Fatima took a breath.
“Choose a bird,” she said, changing the subject. It was the way all their conversations went now: the palace, rambling as it was, had grown cramped under siege, the air perpetually stale with the shut-up breath of a hundred half-starved mouths. Every conversation became an argument. It was safer to retreat into the games of their childhood, as they did more and more; into the stories of creatures that could fly away. Fatima returned to her patch of sun on the balustrade.
“A bird,” she repeated.
Hassan chewed for a moment before answering.
“Red-crested pochard,” he said triumphantly. Fatima laughed at him.
“That’s not a real bird,” she said. “You’re just being an idiot.”
“It is so a real bird! It’s a sort of duck, a waterbird. We used to have them on my mother’s land, near the lake. Hunters would come to trap them in the fall.” In the course of their game, they had long ago run through all the ordinary birds, and had since moved on to more exotic ones.
“Very well,” said Fatima. “The pochard, the pochard—since he has a bright crest, perhaps he was vain, and when the other birds sought him out to accompany them on their journey across the Dark Sea to the mountain of Qaf, he refused. Why should he leave his home, where everyone flattered him and he could spend all day preening? The people of Qaf might not appreciate his plumage as they ought to do. But the hoopoe—”
“Ah yes, the hoopoe is my favorite.”
“The hoopoe, who also had a lovely red crest, scolded the pochard for his shallowness.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know.” Fatima yawned. The effort of thinking too hard in bright sunlight had begun to tire her. “But surely something silly enough to be called a pochard wouldn’t survive such a long journey. Make me a new map. I want a view.”
“A view,” muttered Hassan. “You’ve got lovely views already. Look at this view! Look at the fork-tailed swallows flying low across the reflecting pool! At night, you can see a second field of stars in the water. Enjoy it now, Fa, for soon it’ll all belong to Castile.”
Fatima had never seen the Court of Myrtles at night, when being caught anywhere outside the harem or the sultan’s own rooms might have real consequences, but was in no mood for another argument.
“Will you make me a map or not?” she demanded.
“Yes, of course I will. A map. A view.” Hassan wiped his hands on his coat and sat down at his worktable, a low, scuffed oak plank balanced on two stacks of books. Fatima knelt beside him. She liked to look at his face while he worked, to see it transformed by the fervent, vacant light that possessed him as his maps took shape. His lips would part in an eager smile, like a child’s; there was a bliss about him when he worked and when he prayed that made Fatima wonder whether he knew what it felt like to have one’s faith in the goodness of things removed. Fatima herself had never knelt upon a prayer mat except grudgingly. Obedience was demanded of her all day and on many nights; when she was asked to pray, she had no more left in her. Hassan was different. His obedience was always rewarded; whatever force he called upon in his silent moments always answered him, and though the maidservants might giggle and the undersecretaries scowl when he passed, he did not appear to notice.
Hassan was the only person she allowed herself to watch so openly. To look too long at anything male, the palace guards or the cook or the dozens of secretaries and lawyers who populated the Mexuar, was to commit impertinence; to look too often at the freewomen she served was to risk rebuke. Hassan was different. It gave her a stealthy joy to sit beside him and try to translate the lively conversation between his brows, and know he neither minded nor misread her. He saw her looking now and smiled absently, reaching out to stroke her jaw with one finger. He took out a charcoal pencil and whittled it with a small knife, removing a fragment of paper from one of the untidy stacks on his desk. His fingers—the length and suppleness of which almost redeemed his awkward features—moved quickly across the page, defining the right angles of a short hallway, the nautilus-shell progression of a flight of stairs.
“This is the way you came,” said Hassan. His pencil rasped and shed black ash. “This is a door. It leads off the small antechamber in the harem where the washerwoman keeps her baskets and soap. That is the door you want.”
Fatima teased the map from beneath his fingers and slipped it into the embroidered V at the front of her tunic, against her skin. Hassan watched her and sighed.
“You’re wasted on me,” he said. “God’s names, look at you.” He took her hands in his and turned her to face the sun. “Look.”
Fatima smiled. She was not above admiring herself. Her eyes were so black and unflawed that they swallowed the afternoon light without reflecting anything, like a night without stars. They floated in a face whose pallor might make another girl look sickly. There was no high color in her lips or cheeks of the kind the poets praised: her beauty was something too remote for poetry, a tilting symmetry of jaw and cheekbone and dark brow. Only her hair seemed to be made of anything earthly: it billowed over her shoulders in a mass of dense sable curls that snapped the teeth of every comb Lady Aisha had ever taken to them.
The effect of it all was singular. Whenever Fatima encountered newcomers walking the halls with her mistress, they would invariably stop in their tracks, put one hand on Lady Aisha’s arm, and ask, Where did you get her? And Lady Aisha would say, She is Circassian. And whoever it was would raise one eyebrow and say, Ah. It was always the same: Ah. Much was contained in that single syllable. Ah! All are equal before God, but some are meant to be bought and sold.
Yet Fatima was the only Circassian slave left in the Alhambra, the others all freed or sold off to pay debts, dispersing across the Strait to safety as the armies of Castile and Aragon pressed down from the north. There was no one left to praise her in the language of her mother, whose face she could barely remember and whose homeland she had never seen. She was the last reminder of a time of prosperity, when pretty girls could be had from Italian slave merchants for unearthly sums; there had been no money and no victories since. The Nasrid sultans, heirs to the empire of Al Andalus, to the foothold of Islam in Europe, seemed to have few talents beyond losing the territories won by their forefathers. They preferred beauty to war: they had built the Alhambra, every brightly tiled inch of which represented the lifework of some master craftsman. That was all Al Andalus was now: an empire indoors. A palace, and inside it a garden, and inside that, a beautiful girl.
“Men would risk their fortunes for an hour in bed with you,” said Hassan, letting her arms drop. “Other men.”
“You risk your fortune for my company,” said Fatima. “I love you better than I would love those other men.”
Hassan leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes with charcoal-blackened fingers.
“You’re a good friend to me, Fa. Friends are rare these days. But you’ve got to be more careful. Laughter carries in the Court of Myrtles, and a woman’s laughter most of all. It may carry all the way to the sultan’s quarters—and then what?”
Fatima shrugged. “The sultan knows what you are.”
“Still, I’m not allowed to speak to you alone. It doesn’t look proper. And there is a vizier coming in half an hour who wants a map of the Castilian military encampment at Rejana. So.” He pressed a kiss into the palm of her hand. “Go look at your view.”
Fatima touched the map beneath her shirt: it crackled under her fingers.
“What kind of view is it?” she asked. “Is it very pretty? Is it possible to see the sea from there?”
Hassan was bent over his work again.