The Bird King(64)
It was only when Gwennec stamped up to the stern castle with a wooden plate of bread and cheese that she realized she was hungry. Her mouth watered at the sight of food so plain and dry that she might once have refused it entirely; as it was, she took the plate without a word and dug her teeth into what was offered.
“Wait, wait,” said Gwennec. “Soak it in a little water first, if you don’t want your teeth broken.” He pressed a wooden cup into her hand. Fatima sputtered out a mouthful of crumbs as arid as brick dust as he laughed.
“I’m going to sleep,” he said, still grinning. “Much as it pains me to leave the two of you in charge of anything, I need a proper rest. Wake me at compline—that’s like your night prayer, or close enough.” He surveyed the deck, where Hassan was arranging the rope he had practiced with into neat coils, heaving each thick length over his shoulder with theatrical effort.
“He’s as clever-handed as they come, our blev’ruz,” said Gwennec. “He has a natural sense of where things ought to go. But he hasn’t got brute strength and neither have you. You won’t be able to reason your way out of a mess at sea, with who knows what following behind you. That’s what should worry you.” He sniffed, phlegm rumbling in his throat, and made his way down toward the hold, the top of his yellow head descending, or so it seemed, into the deck itself.
“You’ve been awfully nice to us,” called Fatima, before he disappeared entirely. “You didn’t have to be.”
The head paused.
“I had a choice to make, and I made the choice I could live with,” came Gwennec’s voice. “That’s all.” She heard the thump of sandals being cast off, and then another that might have been a body landing in a berth, and then nothing. As if by silent agreement, the gulls overhead veered toward land, where a rust-colored river tumbled down over slabs of bare rock and ebbed by small degrees into the sea. The two waters did not mix. They battled one another in plumes of blue and red that extended into the open water, each color distinct, irreconcilable.
The clarity of the shoreline made Fatima twitch: she had allowed the cog to drift too close to land. Wiping sweat from her lip, she pressed on the tiller, watching the prow tip until it pointed southeast. Hassan dropped his coil of rope and stood to watch.
“You’ve overcorrected,” he called, peering toward land.
Fatima clenched her jaw to keep from retorting. At some point, Hassan had pulled his hair back with a leather thong to keep it off his face; the sun had made his skin as pink as a ferenji’s. The effect was transformative: his jaw, newly exposed, was firmer; the lines of his face were more decided. He was increasingly unfamiliar. Fatima watched him, disquieted. They had revealed too much to one another. Fatima knew from experience that such a mistake was rarely reparable in full: she could remember lying in bed beside the sultan at fifteen, when the experience was still new enough to inspire giddiness, telling him how often she thought about him and how beautiful he was, and his laugh, forever stamped in her memory, reminding her that she was not his lover, nor were her confidences welcome. It had been the same with Luz, who had drawn her out only to extract what she wanted. Now it would be the same with Hassan. Intimacy invited ugliness; only girls like Nessma were silly enough to think otherwise. There was no point, really, in making such an effort to survive; great love, for which so much was sacrificed, curdled as quickly as the ordinary kind.
After critiquing Fatima’s skill as a pilot, Hassan made no further attempt at conversation. He flitted into and out of her field of vision, disappearing into the rigging and reappearing near the prow, teaching himself to know the joints and sinews of the vessel. At one point he loosed a rope that caused the boom atop the mainsail to swing east and the keel to follow it in a big, swinging arc. Fatima thought of telling him he had overcorrected, but instead compensated silently on the tiller, returning the cog to its course while Hassan swore and tied the rope down again. By sunset they had achieved a wordless understanding of the way the work of one affected the other. It was only when pinpricks of fire lit up the shoreline in the growing dark that Hassan broke the silence.
“Is that Marbella, do you suppose?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said Fatima. She glanced at their wake, as if the dimming outline of the coast behind them contained some clue. “Someone should go wake Gwennec.”
Hassan, who had been leaning against the prow, pushed himself to his feet in a restless motion.
“What I don’t understand is why they haven’t followed us,” he said. “It’s been bothering me all day. Surely the Inquisition isn’t put off by a little water. And they had more boats moored there at the harbor in Husn Al Munakkab. Bigger and faster ones, probably. They could have given chase. What are they waiting for?”
Fatima studied the fires along the shoreline. It must be a largish town, as there were many bright clusters of light; a few were suspended in the air, as if from the ramparts of watchtowers.
“Maybe they’re waiting to see where we’ll go,” she said.
“You think they might be here at Marbella? You think it’s a trap?”
Fatima shook her head. “It’d take them twice as long by land as it’s taken us by water. Unless they managed to pass us by boat without being spotted, I don’t see how they’d know.”
“They could be trailing us, too far in our wake for us to see,” pressed Hassan. “They could have sent a scout on ahead. A single rider with a change of horses could make that distance faster than we have.”