The Bird King(91)
“What happened here?” she asked. Without thinking, she dragged her fingers along the stone wall, as she had done in the corridors of the Alhambra, learning the vertical terrain of the place with the most fundamental of her senses. “What happened to the people who built this city?”
“Do you think I know everything? I imagine they died from a failure of imagination. They probably tried to build a road into that forest and never came out again. Or perhaps they left in their ships, intending to return, and couldn’t find their way. This place—” Vikram paused and sniffed the air as if for answers. “No, it isn’t a place at all. Only an idea with a location. Unless you’re a jinn, or something else created in the First Age, you’re not likely to visit it twice.”
“Unless you’re Hassan,” corrected Fatima. “And you have a map.”
“Unless you’re a miracle worker with perfect faith,” said Vikram drily. “He could go anywhere he liked and the unseen would gather to clear his path. But it was you who took the final steps, little friend, when there were no more maps to guide you.”
Fatima pressed her palm against the doorway of a small house built into the hillside at a slant, the keystone at its peak suspended like a pendulum above the empty space where a door had once been: an invitation or a warning or something more indecipherable. Its hinges were still there, rusted but expectant, angled toward the darkness of the interior rooms.
“This feels like something Hassan could have made,” she said, more to herself than to Vikram. “Like one of the rooms he used to make for me in the palace when I was bored. They were always empty. There was something—I don’t know—muffled about them. But I always had the strongest feeling that other people had been there before. If there was a staircase, the steps were worn. If there was a windowpane, the latch was scuffed, as if it’d been lifted and locked a thousand times. But I never saw a single other person.”
Vikram studied her face and made no reply. The thought of Hassan, the memory of his ink-stained fingers, landed in Fatima’s chest and settled there, halting her where she stood and draining the glamor from the scene around her, a feeling disconcertingly like waking from a dream. Had Hassan and Gwennec reached the island, or had the wave that bore them away carried them somewhere else? Her kingdom, if such it was, was without meaning if Hassan had not survived to see it, and Gwennec, for whom her heart spared a small cry—if they were gone, then her victory had been bought at too high a price. The air felt suddenly close and oppressive, as if the silent city had been shut like a disused wardrobe until the moment Fatima set foot in it. She took great, hollow-feeling breaths that did nothing to relieve her. Fatima began to hurry along the street, craving sunlight. Vikram called out to her, but she ignored him, pelting across the rippled pavement toward the crest of the hill, past stone houses pressed tightly against each other, until she came to a squat little four-walled fortress, an ancient sort of keep, with only sky behind it.
She could see straight through the arched entryway and out the other side. A second arch, the twin of the entrance, revealed a hazy line of clouds and a fringe of sea grass that wandered indoors through the cracks in the paving stones. Between the two arches was a square, high-ceilinged room hardly as large as the courtyard of the harem in the Alhambra, bare of any decoration, a mere interruption between the city and the sea. Breathing raggedly, Fatima stumbled inside.
It was like standing inside a seashell: within the main hall, the thrum of the waves was constant and the light from the open archways lacquered the walls in yellow and pink. Fatima paused, swaying. To her right and left, stone stairways spiraled up toward an invisible second floor; in the middle of the hall was a recessed pit still blackened by the remains of ancient fires. But it was the sky and the grass that called her, and she ran past the fire pit through the archway on the far wall and stood on the extreme verge of a cliff.
Beneath her was a drop of several stories: the stone below was white and soft, limestone perhaps, and long ago some enterprising person had cut into it rough steps at amateurish intervals. Adorned here and there with more pale grass, the steps ended at a thin strip of beach where the outgoing tide sucked and worried at shoals of well-worn sand, and it was there that Fatima saw the monster.
She saw its feet first: they were forked and covered in a kind of yellowish scale and as long as Fatima was tall, and looking down at them, she knew at once that they had made the unearthly tracks she had seen in the snow. They were attached to well-muscled limbs that doubled back on themselves like the legs of a cat, but they were hairless and speckled, supporting a barrel chest the size of a small house. Ribs slid beneath the thin flesh, causing a crest of water-stained spines to sway along the creature’s back; it was moving, weaving back and forth as a snake or a monitor might, its slender tail suspended above the sand behind it, its head bobbing in an awful rhythm. It was the face, though, that filled Fatima with horror: as with the deer, there was something human about it, about the eyes set forward in the skull and focused intently on a single point; the mouth full and small and ready to speak. It advanced along the wet sand, a survivor from a time when the sundering of something from nothing required an act of divine violence.
She knew it immediately. She had seen it night after night as she lay flat on her back, watched it swim through an ocean of ink on the far wall of the sultan’s bedchamber: it was the sea serpent, Hassan’s serpent, freed now from its paper confines, a thing too fearsome to be taken in with a single glance.