The Bird King(58)

“Did you say wine?” Hassan sat up and looked suddenly alert. “Do you think you could go and get me a ladleful, since we’re having such a nice conversation?”

“You drink, then?”

“I do. I have. I’ve broken one of God’s dictates. I might as well break several. It’s a cycle, you see—I adore Him, I disobey Him, and I drink to make sense of it.”

Gwennec looked hurt, as if Hassan had leveled a personal insult.

“I don’t think that’s so,” he said. “God isn’t like that. He knows we’ve all got things we can’t do or can’t stop. It doesn’t follow that we’re excused from those things we can do and can stop.”

Hassan, wincing, propped himself against the deck rail with a dry smile.

“You really are a monk,” he said. “Can I have some wine or not?”

Gwennec snorted and rose to his feet. Crossing the deck in a few long strides, he clattered down into the darkened hold, from whence came the sound of a barrel scraping across the floor. After a moment, he emerged again, balancing three dripping wooden cups dexterously between his fingers. Two cups were full of dark liquid, but the third was clear; this he set beside Fatima.

“Water for you, madam,” he said. “Since you told me no different. Here, blev’ruz. Your liquor.”

Hassan reached up and took the cup reverently between his hands. He drained it in a few gulps, smacking his lips with obvious relish.

“Bless you, Brother Gwennec,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of one hand. “My head feels better already.”

Gwennec himself took only a small sip before grimacing and setting his cup on the ground.

“The salt air has tainted it,” he said. “In Breizh, we drink ale and beer. Keeps better at sea. But southerners insist on the fancy stuff by land or water.”

Fatima, forgetting herself, leaned over Gwennec’s cup and sniffed: a vinegar smell, embroidered with a more compelling scent of fruit and earth, jutted into her nose. She leaned back, tears pricking her eyes.

“How do you drink this?” she asked from behind the sleeve of her robe. “It smells like something the washerwoman uses to make soap.”

Hassan and Gwennec laughed. Hassan pushed his empty cup toward Gwennec and helped himself to the monk’s full one, raising it in a halfhearted toast before draining it as he had his first. Gwennec smiled and let his head loll back against the railing. His skin, though coarse, was unlined; despite his skill in handling the ship and reckoning with God, he could not be older than Hassan, and might well be closer in age to Fatima herself. Fatima could see doubt flickering in his eyes: he had fought and laughed and reconciled with them, and this had upset the straightforward matter of turning them over to his masters. She told herself not to hope too much, though hope promptly suffused her limb by limb, making her heart thud against her ribs.

“Show me how to turn the ship,” she said again, in a softer voice. Gwennec studied her for a moment. His gaze made her uneasy: it was frank, direct, without any of the cool hesitation of the men of the Alhambra, to whom she had been both an object of desire and a source of uneasiness.

“Where is it you mean to go?” asked Gwennec. Fatima leaned over and coaxed Hassan’s satchel from behind his back. Unbuckling it, she withdrew the map, curling now from the damp and the heat of Hassan’s body. She held it out toward Gwennec, only to be stricken with fear as he took it from her, worried for a moment that he would tear it up, or worse, that he would laugh.

Gwennec did neither. He adjusted himself so that the slender moon was at his back and frowned hard, attempting to read Hassan’s complex web of intersecting rhumb lines in the weak light.

“This is a portolan chart,” he said with some astonishment. “Where did you get this? Did you steal it?”

“I made it,” said Hassan indignantly. “I’m a cartographer by trade.”

“But you’ve used a thirty-two-point compass,” pressed Gwennec. He put his thumb over one of the spindly roses that marked various points on the empty seascape, radiating lines across the page at measured intervals. “Only a master navigator would know how to use one of those. Yet you can’t even point this little cog where you want it to go.”

“I used no compass,” said Hassan. “Only the skill of my fingers.”

Gwennec considered this for a moment.

“You’re a liar,” he said finally. “Or you really are a sorcerer.”

“I’m neither. I have one talent. This is it.” The wine had softened Hassan: he gazed steadily back at Gwennec with the calm of a saint. Gwennec looked as though he wanted to argue, but thought better of it, and frowned at the map again. “Here’s the Strait of Gibraltar,” he murmured. “The Dark Sea. And this—” He brushed the oblong perimeter of the island with one flushed finger. “This is Antillia.” He looked at Hassan and then at Fatima, visibly perplexed. “The Isle of Seven Cities. You’re going to Antillia.”

Fatima leaned forward and took Gwennec’s musty woolen sleeve, as if to tether his words to her.

“You know this place?” she asked. “Have you been there? How far is it? How many days?”

Gwennec threw back his head and laughed.

“Every Breizhiz sailor knows it,” he crowed. “And nobody’s ever been there. It’s a myth. No one’s set foot in Antillia for six hundred years, if anyone ever set foot there at all.”