The Bird King(9)

The map was four hundred years out of date.

“You often stare at that map,” came the sultan’s voice, breaking her reverie. “Why do you like it so much?”

“Why do you keep it?” countered Fatima.

“I suppose to remind myself of what I might have ruled,” said Abu Abdullah, kicking off the scuffed leather slippers he wore. “To give myself a reason to rise from bed in the morning. I tell myself that Al Andalus is still here, even if it extends no farther than the walls of this city. And then I can sit on my divan in the Mexuar with a straight face.”

His candor alarmed Fatima. She scanned the room for something else to talk about, thinking of all the poems she’d read about other concubines; tender, jeweled, unfailingly loyal women who lived in a golden era receding ever farther into the past, and whom Fatima would never resemble. Her eyes were drawn to a small table pulled up next to the bed, stacked with papers and waxy scrolls: he had brought his work back with him from the Mexuar, as he so often did now. Fatima clucked her tongue and knelt next to the table, tidying the heap of petitions.

“You know you’re not supposed to bring all this to bed with you,” she said. “Your physicians have said over and over that it disturbs your sleep and your appetite. How many of these couldn’t wait until tomorrow?”

“Considering the centuries of mismanagement that brought us to our current apocalypse—all of them,” said the sultan drily, throwing himself onto his bed. He still moved like a boy. Fatima had found it charming once, but lately it had begun to unnerve her.

“Have you eaten?” she asked, scrutinizing his ribs. Abu Abdullah rolled onto his back with a groan.

“Now you’re just nagging. Good God! Even my slaves nag me now. What a farce.” He caught her by the waist, pinching her in a particularly ticklish spot. Fatima shrieked and doubled over and let him pull her laughingly down beside him.

“My dress,” she gasped. The thread-of-gold was heavy and sharp and dug into her shoulders.

“Is there no end to these small humiliations? Here.” Abu Abdullah helped her pull the offending garment over her head. It ended up in a crumpled heap on the floor. Fatima put her face up to be kissed. His mouth was fragrant and bitter with the mastic powder he used to clean his teeth. The taste of it never failed to remind Fatima of the first time she had been presented to him, on a night two years ago when Lady Aisha had declared her old enough to share a bed: he had been affectionate but impersonal, handling her as deftly as he would a horse on a hunt. She had left him on sore legs, bewildered and imagining herself in love, imagining, in fact, many things that would never come to pass: confiding in him, advising him on matters of state, giving and receiving impassioned letters hidden in flowers, as lovers did in poems. But whatever desire she felt had faded when she realized he was still her king. She could neither initiate their lovemaking nor reject it: it was a transaction in which her desire played no part.

Now, as he pulled her beneath him, Fatima found herself staring at the oil lamp on the table nearby and calculating how long it would be before she could return to her poems. But Abu Abdullah did not touch her in the usual way: instead, he pressed his face against her neck and tucked the wool coverlet around them both.

“Will you stay here?” he murmured. “Sleep here, I mean.”

“Of course,” said Fatima warily, wondering whether this was some trick. “If that’s what you want.”

“Good. I’d like company just now.”

Fatima traced a scar that wandered down his right arm, a legacy of his ill-fated battles in Castile, and felt uneasy.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

For a moment, he didn’t answer her. There was kohl smudged in the creases beneath his eyes; his hair, which he wore long, hung in lank strands across his pillow. Fatima imagined him in a farmer’s unbleached linen shirt, his head shaved and his golden skin dark from long hours working under the sun. He would have been happier, and not much poorer than he was now.

“There is no money left,” he said softly. “And no grain. The shipment of wheat from Egypt that was meant for us was stopped at the port in Rejana by the Castilian blockade. I had a courier this morning. You won’t be spared this time, you and the other women. We will not last the winter.”

Fatima was silent. All her life, meals had appeared at their appointed times, made by unseen hands and unseen means. She knew, or rather sensed, that the rest of the palace had been hungry for some time—perhaps even the sultan himself had missed meals, if the hollows between his ribs were any hint. Certainly Hassan was always eager for whatever she brought him. But the harem had remained apart, supplied in all seasons with bread and oranges and meat, even if there were fewer and fewer maids to serve it.

“We’ll be fine,” she said with more confidence than she felt. “Every year your viziers wring their hands and say it’s the end of the world, but it never is. Granada is still here. We’re still here. We’ll be all right, surely.”

She felt him shake his head.

“Not this time,” he said. “Not anymore.”

Fatima had never heard him speak so quietly. She felt a sudden pity for the man beside her. In other circumstances, circumstances in which she could say yes or no to the nights they spent together, she might well have loved him. The feeling was so analogous to desire that she pulled him toward her, sinking her teeth gently into the flesh of his shoulder. He caught his breath.