“No,” said Fatima, surprised only for a moment by how readily they all responded to her suggestion. “Not here. We’re a royal household now. We sleep in the palace.”
Gwennec helped Deng carry the bags up the stone steps to the clifftop. Fatima followed with Hassan, their arms full of skeletal driftwood, rendered so leached and dry by salt and wind that it weighed almost nothing. Vikram offered no help: he scaled the cliff face, complaining under his breath, and disappeared over the top before the rest were halfway up the slanting staircase. Mary came last, for the short, rough steps hit nearly at her knees. Fatima knew better than to offer help, but slowed her pace and paused every so often, as if to catch her breath, when Mary fell behind.
“You needn’t wait,” Mary panted. “I’ll get there eventually. Faugh! I’ll never set foot on that beach again, that’s for certain.”
“We’ll find another way down tomorrow,” said Fatima. “The elevation wasn’t nearly so steep where I washed ashore.” She scanned the horizon: the little strip of beach bent away and disappeared into the deep blue of the harbor, then reappeared again in a distant haze against a fringe of trees. She wondered whether the perimeter of the island was fixed, or whether, like the interior, it rearranged itself according to some unknowable law, or no law at all.
“Do you suppose that serpent’ll come back?” asked Mary, following Fatima’s gaze. “I don’t like to think of it running loose somewhere nearby. I’ve never been so terrified in all my life. It was like one of those evil tales mothers tell children to keep them close by.”
“Evil?” Fatima stopped and frowned. “Is that what it was?”
“What else might it have been?”
Fatima considered: she saw again the creature’s eyes, the unmistakable contempt, the malice, but these things, though dangerous, were not evil in themselves. Vikram had the same look often enough. It was less frightening, Fatima supposed, to be confronted by something that was honest about its capacity for violence than to dread the smiles and false assurances of something that believed in its own goodness even as it murdered and mutilated.
“I think it was testing us,” she said, shifting the load of driftwood in her arms. “I think—I think the people who were here before, the ones who built the cities, didn’t understand this place, or at least, didn’t try hard enough to understand it.”
Mary leaned against a dusty outcrop, her brown hair plastered against her forehead.
“Do you understand it, then?” she asked.
Fatima hesitated. The wind was picking up and pressed her robe around her knees; Mary, clad only in Deng’s shirt, started to shiver.
“I won’t say I understand it,” she said finally. “But I think—I believe it understands us.”
Mary smiled at this. She looped one hand through Fatima’s elbow and leaned on her as they started up the steps again. The pressure of her hand, though slight, filled Fatima with silent pleasure. She slowed her steps, shifting the bulk of the firewood again, and led the way up the last few steps to the clifftop and the wall of the little keep, which the last blush of twilight had set afire.
Chapter 21
Fatima awoke the next morning to the scent of frying fish. She didn’t move: her neck was stiff from her fall the day before and from her night’s sleep on the bare stone of the main hall, where she had lain down, without seeking anything to pillow her head, as soon as the fire was lit. It was deliciously warm. Gwennec had scraped the crusted soot from the fire pit at the center of the room and bored them all with detailed instructions about the best way to build a fire in such a structure; it involved wadding up kindling and arranging the wood to face in a certain direction. Fatima had fallen asleep by the time he finished, suffused by the heat that crept toward her across the ancient flagstones, waking only when Hassan lay down beside her and Gwennec claimed the spot between her and the fire. Then she slept again, more soundly than she had since she was a child, her fingers wound in the tapered end of Gwennec’s cowl, breathing to the concussive rhythm of the waves on the beach below.
Gwennec was up now: Fatima could see him bending over the fire with his sleeves rolled up, tending to a bowl that sat among the coals. Deng stood beside him. They both smelled of dew and open air and seemed very awake given that the light filling the room was still a solemn blue. On the other side of the fire, Mary lay snoring in a pile of canvas sacks with her feet curled up. Hassan was nowhere to be seen.
“Where is he?” asked Fatima, her voice throaty with sleep. She sat up slowly and stretched her neck.
“Where’s who?” asked Deng.
“He’s upstairs,” said Gwennec, “opening and closing doors. Come and have some fish.”
Fatima sidled toward the fire, wincing as she unbent her cramped limbs. The bowl Gwennec was tending contained a row of smelts with blackened skins. Without further invitation, Fatima plucked one up by its tail and began sucking the meat from the bones.
“Deng and I have been up since first light,” said Gwennec cheerfully. “I made a sort of net from an old scarf I found, and Deng made a very excellent fishing spear out of some green wood, and we went down to the harbor to see what might come up out of the deep water at dawn. We did all right. I caught a lot of smelts, and Deng hooked his spear into a little cave between two rocks and got an octopus. An octopus. That’s lunch.”
Mary sat up in her berth of canvas and rubbed her eyes, sniffing appreciatively.
“Is that a proper meal I smell? I haven’t had hot food since—how long has it been, Deng?”
“Since France,” said Deng drily. “I ate a meat pie straight out of the oven from a bakeshop near the wharf in Calais. It was good, too. I don’t know what you’d have had, Mary. I don’t remember seeing you at all until the ship was becalmed and the madness broke out.”
“Most people find it easier not to see me until they have to,” said Mary with her broad smile. “How funny that we should be such good friends now, yet not have known each other at all just a few short weeks ago! There’s nothing like being threatened with death to make you feel close to someone. I saw you well enough, though, Deng, from the very beginning.”
“I’m hard to miss at this latitude.”
“That’s the truth! I’d never seen anyone like you before. There were others aboard the ship who were frightened by those scars, but I thought they were very jaunty, and I said so whenever anybody got sniffy about it.”
Deng touched the carved chevrons that arced across his forehead and smiled wryly. Fatima, unthinking, mirrored his gesture, touching the seam that ran across her own face, and felt, for the first time, something like regret.
“May I?” asked Deng in a softer voice, reaching toward her. Fatima stiffened instinctively. But something about Deng’s expression, an alloy of sympathy and brisk interest, made her stop and take his hand and rest it upon her cheek. His fingers were still and weightless.
“This is new,” he said in surprise, pressing gently at the edge of the seam. “It’s closed so neatly that I thought it must be older. Someone very skilled at treating wounds must have dressed this for you.”
“It was Vikram,” said Fatima. She frowned, looking up without moving her face. “Vikram isn’t here. Was he here?”
“The awful naked man with too many teeth? I didn’t notice him leave,” said Gwennec, stirring coals with a fat stick of driftwood.