The Bird King(61)

“I think our friend might be a little addled after all,” murmured Brother Gwennec from somewhere behind her. She felt the pressure of his fingertips on her shoulder, lightly. “Look at his eye. The left one.”

Fatima did as he bade her: Hassan’s pupils were lopsided, the left far larger than the right.

“I shouldn’t have given him that wine,” said Gwennec. “He needs to be abed. Propped up, though, so the blood doesn’t settle where it oughtn’t to. You might as well sleep yourself, madam, as it’s clear you’ve had none in some time. I’ll keep watch a few hours.”

The lights of Husn Al Munakkab were growing brighter. Fatima peeled the map from her body and held it up again, studying the punctured shore of the island floating in its net of rhumb lines. Perhaps it was the Qaf of the Bird King, perhaps the Antillia of Gwennec’s seven bishops. Perhaps it was neither, and Hassan’s miracle, confronted with her own overweening ambition, had deserted them. Yet the map remained: real enough to touch, full of possibilities that the way behind them lacked.

Fatima plucked at Gwennec’s sleeve, knowing this was a kind of trespass, and was rewarded with a wary glance.

“Help me turn the boat,” she said.

“No,” said Gwennec.

“I won’t sleep,” she said. “I’ll wait until you do, and then I’ll throw you overboard. We’ll be no worse off than we were before. So you choose. Help me turn the boat and you can be on your way when we dock to buy supplies. Or don’t and I’ll find a way to kill you.” The words came easily to her.

Gwennec pulled his arm back, turning his wrist to loose the fabric from her grasp.

“You don’t have it in you,” he declared.

Fatima laughed in what she hoped was a careless way. “The last man who thought so is lying on the Vega with his guts out,” she said. That she had stabbed him accidentally and lost her nerve seemed like an unnecessary level of detail with which to burden the monk. Gwennec looked her up and down, attempting to guess whether she was lying.

“You really mean to,” he murmured.

“Yes,” said Fatima.

Gwennec got to his feet with an oath.

“You can resupply at Marbella, let’s say,” he said. “That’s as good a place as any for me to go ashore. From there, you pass through the Strait, assuming you’re not taken by pirates or the inquisitors don’t catch you first, and once you’ve cleared the Strait, on to the Dark Sea. Yes, Marbella will do nicely. There’s a Franciscan priory nearby—I stayed there for a night on the way down. They’ll take care of me. I’ll tell them I was kidnapped, and I’ve got a swollen face to show for it.” He thumped up the steps to the stern castle, folding the sleeves of his habit past his rough elbows. “Sleep a while, madam, while I get us under way. When you wake up, I’ll show you how to manage this boat.”

Fatima studied his face. There were weary creases around his mouth, and resignation in the bright, flat blue of his eyes. There was no love there, but no malice either.

“You’re the one with the knife,” he said drily. “I’m not even allowed to carry one, and I’m not likely to bludgeon you to death in your sleep with my sandal.”

She had to smile at this.

“Very well,” she said, and turned away toward the hold.





Chapter 14


Fatima slept without dreaming. The hold of the cog was outfitted with four narrow bunks set into the hull; a wooden screen separated this makeshift cabin from the aft portion of the hold, where the barrels of water and wine and one precious crate of hard cheese were lashed together. Gwennec half carried Hassan down the stairs and secured him in one of the bunks, rolling blankets and burlap behind him to keep his head elevated. Fatima collapsed into the opposite bunk without speaking and turned her face to the hull, listening, for no more than a few moments, or so it seemed, to the groans and sighs of wood and water before sleep took her.

When she woke again, there was sunlight streaming down the open staircase from the deck above, leaving a square of yellow on the sloping floor of the hold. A familiar shadow fell across it, its sloped shoulders rocking up and down with its strange gait. Vikram paced back and forth, his dark head awash in light.

“You’re alive,” she called to him, laughing, reaching out her hands. He turned and curled his lip at her.

“If you can call it that,” he snapped. “I had a vision of my own death at that stinking, mud-caked wharf. It’s all I can think about now. Mortality! If you’d listened to me and run when I told you, I might have been spared such awful knowledge, along with enough spear wounds to impress a messiah.”

Fatima tried to make sense of this accusation. “How?” she asked after a pause. “How will you die?”

“In bed with a full-figured, golden-haired woman who will weep and rend her garments at my passing.” Vikram sat down and began to chew on his talons, looking melancholy. “An enviable death. No less than I deserve.”

“When?” pressed Fatima.

“Many hundreds of years from now, as far as I can tell, though visions aren’t always precise about these things.”

Fatima felt her shoulders drop. “That’s a very, very long time away,” she said, relieved.

“For you, perhaps. But I’ve lived five or six times that long already. It doesn’t seem very far away to me.” Vikram looked into the sunlight cascading down the staircase. “Listen: remember this part. I’m sending someone to you, someone I trust. I say I trust her, but you must not. Do you understand? She will help, but only so long as it pleases her to do so. You mustn’t make her angry. And try not to fall in love with her. That’s a doom I wouldn’t wish on anyone.”