The Bird King(89)

“I might, but I only eat when I’m hungry. You banu adam eat whenever the mood strikes you, whether you’re hungry or not. Judge for yourself which impulse is more reliable.”

“And the thing that made those tracks? When does it eat?”

“Whenever it senses opportunity. Ah, here we are. Look, Fatima. You’re the first of your kind to lay eyes on this place in many hundreds of years.”

Fatima lifted her head. Vikram had taken them to the summit of the snow-covered hill. They stood looking down its far slope, where the snow faded by gentle gradients into yellow sand. A series of mounded dunes led down into a shallow valley, at the bottom of which was a cluster of trees whose thick fronds threw shade over low, flowering bushes; all were suffused with ambient light, as if the sun shone on the little oasis from beneath. In the middle, ringed by the sharp-shadowed trees, was a small lake.

It was perfectly round, the lake was, and a shade of blue that was not reflected in the many-colored twilight of the sky above. Fatima was sure she had seen it before. But she had not: the lake was part of Gwennec’s story, and she had committed its image to memory.

“Is this Antillia?” she asked, startled. “Are we not in Qaf after all?”

“Perhaps it’s time to consider the possibility that it doesn’t matter,” said Vikram. “The place remains, regardless of what you want to call it. Go! Go down and see the king.”

Fatima slid from his back. Her feet landed in a borderland between sand and snow, where the ground was frozen on top but warm underneath. She hurried down the face of the dune, her steps kicking up sheaves of fine sand until she was forced to slow down

and shield her face. The haze before her settled. The lake came into view, nestled in its bed of palm trees. It was not so much a lake, she realized, as a pool or a spring: some ancient race had enclosed it with a low wall of limestone that might once have been white but was now water stained and spackled with lichen. Fatima rushed toward it and pressed herself against the warm stone, searching the curvature of the wall, the thicket of flower-strewn thornbushes, the face of the rosy limestone hill that emerged abruptly from the desert just beyond the oasis.

Nothing stirred except a little current of air through the dry fronds of the trees. Fatima heard Vikram pad toward her and come to a stop, sniffing the air.

“There’s no one here,” she protested.

“Certainly there is,” he said. “We’re here.”

“But where is the king?”

“Where do you suppose? Look into the water.”

Fatima looked down. The surface of the spring was preternaturally calm. Peering into it, she saw only herself. None of the copper and silver mirrors in the Alhambra had reflected images so precisely. She found herself surprised by the sight of her decisive jaw, the skeptical curve of her brow. They belonged to someone older and more intent than she had been when she last saw herself; someone who had gone without food and could take a life if the need arose. But her features were interrupted by something that had not been there before: a thin seam cut diagonally across her face from forehead to chin, traversing her nose at its widest point, less a wound than a fracture, like cracked glass. She touched her face, startled.

“I fixed what I could,” said Vikram, sounding almost apologetic. “You’re lucky you didn’t lose an eye. But the line will always be there, I’m afraid. Will you mind? You look as though you might mind.”

“I don’t mind,” said Fatima, running one finger along the seam. “I was only thinking that people have been telling me how beautiful I am for as long as I can remember, and I’ve always hated them for it. But they were right. I am beautiful.”

Vikram threw his head back and laughed. The sound echoed off the chalky hill on the far side of the spring and bounced back again, doubling itself.

“Come along,” he said. “Let’s go back—it’s too hot in this part of the island.”

Fatima sat on the edge of the little wall and watched Vikram amble away.

“I want to see the Bird King,” she called after him, feeling something had gone wrong.

“You’ve been looking at the Bird King for the last five minutes,” said Vikram.

Fatima looked into the water again. Her own face stared back at her. All the moments that had come before, the things she had remembered and forgotten, arranged themselves into a straight line. She could look back along it to the yellow room in the palace where she had been born and see how they had each proceeded, one after the other, to the wild place in which she found herself, though she could not have imagined at the beginning where the end would be.

“I am the king of the birds,” she whispered to herself.

“Yes, you are,” came Vikram’s voice. “Get up, Fatima. Rise, oh King of the Birds.”





Chapter 20


Fatima took off her boots and left them by the lip of the spring, and walked back up the canted dunes in her bare feet.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.

Vikram was hunched over beside her, a dark blur above the sand containing eyes and teeth and little else she could identify. Yet there was nothing about him that frightened her anymore: she knew, in some real sense, what he was, and more than that, she knew what they were to each other.

“There was nothing to tell,” he said. “To find the Bird King, you needed to rid yourself of all the parts of you that were not the Bird King. I had nothing to do with it, and neither, for that matter, did anyone else. If you had made your choices differently, you might be in Morocco now, comforting a deposed sultan; or in Castile, crowning an empress; or in the Empty Quarter, sitting at my sister’s feet. You could have clung to hope. Instead, you chose something more radical.”