“I’m going to sleep,” he said, still grinning. “Much as it pains me to leave the two of you in charge of anything, I need a proper rest. Wake me at compline—that’s like your night prayer, or close enough.” He surveyed the deck, where Hassan was arranging the rope he had practiced with into neat coils, heaving each thick length over his shoulder with theatrical effort.
“He’s as clever-handed as they come, our blev’ruz,” said Gwennec. “He has a natural sense of where things ought to go. But he hasn’t got brute strength and neither have you. You won’t be able to reason your way out of a mess at sea, with who knows what following behind you. That’s what should worry you.” He sniffed, phlegm rumbling in his throat, and made his way down toward the hold, the top of his yellow head descending, or so it seemed, into the deck itself.
“You’ve been awfully nice to us,” called Fatima, before he disappeared entirely. “You didn’t have to be.”
The head paused.
“I had a choice to make, and I made the choice I could live with,” came Gwennec’s voice. “That’s all.” She heard the thump of sandals being cast off, and then another that might have been a body landing in a berth, and then nothing. As if by silent agreement, the gulls overhead veered toward land, where a rust-colored river tumbled down over slabs of bare rock and ebbed by small degrees into the sea. The two waters did not mix. They battled one another in plumes of blue and red that extended into the open water, each color distinct, irreconcilable.
The clarity of the shoreline made Fatima twitch: she had allowed the cog to drift too close to land. Wiping sweat from her lip, she pressed on the tiller, watching the prow tip until it pointed southeast. Hassan dropped his coil of rope and stood to watch.
“You’ve overcorrected,” he called, peering toward land.
Fatima clenched her jaw to keep from retorting. At some point, Hassan had pulled his hair back with a leather thong to keep it off his face; the sun had made his skin as pink as a ferenji’s. The effect was transformative: his jaw, newly exposed, was firmer; the lines of his face were more decided. He was increasingly unfamiliar. Fatima watched him, disquieted. They had revealed too much to one another. Fatima knew from experience that such a mistake was rarely reparable in full: she could remember lying in bed beside the sultan at fifteen, when the experience was still new enough to inspire giddiness, telling him how often she thought about him and how beautiful he was, and his laugh, forever stamped in her memory, reminding her that she was not his lover, nor were her confidences welcome. It had been the same with Luz, who had drawn her out only to extract what she wanted. Now it would be the same with Hassan. Intimacy invited ugliness; only girls like Nessma were silly enough to think otherwise. There was no point, really, in making such an effort to survive; great love, for which so much was sacrificed, curdled as quickly as the ordinary kind.
After critiquing Fatima’s skill as a pilot, Hassan made no further attempt at conversation. He flitted into and out of her field of vision, disappearing into the rigging and reappearing near the prow, teaching himself to know the joints and sinews of the vessel. At one point he loosed a rope that caused the boom atop the mainsail to swing east and the keel to follow it in a big, swinging arc. Fatima thought of telling him he had overcorrected, but instead compensated silently on the tiller, returning the cog to its course while Hassan swore and tied the rope down again. By sunset they had achieved a wordless understanding of the way the work of one affected the other. It was only when pinpricks of fire lit up the shoreline in the growing dark that Hassan broke the silence.
“Is that Marbella, do you suppose?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said Fatima. She glanced at their wake, as if the dimming outline of the coast behind them contained some clue. “Someone should go wake Gwennec.”
Hassan, who had been leaning against the prow, pushed himself to his feet in a restless motion.
“What I don’t understand is why they haven’t followed us,” he said. “It’s been bothering me all day. Surely the Inquisition isn’t put off by a little water. And they had more boats moored there at the harbor in Husn Al Munakkab. Bigger and faster ones, probably. They could have given chase. What are they waiting for?”
Fatima studied the fires along the shoreline. It must be a largish town, as there were many bright clusters of light; a few were suspended in the air, as if from the ramparts of watchtowers.
“Maybe they’re waiting to see where we’ll go,” she said.
“You think they might be here at Marbella? You think it’s a trap?”
Fatima shook her head. “It’d take them twice as long by land as it’s taken us by water. Unless they managed to pass us by boat without being spotted, I don’t see how they’d know.”
“They could be trailing us, too far in our wake for us to see,” pressed Hassan. “They could have sent a scout on ahead. A single rider with a change of horses could make that distance faster than we have.”
“Yes, all right, there are half a dozen ways they could find out we’re planning to dock at Marbella,” snapped Fatima. “I just don’t find any of them very likely.”
The silence fell again.
“I’ll go get our monk,” Hassan muttered, disappearing belowdecks. Several minutes later, Gwennec emerged, rubbing bloodshot eyes.
“You didn’t sink the boat,” he said, his voice hoarse with fatigue. “That’s a good sign.”
“Have we put it in the right place, though?” asked Hassan with forced cheerfulness. “That’s the real test.”
Gwennec leaned over the deck railing and studied the lights.
“Aye, I’d say you have,” he said, sounding a bit surprised. “You haven’t passed another port town like this one, have you?”
“No,” said Fatima. “There’s been nothing larger than a little smoke on the horizon until just now.”
“Did you notice a river mouth, probably two or three hours back? Reddish water, lots of it.”
“Yes,” said Fatima, feeling more confident. “We passed it late in the afternoon.”
“I’ll be damned, then. This must be Marbella. I expected to wake up in North Africa or Italy or possibly dead. Well done, barnacle geese.” He drummed his fingers on the railing in a cheerful rhythm.
“Save your praise,” said Hassan. “There’s still the small matter of docking and provisioning the ship and setting sail again without being caught.”
“And paying for it,” said Gwennec. “You haven’t got any money, have you?”
Fatima pulled Lady Aisha’s ring over her knuckle and held it up, admiring the many-faceted stone with a feeling of profound regret.
“Will this do?” she asked, handing it over with no small reluctance. Gwennec tested the band with his teeth and grunted.
“Handsomely,” he said. “You’d eat like princes if you had time to kit yourselves out the proper way. As it is, you’ll have to make do with whatever you can find fast at this hour.”
The lights onshore were arranging themselves into straight lines, a few of which might be wharves reaching out like bright fingers into the bay. Fatima could smell smoke and charred meat.
“Pork,” she said.
“Catholics,” said Hassan. “All Catholics between us and the Strait now. The last scions of the Moorish empire stand here on this boat.”
Fatima paced at the railing. Though the air was chilly, she felt moons of sweat cooling beneath her arms and in the hollow of her back.
“I can’t go ashore,” she said. “They’ll know something’s wrong if they see me. You’ll have to go, Hassan. You look as if you could be Castilian.”
Hassan stared at her incredulously. “I can barely speak the language. Your Castilian is twice as good as mine. I’ll have to speak Sabir, and then they’ll know at once what I am.”
“Tell them you’re Breton,” said Gwennec drily. “That’s only a three-quarters lie.”
“You’ll help, surely.” Hassan put his hand on Gwennec’s arm. “You know who to speak to and what to say. I don’t even know what to ask for.”