The Bird King(52)

“I can get us to Qaf,” he said. “I can get us to the isle of the Bird King. That’s where we should go. That’s where we’ll be safe.”

Fatima closed her eyes and attempted to muster her self-restraint.

“It’s a game, Hassan,” she said as gently as she could. “We were bored children shut up in a crumbling palace, so we made it up. Bit by bit. We made up a story.”

“But that’s just it,” said Hassan, leaning toward her. “What if our stories are like my maps? What is a story but the map of an idea? There is a secret in the poem of Al Attar—we made it into a joke because joking felt better than despairing. But perhaps that is the secret. The Bird King is real, and we are his subjects.”

“Hassan—”

“What other choice do we have?” Hassan’s voice rose unsteadily. Fatima pressed her hands to the sides of his face, smoothing away the mania that lodged in the creases around his eyes. She understood now: he was not quite mad, but he had chosen madness over despair. Yet if she followed him there, into madness, it meant she had despaired already.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he begged. “Please.”

“All right, all right.” She pulled away. The sea below her was unchanged, or rather, it was changing as it always had, exhaling against the brief shoreline, a white curl of froth the only bright color left in the waning day. She should have seen it. The way he had laughed at meeting Vikram, at the scout they had left dead beneath the willow tree on the Vega: the brittleness of it, his fine nervousness, like that of a racing horse. Of course he was going mad. He needed solid walls and certainty to counter the constant upheaval of his gift. If the world couldn’t keep him safe, he would seek safety in the stories of their childhood. Her cheeks were wet: she dried them with her sleeve and tried to smile.

“I’m not mad,” he said, reading her thoughts. “I’m as sane as I’ve ever been, though perhaps that’s not saying much. I’ve just decided we weren’t ever living in the world we thought we were. Everyone always looked at me and saw the odd one, the freak, the pervert. But maybe I wasn’t any of those things. If we can drop through a door and land in the dark, in those tunnels beneath the palace, and see demons, and the palace dog was really a jinn after all, who’s to say I wasn’t the only person in that pile of stone who saw things clearly? Why did we tell each other those stories if not to escape? We were making a map, Fa. We can follow it out of this.”

He made her want to believe, though she was no more convinced than she had been when he first suggested it. The thought of leaving entirely, leaving not just the siege, the war, the threat of capture, but the world itself, caught her powerfully, and she answered him before thinking.

“All right,” she said. “We’ll do as you like. We’ll go to Qaf.”

Hassan grinned. Fatima saw his fingers, bluish under the moon, twitch on the leather flap of his satchel.

“I’ve never tried to draw a sea chart,” he said. “I’ve only been on a boat a handful of times, and never out of sight of land.”

“You want to try,” said Vikram, roused from silence. “Your fingers say so.”

“But if I can’t—” Hassan flexed his hands and began to crack each knuckle, one after another. “We’ll die of thirst or drown or be killed by brigands or worse.”

“You’ll never be free of danger. But that’s a choice you’ve already made. If you wanted certainty, you would never have left Granada.” The jinn studied Hassan intently, as if to assess his fitness: if he thought Hassan mad, his face did not betray it. Yet he seemed to be waiting for something, and Fatima, now that she had made her decision, did not want to linger and hear a jinn talk her out of it.

“We’re going,” said Fatima. “Hassan, draw your map.”

There was a small pause.

“I’ll need some light,” he said.

Fatima knelt next to him and put her arms around his neck.

“I love you madly,” she whispered. “Even when we do get lost and drown or die of thirst or any of those other horrible things, I’ll still love you madly.”

Hassan kissed her shoulder.

“We won’t get lost,” he said.

Husn Al Munakkab was cloaked in a murky darkness that was half smoke, half fog. This was a blessing, or so Vikram said, for it made two silent travelers and a dog less remarkable as they slipped through streets of salted mud toward the harbor. Torches lined the main thoroughfares, where weary fishermen loaded the evening catch into barrels and onto wagons, assisted by equally weary boys who managed the tack of their mules and oxen. The side streets were dark, however, and it was along these that Vikram led them, skirting kitchen gardens and lines of washing hung out to dry and the constant punctuation of animal waste.

Fatima had taken another sash from Hassan’s canvas sack and draped it over her head and shoulders, pulling one end over her face as a freewoman would do in the presence of men, leaving only her eyes exposed. Managing this was unexpectedly difficult. Lady Aisha had always made an art of it, holding her scarf across her cheekbone with three fingers, her wrist bent at an elegant angle. Fatima feared her own clumsy approximation would give her away. She felt shy in the unfamiliar garment, even fraudulent; she had to remind herself that she had the same right to wear it now as any freeborn girl. Yet there were no other women in evidence: she could hear women’s voices singing or scolding children from inside the mud-plaster houses they passed, but the streets, it seemed, belonged to the realm of men.