“We’re not going back,” she said. Though she had spoken as calmly as she could, her voice shook. “She can’t have him and neither can you. He’s mine. He isn’t a sorcerer. I’m not giving him up to die.”
Gwennec’s face rearranged itself, the lines and hard edges softening with incredulity. He looked her up and down.
“My God, but you’re made of stern stuff,” he said. “Somebody must have done you a terrible wrong if you’ve lost your natural fear of the sea.”
Fatima looked over the railing at the nameless hues rising and falling around them, the green that was also gray, the deep wine color that hinted at an element finer than water, an echo of the fire the alchemists said burned undying at the center of the world. Every sinew in her body was taut; the profound anxiety of being so close to both escape and recapture left no room for any other emotion.
“I’d never seen the sea until earlier this evening,” she said. “I don’t know it well enough to fear it.”
Gwennec was shaking his head, though whether in admiration or disgust, she couldn’t tell.
“They say people in love do mad things,” he said. “But this is madness of a purer sort than any I’ve ever seen.”
It was the second time he had implied that Fatima and Hassan were lovers. Fatima glanced at Hassan, but he had closed his eyes again and was pinching the bridge of his nose, taking long, dramatic breaths to quell his headache.
“We’re not in love,” said Fatima.
“You must think I’m an idiot,” said Gwennec. “I might be a monk, but I still know what two people in love look like.”
“It isn’t like that.” Fatima felt her cheeks go hot. “We’re not—we don’t—Hassan doesn’t—”
“In addition to being a sorcerer, I’m also a sodomite,” supplied Hassan. “But let it be known that I am passionately in love with you, Fa. I’d offer to marry you if it were even remotely fair to either of us. Alas. The world doesn’t supply happy endings to people like us.”
Fatima looked at Gwennec and saw her own bafflement mirrored on his face. She wondered with fresh alarm whether Hassan might really be injured, and tripped back down the steps of the stern castle to kneel by his side. He looked up at her and cocked one eyebrow.
“This blond, hulking fellow, on the other hand, I would tumble in an instant,” he said to her in Arabic. “If he could only be persuaded.”
“Shush,” said Fatima, looking over her shoulder. “What’s wrong with you? Why are you saying these things? I’m worried you’ve cracked your skull. And anyway, he’s celibate.”
“It only adds to his appeal.”
“You shouldn’t have made that little speech.” Fatima smoothed the front of his robe with hands that shook. “Northerners aren’t friendly to men like you. Who knows what he might do now that you’ve told him?”
“North, south—it’s all the same,” muttered Hassan. “Even in the Alhambra, all it would have taken is for four pious men of sound mind to open my bedroom door at the wrong moment, and I would have been banished or executed. The only reason I still have all my limbs is that everyone was willing to pretend I’m something I’m not.”
“They pretended because they loved you,” said Fatima. She smoothed and smoothed, as if her hands could brush away whatever had possessed him.
“That’s not love,” said Hassan, shaking his head. “You were the only one there who loved me, Fa.”
On impulse, Fatima bent and kissed him. She didn’t want him, exactly, but the intensity of feeling that overwhelmed her suddenly had no other means of expression. His lips were warm and soft and dry and parted under her own without returning their pressure.
“Marry me anyway,” she said, withdrawing only a little. “We like each other best of anyone. The other things don’t matter.”
The smile that rose to Hassan’s mouth was too quick. It told her he had considered and rejected this possibility, perhaps many times over.
“They matter, sweet friend,” he said. “They matter.”
Gwennec thumped down the stairs from the stern castle and sat down hard on the last step, splaying his legs and leaning back on his elbows like a large child.
“You’re a very strange pair,” he said. “And not to be trusted with a ship.” The wind was only skimming the mainsail now, and the ship rode over each swell at an angle, bringing the surface of the water up and down, up and down, as though the bow were a needle pulling through cloth. Fatima saw the lights of Husn Al Munakkab bobbing in the distance.
“Turn us back around,” she said to Gwennec, her chest rising and falling with the water. “Or show me how.”
Gwennec glanced out at the lights and rubbed his scalp vigorously with his fingertips, shedding dander on the shoulders of his black cloak.
“You don’t really want that,” he said. “There’s barely any food to speak of on board. A couple of casks of water, another of wine, though that’s not much good to you Mohammedans. Wherever it is you think you’re going, you won’t get there in this ship, not without resupplying.” He looked around the deck and laughed harshly. “And not without someone who knows a thing or two about sailing.”
“Did you say wine?” Hassan sat up and looked suddenly alert. “Do you think you could go and get me a ladleful, since we’re having such a nice conversation?”
“You drink, then?”
“I do. I have. I’ve broken one of God’s dictates. I might as well break several. It’s a cycle, you see—I adore Him, I disobey Him, and I drink to make sense of it.”
Gwennec looked hurt, as if Hassan had leveled a personal insult.
“I don’t think that’s so,” he said. “God isn’t like that. He knows we’ve all got things we can’t do or can’t stop. It doesn’t follow that we’re excused from those things we can do and can stop.”
Hassan, wincing, propped himself against the deck rail with a dry smile.
“You really are a monk,” he said. “Can I have some wine or not?”
Gwennec snorted and rose to his feet. Crossing the deck in a few long strides, he clattered down into the darkened hold, from whence came the sound of a barrel scraping across the floor. After a moment, he emerged again, balancing three dripping wooden cups dexterously between his fingers. Two cups were full of dark liquid, but the third was clear; this he set beside Fatima.
“Water for you, madam,” he said. “Since you told me no different. Here, blev’ruz. Your liquor.”
Hassan reached up and took the cup reverently between his hands. He drained it in a few gulps, smacking his lips with obvious relish.
“Bless you, Brother Gwennec,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of one hand. “My head feels better already.”
Gwennec himself took only a small sip before grimacing and setting his cup on the ground.
“The salt air has tainted it,” he said. “In Breizh, we drink ale and beer. Keeps better at sea. But southerners insist on the fancy stuff by land or water.”
Fatima, forgetting herself, leaned over Gwennec’s cup and sniffed: a vinegar smell, embroidered with a more compelling scent of fruit and earth, jutted into her nose. She leaned back, tears pricking her eyes.
“How do you drink this?” she asked from behind the sleeve of her robe. “It smells like something the washerwoman uses to make soap.”
Hassan and Gwennec laughed. Hassan pushed his empty cup toward Gwennec and helped himself to the monk’s full one, raising it in a halfhearted toast before draining it as he had his first. Gwennec smiled and let his head loll back against the railing. His skin, though coarse, was unlined; despite his skill in handling the ship and reckoning with God, he could not be older than Hassan, and might well be closer in age to Fatima herself. Fatima could see doubt flickering in his eyes: he had fought and laughed and reconciled with them, and this had upset the straightforward matter of turning them over to his masters. She told herself not to hope too much, though hope promptly suffused her limb by limb, making her heart thud against her ribs.