“Do you remember me, Fatima?” he asked. Fatima said nothing. He ambled toward her, smiling, as though they had met by chance on some pleasant outing. “No? You once served me bread with your dirty little foot.” He balled one gauntleted hand into a fist.
“Fatima,” came Gwennec’s voice, trembling. “Fatima, listen to me—”
Fatima collapsed. For a moment, she couldn’t catch her breath: it was only after she had air in her lungs that she felt the pain radiating out from her middle and realized the general had punched her in the gut. Pricks of light obscured her vision, and she heard, rather than saw, the sound of steel colliding with flesh, twice, while Hassan howled in agony.
“Send word to the baronesa,” said the general, his feet squelching in the mud as he walked back toward his horse. “Tell her the situation is resolved. Take the girl back to my tent. On second thought—take the sorcerer too. Why not? Both of them, one after the other. We’ll see who likes it better.”
Fatima tasted blood in the back of her throat. Someone was dragging her to her feet: she resisted for only a moment before she began to wheeze again and the pain overtook her. She told herself she must find her footing and reached out with her toes, digging them into the mud to keep herself upright. The boat—their boat—rose and sank beyond the throng of men, tethered to the wharf only by the gangplank the dockmaster had left there, its sails struggling to catch the rising air. Fatima watched it with regret.
“It’s not fair,” she slurred, swaying into the steel-plated man who held her arm.
“No,” came the general’s voice, which sounded, at least to her, sympathetic. “It isn’t fair. These things never are. But, my dear, this is the only possible outcome when a couple of unarmed civilians confront a superior force with heavy weaponry. You can count, can’t you? This is about numbers. You should never have run in the first place. Not even your demon familiar can help you, unless he can conjure ten thousand men and arm them with pikes.”
“He wasn’t a demon,” said Fatima, shaking.
“Of course you’d say so. You moon-worshipping sodomites are as backward about the unseen as you are about everything else.” The general inhaled noisily and spat a gob of phlegm at her feet. Before him was a row of tents forming a bivouack in the mud a short distance from the western edge of town, where the red-roofed houses gave way to pigsties and pastures. The largest, a circular tent of white canvas upon which the Castilian arms were painted, was open, the tent flap drawn back to reveal an interior as well appointed as a palace room: there were furs and a brazier with coals glowing inside, and a wooden table covered with charts and missives. To one side was a pallet on a low platform; it had been slept in recently, the blankets crumpled around the absent form of the sleeper. Seeing it, Fatima bent forward and gagged.
“You’re making this too easy,” said the general drily. He dismissed the man who held her arm, and taking her by the collar, shoved her through the open tent flap. She stumbled, landing on the carpet of furs inside. Behind her, she could hear the general begin to unbuckle his breastplate. A numbness crept up her legs, making them heavy, as if she had spent too long in a hot bath. She fought it, knowing it was surrender, her mind abandoning her body to save itself from what came next.
Fatima told herself she would not weep in front of this man. She flinched as his breastplate landed on the furs beside her: a well-made but battered cuirass, tattooed with an intricate design of flowering vines encircling the arms of his house. It had seen mauls and pikestaffs and probably more than one arquebus; it had known combat longer than Fatima had known life, yet here it was, on the ground, unnecessary for this particular act of violence. Fatima marveled vacantly at the discarded steel, at the quieter brutality that came on the heels of warfare, and wondered how many women had been dragged into how many tents, perhaps even this tent—how many men, even, for Hassan would not be spared.
“Why?” she asked her captor, shielding her eyes against the sun that streamed through the open tent flap. The question seemed to baffle him. He paused with his hand on his belt and twisted up his mouth.
“Why? Are you without shame?”
“I want to know.”
The general laughed incredulously.
“This is what happens in war. Sometimes, even when the losing side is on its knees, it doesn’t yet understand it’s been defeated. So you take from it the only thing it has left to give. Then it understands.” He kicked her knees apart and knelt between them. Behind him, past the tent flap, the morning had become intensely bright, the sky a peerless shade of blue: sunlight stung Fatima’s eyes, breaking the stupor that had overtaken her. Without realizing what she was doing, she drew her knife, hidden beneath Gwennec’s cloak, and pressed it against the general’s throat as he leaned toward her. The edge was so fine that a thin seam of blood sprang up immediately on his stubbled neck, beading along the dagger like the embroidered hem of a sleeve. He cried out, struggling to back away, and toppled over, leaving Fatima with her knee on his chest and her fingers slick with his blood.
“Whore,” he spat at her.
“If I’m a whore for resisting you,” she said through her teeth, “what would I have been for giving in?”
“Whore,” he said again. The sight of him belly-up, his belt undone, scrambling with his feet, filled Fatima with a tepid disgust. Little men had waged this war. Together they could muster enough steel and gunpowder to be formidable, but singly they were soft, wretched things, squinting in the sun. Fatima levered herself to her feet and withdrew her knife, replacing it with the heel of her boot, which she pressed against the general’s bleeding neck.
“You’re not going to touch me again,” she said. “You’re not going to touch Hassan at all.”
The general laughed at her.
“You think you can give me orders? You’re dead as soon as I’m on my feet, and I’ll do what I like with the sorcerer.”
Fatima leaned harder on his neck.
“Get Luz,” she told him. “Ask her what will happen if you hurt me.”
The general had begun to wheeze with the effort of laughing. At some point he had lost a tooth to battle or bad food; a gap showed in his taut grin.
“You’re a fool if you’re more afraid of me than you are of her,” he said.
“Get Luz,” Fatima repeated. She removed her boot: the general climbed unsteadily to his feet, one hand on his neck, the other clutching his breeches, his face mirroring her own contempt. Yet he was wary now: she had invoked a name he did not dare contradict.
“Whore,” he said a third time, and stepped out of the tent.
Fatima slid to her knees. She felt as though she were still at sea, unmoored and buffeted by surf, losing what little control she had possessed over her own trajectory. Why had she said Luz’s name? Luz was worse than any general, for she could reproduce wide-eyed innocence so well that it was likely she had convinced herself of her own virtue.