By the time they reached Con, the first of the Castilian ships had already been sighted from the city walls. The little frog-man, who liked to make himself important, had been standing watch ever since the king had left the keep, and bellowed an alarm from his half-inflated throat when a sail appeared on the horizon.
“A ship, a ship,” he croaked, leaping down from the wall to spread the news. “Where is the king? Make ready our armaments and our supplies, for who is to say whether this vessel carries friend or foe? Have we no archers, no infantry? Like Darius and Alexander, we shall put all our strongest men on our left flank, for if it comes to open battle, the lines will drift—”
Fatima was, at that moment, near the top of the chalk stairs to the keep, with Luz leaning heavily on her arm. She could have seen the sail herself if she had looked over her shoulder, but her focus was on the inquisitor, who stared vacantly at the steps before her as if she did not perceive them. It was all Fatima could do to keep her from swaying too far in one direction and falling to her death, for neither Gwennec nor Hassan offered help. Instead, they led the horse, coaxing it when it balked at the narrow stairs, for the only other route from the beach to the keep took the better part of two hours to traverse. She could feel them both staring at her as they climbed, their sandaled feet scuffing reproachfully on each step.
“I should let you fall,” she murmured to Luz. “I should let you be dashed to pieces against the sand. It would make those two happy. It would make me happy too, for that matter.”
Luz made a rough, strangled noise; it was the only sound she appeared capable of producing. As the eastern arch of the keep came into view, Fatima had a profound urge to do exactly as she threatened. The sun had burned through some of the mist and lit the remaining clouds to a troubled, golden hue; here and there rays of light struck the gray stone, making it seem as though the world had been reduced to two rich but indeterminate shades of metal. She could see her bath, the wooden tub Gwennec had made with his own hands, sitting at an angle in the archway, a wadded scrap of velvet hanging over one edge to pillow her head. She did not want to bring Luz into this place.
Deng stuck his head around the archway as Fatima mounted the last stair and released Luz to sit on the verge of the white cliff.
“Hello, is that a horse? Where have you been? Our friendly frog has raised the entire city, claiming there are ships on the—” He stopped when he saw Luz. His face settled into an expression Fatima had come to know well: a fixed, bright focus, through which one could sense him assessing the vast catalog of his knowledge. He swept his robe out of the way with a practiced hand and knelt at Luz’s side. Looking at him made Fatima momentarily queasy: it was lovely to watch him, to see the economy of movement in his physician’s hands, and she knew Hassan had marked this and that it had stirred in him a desire and a kinship she couldn’t match. Hassan himself was at Luz’s side a moment later. He brushed past Fatima to squat beside Deng, stroking the older man’s wrist with the back of his fingers in wordless greeting. Fatima watched this tableau, the two men bent solicitously over Luz’s slack body, and found herself blinking back tears.
“You were right, Gwennec,” she said. “I should have left her on the beach.”
Gwennec only grunted and led Stupid into the keep, where the gelding’s hooves rattled against the flagstones and made him skitter.
“I’m taking Stupid to the common to graze,” he said. “He can fight with the chickens for the best spot. If we’re under siege by the time I get back, it won’t be my fault.” He pulled up his cowl, obscuring his face, and strode across the short length of the keep to the western archway, Stupid trailing behind him.
Noise came from the city below. Fatima could hear the frog-man bellowing and human voices answering him and the rattle of the crude spears they used to hunt small game. Remembering Deng’s remark about the ships, she hurried back to the eastern archway of the keep in alarm. Luz was sitting up with Deng’s hands to steady her. The horizon was still and bright, a milky silver under the tentative sun, and there, due east, half hidden by the curvature of the earth, were the topsails of two massive ships.
“How many?” Fatima demanded, turning on Luz. “How many are there? Just those two? Or are there more following behind?”
Luz opened her mouth to speak, but only a rasp emerged. Grimacing, she reached out to write in the chalk, digging her nail into the yielding stone.
We were three set out from Andalusia, she wrote.
“Counting yours?” pressed Fatima. “The one that was destroyed in the great wave along with mine? How long were you adrift before you washed up on our beach?”
Luz looked up at her helplessly.
“I can barely feel her pulse,” said Deng, baffled. “You’re being awfully hard on her. We all got here the same way, we were all half dead when we arrived, and we’ve always fed and clothed—”
“This is the woman who wanted Hassan stretched on a rack,” snapped Fatima. “And those two ships on the horizon carry men who’d like to put him there still.” She gathered up her still-damp skirts and walked away before Deng could respond. She had no desire to witness his dilemma. Mary, trailed by the frog-man and the small coterie of variously shaped jinn who seemed to think she was delightful, was coming toward her through the western arch of the keep, red-faced, her hair plastered against her temples.
“My king,” she panted, “there’s been news.”
“I’ve heard,” said Fatima, pulling back her own hair and binding it with a leather thong. “If you expect me to say something inspiring about banding together against a much larger foe, I haven’t thought of anything memorable yet.”
“It isn’t that,” said Mary. “Only Rufus—he’s the Venetian man-at-arms who arrived last week—he was out hunting in that savanna that appeared outside the gate this morning, and took a few hares, and saw the tracks of the leviathan and decided to trail it to its den, or wherever it might lodge.” She paused for breath.
“That was foolish,” muttered Fatima, parting her hair to braid it. “He might have been killed.”
“He might’ve been, but instead he followed the tracks to a sort of hollow, he called it, full of bones. Bones, and this.” Here she held up a battered length of leather, cracked and soiled and very obviously a boot.
Fatima took it from her silently. The leather was water-stained and the crest of each fold was bleached from long exposure to sun and air. She studied it, bending it this way and that in her hands until the creases thinned and buckled, and instructed herself not to panic.
“What does it mean?” pressed Mary. One of the jinn, a tiny thing that, when visible, took a batlike form, had climbed up on her shoulder and sat gazing at Fatima with an identical expression of pleading and desperation. Fatima turned away and gritted her teeth. They all looked at her that way eventually, when they were frightened enough, and it never failed to make her angry.
“I asked for this,” she said aloud to herself. “When the sultan asked me what I wanted, I told him I wanted this. And now here I am.”
“When God really wants to test you, He gives you exactly what you desire,” muttered the returning Gwennec, slapping dirt off his hands. He smelled of horse. “At the end of the story of Job, he gets all his wealth back again, and God leaves. Remember that.”
“Are you going to help, or just dispense these little pearls of wisdom?” snapped Fatima.
“I haven’t decided yet.” Gwennec sniffed conspicuously and made off in the direction of the washhouse.
Fatima looked again at the weathered boot in her hand. She knew what it meant but didn’t dare say to Mary or the jinn, who were still looking at her with expectant upturned faces. Instead, she told them what she had discovered on the beach.
“Time isn’t passing properly here the way it is in the rest of the world,” she said. “Luz and the horse—they went into the water at the same time Gwennec and Hassan and I did. Weeks have gone by here, or months even, but only moments have passed in the world we left.”