The Bird King(8)
Fatima softened at the thought that her mistress had listened and understood. She did not want influence but didn’t say so; instead she bent to kiss Lady Aisha’s slender hand.
“Tell him to come and visit his old mother,” said Lady Aisha, nestling into her divan. “He hasn’t been to see me in a week.” She sighed again, but she was smiling now. Fatima blew out the lamp and left.
The corridor that led to the sultan’s private quarters was dark as Fatima walked along it; someone had forgotten to light the torch in the wall sconce midway. But there was a moon, and eddies of silver penetrated the latticed windows overhead, creating a feeble glow that kept Fatima from blundering into anything. She dragged one hand along the wall at hip level to steady herself. Her fingers accumulated the dusty residue of whitewash as she went, but then encountered something warm and sleek: the pelt of an animal. She clung to the wall and bit back a shriek.
“Dog,” she gasped.
A shadow detached itself from the wall and came toward her, panting, its yellow eyes hanging in the dark like drops of molten glass.
“What are you doing here?” Fatima demanded, still in a whisper. She reached out her hand: the dog breathed on it happily. “How many times do the guards have to throw you out? They’ll poison you next.”
The dog shook itself and farted, as if to demonstrate its bravado. Fatima stuffed her hand into her mouth to keep from laughing. In the daylight, the dog was a mangy, jackal-like thing: head too large, limbs too long, giving it a strange, loping gait, like that of a crouching man. How the creature continually made its way into the harem was the cause of spirited debate. Nessma and her ladies pretended to be afraid of it, claiming it was the daytime shape of some ungodly thing, a jinn perhaps, who entered and left the harem by turning sideways into the realm of the unseen. Lady Aisha was perpetually offering to kill it herself with her own eating knife, but this was an empty threat: the dog adored her, and would sit at her feet with its eyes closed, just like a real courtier, when she played the lute.
“You have to go,” whispered Fatima, tugging on the scruff of the dog’s neck. “The sultan can’t see you here.”
The dog snapped at her hands. It smelled of sulfur and warm iron.
“I’m not joking,” said Fatima. “Go. I have things to do.”
The dog groaned and ambled into the dark, its nails clicking rhythmically on the stone floor. Fatima waited until she couldn’t hear it anymore before wiping her hands on her tunic and continuing down the hall.
The door to the sultan’s rooms was slightly ajar when she reached it. Fatima cleared her throat to announce herself. It opened wider to reveal Abu Abdullah himself, clad for sleep in a white izar tied at his hips, falling in pleats to his ankles. Fatima studied his bare torso ruefully. He was handsome enough, and still young—young enough to sire many more children—but there was already gray at his temples, and his face, always a little too round for a sultan’s, had acquired a permanently stunned expression.
“Good, you’re here,” he said, grazing her forehead with a kiss. “Come in.”
Fatima slipped past him into the room. Abu Abdullah’s sleeping chamber was modest, as he was: a cotton mattress on a low dais at the center of the room, the skin of a large buck he had hunted as a youth growing ratty on the floor. Fatima had long thought that if Abu Abdullah had been born a commoner, he would have been perfectly content as one of the farmers who lived outside his walls: florid, hardworking men with smallholdings and large families. Kingship did not suit him. He had no taste for fine clothes or complicated dinners. When, in her rare bouts of enthusiasm, Fatima called him by his name instead of his title, he did not reprimand her.
“I’ve taken you away from your books,” he said now, his voice amused and sad. “I can always tell when you’ve been reading. You come in with this unmistakable look of irritation.”
Alarmed, Fatima ducked her head and smiled through her lashes in her best imitation of modesty.
“Never, my lord,” she said promptly. The sultan laughed.
“There’s no use denying it,” he said. “I know you too well for that.”
Fatima wondered whether this was true. She looked away, not daring to meet his eyes, and her gaze fell upon a map on the far wall. It was one of Hassan’s early efforts, the size of his signature betraying the self-confidence of a very young man. It was large: ten handspans tall and at least as many across. Sketched along its mottled vellum perimeter was the outline of the Iberian Peninsula; below that, the crown of Africa curved up to meet it at the Strait of Jebel Tareq. To the southeast was the Middle Sea, called mediterranean by the Catholics; to the northwest, the Dark Sea, represented by an expanse of nothing. The nothing was inhabited by a sea serpent. It drifted in the featureless ocean with an expression of inky melancholy, treading water at the edge of the world. Fatima often found herself staring at it on nights when she would rather have been somewhere else, imagining what it might be like to be the only figure in the blank space at the end of the map: solitary but free.
East of the lonely serpent, the Iberian Peninsula was shaded green to show the extent of the Empire of Al Andalus. Beginning at the feet of the Pyrenees, it swept south, shying away from the kingdoms of León, Castile, and Pamplona, curving west to encompass Lisbon, and dipping south again to Toledo, Córdoba, Seville, and Granada. It was a good size. There were ports marked in blue and high roads in red, which, taken together, gave the impression of unassailable prosperity. The Catholic kingdoms to the north were small and divided. They posed no threat.