The Bird King(71)
“Let me go,” she begged, but Luz seemed not to hear her. The speck squirmed, swimming against the white of Luz’s eye, a feeble horror, a worm culled from some other earth. With all her strength, she wrenched her hands from Luz’s grip and wiped them on her tunic.
“You’re afraid,” said Luz placidly. “Don’t be. I’ve been praying for you, Fatima. And for Hassan, grievous though his sins may be. No one is beyond God’s mercy. You need only repent. A new world is coming—I have seen that too. The banner of the Savior will fly over lands undreamed of by old men in their cassocks. Isabella of Spain will reign over an empire so vast that the sun will rise on its easternmost shore before it sets on the westernmost mountain. The sins of the world will be cleansed with blood, as salvation was bought with the blood of the Son. You could share it with us, Fatima. You could stand by my side, by the side of my queen, and joy unending could be yours.”
The speck had writhed its way across the surface of Luz’s eye and lodged just beside her iris, a parasitic moon orbiting a convex host. Fatima’s ears were ringing; the ground seemed to fade and run beneath her. She leaned heavily on her hands to steady herself.
“I thank you for your prayers,” was all she could think to say. Luz smiled and rose to her feet.
“You’ll be safe here,” she said. “Eat and rest. I’ll come and see you in the morning, after you’ve had some time alone.” She hesitated at the tent flap and smiled again, and then was gone, succeeded by an eddy of cold air.
Fatima lay down on the furs that covered the floor of the tent and hugged her knees to her chest. Luz had left her lamp behind: it cast an uneven circle of light on the little table and the ground, and across Fatima’s feet, leaving everything beyond it obscured. She heard a small noise, like a cry, from somewhere outside, and held her breath to listen, thinking it might be Hassan, but it did not come again, and she was left to imagine who or what had made it.
Through the tent flap, she watched a filament of stars progress across the sky and let herself fall into a stupor. She thought of Luz, whose hair was the color of the lamplight, and felt the imprint of her kisses upon her fingertips, and wondered whether she was wrong after all, and this was what goodness looked like. She spoke like goodness. It would be easy, thought Fatima, if Luz was right: if Luz was right, one need never bother about the wreckage left in the wake of these holy wars, about the lives lost and enslaved, for the wreckage was cleansed by the horrors visited upon it. She fell half asleep thinking about how easy it was. Yet against her lids, she saw the little speck, the worm, burrowing its way across Luz’s field of vision, and knew, in a way she knew very little else, that whatever had spoken to her was not God.
Something warm and soft pressed against her and brought her back to consciousness. It rumbled happily, smelling of the pine woods: it was the tortoiseshell cat, the tiny queen that had been and gone in the afternoon, and it was blinking at her companionably in the dark. Fatima rolled onto her back and held out her hand: the cat rubbed its cheek against her fingers. But the little creature was after the remains of the meal Luz had brought her, and soon abandoned Fatima to lick mutton fat from the edge of the bowl. Fatima sat up to stretch her stiff legs. The cat twitched its tail and made small satisfied sounds as it ate, indifferent when she caressed it. It felt good to touch something so artlessly affectionate, something that neither promised nor demanded anything. Whether Fatima lived long enough to set foot outside the encampment or not, there would still be black-and-gold cats, and sparrows, and the matted grass she could feel beneath the furs that covered the ground, and though her time among them might be brief, the knowledge that these simple things would persist comforted her.
“Look at you, so small and neat. You’re very pretty,” she told the cat.
“So are you,” said the cat, raising its head and licking its whiskers, “though my brother says you’ve heard it so often that the compliment annoys you.”
Fatima fell backward onto her hands.
“You’re not friendless,” the cat continued. “The forces you see are working against you, but some you do not see are working on your behalf.”
“The forces I see,” repeated Fatima dully. The cat fluffed out its tail and shook its paws like a woman fussing with her skirts, and suddenly Fatima did see a woman, or the reflection of a woman, clothed in furs and in her own thick black-and-gold hair, which sparkled with fragments of ribbon and small jewels. She was angular, all sloping jaw and skewed brow, and her eyes were large and yellow in a face the color of temple smoke. On her feet were a pair of jeweled slippers sewn with thread-of-gold, like those a palace woman might wear.
“What are you?” Fatima whispered.
“You already know,” said the woman.
Unthinking, Fatima reached out to touch the woman’s hair, expecting to encounter only air and silence, but instead found her fingers tangled in warm, heavy tresses that gave off the scent of living wood. The woman closed her eyes and smiled with undisguised pleasure, offering the side of her neck for Fatima to stroke. In a stupor, Fatima let her fingers trail over the feverish skin, as soft as something newly born, and felt as though she had fallen backward, so that the woman and the world itself loomed over her.
“Are you frightened of me?” the woman asked. When Fatima didn’t answer, she shifted, half shrugging, and Fatima’s fingers slipped down a length of jeweled chaos to rest against the flat of her belly. Fatima was seized by something that was emphatically not fear, but frightened her nonetheless.