The Bird King(84)

“I thought you’d fallen overboard,” he said, terror bright in his voice. “Oh God! I thought you were dead.”

Fatima pressed her face into the curve of his neck: Hassan, half sobbing, kissed her forehead, where her hairline mingled by feathered degrees into her brow. It was not exactly an apology, but Fatima pretended it was, and let herself sink against him as the cog heaved again.

“What is this?” she heard him shout.

“A rogue wave,” came Gwennec’s voice from atop the mast. “There may be more where that came from. The Dark Sea is nothing but fog and violence, damn it all, and this cog wasn’t built for open water.”

“And the carrack?”

“Still there, though we’ve a bit more room between us now. Christ Jesus, don’t just stand there—someone get on the tiller before I lose my mind.”

Fatima looked up and attempted to steady herself. The cog was still rolling, though the angle was no longer so acute. Stupid was on his knees against the rail, showing the whites of his eyes; foam spattered from his mouth. Something fluttered on the table beside the tiller: it was the map, still pinned by its quartet of stones, struggling like a bird caught in a hunter’s trap.

“Hassan,” said Fatima. “I have an idea.”





Chapter 18


He didn’t like to let go of her hand. Gwennec found him a crate to sit on near the little table on the stern castle, but it was Fatima he wanted beside him, his right hand clutching hers as he sketched with his left. She rose every so often to check their course, though the compass, and the gimbals in its orbit, went oddly still after Hassan began to alter the map. Fatima imagined the compass had been a living thing and was now dead: they had killed it, and the halos and half spheres of metal constituted a corpse.

The fantasy was so vivid that she found herself unwilling to look at the compass after a time, focusing instead on the movement of Hassan’s fingers, the darkening circles beneath his eyes. He was working in ink now, not in charcoal: he had selected a blue bottle from the innards of his leather case and mixed powders and oils to create a color that reminded Fatima of the ship, a red-brown, water stained, earthy hue, each drop of which pulled them closer to the king of the birds.

“What’s moving?” Gwennec asked at one point, hovering over Hassan’s shoulder. “Us, or the island, or the sea?”

“Nothing is moving,” murmured Hassan. “I’m just shortening the distance between us and what we want.”

“You know the sun’s gotten confused,” pressed Gwennec. “I’ve been up the mast, watching it tick around in a circle. It’s as if this cog is the still point at the top of the world, where they say there is no darkness.”

“You’re awfully calm about it,” said Fatima.

“I don’t know what else to be. I don’t know what else to do. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Fatima untangled her fingers from Hassan’s, kissing his head when he made a noise of protest. She straightened and stretched her back. The fog had returned; or rather, the horizon had vanished, and the carrack, if it still followed them, was hidden in a gray blur.

“I’m tired,” she announced.

“Go sleep,” said Gwennec. “I’ll stay with him.”

“I don’t want you,” muttered Hassan.

“You’ve not got much choice. It’s me or Stupid, and Stupid shits every twenty minutes. I notice neither of you refined gentlefolk has bothered to clean up.”

“You clean it up, since you’re the least domesticated.”

“Oh, I see how things lie. Shall I wipe your ass as well, while I’m about it?”

Fatima left them to bicker and went belowdecks. Her shoulders ached from being too long in one position: there was pressure in her temples that blinking did nothing to dispel. She crawled into the bunk where Hassan and Gwennec had slept and breathed their mingled scents. Before her eyes, the grain of the oak trees that had become the hull of the ship slid along from plank to plank, as solid as ever. Everything around her seemed too real: surely she was asleep, or she had gone overboard in the rogue wave, or she was back in the palace, dreaming, and had never left at all. Nothing real could follow from desires like hers. They were adrift in what was surely no longer the waking world; fate did not reward such recklessness. If you climb too high, Lady Aisha had once told her, the angels will come down and ask you where you’re going. Yet the hull, as she touched it, was rough and sturdy and shifted almost imperceptibly beneath her fingers to accommodate the motion of the water. The ship was still real, still hers.

“Qaf,” she whispered, tracing invisible letters on the hull. “Antillia.” Perhaps the difference didn’t matter; perhaps it was only the escape that mattered. And she had escaped: she was free, and though freedom was neither happiness nor safety, though it was in fact a crueler and lonelier thing than she could have imagined, it was real, just as the ship was real, and like the ship, it was hers.

She fell asleep with her finger pressed against the hull. A jostle and the scent and heaviness of a warm body half woke her sometime later—when exactly, she couldn’t tell; the light had not changed when Hassan collapsed beside her with a sigh.

“Move over,” came Gwennec’s voice, whispering.