The Bird King(67)

“Then let’s go.” Fatima left the tiller and went down to the railing to untie the ropes that secured them to their mooring. Hassan climbed into the rigging with the hem of his robe between his teeth. The cog rocked back and forth like a horse that has seen the pasture gate, the sail dancing and shivering as Hassan pulled the boom up the length of the mast, hand over hand. Fatima returned to the helm. The light was turning blue, preluding dawn; at her fingertips, the map waited. She took a breath and looked out at the water, expecting to see the uninterrupted plane of turquoise that would lead them out of the Middle Sea, through the Strait.

Instead, she saw ships.

There were three of them, large carracks that loomed like a forest of masts and sails over their own little cog. They had arrayed themselves in a half circle at the mouth of the harbor, their broadsides toward the wharves, blocking the passage out. Their colors unfurled in the early dawn. With dread, Fatima watched them, though she knew already what she would see: the red-and-gold counter-quartered flags of Aragon and Castile. Fatima seized the rail of the stern castle, weak-kneed.

“Hassan!” she called, her voice high and shaking. Hassan dropped to the deck, landed wrong, and cursed, limping to the rail to look where she was pointing.

“God and His angels and all the prophets,” he said, awestruck. “I was right, Fa. They’ve followed us.”

“How?” For a moment, Fatima thought her disbelief might be enough to dispel the ships and send them back to wherever they had come from. “How, how?”

“Does it matter?” Hassan was pulling her away from the railing. Fatima followed vacantly, balancing step by step down the wobbly plank that bridged the gap between ship and pier, and found herself on dry land.

“What are you doing?” she asked, bewildered.

“What does it look like? We have to hide—we can lose them in town and wait until dark, then go—I don’t know where—I’ll make a new map—”

Fatima halted.

“We’re not going anywhere,” she said. “We’re getting on that ship, Hassan, and we’re leaving and never coming back again.”

He laughed at her.

“You should never have listened to me. I’ve gone witless. We can’t be children about this anymore. There is an empire out there, Fa. And it wants us dead, and we are not going to escape it in a tiny little cog, even if we had a king’s ransom in terrible cheese and terrible salted beef.” He spread his arms, a tall premonition in the tepid dawn, and gestured to the mud, the salt-warped wood, the indifferent sky. “This is it. This is all there is. There is no king of the birds.”

Fatima sat down. The damp soaked through her cloak and into her robe, chilling her legs. He was saying only what she herself had thought half a hundred times since they left Husn Al Munakkab, yet it hurt to hear.

“You can’t say that,” she told him. “You made the map. I don’t understand why you’re like this, why what Gwennec said upset you so much. You believed it all until he told that silly story about the seven bishops—you made me want to believe it when I doubted. I don’t understand.”

Hassan grinned hysterically.

“I’ll tell you,” he said in a different voice. “It wasn’t the story, it wasn’t that. It was when you counted up those odd little inlets on the island. I knew it was over then.”

Fatima pulled her knees up and hugged them in an effort to stay warm.

“It might not mean what Gwennec says it does,” she countered, though softly. “They could be anything, those marks.”

Hassan shook his head. “I know what it means. It means I can’t run. The Inquisition and the Castilians—they’re not just out there, they’re in my head. Your head, too. They’re inside the only thing that was ever really ours. Even our stories are not our stories. We tried to tell our own, Fa, and all we did was end up telling theirs.”

Fatima reached for his hand. He took it and flung himself into the mud beside her. She wanted to disappear, to fuse with the familiar scent of his clothes, his hair. She searched her mind for some means of escape they hadn’t yet considered and could think of nothing. Birds had wings, but they did not, and so they were left at the mercy of lesser kings. Fatima looked up at the sky and saw that the day would be cloudless: the sky was a smoky azure from horizon to horizon, tinged in the east by pink and gold. She looked down again when she heard the unmistakable sound of hoof beats.

A row of horses in full regalia cantered down the furrowed high road that led toward the wharves, ridden by men wearing plate and helms and armed with a ludicrous show of weapons: pikes and heavy oak-shouldered arquebuses and even a few swords. Fatima struggled to her feet in her mud-sodden robe.

“All this for us?” she marveled. “For two people with only a couple of knives between them?”

“Let them overcompensate,” said Hassan miserably. “Last time they tried this, we had Vikram. For all they know, we’ve got an army of jinn at our disposal. I’m a sorcerer, after all.”

“How?” said Fatima again. “How could they know so precisely where—”

She stopped when Hassan gripped her arm in what felt like a spasm of pain. He was staring into the mass of horses and men at a dark, unarmored shape bobbing unsteadily atop a gray gelding. It was a monk’s habit. As Fatima watched, the monk’s cowl fell back, revealing a head of bright blond hair.