The Bird King(85)

“Not big enough for three,” muttered Hassan.

“Then turn sideways, you radish. I’m freezing out here. Move, move.”

Fatima found herself pressed between Hassan and the slope of the hull.

“No one is sailing this ship,” she murmured.

“Nothing to sail,” said Gwennec. “No wind, no landmarks, compass dead.”

“Is that it, then? We wait here to die?”

“No,” came Hassan’s voice. “I think we’re close now. I think this is how it’s meant to look. Hidden in the fog. That’s what the story says.”

Fatima was about to correct him—surely they had added that detail themselves—but stopped herself. She could no longer remember what they had read and what they had written. Sleep pulled at her again. Gwennec’s breath was already deepening; beside her, she felt Hassan twitch in the violent prelude to dreams. She rested her cheek against his.

She dreamed of a white shoreline. Hills of thick, pale grass, flattened by wind, leading down to the sand; small trees, their trunks like warped silver, hanging over the cresting hillsides, their branches straining backward, like the grass, as if a strong gale had swept over the whole of the landscape. The air was heavy with the smell of rain. Fatima sensed rather than saw the figure standing beside her, yet even before she turned to look, she knew what she would find.

The Bird King did not touch the ground. He hung in the air, held aloft by currents Fatima could not feel, silently beating his great wings. She could look at him only in pieces. He had no face, at least none in any sense that Fatima could describe, but he was clothed in feathers: crimson, blue, gray, glass-green, dark ocher. There were colors that were not colors but memories: the rosy-edged white of a winter sunrise and the mottled red and green of earth blending into water, and here and there a blue-black parted by gold like the quiet dawns in which Lady Aisha had touched her shoulder and asked if she would rise to pray.

He was too frightening to be truly beautiful. There was a remoteness about him, a terrible, unrelenting kind of mercy, the kind that could meet good and evil with equal tenderness. Yet Fatima reached for him with both her arms, saturated with relief and bawling like a child.

I’m here, she said. I’ve come. I crossed the Dark Sea to find you, and now I’m here.

The Bird King folded his wings around her shoulders. She expected him to speak, to communicate something infallible, a tidy ending for the story she and Hassan had begun, but he was silent. The landscape around them dimmed, and Fatima felt a little thrill of doubt. In that doubt, she saw Luz, or rather, the spot in Luz’s eye, which seemed, in the jumbled logic of dreaming, to contain a vast stretch of time in which all the failures of men were chronicled. It pulled itself toward her, closing the rupture of moments and miles between them, until it was so close that it filled her sight.

Hurried footsteps thumped over her head; the space where Hassan and Gwennec had slept was cold. The ship had begun to pitch again. Across the hold, water rose and sank beyond the little row of portholes, each wave knife-edged, crowding against the white sky. Fatima clenched her teeth to fight the nausea that swelled in her gut each time the cog heaved upward. She made her way across the hold and up the steps, swaying like a drunkard, and looked past the stern at what she knew she would find there.

The outline of the carrack was sharp and solid in the pale nothing behind them. Shouts came from the deck. Fatima could see men pointing toward the cog; a dog’s bark cracked through the chill air; a loud blast sounded on a horn.

“We failed,” said Hassan, appearing beside her. “I failed.” His skin looked sallow in the odd light, the skin beneath his eyes as dark as a bruise, as if the effort of altering the map had bled his strength. He looked at Fatima for absolution. “I thought surely they couldn’t follow if I bent things a little. They don’t have the map. But perhaps they have something better.”

“Whatever they have, it isn’t better,” said Fatima. “It’s something worse. Something awful can work as well as something wonderful. That doesn’t make it better.” She stroked his hand with its dirty, ink-stained bandages. “It was my idea, anyway. If anybody’s failed, it’s me.”

Hassan looked at her in surprise.

“I’m not sure I know you at all anymore,” he said. “That sounded almost like an apology.”

The deck of the carrack seethed with activity. Within the scrum of men, clad in black, Fatima saw, or thought she saw, a woman with brassy hair. But the slender figure was quickly eclipsed by the lead hooks of arquebuses as they were propped upon the deck railing, the dull thunk of metal audible across the water. Fatima watched the guns and wondered whether she might still be asleep. That an idea of her own, an idea so clever, the only logical continuation of their excellent luck, might fail so profoundly, had rendered her dull, and she watched with indifference as the row of scarlet-clad fusiliers opposite her loaded shot into each arquebus. Then there was a sudden flare. The sound came a moment later, and a moment after that, a hot breeze stung her neck, too close.

“Get down!” screamed Gwennec. “You madwoman!”

Fatima threw herself onto the deck. Stupid, less easily reasoned with, was on his feet, lathered in sweat, galloping back and forth between the railings. The cog heaved and dipped over rolling water. Fatima braced herself against the rail and gritted her teeth.