“Are you going to draw something?” she asked.
Hassan pulled a roll of paper from his satchel and spread it out across his knees. “There’s never no other way,” he murmured. “There are always other ways. If there are scouts who watch the harbor road, there are scouting paths that run alongside it. They won’t expect us there, especially in the dark. It’s better than nothing.” He ran his fingers around the edge of the paper. Picking up a charcoal, he drew a meandering line. On either side of the line, he began to sketch what looked to Fatima like the ripples caused by throwing a stone into a quiet pool, yet instead of concentric circles, these were irregular shapes, bulging and shrinking at odd intervals.
“What are those?” she asked, not quite touching the paper with one finger.
“The southern mountains,” said Hassan. His eyes had grown bright. “I’m drawing the elevation of the range that runs alongside the harbor road—which is this line, here. Each peak is highest where I’ve drawn the smallest shape. The widest shape is the base. The closer together the lines are, the steeper the slope. If I had more time, I would mix some colored inks and shade everything, so it would make more sense. But you can still grasp the abstract. Think of it like looking straight down at a mountain from overhead, as a bird does.”
Fatima squinted at the map taking shape beneath Hassan’s long fingers. After a moment, the nebulous shapes seemed to pop in front of her eyes, taking on depth, becoming a range of hills that rose and flattened at organic intervals.
“I’ve never seen a map like this before,” she muttered.
“That’s because no one else makes them,” said Hassan with a little smile of pride. “Most mapmakers draw little ticks to show you where the hills are, but that tells you nothing except ‘There is a hill here.’ Anyone who wants to navigate between the hills must rely on the knowledge of someone who’s already been there. If that person dies or forgets, the knowledge is lost. The map goes silent. This map cannot be silenced. If you learn how to read it, Fa, you can walk through those mountains to the south as sure-footedly as the best Castilian scout, all by yourself if you want to.”
Fatima looked again at the map. Running between the feet of the mountains were narrow bands of white space—gullies perhaps, or little valleys, zigzagging toward the edge of the map haphazardly.
“Here,” she said, tracing a path with her finger. “If I wanted to stay off the main road, this is where I would go.”
“You see?” Hassan actually giggled. “There’s always another way.”
A shadow peered over their shoulders.
“Your way is clever,” said Vikram, “but also slow. Many sharp drops and sharp rocks on which to break ankles. There’s a reason your ancestors put the harbor road where they did. If I were you and I had Vikram along to rend and rip where necessary, I would take my chances on the road and reach the sea with all possible speed, rather than fumble through gullies and give my enemies time to turn every shipmaster in the harbor against me.”
“Do you think they will?” asked Fatima, looking up at him. He was a dark blot against the sun. “Do you think we’re that important?”
“I think you’re that distinctive,” said Vikram, leaping off the edge of the well and landing in a soft puff of dust. “All one would have to do is put out the word that a Circassian girl is making her way south with a red-haired scribe for a companion, and make it clear that anyone who helps them will run afoul of the Holy Office. How many travelers fit that description, do you suppose?”
Fatima looked down at her hands and said nothing.
“Besides,” said Vikram in a quieter voice, “that woman—the golden-haired one—she has a vicious streak in her. Do you know she broke two of my ribs that night in the harem garden? Crunch, with that little white foot, right here.” Vikram gestured to his side, where the broad chest of a man blended shade by shade into the dappled pelt of a beast. “It’s difficult to hurt something like me. You couldn’t manage it, Fatima, because you don’t like to cause pain, even at the height of your fury. You could kick and kick without making a dent. No—to hurt me, you’d have to enjoy it.”
Fatima didn’t like to remember that evening. The thought of Luz made her chest tighten unexpectedly. She rose and shook the dust from her bloodied robe. A breeze had kicked up and was dancing down the valley, buffeting her face; it smelled of the sap and oil of the olive groves, the warm untended earth. A lone sheep-bell clanked tonelessly somewhere nearby, rattling with the breeze and then going silent when it died down, only to start up again when the air roused itself. Fatima followed the sound into the shadow of the abandoned house, now more a carapace of stone than anything resembling a dwelling: everything made of wood had been looted or burned, leaving the doorways empty and the windows unshuttered, the slanted roof open to the sky. Fatima ducked through the remains of the front door to stand inside.
The house was generous. It had been two full stories once and a stone staircase still ran halfway up one wall, ending at nothing. Fatima was standing in what must have been the kitchen. There was a blackened hearth in a tiled niche; a domed clay oven sat above it, unraked coals still inside. The floor was filthy, covered in a thin layer of dried mud and rushes and signs of animals bedding down at night. An animal smell lingered too. Near Fatima’s foot was the unmistakable imprint of a man’s boot, the toe pointing toward the center of the room like the tip of a spear: the smallest suggestion of violence.
A bell began to clank again, so close that Fatima jumped. The sound was coming from a far corner of the room, where, draped across the steps leading down to a weedy garden, lay the skeleton of a ram. Its skull, all jawbone and hollow eyes, was flung back, as if the beast had offered itself up for sacrifice. The bell Fatima had heard hung from the sinewy remains of its neck and swayed back and forth in an invisible current. Fatima stared at it, transfixed. How quickly the earth and air reclaimed the dead, stripping fur from flesh and flesh from bone, leaving behind only an outline, a tailor’s pattern, pinned together with vertebrae. Fatima felt as though she was intruding on something sacred. It was as if a tailor was there in the room, unstitching the work of man, returning the house and the beasts to rubble and loam, and Fatima was not meant to see.
A sudden flash of red made her gasp. There was something moving behind the ram, extricating itself from the nest of bones in a rippling mass of fur. Fatima groped at her knife. The mass made a small chittering sound and sprouted a pair of tufted ears. It was a fox. Fatima sighed with relief and sat down hard on her tailbone, her legs weak and sweating.
“You scared me,” she told the fox. It looked at her with round yellow eyes, baffled.
“I thought you were a jinn,” she said. “Some horrible thing with too many teeth, like Vikram.”
Indifferent, the fox flicked its tail at her. It slipped down the garden stairs on tiny black feet and disappeared into the weeds. Fatima took several long breaths, fanning her face with one hand.
“You shouldn’t be here alone.” Vikram appeared beside her as if summoned and sat on his haunches, his own yellow eyes following the trail the fox had left behind in the swaying grass. “It’s not safe.”
Fatima wiped her face on her sleeve.
“I like to be alone sometimes,” she said. “This isn’t an evil place. Evil things have been done here, that’s all.”
“You try very hard to be brave. Well and good. You can be as brave while walking as you can while sitting. The sun is high, it’s time to go—and you’ve got to change first. If you’re spotted in that butcher’s apron, someone might think you’ve killed a man.”