He didn’t like to let go of her hand. Gwennec found him a crate to sit on near the little table on the stern castle, but it was Fatima he wanted beside him, his right hand clutching hers as he sketched with his left. She rose every so often to check their course, though the compass, and the gimbals in its orbit, went oddly still after Hassan began to alter the map. Fatima imagined the compass had been a living thing and was now dead: they had killed it, and the halos and half spheres of metal constituted a corpse.
The fantasy was so vivid that she found herself unwilling to look at the compass after a time, focusing instead on the movement of Hassan’s fingers, the darkening circles beneath his eyes. He was working in ink now, not in charcoal: he had selected a blue bottle from the innards of his leather case and mixed powders and oils to create a color that reminded Fatima of the ship, a red-brown, water stained, earthy hue, each drop of which pulled them closer to the king of the birds.
“What’s moving?” Gwennec asked at one point, hovering over Hassan’s shoulder. “Us, or the island, or the sea?”
“Nothing is moving,” murmured Hassan. “I’m just shortening the distance between us and what we want.”
“You know the sun’s gotten confused,” pressed Gwennec. “I’ve been up the mast, watching it tick around in a circle. It’s as if this cog is the still point at the top of the world, where they say there is no darkness.”
“You’re awfully calm about it,” said Fatima.
“I don’t know what else to be. I don’t know what else to do. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Fatima untangled her fingers from Hassan’s, kissing his head when he made a noise of protest. She straightened and stretched her back. The fog had returned; or rather, the horizon had vanished, and the carrack, if it still followed them, was hidden in a gray blur.
“I’m tired,” she announced.
“Go sleep,” said Gwennec. “I’ll stay with him.”
“I don’t want you,” muttered Hassan.
“You’ve not got much choice. It’s me or Stupid, and Stupid shits every twenty minutes. I notice neither of you refined gentlefolk has bothered to clean up.”
“You clean it up, since you’re the least domesticated.”
“Oh, I see how things lie. Shall I wipe your ass as well, while I’m about it?”
Fatima left them to bicker and went belowdecks. Her shoulders ached from being too long in one position: there was pressure in her temples that blinking did nothing to dispel. She crawled into the bunk where Hassan and Gwennec had slept and breathed their mingled scents. Before her eyes, the grain of the oak trees that had become the hull of the ship slid along from plank to plank, as solid as ever. Everything around her seemed too real: surely she was asleep, or she had gone overboard in the rogue wave, or she was back in the palace, dreaming, and had never left at all. Nothing real could follow from desires like hers. They were adrift in what was surely no longer the waking world; fate did not reward such recklessness. If you climb too high, Lady Aisha had once told her, the angels will come down and ask you where you’re going. Yet the hull, as she touched it, was rough and sturdy and shifted almost imperceptibly beneath her fingers to accommodate the motion of the water. The ship was still real, still hers.
“Qaf,” she whispered, tracing invisible letters on the hull. “Antillia.” Perhaps the difference didn’t matter; perhaps it was only the escape that mattered. And she had escaped: she was free, and though freedom was neither happiness nor safety, though it was in fact a crueler and lonelier thing than she could have imagined, it was real, just as the ship was real, and like the ship, it was hers.
She fell asleep with her finger pressed against the hull. A jostle and the scent and heaviness of a warm body half woke her sometime later—when exactly, she couldn’t tell; the light had not changed when Hassan collapsed beside her with a sigh.
“Move over,” came Gwennec’s voice, whispering.
“Not big enough for three,” muttered Hassan.
“Then turn sideways, you radish. I’m freezing out here. Move, move.”
Fatima found herself pressed between Hassan and the slope of the hull.
“No one is sailing this ship,” she murmured.
“Nothing to sail,” said Gwennec. “No wind, no landmarks, compass dead.”
“Is that it, then? We wait here to die?”
“No,” came Hassan’s voice. “I think we’re close now. I think this is how it’s meant to look. Hidden in the fog. That’s what the story says.”
Fatima was about to correct him—surely they had added that detail themselves—but stopped herself. She could no longer remember what they had read and what they had written. Sleep pulled at her again. Gwennec’s breath was already deepening; beside her, she felt Hassan twitch in the violent prelude to dreams. She rested her cheek against his.
She dreamed of a white shoreline. Hills of thick, pale grass, flattened by wind, leading down to the sand; small trees, their trunks like warped silver, hanging over the cresting hillsides, their branches straining backward, like the grass, as if a strong gale had swept over the whole of the landscape. The air was heavy with the smell of rain. Fatima sensed rather than saw the figure standing beside her, yet even before she turned to look, she knew what she would find.
The Bird King did not touch the ground. He hung in the air, held aloft by currents Fatima could not feel, silently beating his great wings. She could look at him only in pieces. He had no face, at least none in any sense that Fatima could describe, but he was clothed in feathers: crimson, blue, gray, glass-green, dark ocher. There were colors that were not colors but memories: the rosy-edged white of a winter sunrise and the mottled red and green of earth blending into water, and here and there a blue-black parted by gold like the quiet dawns in which Lady Aisha had touched her shoulder and asked if she would rise to pray.
He was too frightening to be truly beautiful. There was a remoteness about him, a terrible, unrelenting kind of mercy, the kind that could meet good and evil with equal tenderness. Yet Fatima reached for him with both her arms, saturated with relief and bawling like a child.
I’m here, she said. I’ve come. I crossed the Dark Sea to find you, and now I’m here.
The Bird King folded his wings around her shoulders. She expected him to speak, to communicate something infallible, a tidy ending for the story she and Hassan had begun, but he was silent. The landscape around them dimmed, and Fatima felt a little thrill of doubt. In that doubt, she saw Luz, or rather, the spot in Luz’s eye, which seemed, in the jumbled logic of dreaming, to contain a vast stretch of time in which all the failures of men were chronicled. It pulled itself toward her, closing the rupture of moments and miles between them, until it was so close that it filled her sight.
Hurried footsteps thumped over her head; the space where Hassan and Gwennec had slept was cold. The ship had begun to pitch again. Across the hold, water rose and sank beyond the little row of portholes, each wave knife-edged, crowding against the white sky. Fatima clenched her teeth to fight the nausea that swelled in her gut each time the cog heaved upward. She made her way across the hold and up the steps, swaying like a drunkard, and looked past the stern at what she knew she would find there.
The outline of the carrack was sharp and solid in the pale nothing behind them. Shouts came from the deck. Fatima could see men pointing toward the cog; a dog’s bark cracked through the chill air; a loud blast sounded on a horn.