The Bird King(94)

“Here.” Gwennec’s rough hand grazed her cheek; he settled something across her brow. “A king needs a crown.” He laughed in his hoarse way. Fatima reached up and touched a circlet of sea grass crudely woven with small yellow flowers.

“Hail Fatima,” said Gwennec, rising and shaking the sand from his habit. “King of the Birds. You idiots were right after all—you were right about everything, only not in the way you thought.” The air was growing cooler; much of the light had left the sky. Fatima stood, one hand on her prickly crown, and surveyed the empty beach. The others watched her, waiting, just as Vikram had said, for someone to tell them what to do.

“We’ll need a fire,” she said.

“I’ll get one started,” said Mary, moving toward the little encampment. “We collected a good bit of driftwood this morning.”

“No,” said Fatima, surprised only for a moment by how readily they all responded to her suggestion. “Not here. We’re a royal household now. We sleep in the palace.”

Gwennec helped Deng carry the bags up the stone steps to the clifftop. Fatima followed with Hassan, their arms full of skeletal driftwood, rendered so leached and dry by salt and wind that it weighed almost nothing. Vikram offered no help: he scaled the cliff face, complaining under his breath, and disappeared over the top before the rest were halfway up the slanting staircase. Mary came last, for the short, rough steps hit nearly at her knees. Fatima knew better than to offer help, but slowed her pace and paused every so often, as if to catch her breath, when Mary fell behind.

“You needn’t wait,” Mary panted. “I’ll get there eventually. Faugh! I’ll never set foot on that beach again, that’s for certain.”

“We’ll find another way down tomorrow,” said Fatima. “The elevation wasn’t nearly so steep where I washed ashore.” She scanned the horizon: the little strip of beach bent away and disappeared into the deep blue of the harbor, then reappeared again in a distant haze against a fringe of trees. She wondered whether the perimeter of the island was fixed, or whether, like the interior, it rearranged itself according to some unknowable law, or no law at all.

“Do you suppose that serpent’ll come back?” asked Mary, following Fatima’s gaze. “I don’t like to think of it running loose somewhere nearby. I’ve never been so terrified in all my life. It was like one of those evil tales mothers tell children to keep them close by.”

“Evil?” Fatima stopped and frowned. “Is that what it was?”

“What else might it have been?”

Fatima considered: she saw again the creature’s eyes, the unmistakable contempt, the malice, but these things, though dangerous, were not evil in themselves. Vikram had the same look often enough. It was less frightening, Fatima supposed, to be confronted by something that was honest about its capacity for violence than to dread the smiles and false assurances of something that believed in its own goodness even as it murdered and mutilated.

“I think it was testing us,” she said, shifting the load of driftwood in her arms. “I think—I think the people who were here before, the ones who built the cities, didn’t understand this place, or at least, didn’t try hard enough to understand it.”

Mary leaned against a dusty outcrop, her brown hair plastered against her forehead.

“Do you understand it, then?” she asked.

Fatima hesitated. The wind was picking up and pressed her robe around her knees; Mary, clad only in Deng’s shirt, started to shiver.

“I won’t say I understand it,” she said finally. “But I think—I believe it understands us.”

Mary smiled at this. She looped one hand through Fatima’s elbow and leaned on her as they started up the steps again. The pressure of her hand, though slight, filled Fatima with silent pleasure. She slowed her steps, shifting the bulk of the firewood again, and led the way up the last few steps to the clifftop and the wall of the little keep, which the last blush of twilight had set afire.





Chapter 21


Fatima awoke the next morning to the scent of frying fish. She didn’t move: her neck was stiff from her fall the day before and from her night’s sleep on the bare stone of the main hall, where she had lain down, without seeking anything to pillow her head, as soon as the fire was lit. It was deliciously warm. Gwennec had scraped the crusted soot from the fire pit at the center of the room and bored them all with detailed instructions about the best way to build a fire in such a structure; it involved wadding up kindling and arranging the wood to face in a certain direction. Fatima had fallen asleep by the time he finished, suffused by the heat that crept toward her across the ancient flagstones, waking only when Hassan lay down beside her and Gwennec claimed the spot between her and the fire. Then she slept again, more soundly than she had since she was a child, her fingers wound in the tapered end of Gwennec’s cowl, breathing to the concussive rhythm of the waves on the beach below.

Gwennec was up now: Fatima could see him bending over the fire with his sleeves rolled up, tending to a bowl that sat among the coals. Deng stood beside him. They both smelled of dew and open air and seemed very awake given that the light filling the room was still a solemn blue. On the other side of the fire, Mary lay snoring in a pile of canvas sacks with her feet curled up. Hassan was nowhere to be seen.