The Bird King(97)
Torn between offense and curiosity, Fatima hoisted the buckets and picked her way among clumps of goldenrod and violets and orange poppies toward the pool. It had no defined edge; water seeped out among the flowers and made them seem to float, their vibrant faces doubled on the surface of the pool. Fatima waded in and filled her buckets to the brim, watching Vikram, who seemed, with the little waterfall leaping behind him, like the reflection of something that wasn’t there.
“Are you happy?” the reflection asked her. Startled, Fatima looked at him, and then at the floating flowers, and over her shoulder at the gray walls of the city, and above them, the milky sky.
“I’m afraid of being happy,” she confessed.
“You mustn’t be. Joy is one of the most powerful weapons your race possesses.”
“Joy I feel,” said Fatima, closing her eyes against the bright air. “Joy comes in moments. Happiness is supposed to last. Whenever I feel it, I’m afraid something will take it away, and it won’t come back again.”
“Little old woman! You’re wise, and wisdom often makes people unhappy. But you’re more afraid of happiness than you were of the leviathan you met on that cliff. Have you already forgotten what I told you when I pulled you out of the sea? You must be without fear: of the leviathan and of yourself.” He hauled himself out of the pool and shook, sending a halo of droplets into the air. Fatima shouldered the heavy buckets and began to make her way back through the flowers unsteadily.
“Strange,” she said, listening to the receding sound of water. “I’m meant to be the king of the birds, yet I haven’t seen a single bird since I came here.”
“Don’t be dense. You’ve seen birds aplenty—the two you brought with you and another two who washed ashore as soon as the way was open. And more will come besides.”
Fatima stopped where she was.
“What do you mean more will come?” she called. But Vikram did not seem to hear. He scampered ahead, keeping to the grassy track she had made on her way out. Fatima opened her mouth to call again and then thought better of it. The scent of the flowers was so thick and sweet that worry was impossible. Fatima shouldered her buckets, but she did not hurry. Vikram was a dark smudge against the verdant field, like a devil in heaven, cavorting among hillocks of grass. The air, thick as it was, carried with it the sound of familiar laughter from the city walls. Fatima felt a heaviness settle in her limbs, not unpleasantly; it pressed down on her with the sun like a blanket of light, inviting repose. Fatima let her shoulders go slack. At the end of the track of dew and crushed grass, Hassan stood in the empty city gateway, laughing, clad in green velvet, and Gwennec, who had summited the walls, waved to her with flowers in his hair.
Their days quickly took shape and assumed a pattern. Fatima rose first, when the sun had barely colored the eastern windows of the keep, and remade the fire. Quite alone, she climbed to the second floor and exited through a door that opened onto the perimeter wall, then wound her way between the battlements and walked the length of the city until she reached the city gate. The meadow was nearly always just outside, but what lay beyond it changed day by day: sometimes it was a forest of autumn birches, sometimes a grassy plain, once the blue unyielding ledge of a glacier shouldering its way through the landscape toward the sea. Once, the meadow stretched so far toward the horizon that Fatima caught a glimmer of the spring at the center of the island and the mountain that rose above it. There was always water close by, a lake or a stream or a bank of melting snow, and if the cistern looked low, Fatima would spend the rest of the day filling it again. She found herself working harder than she ever had at the Alhambra, but minding it less: she worked to feed and water herself and her friends, and looked with pride upon the calluses that quickly covered her hands.
The others each took up the tasks to which they found themselves best suited. Within days, Mary had cataloged all the linen in the keep, and a week after that, she presented Fatima and the others with new tunics and gowns and hose cut from remnants of the embroidered velvets and silks. She commissioned Gwennec to build her two great wooden tubs from the old boards and disused doors that he had found about the city and then installed them in an outbuilding adjacent to the cistern, with a fire to heat the water. Here they washed their clothes when these were dirty and themselves too, bathing with soap Mary made from ash and salt and rendered fish fat, using handfuls of violets and flowering linden collected from the meadow to disguise the smell. Deng and Hassan fished and foraged; Deng taught them all the names of the medicinal plants and roots he collected on his walks, and what to avoid and what to eat, and hung bunches of herbs from a beam along the north side of the main hall to dry.
Gwennec, for his part, rummaged until he found a hammer and saw and began to collect all the nails he could find that had not rusted through. He built the two tubs for the laundry and a third, smaller one for Fatima after she confessed to missing the baths in the Alhambra: this he set in the eastern archway of the main hall, so that Fatima could bathe with a view of the sea. He built a lap desk for Hassan with pigeonholes for his quills and charcoals and bottles of ink, and Hassan, who had no land left to map, began to map faces instead. Sketches appeared around the hall, propped against columns or tucked next to sleeping mats like the gifts of a bashful child: Mary sewing, her head thrown back in laughter or song; Gwennec with the sleeves of his habit rolled up as he wove a reed basket; Fatima bathing in the empty archway, her head turned toward the sea.