waiting. Fatima told herself she would not cry again: she hated crying; it gave her none of the relief it seemed to give other people. Instead, she balled her hands into fists, digging her nails into her palms until they smarted. This sensation, and the complicated nature of scrambling down a steep slope in bad light, occupied her thoughts so completely that she did not at first register the sound of singing that carried toward her from the valley.
The voices were gruff and happy and possibly a little drunk. It was only when she realized they were singing in Castilian that Fatima seized up where she stood, one swollen foot hanging in midair. Limping toward a fallen log, Fatima peered down at a small clearing on the valley floor, and saw a cluster of felt caps around the remains of a fire. A pair of broad-shouldered packhorses dozed nearby. There were cuirasses of battered steel plate piled beside the fire, attended by a boy, a squire or a servant perhaps, who appeared to be fiddling with the buckles while half asleep. These were soldiers, then, or mercenaries of some wealth. In the half dark, Fatima could not make out the colors of their doublets to determine where they owed their allegiance: all she could tell for certain was that they were directly in her path.
The rubble beneath Fatima’s feet began to slide away. She crouched and pressed her back against the hillside, holding herself rigid. A trickle of rock clacked and tumbled down the meandering slope to rain on the edge of the clearing below, tickling the boughs of the pines that ringed the soldiers’ camp. One of the men looked up and swatted his companion on the belly.
“Creo que he oido algo.”
“Qué?”
The first man whistled. The boy who had been fiddling with the stack of armor got to his feet and frowned up the hill, lifting a pike in his small hands. Fatima closed her eyes and willed him not to see her. She thought of the contours of Hassan’s map and tried to re-create them in her mind: the way the ravine turned west at its narrowest point, the gentler slope of the hill on the far side. Hassan himself had said that Fatima could navigate the mountain passes on her own with a map such as his. These were not simply tick marks on a piece of paper: they were hills with a definite shape, if only she could remember. Perhaps if she could cross the ravine in front of the soldiers, she could put the far hill, the one with the more forgiving elevation, between them and herself. Barely breathing, Fatima altered course, inching sideways along the hillside instead of down, lowering each foot to the ground by increments.
“Start singing again,” she whispered. “Sing your horrible songs.”
The men stayed mute. Fatima could hear the clatter of steel and wood, the squeal of a rudely awakened horse. In front of her, the ground was dropping away: the ravine shrank to a treeless gap wide enough for a single man on horseback, full of brittle shale, the debris of old rockslides. Clinging to the branches of a young pine, Fatima lowered herself into the gap, dropping the last several feet to land hard on the shattered rocks below. The jolt made her howl. Somewhere behind her, the men began to shout. Clawing at the pliant earth, Fatima dragged herself up the far side of the ravine, kicking up a hail of dirt and stone until she could taste both when she breathed. She didn’t dare look over her shoulder. Finally she emerged onto turf and autumn weeds: the far hillside sloped upward toward its mild zenith, treeless except for a few knots of juniper. Fatima ran, her feet protesting, registering each footfall as a dull throb in her heel. The voices behind her were growing closer.