The Bird King(51)

Fatima reached toward it with her hands. The color stretched out toward a horizon that was perfectly flat, where it merged with the setting sun.

“I want to touch it,” she said. “It can’t really be water. It must be something else. I want to touch it.”

Vikram only smiled and began to sing. Fatima stood where she was and listened to the breathing of the waves. She could hear Hassan struggling up the hillside toward them, exhaustion making his gait halting and irregular. At the summit, he lowered himself to the ground and reached up for Fatima’s hand.

“We’re alive,” he marveled. “Three days on foot over bad terrain, with worse food, and nearly murdered, and we are still alive. If only Lady Aisha could see us now.”

“I don’t even care about that,” said Fatima. “I don’t want to look at anything else except the sea, ever again. Let the Holy Office come.”

“Let it not,” sighed Hassan, leaning against her leg. He followed her gaze over the firelit town and down to the open water. The roll and hush of the waves below steadily filled the silence between them. The line of sand thinned minute by minute as Fatima watched it, and the slim hulls of beached fishing boats began to right themselves and float.

“The beach is disappearing,” she said, alarmed. “It’s filling up with water. Look.”

“The tide is coming in,” laughed Hassan. “It’ll go out again before dawn.”

“Why?”

“The moon pulls the water when it rises and sets.”

“The moon?” Fatima looked over her shoulder and saw a waning crescent peek out from beyond the hilltops. “How is that possible?”

“Merciful God, I don’t know. But the look on your face right now is so funny. Ask some more questions.”

Fatima realized her mouth was hanging open and shut it. She lay down and looked at the first of the stars overhead. They glittered faintly, multiplying as the light faded. The air was full of salt and smoke. There seemed, for the first time since she had left the Alhambra, paths through the great world that were open to her.

“It’s time to make a decision,” came Vikram’s voice in the twilight, gently. Fatima turned to look at him. His hair streamed down across his shoulders, lifting strand by strand in the light wind; his smile was, she thought, a little sad.

“Not now,” she begged, propping herself up on one elbow. “I haven’t had a rest since before dawn.”

“You can’t live on this hill. Down in the harbor there are ships. Each will run a different course, but you can only board one.”

Fatima twisted Lady Aisha’s ring on her finger. Now that she had the leisure to admit it to herself, she found she had thought no farther than this hill at the edge of the map that hung on the wall in the sultan’s bedroom, beyond which was only blank paper and Hassan’s crudely drawn sea serpent: perhaps she never believed they would survive long enough to decide what came next. They had fled to spite their masters but now they must live for something else. The how seemed as important as the where, but the where came first, and try as she might, Fatima could not imagine a place that felt safe.

“Should we cross the Strait, like everyone else?” she hazarded.

“You ask that as if there is a right and a wrong answer,” said Vikram. He was looking at her in a way she found unsettling.

“I want to say something,” announced Hassan, looking out toward the water. “Something mad.”

Fatima recognized the vacant light that had entered Hassan’s eyes and quaked inwardly.

“The thing I do with maps. I’ve always wondered whether it isn’t some kind of intuition, better than what everyone else has, but the same sort of thing: whittling unconsciously through possibilities until I arrive at the sole possibility, the truth. Like being very, very good at guessing, so good that sometimes the angels indulge me and make my guess right even when it isn’t—so that a cave appears in the rocks, or a tower in the palace, or a trapdoor in the floor of my room. That’s what it feels like—like being spoiled by heaven as if I’m some willful but beloved child. Though I don’t know why it should be so—I haven’t been good, not really.” He sniffed and rubbed his nose absently with the back of one hand. Fatima felt a swell of tenderness and pulled his hands away from his face, kissing one and then the other.

“You’re wonderful,” she pressed. “You don’t lie or steal or gossip and when you’ve had a terrible day, you don’t even take it out on your friends.” She paused, her words hanging reproachfully in the back of her mouth. Everything seemed clearer to her on the hilltop: the horizon and the curve of the earth, and also her own faults, which seemed to multiply the farther she got from the life that had fostered them. “You’ve saved the lives of people who are afraid of you,” she said in a softer voice. “More than once.”

Hassan was shaking his head.

“It’s not enough. Luz and her inquisitors are probably right: I should be put on the rack and made to atone or some such thing, for my impudence if nothing else.”

“No one can choose who God loves, or change who God loves,” said Vikram. “Not even the Inquisition.”

Hassan looked back toward the water.

“I want to say something,” he repeated. Fatima knew what it was, and her heart sank.