Mary considered this for a minute and then lifted her chin.
“That’s not so bad,” she said stoutly. “Is it? It’s the sort of thing you expect from an enchanted island. Avalon was said to be the same way, in the mists, with the High King waiting as young as ever.”
“It’s not that simple.” Hassan appeared behind Fatima’s shoulder and took the boot from her, turning it in his hands. “Time doesn’t pass, at least not in the sense you mean. It just is. All of it, all at once. The past, the present, the future. Fate exists within time, but the master of fate exists outside it.” He hesitated and gave Fatima another unfathomable look.
“What?” she said.
“There’s a fellow here,” said Hassan quietly, addressing the boot. “A Jew from Córdoba. He says the Spanish have issued a proclamation ordering all Jews out of Iberia. His family boarded a ferry to Morocco that overturned in bad weather. That’s how he got here.”
Fatima felt sweat break out on her upper lip and dashed it away with the back of her hand.
“And?”
“When we left, you and I, I mean, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had issued no such proclamation. The man says—Fa, he says he left Spain two years after the fall of Granada.”
Humidity had saturated Fatima’s brocade robe: she longed to take it off and send everyone away and bathe with her familiar view of the sea, lead-colored now under the mottled clouds.
“You’re very calm about this,” she said.
“I ought to be. I brought us here. We’re no longer a where, so we’re no longer a when either. Time is moving as it always has in proportion to those who perceive it. Nothing is wrong.” He smiled crookedly. Days spent walking and working under the sun had burnished him until his skin was nearly the same red-brown as his hair; he stood square, his courtly slouch gone. Vikram was right: Hassan, in his own odd way, had always been the braver one, if for no other reason than that his very existence was a sort of trespass. Now, here, he had become an immutable version of himself, who knew by instinct what others could only guess.
“Why are you telling me this?” Fatima asked him.
“So you won’t be afraid,” said Hassan, smiling again, a pleading smile. “You’ve done so well, and I haven’t told you, because it’s been—” He stopped and caught his breath. “You haven’t asked about Deng and me, but I can tell you’ve—I didn’t expect you to be jealous, is what I mean. We’ve been friends for so long, and I’ve had lovers now and again when I could manage it discreetly, which surely you must have known, and you’ve never been jealous before, so—”
“It was different before,” said Fatima, louder than she intended. She didn’t want to have this particular argument in front of other people, but it seemed impossible to stop. “This was meant to be about you and me. Not about other people. You and me and to hell with the rest of the world—let them find their own way if they can.”
“Well it damn well is about other people now, isn’t it?” Hassan gestured angrily at Mary and the little jinn, who were pretending not to listen. “And it has been for some time. There are all the people who only came here because we opened the way, and all the jinn, and there’s our Gwen, who doesn’t even want to be here—and all of them, all of them, look to you for guidance. And right now they’re terrified because there are two Castilian warships on the horizon and we’ve got no weapons aside from a few handmade spears and some cutlery.”
“Rufus has a crossbow,” said Mary helpfully. “Though only a few bolts to go with it.”
“We are not without means,” said the little jinn on Mary’s shoulder, its voice no deeper than a cricket’s. “If need be, we will fight alongside our cousins.”
Fatima regarded the tiny creature with skepticism: it looked as though it would be overmatched by a determined squirrel. Nevertheless, there was no help she could afford to turn away.
“Gather everyone on the green,” she said, lifting her chin. “And every stick and stone heavy enough to be called a weapon.”
It was all managed soon enough. There was pitifully little to manage at all: twenty able human beings, not counting Asher and his brothers, who were too young to be asked to fight; and nearly as many jinn, though not all came when called and others were difficult to perceive in the best of circumstances. They stood in the tiny green and arrayed themselves for war as best they could, amid the squabbling chickens, who resented the incursion into their pasture. Stupid, who regarded both chickens and spears with suspicion, watched them from a patch of clover, his mouth green with grazing. The sight of it was more pastoral than martial. Among them, only Rufus, a broad, well-muscled man who sweat profusely, had ever been in battle, though many could hunt and fish well enough to aim a spear. It was just as it had been in the Alhambra during the long siege: the walls and cliffs would keep them safe for a time, but when those were breached, by men or by hunger, no one inside stood a chance.
“We must find a way to close up the gate,” said Fatima, standing before them. The wet wind took her words and muddled them, making her sound even younger than she was. “Whatever door was there rotted away long ago. Carts, crates, old boards—we must block the entryway as best we can. Then we stand on the walls and make life difficult for them when they try to breach the gate. They may decide it’s not worth their trouble if their own supplies are low, which they must be after this long at sea. It’s the best we can do.”
“The walls are thick, but they’re not high,” said Rufus, leaning on his spear. The crossbow Mary had spoken of so glowingly was slung over one shoulder, pointing at the ground, shiny from overuse. “It wouldn’t take more than a few siege ladders to put men on top and avoid the gatehouse entirely.”
“They will have walked uphill for two hours by the time they get here,” said Fatima, concealing her irritation at having been contradicted. “They won’t go up the stone stairs from the beach—they’d need to go single file and we could pick them off one by one from the clifftop. Which means they’ll have to go all the way around the harbor. And they don’t know the paths as we do—they may get lost or turned around in the forest. They won’t be in any state to put up siege ladders.”
“Some of us will hide along the paths,” said one of the jinn, a slim, glistening thing like a blue candle flame who seemed to speak with two voices at once. “We might kill a few, and we will certainly frighten the rest.”
“Perhaps the island will help us,” said Sona. Her big eyes glistened with fear or desperation. She was cradling Asher’s youngest brother against her shoulder: the child would nap only when someone held him. Fatima didn’t want to dash her hopes, but she needed every person sharp and ready, and hope did not make a person sharp.
“The island doesn’t help,” she said, thinking of the worn boot. “The island just is. We have only ourselves to rely on.”
“Then we will make our stand,” said the frog-man, belling out his throat pouch. “We may be few, but we are defending our home. There are forces at work in the world hidden even from the jinn, and they will be on our side.”