The Bird King(92)
Screams broke Fatima’s trance. There were other figures on the beach, she now saw: two in identical dark, spattered cloaks and two more in varied states of disarray; one, a child, appeared to be wearing nothing more than a nightdress. The cloaks, the same as the one Fatima herself wore, and the windblown, salt-lightened heads of red and blond hair above them, sent her to her knees and tore a noise from her throat that sounded as though it came from somewhere else.
The monster whipped its head toward her and looked up into her eyes. Terror racked Fatima’s body like heat, pulling at her sinews, begging her to flee. It was a displacing, disorienting fear, one that upset the hierarchy of things. If the creature below her was made from the same matter as Fatima, it was possible that God was not entirely on her side; if the thing below her was real, then God was also on the side of the monsters. The world, in all its upheaval, was not partisan, and might raise her up only to strike her down with luminous indifference.
“I am the king of the birds,” she whispered to herself. “I am the king of the birds.”
The monster—the thing, the leviathan—twisted itself into a crouch and leaped, sinking its claws into the white cliff. Fatima heard something scrabbling across the paving stones of the hall behind her: Vikram, a smaller darkness, had caught up and was howling piteously, like a dog.
“I am the king of the birds,” Fatima repeated. The leviathan pulled itself up toward her along the cliff face, sending fragments of chalk down on the sand below, its supple mouth pursed—not a nightmare, she thought absently, but a challenge, a reminder that the dominion of mortal men and women was circumscribed, even here at the end of the earth.
The leviathan hauled its heavy body onto the ledge of the cliff. It smelled of hot metal or of summer sun on bare earth, like Vikram, and Fatima wondered if it, too, was a jinn, something made of fire, more akin to the stars than to herself. It made no difference: she would die or she would live, but the thing would acknowledge her. She stood before it and dug her toes into the yielding chalk and lifted her chin.
“I am king here,” she said, and though it sounded forced in her ears, her voice didn’t waver. “And you will answer to me.”
The creature tilted its head. Its lips parted in a slit, behind which was elemental darkness.
“I am king here,” it said, mimicking her tone, her inflection. “And you will answer to me.”
Fatima hesitated. Was it mocking or threatening her, or, like a parrot, could it only repeat the things it heard? In the moment it took her to consider, the monster lunged.
Fatima was thrown backward on the chalk cliff and felt her teeth rattle. Light blinded her. It didn’t fade when she blinked, and she pressed her eyes with the palms of her hands, fearing that she had lost her sight. But the light intensified: it was amber and gold and almost thick, and warmed the cliff beneath Fatima’s back. It was, she realized, the sun, which had declined far enough to shine straight through the entrance of the keep behind her and out the other side, striking the monster full in the face.
It winced and gave a choked cry. The pressure on Fatima’s legs receded. She kicked blindly, hitting air at first and then something more solid. The monster grabbed uselessly at the grass and the brittle chalk and cried again and fell, and the piercing light fell likewise, its glory fleeting, eclipsed by the stone parapets of men.
Fatima saw the shapes of birds. A hoopoe hovered over her, its red crest and barred wings in disarray; beside it, a crow hooded in black was making a rasping, mournful sound. A sparrow, too, flitted into and out of her vision and chirped and fussed, and a dark-headed heron snapped and spread its blue-and-white wings.
“Stay back,” the heron commanded. “She hit her head on that ledge. The bones in her neck may slip if we move her.”
“To hell with you,” wailed the hoopoe. “Give her to me. Fa! Please open your eyes—”
The crow stroked her brow and muttered prayers beneath its breath.
“I told you I knew where we were!” chirped the sparrow. “It is the isle of Avalon! And this is the High King who can make light spring from the ground and drive out the serpents—”
“This is a girl, though, not a king.”
“A queen, then.”
“No,” muttered Fatima, alarmed at this suggestion. She thought of Lady Aisha, who ruled from inside a courtyard; and farther away, Luz’s queen, whose lands were vast but who was outranked by her sullen husband. “Queen is a terrible job. Don’t want that job. Want to be king.”
“Bless me, she speaks!”
Fatima opened her eyes. The face of a man interposed itself between her and the milky evening: a blue-black face, marked with a triple chevron of thin scars that spanned the breadth of his forehead and met between his brows. It was a long, settled face, the jaw deliberate, the eyes large and watchful: the sort of face that bore age gracefully, leaving Fatima with no indication of how old the man might be aside from a certain gray cast about his temples. He was studying her face with evident surprise, touching the seam across the bridge of her nose with practiced fingers.
“You’re quite human,” he said. “When I saw you on the cliff, I could have sworn you were something else.”
Fatima sat up too suddenly. The sky reeled: the scarred man clucked his tongue and steadied her head between his hands.
“That was foolish,” he said. “What if one of your small bones had slipped out of place? You might never walk again.”