The Bird King(99)
It continued this way, the boats arriving in a stuttered succession, filled with the last hopes of people for whom the sea offered, if nothing else, a quieter and more dignified death than the land would have given them. They arrived surprised to find themselves among the living. The wariness took days to fade, sometimes longer; it took the first undercooked fish or poorly chosen mushroom, something that sent them retching into the bushes, to remind them they still had bodies. After that, they would begin to smile. Sona, when the glassiness left her eyes, set about establishing her chickens in the small abandoned green at the center of the city, building them a coop made from scrap wood: in a week, there were eggs as a change from the monotony of fish meals. Not long afterward, Asher and his brothers began to speak in full sentences and to apply themselves to small tasks without being asked: collecting soiled linen for Mary’s washhouse, whittling stakes to make a fence around the poultry run, dispersing into the empty houses to salvage nails when Gwennec’s supply ran out. If they were encouraged to play—Hassan made them toy knights and horses from river clay and almost begged them to leave off the little round of chores they had invented for themselves—they would only grimace and slip away or shake their heads with unnerving emphasis. They would live, they would smile again, but they would not laugh, and no amount of pleading by adults would make them into children.
Other things arrived as well. It was always during the fragile hour between sunset and full dark, the time between prayers, when the colors of the sky were haunted: shadows came, cast by nothing and speaking in whispers; slender trees that walked and did not speak at all; and things that looked like cats or jackals but went on two legs instead of four. One evening brought a fat, jolly creature that stood no taller than Fatima’s knee and looked, to her eyes at least, like a frog that had undergone several additional metamorphoses on its journey from tadpolehood; if it wanted to talk to someone, it would climb onto the nearest rock or hillock or stair to look its companion in the eye and then hold forth at length, with extraordinary vocabulary, about the weather or the tides or any other subject that happened to catch its interest.
They emerged, it seemed, from the air itself, fleeing from shores unknown to the island’s earthly inhabitants, and took up residence alongside their human neighbors in the empty houses and sheds that lined the cobbled main street of the city. The street was full of sound now at all hours of the day, full of jokes and arguments and the protests of Sona’s rooster; and sometimes, when unknowable conditions were met, some of the jinn could be persuaded to sing. Fatima took to sitting in the western arch of the keep at twilight, warming her feet on the stone steps still radiating the heat of the day, and listening to the noises that persisted after the light had died. They suffused the extraordinary landscape with what was small and tender and banal: the anxious muttering of hens settling down to roost, the sound of washing water poured into basins, the gentle unmelodic snores of those who slept. Civilization was, Fatima realized, something very simple; it was the right of these small rituals to perpetuate themselves in peace. As king, she did very little but witness it. There were no lands to conquer, no riches to hoard, no rivals to dispatch; there were only water buckets to carry and boats to meet on the beach. The others called her the king when they were alone and Fatima when she was with them, for so she was: king of all and master of none.
Chapter 22
Hassan and Gwennec had taken to rising together before dawn so that Gwennec could pray lauds and Hassan could pray fajr, and afterward they could both join Fatima as she walked the walls of the city: it was on one of these occasions that they spotted a horse on the beach.
“Is that what I think it is?” said Hassan, peering over the ramparts that ran along the roof of the keep toward the brownish object treading through the sand below. “A horse? Have there been any boats?”
“Not for days,” said Fatima. She stood on tiptoe and looked where Hassan was pointing. The horse was moving slowly, staggering like a drunkard, its track a jagged line along the beach behind it. It was wearing a rope halter but bore no other sign of human ownership; its shaggy mane and tail streamed water, as though it had only just emerged from the surf, a nautical oddity, divorced from any craft that might reasonably carry it.
Fatima watched the sun illuminate a familiarly dappled shoulder and went still. Without speaking, she turned and hurried back into the keep, running lightly down the curved stone staircase that led to the main hall on the first floor and exiting through the eastward archway. The day was gray and windy: wet air slapped against her face as she made her way down the cliff steps and finally stumbled onto the beach. The horse pricked its ears at her approach and stopped, raising its boxy head. Fatima halted likewise and caught her breath.
It was Stupid. Foam dripped from the stout gelding’s mouth, and he was breathing heavily but seemed otherwise unharmed. He bobbed his head when he recognized Fatima, shuffling toward her to press his nose against her chest. Fatima stroked the animal’s wet flank. A numbness crept up from her fingertips, which registered the warmth and damp of the horse’s coat only remotely.
Muffled shouts reached her over the rolling of the surf. Hassan and Gwennec skittered to a stop just short of her, incredulous and laughing.
“It is Stupid!” crowed Hassan. “I told you, Gwen! What other horse have you ever met with a face like a brick? What a good boy”—here he reached out to rub water from the creature’s mane—“What a good boy.”