The Bird King(69)

Fatima told herself she would not weep in front of this man. She flinched as his breastplate landed on the furs beside her: a well-made but battered cuirass, tattooed with an intricate design of flowering vines encircling the arms of his house. It had seen mauls and pikestaffs and probably more than one arquebus; it had known combat longer than Fatima had known life, yet here it was, on the ground, unnecessary for this particular act of violence. Fatima marveled vacantly at the discarded steel, at the quieter brutality that came on the heels of warfare, and wondered how many women had been dragged into how many tents, perhaps even this tent—how many men, even, for Hassan would not be spared.

“Why?” she asked her captor, shielding her eyes against the sun that streamed through the open tent flap. The question seemed to baffle him. He paused with his hand on his belt and twisted up his mouth.

“Why? Are you without shame?”

“I want to know.”

The general laughed incredulously.

“This is what happens in war. Sometimes, even when the losing side is on its knees, it doesn’t yet understand it’s been defeated. So you take from it the only thing it has left to give. Then it understands.” He kicked her knees apart and knelt between them. Behind him, past the tent flap, the morning had become intensely bright, the sky a peerless shade of blue: sunlight stung Fatima’s eyes, breaking the stupor that had overtaken her. Without realizing what she was doing, she drew her knife, hidden beneath Gwennec’s cloak, and pressed it against the general’s throat as he leaned toward her. The edge was so fine that a thin seam of blood sprang up immediately on his stubbled neck, beading along the dagger like the embroidered hem of a sleeve. He cried out, struggling to back away, and toppled over, leaving Fatima with her knee on his chest and her fingers slick with his blood.

“Whore,” he spat at her.

“If I’m a whore for resisting you,” she said through her teeth, “what would I have been for giving in?”

“Whore,” he said again. The sight of him belly-up, his belt undone, scrambling with his feet, filled Fatima with a tepid disgust. Little men had waged this war. Together they could muster enough steel and gunpowder to be formidable, but singly they were soft, wretched things, squinting in the sun. Fatima levered herself to her feet and withdrew her knife, replacing it with the heel of her boot, which she pressed against the general’s bleeding neck.

“You’re not going to touch me again,” she said. “You’re not going to touch Hassan at all.”

The general laughed at her.

“You think you can give me orders? You’re dead as soon as I’m on my feet, and I’ll do what I like with the sorcerer.”

Fatima leaned harder on his neck.

“Get Luz,” she told him. “Ask her what will happen if you hurt me.”

The general had begun to wheeze with the effort of laughing. At some point he had lost a tooth to battle or bad food; a gap showed in his taut grin.

“You’re a fool if you’re more afraid of me than you are of her,” he said.

“Get Luz,” Fatima repeated. She removed her boot: the general climbed unsteadily to his feet, one hand on his neck, the other clutching his breeches, his face mirroring her own contempt. Yet he was wary now: she had invoked a name he did not dare contradict.

“Whore,” he said a third time, and stepped out of the tent.

Fatima slid to her knees. She felt as though she were still at sea, unmoored and buffeted by surf, losing what little control she had possessed over her own trajectory. Why had she said Luz’s name? Luz was worse than any general, for she could reproduce wide-eyed innocence so well that it was likely she had convinced herself of her own virtue.

Fatima wiped her dagger on the skirt of her robe, and despite the heat, hugged Gwennec’s cloak about herself. The smell of incense comforted her. She sat, rigid, looking at the flap of the tent and the sun for what felt like hours, watching the light move across the ground and touch her feet and pass on. Her only visitor was a cat, a little black-and-gold tortoiseshell that danced into the tent as if there had never been war or death in the world and rubbed itself against Fatima’s back. When it found no food about her, it left again, taking with it the last of the sunlight.

Torches were lit elsewhere. Fatima could hear men calling to one another across the encampment. There was woodsmoke and the scent of herbs and fat rendering in a pot nearby; Fatima felt her mouth water and remembered she had eaten nothing since the previous day. She strained to hear Hassan’s voice, or to catch a glimpse of him through the tent flap, but she saw no sign of him. Fear came in waves: perhaps the general had made good on his threat and would deliver Hassan’s head to her in a basket, as the Prophet Yahya’s was given to Salome; or perhaps, having been thwarted in his own tent, he would take his anger out on Hassan in other ways.

With nothing else to do, Fatima prayed. She made ablutions in the dust, bargaining with the unseen to spare that beloved body, those beloved hands, that fine and vulnerable mind. She would give up many things in return: she would give up her own beauty, which had served others far better than it had served her. She would give up anything in return for some sign that Hassan was safe.

But no sign came. There was only a light bobbing toward her through the twilight, and when it paused at the threshold of the tent, Fatima saw that it was Luz, cloaked in black and carrying an oil lamp.