The Bird King(70)

Fatima shrank from her instinctively. Luz entered without a word and set her lamp on the table near the center of the room, where it threw light on the peaked canvas overhead. She pulled a stool from where it sat near the table and settled herself upon it, tucking the skirts of her dress out of the way.

“You look thinner,” she said to Fatima in her ringing voice.

Fatima swallowed and said nothing.

“You assaulted the general,” said Luz, one eyebrow arching toward the feathery gold of her temple. “He wants to hang you.”

“He assaulted me,” protested Fatima. “I was only defending myself.”

Luz smiled without humor.

“Your virtue is safe,” she said. “I’ve seen to that.”

Fatima knew she probably expected a show of gratitude but could not bring herself to thank Luz for something that should have been hers by right.

“And Hassan?” she ventured.

Luz didn’t answer. She studied Fatima in the shallow lamplight with pursed lips. The spot in her left eye, the dark spot Fatima had seen from her hidden vantage point on the road south, was still there, gleaming beneath the blonde fringe of her lashes: not a speck of dust, then, but perhaps an injury, though what sort of injury, Fatima couldn’t guess. Looking at it for too long made her uneasy, and she stared instead at her own feet.

A fat serving man in a stained tunic came panting through the door with a plate of food and set it on the ground near Fatima’s hand. Fatima fell upon it like a hawk, scooping up hot fragments of leek and mutton and watery almond pottage with her fingers and licking each one clean.

“There’s a spoon,” said Luz drily. “If you want it. We don’t normally eat so well, but today is the Feast of Saint Verena. She’s said to watch over young girls on long journeys. She was born in Egypt and traveled all the way to Switzerland to evangelize the pagans there a thousand years ago. Perhaps it was she who saved you from being despoiled.”

“I saved myself,” muttered Fatima around a mouthful of leek.

“Well. You called for me, anyway, and I came.” Luz smiled again. Her face and hands, the only parts of her visible in the dark, seemed to glow with an internal luminescence between the folds of her black gown, so that she appeared like the shrouded icon of some saint. Fatima withdrew instinctively, pulling her feet beneath the spattered hem of Gwennec’s cloak.

“What happens now?” she asked.

Luz spread her hands.

“You tell me,” she said. “We can have a short conversation in which you accept your Savior, the Son of God, and confess, in writing, the sins you have witnessed and participated in with the sorcerer Hassan ibn Haytham of Granada. Or we can have a longer conversation in which I extract those things from you piece by piece. It’s entirely up to you.”

The magnanimity in her voice, the little ironic thrum of laughter, turned the food to a solid, indigestible lump in Fatima’s mouth. If Luz had been slow-witted and humorless, or without affection, Fatima could have hated her, but Luz was none of those things, and it was this, the richness of her smile, the ample evidence of a tender heart and a lively mind, that made something in Fatima recoil with dread.

“The sultan will be furious when he finds out you’re holding me here and letting your men lay their hands on me,” Fatima hazarded.

Luz laughed.

“The sultan has repudiated you,” she said. “You have no friends left, Fatima. Even the monk whose cloak you’re wearing has learned better. Soon enough, Hassan will come to realize his own errors, and when he does, as I’ve promised you and I promise you now, he will be spared. So will you, if only you humble yourself and examine your heart.”

Fatima examined her heart. Might she do as Luz asked? It was only a matter of words. She could, she thought, adopt an air of convincing sincerity. She was used to pretending. She could kneel and profess an alien faith and maybe even shed a few tears, and make up a story or two in which Hassan’s powers were the gift of the Devil. But then there was the troublesome possibility that Hassan might tell different stories, or might, for all his nervous sensibilities, prove the stronger character in the end, and insist upon his own innocence, even in the face of death.

“Can I think about it?” she asked in a much smaller voice.

Luz’s eyes went wide. She left her seat to kneel at Fatima’s feet and take the younger woman’s hands between her own, kissing the tips of her fingers.

“Of course you can think about it,” she said. “You don’t know how happy it makes me to hear you ask.” She leaned closer, until Fatima could smell the oil of her hair and the honeyed scent of rose water rising from her bodice.

“Can I tell you a secret?” she whispered.

Fatima didn’t dare reply.

“God speaks to me,” said Luz. “He has favored me with His insight. I see things that are a vast distance away, in time and in space. I saw you on your stolen ship. I saw the place where you would dock. And I saw you before, on the road, when you hid in the ditch at my feet, but God told me it wasn’t yet time. He told me that if I were patient, you would lead me back to the sorcerer Hassan. And it all happened, didn’t it? It all happened just as the Lord showed me it would.” Her breathing had grown rapid. Fatima tried to free her hands and found she could not. Luz’s face was tense, elated, the chapped corners of her mouth pulled taut. As Fatima watched, the speck in her left eye began to wriggle.