The horror sat atop the waves, many times the size of the Spanish carrack, slowly unfolding itself coil by coil. Though it lay very close to the beach, the men in the longboats never glanced at it, and instead looked past it, or through it, at the meager force confronting them upon the sand.
“They don’t see it,” said Fatima to herself. “They can’t see it.” A cannonball smashed into the cliff above her head. One or two of the ancient steps had come away, leaving gaps in the staircase that led to the clifftop, not too wide for someone as tall as Fatima or Hassan to jump across, but much too wide for Mary or for Asher’s young brothers. The possibility of retreat was no longer certain. Fatima looked down at the boot in her hand. It could not end here, it must not end here, yet no other end was evident. They would end as the bishops had; they would end as boots, as a city hastily abandoned, tools left where they lay, for there was some secret to surviving a happy ending that they did not possess.
Something flickered overhead, a shadow that momentarily interrupted the sun. Fatima looked up. The leviathan, the dragon as Mary called it, was crouched on the clifftop, looking down at the battle below. The noise must have roused it, or perhaps the scent of blood. Fatima could see Deng standing in the arch of the keep and watching it in his imperturbable way. Luz was upright now, hanging behind him in Fatima’s bleached shift, her hair a snarl of gold around her shoulders.
Fatima looked again at the boot and found it didn’t move her. She left it in the sand and pelted toward the chalk stairs, taking them two at a time, heedless of the cannonballs that shrieked and shuddered around her. The leviathan swiveled its head. Its eyes fixed on hers and a smile bloomed on its supple mouth, unsheathing the rows of teeth. Fatima stopped on a step that ended at nothing, at a powdery crater where the next step had been, and wheeled her arms to keep the momentum from pulling her over. The leviathan slid down the cliff toward her. She could hear her own breath whistling in her throat and ignored it, looking into the face of the dragon, into the greenish, human eyes, until it was so close that she could smell the reptilian sweetness of its hide.
It was death; Fatima knew this, but if she could occupy the leviathan, Hassan and Gwennec and Mary and all the others, her friends, might have a little more time.
The beast blinked. Its eyes were still and glassy, like the surface of the spring at the center of the island. Fatima looked into them, expecting to see herself. But the reflection of the sun on the water below was too bright, and she saw instead a diffuse radiance, a light in which more light was enthroned, blotting out mere images.
“I’m sorry,” she said to it.
The leviathan opened its mouth.
“Gwennec said something,” said Fatima. “He said we have to learn to live with the things that God has set askew. I thought that meant that we had to learn to live with things like you, but I think perhaps it means that you must learn to live with things like us.”
The breath of the beast was so hot that Fatima felt her hair lift and float around her. Down on the beach there were shouts, a scorched smell, and the dull sound of wood splintering on metal. She was shaking, not from fear but from the sheer pressure of time, the moments passing there on the white steps while death waited. The expression on the leviathan’s face had changed: it stared at her no less intensely, but with as much curiosity as malice.
“You are the Bird King,” she said to it. “I am the Bird King. Hassan is. Even Luz. We all are, none of us are. Nothing is so frightening or evil that it doesn’t come from the same thing that made the stars.”
The beast roared and lunged. Fatima closed her eyes.
“We are the king of the birds,” she whispered. But the end didn’t come; instead, it leaped past her down the cliff, its claws puncturing the chalk, and hurled itself into the coils of the mote.
Fatima stood and watched it, dazed. It was only the howl of the mote, the demon, if such it was: a sound that seemed to draw all the air with it, that propelled her to move. She turned and ran, tripping over her sand-caked robe in her haste to rush down the stairs. The leviathan was tearing at the translucent coils that rolled across the water, rending shadow from blood and splinters, its own oily hide raked by jagged spars that heaved in the surf. The mote screamed again. It had an angry cry, vicious, as high and shrill as the cannon that was still firing from the deck of the Spanish carrack. Then, suddenly, it rose up, becoming a spiral, then a line, and then a mote again, a speck of sooty dust, to be carried away by the wind.
The leviathan threw back its head and bellowed in triumph. Those left alive on the beach scattered before it, the soldiers throwing themselves into the surf wearing their heavy armor, panic making them heedless of the weight they carried. With a hiss, the leviathan galloped over them into the water, crumpling breastplates beneath its forked feet. The cannon sounded; a ball flew toward the creature and missed. Out of the waves it leaped, slamming into the broadside of the carrack, which rocked and threw a sheet of foam high into the air. The cannon smashed through the railing of the deck and slipped into the sea, a weapon no longer; its iron barrel, still hot, disappeared in a eulogy of steam.
Chapter 25
The beach went quiet. Fatima sat down where she was, soaked in seawater and blood—someone’s—and her own sweat. The churned-up sand came into focus only slowly: she saw figures lying prone in dark pools and twisted, unmoving shadows that could only be the bodies of jinn. Fatima pushed herself to her feet and began to walk, though where or for what purpose, she did not know. The ordinary sounds of the tide and the wind through the beach grass returned to fill the stifled air. Then came other sounds: a cry, a frantic inquiry. Hassan’s voice.
Fatima broke into a run. Hassan was kneeling beside a cascade of white rock near the far foot of the cliff, where the sheer wall reached into the sea and left only a thin strip of sand to walk upon. He was hunched over a body. Fatima saw a rough, tanned foot shod in a sandal, the dirtied folds of a white habit, a black scapular. It seemed as though the air around her turned dense, slowing her steps: she found she could no longer run, and approached the sandaled foot with a heavy tread.
Gwennec’s head was pillowed on Hassan’s lap. His face was greenish, all its high color gone; his breath rattled in his throat. His eyes, though, were the eyes she remembered, and they settled on her face, blinking up at her as she came into view.
“Caught a spear in the side,” he croaked. His fingers twitched. Fatima knelt next to Hassan and pulled back the monk’s scapular: underneath, on his left side, a stain like a poppy bloomed, brighter than it had reason to be. Grief assaulted her, grief and guilt, and she felt her face begin to burn.
“Oh my darling,” she quavered, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I said such an awful thing to you earlier and I don’t even know why. I know you wouldn’t have left us, I know you didn’t want to, but I thought I was being—I don’t know, I don’t know. Generous.”
“Cold,” said Gwennec, and grinned. Then his face changed, tightened, and he gave a stuttering gasp. “I need a priest.”
“You’ve only got us heathens,” said Hassan, stroking the monk’s hair with a hand that shook. “Which is why you’re not to die, Gwen. You’re to live. Perhaps if we never manage to fetch a priest, you’ll live forever. Look! Deng is coming. I see him on the stairs. He’s even brought a plank with him to bridge the gap where the cannons blew a step away. What a clever fellow. He’ll make it all right, you’ll see.”
Gwennec laughed soundlessly. He reached up with two fingers, his hand marbled in blood and dirt, and touched Hassan’s beard.
“My friend,” he said, “my brother. Still an innocent, even after all this.”
“Don’t patronize me,” said Hassan, his voice breaking. “I can’t stand to hear you all solemn just now. You can’t leave us, Gwen. Who will patch the roofs and tubs and doors, and who else is such a good fisherman?”