The Bird King(66)

“Put this on,” he said. “There’s one for the blev’ruz too. You shouldn’t be seen in those clothes.”

“Whose are they?” asked Fatima, plucking at the fabric.

“Mine,” said Gwennec curtly. “Keep the hood close around your face.”

The cog ghosted up alongside a stout wooden pier, its salt-cracked surface wavering in the torchlight. There was a man, or several men, standing a little farther along: Fatima heard a burst of laughter and the bright jingle of what might be a coin purse.

“That’ll be the dockmaster,” murmured Gwennec. “He’ll want a fee for mooring your boat, and a name and a point of origin for his logs.”

“What should we do?”

Gwennec thought for a moment and let out a sharp sigh.

“I’ll take the blev’ruz with me and get him past the coin-jangler over there. You stay here with the boat. I’d say scream if there’s trouble, but I don’t know that it’d do much good.” The monk looked hawkish in the firelight, his eyes shadowed beneath his brow, his face unreadable. Fatima knew she should say good-bye, or at least something that sounded final, yet all she could hear was hostis, hostis, and it stopped her.

“I wish we’d met some other way,” said Gwennec, trying to smile.

Fatima looked away. “You’re a monk from Brittany and I’m a freedwoman from Granada,” she said. “This is the only way we could have met.”

Gwennec sniffed and rubbed his nose with the back of one hand. The men on the pier were approaching, calling to them in Castilian, lowering a wooden plank against the lowest point of the deck railing. Gwennec flipped his cowl over his head and hurried down the steps of the stern castle, looking suddenly clerical. He pulled Hassan, incongruous in the borrowed cloak, with him, and then they were both gone, lost in the shadows of the men on the pier and the billowing smoke of their torches.

Fatima stood where she was, her hands on the tiller. Her cloak smelled of the man to whom it had belonged: wool that was more sheep than cloth, the sweat of physical labor, the sea, and beneath it all, a hint of precious resins, amber and oud and frankincense, the stamp of hours spent in prayer behind a censer. She pulled it around herself, rubbing her cheek against the folds of the hood. Perhaps the scent of Gwennec’s prayers was worth something, and God, if God was listening, would look kindly on her by virtue of sheer proximity. Fatima hoped so, and waited.

The pier remained mostly empty. A few stray dogs, their ribs bulging, meandered up and down and sniffed for scraps; a man stumbled past and leaned against a piling to piss. Fatima didn’t dare make a sound. The tiller grew slick beneath her hands: she dried them on her cloak and gripped the tiller again. It would make no difference: she would never be able to get the cog under way by herself, if it came to that, but standing at the helm gave her something to do besides worry.

She closed her eyes and thought again of the king. She saw, no longer a bird or a phoenix, but an outline of an unnamed creature that stood, dark and luminous at once, between her and the sun. It had no features, no limbs that she could see, yet it was feathered—crimson, green, blue, black pricked with starry gold, white tinged with copper and pink, like daybreak in winter. Fatima reached for it; it lay just beyond her grasp, and when she reached a little more, it moved a little farther beyond that. Help me, she begged. Help me now.

A thump woke her. The cog rocked back and forth indignantly. Another thump followed, then a third.

“Over there,” came Hassan’s voice in Castilian. He had affected a broad, halting accent—Gwennec’s accent, Fatima realized, or rather a sloppy approximation. She laughed soundlessly in spite of herself. Two men in linen shirts and mud-spattered hose were rolling great barrels across the width of the ship, making for the entrance to the hold below.

“Put them against the hull with the others,” instructed Hassan, waggling one finger in the appropriate direction.

“Put them against the hull with the others,” repeated one of the men, his voice high and mincing. The other man snickered and elbowed him.

“Hush up, he may hear you.”

“He doesn’t hear, he’s a Breton. Look at him, dumb as a post. Fish and beer and cow manure are all they know. Not proper Frenchmen, nor proper Celts—they barely understand each other, let alone—”

“Quiet, you idiot.”

The men disappeared into the hold and reemerged without their cargo, slapping their dirty hands against their breeches. Hassan, who had heard quite well, deposited a number of coins in their outstretched hands without a word and waved them off.

“Salted beef, hard cheese, that awful crusty bread—but oranges and lemons, too, to prevent mouth-bleeding. Those cost some money.” His head was level with the lip of the stern castle at her feet; she saw only a hood of nubbly blue. “We’re to eat some fresh and dry the rest so they don’t spoil, then soak them in water when we need them.”

“How much do we have?” Fatima asked. “How many days of food?”

“Two or three weeks, I think,” said Hassan. “If we haven’t spotted this damned island by then, we might as well throw ourselves overboard in any case.” He put back his hood. Fatima resisted the urge to stroke his coppery hair: the possibility that he would push her away was too terrible.

“It’s nearly dawn,” he said. “The tide will be going out soon.”