Luz hesitated only a moment. “Of course,” she said brightly. “If Lady Aisha will allow it. Are you permitted to leave the harem, then?”
“She may, and often does, provided she is chaperoned and guarded,” said Lady Aisha, disengaging her arm. “I will trust you to chaperone her—as for the guards, they are just outside the doors, probably sleeping. Only the oldest and most lethargic soldiers are assigned to the harem. We like to avoid unrequited love stories when possible.”
Luz took Fatima’s hand.
“Do we have to bring guards?” she asked. “How likely is an assassination attempt in the next hour and a half? It’s so hard to appreciate a view when there’s a man with a pike standing behind you.”
Lady Aisha pursed her lips.
“Take her to see the pretty gardens and the fountains and the baths,” she said to Fatima in Arabic. “But keep her away from the Mexuar. Keep her away from my son.”
The heat of the day intensified. Fatima longed for one of Hassan’s maps, so she could take Luz somewhere unseen, preferably with good shade and scenery that would keep her occupied. She felt pensive, and when she was pensive she was silent; Luz seemed to understand this and did not press her for conversation. Fatima led her through one set of corridors and then another, and then a portico, making for the tower they called the Captive, where, according to legend, a particularly possessive sultan had marooned his favorite wife.
On the way, they passed the private rooms of those high functionaries and royal cousins lucky enough to be quartered in the palace itself and not down the hill in the city. Knots of men congregated in the shade, fanning themselves with the ends of their turbans, their quilted outer coats discarded beside them. Their voices were low and tense. Here and there was evidence of a distressed bureaucracy: papers carrying official seals lay in shredded heaps on the ground or burned in braziers, the smoke jutting up toward the cloudless sky in plumes. Conversation ceased when Fatima and Luz passed, and some men, the obsequious ones, pressed their hands to their hearts and bowed their heads.
“They treat you with a great deal of respect,” Luz observed quietly.
“They treat me with caution,” said Fatima. “I might be carrying the sultan’s child, in which case I’m very important, especially if it turns out to be a boy. Or the sultan might sell me tomorrow, in which case I’m not important at all. They hedge their bets.”
“He wouldn’t really sell you, surely.”
“No, he wouldn’t. But he could.” Fatima shouldered open a brass-studded door at the far side of the portico. “This way.”
The Captive loomed above them, square and unsympathetic. No one lived in it now. Fatima had played in the shabby rooms near the top as a child, watching the swallows that roosted in the eaves shed dander and droppings on stacks of discarded furniture from grander eras. She could hear them now, the males trilling in their nervous way, the chicks that had fledged in the spring darting up and down through the air, preparing to abandon their parents.
“What place is this?” asked Luz.
“The nicest prison in Al Andalus,” replied Fatima. “But it’s empty now. I’m not sure why I brought you here, to be honest. I used to play at the window where those swallows are diving. Sometimes the princes would come too—Ahmed and Yusef. They were only a few years younger than I am.” She sniffed and rubbed her nose with the back of one hand. “You have them now, of course. As hostages.”
“They’re quite well,” said Luz gently. “They and little Aisha. I saw all three of them at court just before I left. They want for nothing—you can tell their father that.”
“He loves his children,” said Fatima, feeling suddenly hostile. “He wants to see them, not hear about them from me.”
“It is within his power to bring them home,” said Luz, looking up at the Captive’s empty-eyed windows. “You can tell him that as well.”
Fatima, unprepared to enter into a negotiation, kept silent. The tower before her exhaled its peculiar fragrance of dust and lost time, communicating nothing.
“Show me something else,” said Luz abruptly. “Show me your favorite place.”
Fatima chewed her lip and tried to decide whether it was wise to take this request literally. There were plenty of charming porticoes and courtyards, though many of them had accrued a permanent veneer of dirt in recent months. And there would be men in all of them, lawyers and secretaries and clerks, possibly burning more papers, or removing valuables, or doing any of the other things men do when faced with the end of an empire. Perhaps after all it was safer to do as Luz asked.
“This way,” said Fatima, turning back the way they had come. She slipped through the open door, past the pyres of burning deeds and letters, and led Luz toward the Court of Myrtles.
Hassan was dozing when they arrived at his workroom. He lay draped on a mound of cushions with his tunic open and a wedge of charcoal dangling from his fingers, as if he had fallen asleep in midsentence. Fatima rapped on the wall to wake him. He jerked upright, his eyes wide and red, and looked from Fatima to Luz with dazed incomprehension.
“I wasn’t asleep,” he said.
“Of course not,” said Fatima, coming into the room. She sat on the balustrade and drew her feet up beneath her. “I’ve brought you someone. She doesn’t speak Arabic, so far as I can tell.”
Hassan stared hard at Luz, blinking, as if trying to determine whether she was real.
“What have you been speaking to her?” he asked finally.
“Castilian,” said Fatima. “We should probably behave ourselves. She’s almost a nun.”
“Then why is she dressed like an Arab courtesan? What’s going on? Who are you? Where are we?”
“Fatima tells me you’re the court mapmaker,” said Luz, pulling out a cushion and sitting down. The sound of her voice made Hassan sufficiently serious. He crossed his legs, gesturing with a hospitable smile at the cushion to which Luz had already helped herself.
“Please sit,” he said. “Welcome to Granada. I hope Fatima hasn’t promised you anything grand—I could tell you my workroom isn’t usually such a mess, but I would be lying.”
“You have a superb view,” said Luz, her eyes sliding charitably past the heaps of paper and sooty pencil cases. “The Alhambra lives up to its reputation. But how does a mapmaker come by such a large and well-situated room in a palace like this?”
Hassan shot Fatima a nervous glance. She shifted on the balustrade, unsure of what to say. She had not expected Luz to ask a real question.
“I’m very good at what I do,” said Hassan. He tilted sideways, as if making a joke.
“You must be,” laughed Luz. “The royal mapmaker at Toledo works in a closet, I think. So! You’re Fatima’s friend. I didn’t know that was allowed.”
“It’s not,” said Hassan, glancing again at Fatima. “Not since Fatima came of age, anyway. We met when we were children. Ten years ago, it must have been—I was fourteen when I was sent here to begin my apprenticeship. Fa was still only a tiny thing.”
“I used to steal Hassan’s charcoals,” supplied Fatima. “To draw.”
“The master cartographer—he’s dead now—would have absolute fits. But he couldn’t go into the harem, so all little Fa had to do was run there and hide in Lady Aisha’s skirts. She got away with everything. Still does.”
Luz laughed again, tilting her head back to expose a white throat delicately crisscrossed in blue. Fatima wondered for a moment whether she was flirting with Hassan. Hassan seemed to be wondering the same thing, for he became very interested in a stray thread clinging to the sleeve of his tunic, picking at it with his thumb and forefinger.
“Was she as beautiful a child as she is a woman?” coaxed Luz.
“Who? Fatima?” Hassan looked up again. “Not that I noticed.”