The Bird King(90)
“What? What did I choose?”
“Faith.” Vikram galloped ahead, racing toward the top of the dune, where a breeze that smelled of amber and oud-wood was lifting eddies of sand and mingling them with the snow that covered the far side of the slope. Fatima thought his choice of words odd—she had been filled with doubt every step of the way, and had, in fact, disbelieved in the Bird King at the very moments when it seemed most necessary to have faith. Yet she had continued anyway, and had somehow imparted faith to Hassan and Gwennec when theirs had waned, so perhaps it amounted to the same thing; perhaps after all it amounted to belief.
“Say I had chosen differently,” pressed Fatima, struggling to keep up. “Say I had gone to Morocco. Who would be the Bird King now?”
Vikram danced on the knife-edge of the dune, a darkness that mingled all colors, and grinned down at her with disembodied fangs.
“You won’t like the answer!” he sang. “It’s a jinn answer. The Bird King would be the Bird King. The Bird King is, and has always been. The Bird King doesn’t change.”
Fatima made a face at him.
“You see? I told you you wouldn’t like it. Come along, let’s see to your subjects. They’re all gathered on the beach not far from where I found you, waiting for someone with enough sense to tell them what to do.” He tripped down the far side of the dune into the snow, where the light softened and grew richer, throwing rose and purple shadows into the gentle swells of the landscape and gilding the bare-branched trees. Fatima set her foot on the frozen earth and felt a small thrill of delight. She would not wear ill-fitting shoes again: she would feel heat and cold and earth against her bare skin, or she would have shoes made for her, tailored to her own feet and worn by no one else. She walked across the snow as lightly as Vikram, and laughed, propelled by joy so intense that it verged on something entirely different. When she caught up to him, she took him by the claw and danced in a circle, leaving a stuttering track on the white ground.
The island, as they made their way back toward the beach, never arranged itself into a memorable pattern. There was a forest, but not the forest she remembered passing through on the way to the spring at the center; in this forest, it was autumn, and great straight-limbed oaks shed their yellow leaves over the silent, trackless ground. Fatima saw a deer, or something like a deer, drinking from a stream: it paused and lifted its head when it heard them approach, revealing a dry little smile in a face that was almost human. It stared at Fatima with its luminous eyes, slit like those of a goat, holding her gaze not like a frightened animal, but like a traveler on a road, curious and cautious. Fatima froze where she stood.
“Fear only God,” murmured Vikram, pulling her onward. “Not man, nor beast, nor jinn, nor death: fear only God and you will be safe.”
Fatima forced herself to continue. As she walked, she repeated Vikram’s words until her thoughts echoed the rhythm of her footfall: fear not, fear not, fear not. She watched her feet too, until the yellow leaves upon which she walked thinned into rippling grass and then abruptly to blocks of stone. Fatima looked up, startled. Before her rose the wall of a city, or what had once been a city: the wall had tumbled down in places, revealing an empty street paved with river rock and lined with dark-windowed houses, the style and character of which Fatima couldn’t place. The city was not Moorish, certainly, and not Spanish either: the stout, square houses were made of rough-cut stones with no mortar between them, the windows tiny and vaulted, as if to defend the edifice against siege or bad weather. No, not Spanish, but human enough to stand at odds with the wild, unsettled land around it. Fatima reached out and touched the wall, and felt within it the rumble of a waxing tide.
“Are we close to the sea again?” she asked.
“Nearly. If you walk along this main road, you’ll rapidly come to a cliff with a tidy little fortress perched over it, and below that, a sort of harbor, though no ships have docked there in centuries.” Vikram climbed a pile of rubble and surveyed the vacant street, the color of his shadowy pelt mimicking that of the stone around him. Fatima struggled up the rubble behind him. The city, as she looked at it, began to feel familiar, like an image from a dream or the pressure of a memory. Inhaling sharply, Fatima realized where she had seen it before.
“The map,” she said. “Hassan’s map. Seven harbors. Seven cities for seven bishops—that’s what Gwennec’s story said.”
“He was right enough,” said Vikram, leaping from stone to stone until he stood in the street below. “Though ‘city’ is a generous term. Most of them are little more than a few houses clustered around a watchtower. This is the largest.”
Fatima touched the wall again. The rumble of the invisible surf pulsed through her hand, as though the wall were breathing in a labored way, in and out.
“Con,” she said. “This is Con.”
Vikram smiled.
“The king knows her kingdom,” he said, loping along the street. “Let’s walk this way. There are steps cut into the cliff below the fortress, which will lead us down to the beach.” He trotted off, casting no reflection on the polished stones. Fatima hurried to follow. The emptiness of the street was profound: nothing moved; no sound came from the crowded houses, the doors and shutters of which had long since rotted away; even Fatima’s footsteps made no echo, as though the air itself consumed her passage.