“This feels like something Hassan could have made,” she said, more to herself than to Vikram. “Like one of the rooms he used to make for me in the palace when I was bored. They were always empty. There was something—I don’t know—muffled about them. But I always had the strongest feeling that other people had been there before. If there was a staircase, the steps were worn. If there was a windowpane, the latch was scuffed, as if it’d been lifted and locked a thousand times. But I never saw a single other person.”
Vikram studied her face and made no reply. The thought of Hassan, the memory of his ink-stained fingers, landed in Fatima’s chest and settled there, halting her where she stood and draining the glamor from the scene around her, a feeling disconcertingly like waking from a dream. Had Hassan and Gwennec reached the island, or had the wave that bore them away carried them somewhere else? Her kingdom, if such it was, was without meaning if Hassan had not survived to see it, and Gwennec, for whom her heart spared a small cry—if they were gone, then her victory had been bought at too high a price. The air felt suddenly close and oppressive, as if the silent city had been shut like a disused wardrobe until the moment Fatima set foot in it. She took great, hollow-feeling breaths that did nothing to relieve her. Fatima began to hurry along the street, craving sunlight. Vikram called out to her, but she ignored him, pelting across the rippled pavement toward the crest of the hill, past stone houses pressed tightly against each other, until she came to a squat little four-walled fortress, an ancient sort of keep, with only sky behind it.
She could see straight through the arched entryway and out the other side. A second arch, the twin of the entrance, revealed a hazy line of clouds and a fringe of sea grass that wandered indoors through the cracks in the paving stones. Between the two arches was a square, high-ceilinged room hardly as large as the courtyard of the harem in the Alhambra, bare of any decoration, a mere interruption between the city and the sea. Breathing raggedly, Fatima stumbled inside.
It was like standing inside a seashell: within the main hall, the thrum of the waves was constant and the light from the open archways lacquered the walls in yellow and pink. Fatima paused, swaying. To her right and left, stone stairways spiraled up toward an invisible second floor; in the middle of the hall was a recessed pit still blackened by the remains of ancient fires. But it was the sky and the grass that called her, and she ran past the fire pit through the archway on the far wall and stood on the extreme verge of a cliff.
Beneath her was a drop of several stories: the stone below was white and soft, limestone perhaps, and long ago some enterprising person had cut into it rough steps at amateurish intervals. Adorned here and there with more pale grass, the steps ended at a thin strip of beach where the outgoing tide sucked and worried at shoals of well-worn sand, and it was there that Fatima saw the monster.
She saw its feet first: they were forked and covered in a kind of yellowish scale and as long as Fatima was tall, and looking down at them, she knew at once that they had made the unearthly tracks she had seen in the snow. They were attached to well-muscled limbs that doubled back on themselves like the legs of a cat, but they were hairless and speckled, supporting a barrel chest the size of a small house. Ribs slid beneath the thin flesh, causing a crest of water-stained spines to sway along the creature’s back; it was moving, weaving back and forth as a snake or a monitor might, its slender tail suspended above the sand behind it, its head bobbing in an awful rhythm. It was the face, though, that filled Fatima with horror: as with the deer, there was something human about it, about the eyes set forward in the skull and focused intently on a single point; the mouth full and small and ready to speak. It advanced along the wet sand, a survivor from a time when the sundering of something from nothing required an act of divine violence.
She knew it immediately. She had seen it night after night as she lay flat on her back, watched it swim through an ocean of ink on the far wall of the sultan’s bedchamber: it was the sea serpent, Hassan’s serpent, freed now from its paper confines, a thing too fearsome to be taken in with a single glance.
Screams broke Fatima’s trance. There were other figures on the beach, she now saw: two in identical dark, spattered cloaks and two more in varied states of disarray; one, a child, appeared to be wearing nothing more than a nightdress. The cloaks, the same as the one Fatima herself wore, and the windblown, salt-lightened heads of red and blond hair above them, sent her to her knees and tore a noise from her throat that sounded as though it came from somewhere else.
The monster whipped its head toward her and looked up into her eyes. Terror racked Fatima’s body like heat, pulling at her sinews, begging her to flee. It was a displacing, disorienting fear, one that upset the hierarchy of things. If the creature below her was made from the same matter as Fatima, it was possible that God was not entirely on her side; if the thing below her was real, then God was also on the side of the monsters. The world, in all its upheaval, was not partisan, and might raise her up only to strike her down with luminous indifference.
“I am the king of the birds,” she whispered to herself. “I am the king of the birds.”
The monster—the thing, the leviathan—twisted itself into a crouch and leaped, sinking its claws into the white cliff. Fatima heard something scrabbling across the paving stones of the hall behind her: Vikram, a smaller darkness, had caught up and was howling piteously, like a dog.
“I am the king of the birds,” Fatima repeated. The leviathan pulled itself up toward her along the cliff face, sending fragments of chalk down on the sand below, its supple mouth pursed—not a nightmare, she thought absently, but a challenge, a reminder that the dominion of mortal men and women was circumscribed, even here at the end of the earth.
The leviathan hauled its heavy body onto the ledge of the cliff. It smelled of hot metal or of summer sun on bare earth, like Vikram, and Fatima wondered if it, too, was a jinn, something made of fire, more akin to the stars than to herself. It made no difference: she would die or she would live, but the thing would acknowledge her. She stood before it and dug her toes into the yielding chalk and lifted her chin.
“I am king here,” she said, and though it sounded forced in her ears, her voice didn’t waver. “And you will answer to me.”
The creature tilted its head. Its lips parted in a slit, behind which was elemental darkness.
“I am king here,” it said, mimicking her tone, her inflection. “And you will answer to me.”
Fatima hesitated. Was it mocking or threatening her, or, like a parrot, could it only repeat the things it heard? In the moment it took her to consider, the monster lunged.
Fatima was thrown backward on the chalk cliff and felt her teeth rattle. Light blinded her. It didn’t fade when she blinked, and she pressed her eyes with the palms of her hands, fearing that she had lost her sight. But the light intensified: it was amber and gold and almost thick, and warmed the cliff beneath Fatima’s back. It was, she realized, the sun, which had declined far enough to shine straight through the entrance of the keep behind her and out the other side, striking the monster full in the face.
It winced and gave a choked cry. The pressure on Fatima’s legs receded. She kicked blindly, hitting air at first and then something more solid. The monster grabbed uselessly at the grass and the brittle chalk and cried again and fell, and the piercing light fell likewise, its glory fleeting, eclipsed by the stone parapets of men.
Fatima saw the shapes of birds. A hoopoe hovered over her, its red crest and barred wings in disarray; beside it, a crow hooded in black was making a rasping, mournful sound. A sparrow, too, flitted into and out of her vision and chirped and fussed, and a dark-headed heron snapped and spread its blue-and-white wings.
“Stay back,” the heron commanded. “She hit her head on that ledge. The bones in her neck may slip if we move her.”
“To hell with you,” wailed the hoopoe. “Give her to me. Fa! Please open your eyes—”