The Bird King(7)

Fatima looked around helplessly. The serving woman came in to light a clot of incense in a brazier. Its scent wafted up and mingled with the steam to form a dense, sickly smell, like flowers left too long in a bowl of water and gone to rot.

“Air, my lady,” said Fatima.

Lady Aisha did not pretend to misunderstand her. She peered up at her bondswoman and pursed her thinning lips.

“Interesting,” she said.





Chapter 2


The sultan called for her that evening. Fatima was sitting in the doorway of Lady Aisha’s private room leafing through an illuminated volume of Hafez when his messenger arrived—a boy of eight or nine, young enough to act as liaison between the world of women and the world of men. The book was written in Persian, a language that Fatima did not know but which shared enough vocabulary with Arabic to be intriguing. She sounded out the foreign words, encountering a term here or there that was familiar, so that the poems became abstract impressions of themselves: love, seeking, oneness, restraint, prayer. It was a pleasant way to spend an idle evening, especially one as fine as this: through the open door she could see the courtyard, lit now by innumerable little oil lamps, and the cicadas, which had been riotous in early summer, had subsided to a pleasant hum. The interruption of the boy annoyed her.

“Mistress Fatima,” he panted. “His majesty is asking for you. Now, or sooner.”

Fatima clapped the book shut. The child was currying favor; she was no one’s mistress, not even her own.

“Call me girl,” she muttered, standing up. “Everyone else does.”

“Girl Fatima,” said the boy obediently, “his majesty—”

“Yes, fine, all right. I’ll follow in a minute.”

The boy disappeared. Fatima padded into Lady Aisha’s room and returned her book to the carved wooden case where it lived with a dozen others: the Ibn Arabi and Plato for which Lady Aisha had mocked her, but also several volumes of jahili poetry, and a large, odd-smelling book of folktales called Alf Yeom wa Yeom. Tucked beside them was an unbound folio of yellowed paper, the first pages of The Conference of the Birds.

She ran one finger over the untidy leaves, pressed indifferently between two ledgers of receipts to keep them upright. They had been bought, at great cost, from one of the only booksellers the palace had seen in recent years: a man so elderly that the Castilians had not seen fit to embargo him as he passed through their siege lines. So elderly, in fact, that he had been allowed into the harem itself to spread his wares at Lady Aisha’s feet. It was a paltry offering. There had been a few books of fiqh by lesser scholars, an illuminated French chanson or two. There were even, as Fatima remembered, shipping manuals and fat lists of tariffs, the source or interest of which remained unclear. The Conference of the Birds, though incomplete, was the only thing in which Lady Aisha had seen any value.

She bought it with a melancholy she did not bother to disguise. Fatima read the first pages to her mistress so many times that she had committed them to memory. But the story stopped just as it began to get interesting. It unfolded in the time before Adam, when the animals could still speak. The birds, forever quarreling with each other, had long been without a ruler, and gathered together in their meeting place to decide what must be done. The hoopoe, wisest among them, urged the rest to put aside their differences, and rallying the hawks and owls and sparrows and ravens, they set off to the land of Qaf to find their lost king. Yet there was no hint of what befell them next. The folio ended in midverse with the birds in flight over the Dark Sea. There were no teachers left in the palace, aside from a sheikh or two to instruct the sons of bureaucrats. If anyone knew the rest of the poem, no one was telling.

Unsatisfied, Fatima brought the folio to Hassan, who could make anything funny. He had not disappointed her. That was the beginning of their game: they chose a bird, gave it a story, and sent it off, like a child’s paper sparrow, into the air. They had not, as yet, bothered with an ending.

Fatima smoothed the loose pages of the folio so that they were even with the edge of the bookcase. She couldn’t stall much longer. Lady Aisha was lying on her divan with one arm thrown over her face, as if even the feeble light of the oil lamp above her was too much for her eyes. Fatima touched her foot.

“I’m going,” she said.

Lady Aisha turned on her side with a sigh.

“This is a reminder,” she said to Fatima, reaching out to stroke the papers she had just arranged. “This is what it looks like to live at the end of history. There was a time when the most flea-ridden dervish could recite the entirety of The Conference from memory. Now, like the birds, we’ve forgotten more than lesser peoples have ever remembered.”

Fatima waited for the moment to pass.

“Wear something pretty,” murmured Lady Aisha.

Fatima was already pulling her tunic over her head, scanning the fat wooden wardrobe that stood against one wall for something suitable. She selected a robe made from sheer, gauzy fabric, embroidered with thread-of-gold stars.

“There’s no point,” she said, wriggling into it. “It’s just going to come off in five minutes, and it’s nearly too dark to see.”

“It’ll give you confidence,” said Lady Aisha. “He favors you more and more, my dear. My son is not a profligate man—unlike some other sultans one could name. He beds his two wives. Not even that—he beds one wife, as Lady Maryam has seen fit to shut herself away from the world since her children were taken. He beds you. And maybe, once in a while, he beds that blonde Proven?al war captive who refuses to learn Arabic or Castilian—but she’s not important. The point is: freedom is well enough, but influence is better, and if you wanted it, you could have influence aplenty.”