The Bird King(53)

Eager to appear irrelevant, Fatima kept her head down, watching the interwoven tread of Hassan’s boots and Vikram’s paws. She made a game of setting her feet precisely where Hassan’s had been, filling his watery footprints with her own, exactly equal in size in her borrowed boots. They had been walking for at least a quarter of an hour when the footprints paused. Fatima looked up. A forest of masts was bobbing between the roofs of the houses up ahead. She almost gave a little cry of happiness, but Vikram nipped at her hand.

Quiet, he murmured from somewhere inside her skull. There is a man behind us, and he stopped when we stopped. No, don’t look. There may be more where he came from.

Fatima pursed her lips to keep from making a sound. Beside her, Hassan was clutching a thin sheaf of paper to his chest as he walked, and seemed not to hear what Vikram had said to her. He had drawn the map while hunched over a stack of split wood behind a barn at the edge of town, beneath a greenish circle of lantern light. It was not like the other times Fatima had watched him work. He swayed back and forth like a woman in childbirth, muttering to himself and sometimes to Vikram, who had perched on a log beside him to hum and stroke his hair, like some demonic midwife. It had taken so long that Fatima became restless and wandered too far away, nearly getting lost on a cow path as the night darkened. Afterward, Hassan had been flushed and quiet. He showed the map to Fatima only once before clasping it to his chest: it was a beautiful thing, an astonishing thing, radiant with rhumb lines originating at set intervals across an empty sea. To the east was the coastline from the map that hung on the wall of his palace workroom; to the west, where the sea serpent had been, was an island.

It was an odd shape, nearly rectangular, punctured by small harbors shaped like flowers. It had the effect of something man-made, something imaginary, and when Fatima looked at it, her resolve had wavered.

Yet she said nothing, and neither had Hassan. He looked defiant now, staring past Fatima at the row of masts before them. Only Vikram looked back, his canine tongue lolling between his teeth with a look of unmistakable irritation.

This will be more difficult than I had hoped, he said. One, two, three—yes, four of them. You’ll have to run for it.

You’re not coming with us? The thought came unbidden.

No, I’m not. I told Lady Aisha I would see you safely across the Vega, and I have. What happens now is your own affair.

But—instinctively, her hand went to the scruff of the dog’s neck, which she had shaken and caressed so many times. We can’t just part like this. This is such a silly way to leave things. I’m afraid. Vikram—

He shook her off and padded down the street in the direction they had come from. Fatima felt her heart begin to race.

Vikram!

Damn it all, don’t you dare panic now. Go, run. Both of you.

Fatima let the scarf fall from her face and seized Hassan’s free hand. He yelped as she pulled him along, splashing through a pool of foul-smelling water in her haste to move forward. A vile curse followed them, succeeded by the sickening hiss of a drawn sword. Unable to resist, Fatima looked back.

Four men in dark doublets and mud-spattered woolen hose circled uneasily around Vikram, who looked, in the darkness and at this distance, like little more than a shadow with teeth. One of the men feinted toward him with a dagger, only to be rewarded by a perfect semicircle of puncture marks on his arm. His scream was so high and terrified that Fatima felt momentarily light-headed. The scream brought shouts and whistles and still other men, who came rushing down an alleyway with their weapons already drawn.

“There! Toward the docks!” The one in front, his face masked beneath a steel half helm, pointed toward Fatima and Hassan with his pike. Beneath his cuirass, his doublet was red and black. Fatima’s stomach dropped.

“She’s here,” she whispered. “Those are her men.”

Hassan pushed her forward. The street behind them was dark where blood had soaked into the muddy ground. Vikram snapped and snarled at the men in red and black, but there were too many. Fatima saw the blade of a slender espadon flash in the torchlight and heard a wail that was neither human nor animal. She fell against Hassan, screaming. This was the wrong thing to do. The man with the espadon looked up and into her eyes and pointed toward her with a mail-clad finger. A moment later, the men in red and black closed in, and the shadow, or what was left of it, was entirely eclipsed.

“Let’s go—please, Fa, please.”

There was a sharp tug on her arm. Fatima didn’t realize she had stopped, and stumbled onward, too dazed to speak. The tangle of houses and refuse and wash lines parted in front of them: the horizon opened, revealing a wooden wharf with a line of cogs and fishing vessels moored alongside it, bobbing up and down in the soft swells. Under the moon, the boats were only half real, the conveyances of ghosts, their softly clanking masts discolored in the faint light.

“Which one? Which one?” Hassan was turning in a circle, the map clutched in one hand. He laughed in a way that frightened Fatima. She was struck by the impossibility of their enterprise. Even if they had time to search for one, no captain alive would agree to sail west with only Hassan’s map for reassurance—not for the ring on Fatima’s finger, nor for all the rings in Lady Aisha’s jewel box. Yet there was no way of escape now except by water. Fatima took one breath, and then another. Wrapping her fingers around Hassan’s sleeve, she pulled him down the nearest gangway, a mere plank of wood that shuddered under their combined weight, and tumbled him onto the deck of a small one-masted cog. The deck was pungent with the smell of tar and hemp. The cog was moored to a post with a thick rope, tied with a knot so elaborate that Fatima thought she might lose her wits entirely.