The lithe shoulders beneath Fatima’s cheek swayed back and forth. She could hear Hassan traipsing along nearby, his breath labored. Night air had altered the scent of the hills: the sweetish perfume of carob and juniper replaced the yellow-green smell of grass; the breeze was full of pine sap. Opening one eye, she saw the ground to their left spill away into a rubbly depression, the stones marbled in the bluish light of the band of stars overhead. At the bottom was a shallow pool of black water.
“That’s the flood basin,” said Hassan. “We’re doing all right. We’re doing very well, actually.”
Fatima felt Vikram grumble beneath her cheek, though he said nothing. The grasses thinned into rock and scrub as they moved toward higher ground. The mountains were opaque before them; the campfires Fatima had seen at a distance seemed to hang in the sky. She could hear laughter, faint but sharp, carried with the smell of woodsmoke.
“Men everywhere,” muttered Vikram. “Men on the road, men in the foothills, men at our backs. What a pageant. This is the last favor I’ll ever do for that woman.”
“It’s only a bit farther to this first gully.” Hassan’s face was ghostly in the dark. “It’s quite steep. Maybe we can find an overhang or some such thing to shelter under.”
“Make one,” said Fatima. “A nice, dry place to rest. You can do that much, Hassan, I know you can.”
Hassan mumbled something inaudible and scuffed at the ground with the toe of his boot. Nevertheless, he withdrew the map from his satchel, holding it up against Vikram’s flank as they walked and scratching away at one corner with a nub of charcoal.
“That’s not terribly comfortable,” Vikram complained.
“Wait,” said Hassan. “I’m almost done. There. Look at this, Fa.”
Fatima unlinked one hand from around Vikram’s shoulders and held up the altered map, turning it this way and that to catch what feeble light she could. On the northwestern edge of the map, near the mouth of a narrow valley between two steep slopes, there was now a series of closely concentric shapes, like a knot in the bark of a tree.
“A cave,” said Fatima.
“Yes, a cave,” said Hassan, dancing a little. “I do so like being useful.”
“Let me see that.” Vikram reached over his shoulder and snatched the paper out of Fatima’s hands. He examined it for a long moment. “Remarkable,” he said finally. “The wind has just changed key to accommodate your landscaping efforts. I can hear it whistling up ahead. Look.”
Fatima followed his gaze up the embankment they were climbing. Beyond the pine trees, the ground rose sharply and narrowed to a peak. Another hill was visible just beyond it. The pairing was familiar: it was the entrance to the gully that led southwest on Hassan’s map, and sure enough Fatima saw, tucked into the eastern flank of the nearest slope, a blot of darkness among the rocks.
“Your talent is a far finer thing than I had thought, Hassan of Granada,” said Vikram. He sounded somewhat astonished. “It’s one thing to alter the works of man, but quite another to alter those of nature. Tell me—when you were a child, did you confuse colors with sounds, or perhaps with numbers?”
“Yes,” said Hassan, surprised. “And numbers had genders, too—they were male or female, and sometimes both, and sometimes a third sex without a name. Whenever I heard a loud sound, I saw a color or a pattern, as though a cloth had been laid over my eyes. It was abominably confusing.”
“It would be,” said Vikram in a distracted voice, studying the map again. “Yes. That’s common enough with a gift such as this.”
“What does that mean? What’s common?”
Vikram handed the map back to Hassan and shifted Fatima on his back.
“All children of the banu adam are born with a bit of the First Speech,” he said. “The language spoken by the angels and the beasts and the jinn before the birth of humankind. Incorruptible knowledge. Helps you see the intersections of things. You call it fitrah in your faith. In nearly all cases, it fades as the child grows up, but for a very few, it doesn’t.”
“Does that mean you know what it is?” asked Fatima, sitting up straighter. “Is there a name for what Hassan does?”
“Oh, undoubtedly. It’s a miracle.”
“Don’t make fun of me,” protested Hassan.
“Who’s making fun of you? I’m as serious as I ever get.”
“But Hassan isn’t a holy man,” said Fatima. The image of Hassan as a wandering ascetic, with a long beard and a short robe and a pious scowl, was so comical that she almost laughed.
“Neither are most miracle workers,” said Vikram. “Most are ordinary men and women with all the usual flaws and hypocrisies. People would rather call them witches and burn them than acknowledge that miracles are bestowed upon the world with glorious, unfathomable generosity, because people are idiots.”
Fatima studied Hassan’s long fingers, occupied now in stowing the map in his satchel. They did not appear miraculous. Or if they did, so did everything else: the trees exhaling in the darkness, insensible of any danger Fatima might face; the halo of distant stars overhead, more insensible still. The matter that populated the world seemed bound together by nothing, yet it all persisted nonetheless: trees, stars, foxes, corpses, Castilians and Berbers, jinn and men and slaves. Fatima was hungry and dirty, but somewhere far behind her, Lady Aisha was clean and well fed, and perhaps thinking of her at that very moment, just as she was thinking of her old mistress. Perhaps the real miracle was that the world could support so much contradiction. Next to that, Hassan’s talents seemed rather modest.
“A miracle,” said Hassan from the darkness beside her, his voice small. “I never had the courage to think of it that way. People always thought it was funny that I still pray, in spite of being—well, being the way I am. The imam who gives the Friday sermon at the Alhambra told me I needn’t bother. To my face, Fa! As if I had no right to pray, as if one must be perfect before one sits on a prayer mat. Yet I have always prayed. As a child, I asked for so many things. I would kneel and ask and ask and ask. It was the only time I ever felt as though someone heard me. I never got most of the things I prayed for. But I did get this.”
He lapsed into silence. Fatima reached out and took his hand and held it up against the sky, and through his fingers saw the starlight winking. The cave Hassan had coaxed out of the rock looked small as they approached it, a simple confluence of sandstone blocks to which a few young pines were clinging: when Hassan stood upright, his head brushed the ceiling; and when Fatima climbed down from Vikram’s back and limped toward him, she had to duck to fit inside. Nevertheless, it was dry and level and several strides long, tapering downward as it merged into the rubbly hillside. Fatima lowered herself to the ground with a moan, curling her knees up toward her body.
“Give me your feet, little sister,” said Vikram. “And chew on this lovely thing I picked as we were walking.” He pressed something flat and damp into Fatima’s hand. It was a length of pale tree bark, its greenish underside glistening with sap. Fatima popped it into her mouth. A bitter, herbal flavor burst over her tongue. She chewed obediently, trying to ignore the stabs of pain as Vikram bent her foot from side to side.
“What a mess,” he said. “Hassan—choose the least offensive of those gaudy sashes you’ve got in your sack and give it to me.”
Fatima heard Hassan sigh as he riffled through the canvas bag.
“That’s three robes and two sashes you owe me now,” he told her.
“I saved your life,” said Fatima.
“When we’re stashed in a nice little cog on its way to Tunis or Timbuktu, with a hot plate of food and one snug berth apiece, I will thank you properly,” said Hassan. “For now, I’ll keep a tally of my clothes.”