The Bird King(98)
When they were not at work, they wandered together along the coast, taking with them lunches of dried fish and acorn flour cakes baked in the embers of the cooking fire. Hassan always brought his map. Water-stained though it was, he rolled it up in its carrying case with a few charcoals and quills, hoping to add to it, but the interior of the island remained as opaque to him as it did to the others: he would stand on a bluff or a ledge he had bloodied his knees to reach and pause for a moment and then invariably begin to laugh.
“It’s like drinking too much wine,” he said on one such expedition. “I look west and see a forest. Then I turn and get a headache. Then I look back and the forest is a desert, or marshland covered in fog. My fingers are blind. I don’t think the island wants to be mapped.”
“Then don’t try,” Fatima had replied, feeling nervous. “Vikram says it’s not a proper place at all, only an idea with a location. Perhaps we shouldn’t upset it. Or—I don’t know. Misconstrue it.”
“You’re starting to sound like him. Full of convenient little notions.” But Hassan had acquiesced, and though he still brought the map with him on their walks, he no longer took it out every time they paused to rest, and once in a while, when the landscape faded or shifted, Fatima caught him smiling a little bitterly at it, communing with the only place that would not bend to his fingers and yet had saved his life.
The coastline, at least, remained as Hassan had drawn it: an hour’s walk south along the beach brought them around the first of the tiny harbors to the second of the seven cities, which was, as Vikram had said, little more than a short, square tower with several houses crowded around its feet, their wooden roofs fallen in and desiccated. As they turned northward again, the beach widened, bordered by dunes rather than chalk cliffs; two subsequent towers were visible together, set on the westward side of the island, gazing toward one another from across a green lagoon. Continuing northward along the beach for another hour brought them to another tower, which leaned precariously toward the sea on a poor foundation and had mostly tumbled down. Then came a jagged loop around the northernmost point of the island, where the beach was reduced to a thread of sand so narrow that it was necessary to walk single file past a lonely outpost that loomed on fangs of slate over their heads. The final city was only half built: a square hole in the ground lined with stone blocks, abandoned so hastily that chisels and mallets and plumb lines lay discarded inside, all of which Gwennec happily appropriated and carried back to Con in the folds of his habit.
All told, it took less than a day to walk the entire shoreline of the island and arrive back where they began: if they left Con shortly after dawn and rested on the beach for an hour at midday, they would arrive back at twilight, while there was still some light left in the sky.
At night, they sang. It was in singing that they realized they had no common language: Hassan wondered aloud how Mary had come to know songs in Arabic, and she told him, baffled, that she was singing in the language of her own damp corner of Cornwall. Deng lapsed into his mother tongue without thinking as he taught them rounds learned in childhood on the red plains below the Nile, yet Fatima understood him just the same; Gwennec tried Latin and then Breton and sounded as he always had.
Fatima, tentatively, began to re-create a melody she had last heard when she was barely old enough to stand, a song learned at Lady Aisha’s feet, when Vikram was still just a dog she could look in the eye when he was crouched on all fours. The memory, never more than an impression, became vivid now, the words to the song second nature. It was about a tree whose roots curled among the bones of the ancestors buried there: when Fatima sang it again now, she had to excuse herself and went out to the steps cut into the chalk cliff and wept.
She sat longer than she meant to, long enough for all the light to vanish from the sky and a white band of stars to appear overhead. Someone had banked the fire. When she made her way back inside toward her sleeping mat, she discovered that the place next to hers was empty. Hassan had moved away from the fire, into a darker corner of the hall, and Deng was slumbering next to him, under the same blanket.
Fatima sat awake a while longer and watched Hassan breathing. He slept with his lips slightly parted, the rise and fall of his chest mimicking the waves on the beach below. The firelight picked up the copper in his hair and beard and brightened them to a giddy hue, a red as vivid as autumn bracken. Only when he stirred and murmured did Fatima look away. The embers of the fire pulsed and flickered, their colors fading: she stared into them, past them, letting her eyes lose focus, watching blue slide into orange and red, unable to determine the precise instant at which one became the next.
The others began to arrive the next morning. On the first day, the tide brought in a tiny rowboat containing a lone Romani woman, a basket of chickens, and one half-drowned rooster. The woman’s name was Sona: she had a mass of white hair as curly as Fatima’s own and blue lines tattooed on her chin, beneath the fullest part of her lip. She had fled in the little boat, stolen from a fisherman’s pier, when her family’s caravan was attacked by Ottoman soldiers while they summered on the shore of the Black Sea. A few days later, the jagged remains of a raft, barely more than a few planks of water-gray wood lashed together, were spotted offshore: four boys were huddled upon it, their identical auburn heads pressed together, their skin blue. The eldest was named Asher and he was twelve years old: he volunteered this much, and no more, when he and his brothers had been fed, given dry clothes, and warmed before a fire. The youngest was no more than five and did not speak at all but stared up at Fatima with wide brown eyes from which childhood had been wiped clean.