Fatima wiped her dagger on the skirt of her robe, and despite the heat, hugged Gwennec’s cloak about herself. The smell of incense comforted her. She sat, rigid, looking at the flap of the tent and the sun for what felt like hours, watching the light move across the ground and touch her feet and pass on. Her only visitor was a cat, a little black-and-gold tortoiseshell that danced into the tent as if there had never been war or death in the world and rubbed itself against Fatima’s back. When it found no food about her, it left again, taking with it the last of the sunlight.
Torches were lit elsewhere. Fatima could hear men calling to one another across the encampment. There was woodsmoke and the scent of herbs and fat rendering in a pot nearby; Fatima felt her mouth water and remembered she had eaten nothing since the previous day. She strained to hear Hassan’s voice, or to catch a glimpse of him through the tent flap, but she saw no sign of him. Fear came in waves: perhaps the general had made good on his threat and would deliver Hassan’s head to her in a basket, as the Prophet Yahya’s was given to Salome; or perhaps, having been thwarted in his own tent, he would take his anger out on Hassan in other ways.
With nothing else to do, Fatima prayed. She made ablutions in the dust, bargaining with the unseen to spare that beloved body, those beloved hands, that fine and vulnerable mind. She would give up many things in return: she would give up her own beauty, which had served others far better than it had served her. She would give up anything in return for some sign that Hassan was safe.
But no sign came. There was only a light bobbing toward her through the twilight, and when it paused at the threshold of the tent, Fatima saw that it was Luz, cloaked in black and carrying an oil lamp.
Fatima shrank from her instinctively. Luz entered without a word and set her lamp on the table near the center of the room, where it threw light on the peaked canvas overhead. She pulled a stool from where it sat near the table and settled herself upon it, tucking the skirts of her dress out of the way.
“You look thinner,” she said to Fatima in her ringing voice.
Fatima swallowed and said nothing.
“You assaulted the general,” said Luz, one eyebrow arching toward the feathery gold of her temple. “He wants to hang you.”
“He assaulted me,” protested Fatima. “I was only defending myself.”
Luz smiled without humor.
“Your virtue is safe,” she said. “I’ve seen to that.”
Fatima knew she probably expected a show of gratitude but could not bring herself to thank Luz for something that should have been hers by right.
“And Hassan?” she ventured.
Luz didn’t answer. She studied Fatima in the shallow lamplight with pursed lips. The spot in her left eye, the dark spot Fatima had seen from her hidden vantage point on the road south, was still there, gleaming beneath the blonde fringe of her lashes: not a speck of dust, then, but perhaps an injury, though what sort of injury, Fatima couldn’t guess. Looking at it for too long made her uneasy, and she stared instead at her own feet.
A fat serving man in a stained tunic came panting through the door with a plate of food and set it on the ground near Fatima’s hand. Fatima fell upon it like a hawk, scooping up hot fragments of leek and mutton and watery almond pottage with her fingers and licking each one clean.
“There’s a spoon,” said Luz drily. “If you want it. We don’t normally eat so well, but today is the Feast of Saint Verena. She’s said to watch over young girls on long journeys. She was born in Egypt and traveled all the way to Switzerland to evangelize the pagans there a thousand years ago. Perhaps it was she who saved you from being despoiled.”
“I saved myself,” muttered Fatima around a mouthful of leek.
“Well. You called for me, anyway, and I came.” Luz smiled again. Her face and hands, the only parts of her visible in the dark, seemed to glow with an internal luminescence between the folds of her black gown, so that she appeared like the shrouded icon of some saint. Fatima withdrew instinctively, pulling her feet beneath the spattered hem of Gwennec’s cloak.
“What happens now?” she asked.
Luz spread her hands.
“You tell me,” she said. “We can have a short conversation in which you accept your Savior, the Son of God, and confess, in writing, the sins you have witnessed and participated in with the sorcerer Hassan ibn Haytham of Granada. Or we can have a longer conversation in which I extract those things from you piece by piece. It’s entirely up to you.”
The magnanimity in her voice, the little ironic thrum of laughter, turned the food to a solid, indigestible lump in Fatima’s mouth. If Luz had been slow-witted and humorless, or without affection, Fatima could have hated her, but Luz was none of those things, and it was this, the richness of her smile, the ample evidence of a tender heart and a lively mind, that made something in Fatima recoil with dread.
“The sultan will be furious when he finds out you’re holding me here and letting your men lay their hands on me,” Fatima hazarded.
Luz laughed.
“The sultan has repudiated you,” she said. “You have no friends left, Fatima. Even the monk whose cloak you’re wearing has learned better. Soon enough, Hassan will come to realize his own errors, and when he does, as I’ve promised you and I promise you now, he will be spared. So will you, if only you humble yourself and examine your heart.”
Fatima examined her heart. Might she do as Luz asked? It was only a matter of words. She could, she thought, adopt an air of convincing sincerity. She was used to pretending. She could kneel and profess an alien faith and maybe even shed a few tears, and make up a story or two in which Hassan’s powers were the gift of the Devil. But then there was the troublesome possibility that Hassan might tell different stories, or might, for all his nervous sensibilities, prove the stronger character in the end, and insist upon his own innocence, even in the face of death.
“Can I think about it?” she asked in a much smaller voice.
Luz’s eyes went wide. She left her seat to kneel at Fatima’s feet and take the younger woman’s hands between her own, kissing the tips of her fingers.
“Of course you can think about it,” she said. “You don’t know how happy it makes me to hear you ask.” She leaned closer, until Fatima could smell the oil of her hair and the honeyed scent of rose water rising from her bodice.
“Can I tell you a secret?” she whispered.
Fatima didn’t dare reply.
“God speaks to me,” said Luz. “He has favored me with His insight. I see things that are a vast distance away, in time and in space. I saw you on your stolen ship. I saw the place where you would dock. And I saw you before, on the road, when you hid in the ditch at my feet, but God told me it wasn’t yet time. He told me that if I were patient, you would lead me back to the sorcerer Hassan. And it all happened, didn’t it? It all happened just as the Lord showed me it would.” Her breathing had grown rapid. Fatima tried to free her hands and found she could not. Luz’s face was tense, elated, the chapped corners of her mouth pulled taut. As Fatima watched, the speck in her left eye began to wriggle.
“Let me go,” she begged, but Luz seemed not to hear her. The speck squirmed, swimming against the white of Luz’s eye, a feeble horror, a worm culled from some other earth. With all her strength, she wrenched her hands from Luz’s grip and wiped them on her tunic.
“You’re afraid,” said Luz placidly. “Don’t be. I’ve been praying for you, Fatima. And for Hassan, grievous though his sins may be. No one is beyond God’s mercy. You need only repent. A new world is coming—I have seen that too. The banner of the Savior will fly over lands undreamed of by old men in their cassocks. Isabella of Spain will reign over an empire so vast that the sun will rise on its easternmost shore before it sets on the westernmost mountain. The sins of the world will be cleansed with blood, as salvation was bought with the blood of the Son. You could share it with us, Fatima. You could stand by my side, by the side of my queen, and joy unending could be yours.”
The speck had writhed its way across the surface of Luz’s eye and lodged just beside her iris, a parasitic moon orbiting a convex host. Fatima’s ears were ringing; the ground seemed to fade and run beneath her. She leaned heavily on her hands to steady herself.