The sun was low before work on the gate was finished. The empty houses that had not yet been pillaged for every nail and scrap of wood were picked over until nothing of use remained; the resulting barricade, a mess of stacked boards and crates packed with earth and stones to make them heavier, filled the empty gate nearly to its peaked arch. When everyone was covered in dirt and splinters and starting to snap at everyone else, Fatima dismissed them all to the washhouse, and though she was as sore and dirty as any of them, took herself back up the hill to the palace to see whether Luz was still alive.
She found the inquisitor laid out upon a pallet near the fire, asleep, dressed in a linen nightdress that looked very much like Fatima’s. Her own black gown was drying in a patch of fading sunlight. Fatima pursed her lips. Deng was squatting over his mortar and pestle on the far side of the fire pit, frowning in concentration.
“I’m making a poultice for her eye,” he said before Fatima had a chance to ask. “I’ve never seen a wound like that before. I’m not certain she’ll keep her sight.”
“She was possessed,” said Fatima, unblinking. “Are there herbs for that?”
Deng looked up at her. He seemed tired: the grooves around his mouth were finely drawn.
“I treat the patient,” he said. “I’m a doctor, not an exorcist.”
Fatima swallowed the retort that sprang immediately to her lips. Walking past Deng, she stood in the eastern arch of the keep and peered toward the horizon, squinting in the rosy dusk. The two ships were larger now, their fat prows fully visible: they might make landfall by morning.
“We’ll need an archer here,” she said to no one in particular. “In case they get ambitious about those stairs.”
“Where would you like me?” asked Deng.
“Exactly where you are,” said Fatima, turning toward him again. “You’ll have many more patients before this is over.”
“Exactly where I am?” Deng stood, wiping his hands on a clean scrap of linen. A green smell emanated from him when he moved: the tang of willow bark and sweet rushes and camphor.
“He speaks of nothing but you,” Deng said in a quieter voice. “No—that’s not quite true. He speaks of many things, but you are part of each of them. Of the palace and his apprenticeship there, and your sultan, and the stories you told each other as children. I don’t mean to step between you. Only—he would be happier, he would allow himself to feel more happiness, if the hold you have on one another were a little less.”
Fatima felt heat rise in her face until it seemed as though even her scalp was blushing.
“I wouldn’t have said anything,” Deng continued, “but we’re never alone, you and I, and we may all die in the morning.” He let the scrap of linen fall and smiled wanly. “War! War and more war, even here. Destroying a body is far easier than fixing one, yet there are two dozen of you to do the destroying, and only one of me to do the fixing.”
He was trying to end the conversation. Fatima, who had contributed little to it, turned away and hurried out of the keep through the western arch and down into the city to count spears and set a watch.
Chapter 24
No one slept. The inevitability of the ships, the ambiguity of time, the ripe humidity that had settled over the coast all conspired to keep man and beast and jinn awake: they huddled in twos and threes on the green or practiced with their spears by firelight to keep themselves occupied. Fatima sat on the cliff under the moonlight with a pile of stones beside her, teaching herself to use a leather sling; Rufus’s crossbow was too heavy for her and Rufus himself was needed at the gate. There were no other archers among them. It was calming to load stones into the leather pouch and think of nothing but swinging her arm and loosing the pouch at the correct moment to send her burden whistling into darkness. She aimed at a flowering vine that clung to a step halfway down the cliff, its white blossoms ghostly in the night air. For some time all her shots missed, but as the night drew on they began to land on the step, and then to hit the vine itself. It was only when a shadow slid across the cliff, darker than the nighttime, that she put her sling down and stood.
“Vikram,” she called. Her voice echoed off the limestone. The shadow stopped and turned.
“You’re leaving,” said Fatima accusingly. “You’re sneaking away.”
“I told you I would,” said Vikram, his voice small.
“But we’re going into battle.” Fatima sat down again, feeling undone. “We need everyone. Even the frog-man and the little jinn the size of a soup bowl are fighting. And you’re the—” Her breath caught in her throat.
The shadow sighed and ambled up the steps toward her, resolving, at the last moment, into something like the dog-man she had first met, something with a recognizable configuration of arms and legs, or legs and legs, though not in any order in which either a dog or a man might possess them. Fatima reached out to touch him and felt him lean into her hand.
“You’re not meant to rely on me,” said Vikram almost gently. “It’s not good for you. It isn’t good for me either. The rules by which the world was made don’t allow for it.”
“I don’t care,” said Fatima, “I want you here. I don’t care about whatever silly rules you think you have to follow. You’re terribly orthodox for a jinn. I am king, and I say you stay.”
A grin appeared in the darkness. Vikram leaned forward and pressed a kiss against her forehead: it left no mark but burned even after he pulled away.
“You won’t win by throwing rocks with that little sling,” he said, gliding down the stone steps. “But you already know that, just as you already know why the leviathan hoards bones and boots. You never needed me, little friend; I don’t make the wheels of fate, I just oil them a bit, and that only when it suits me.” He began to hum his odd melody, the outline of his limbs evaporating little by little until it was possible to see the horizon through his body. “Besides, I don’t fancy being trapped here when you close the way again.”
“What does that mean?” called Fatima. She stood. “Vikram! What does it mean? Can you see the future?”
“Not exactly,” came his voice, faintly. “Though I can see you well enough.”
Fatima called again and received no answer. Only the horizon remained. The Castilian ships were so close that the crosses made by their masts and booms punctured the harbor on either side. Fatima heard, or thought she heard, voices calling across the dim water. She gathered up her skirts, observing absently that brocade was a poor fabric for warfare, and rushed inside the keep, where Deng was changing the poultice on Luz’s eye.
“They’re here,” she said.
Deng folded a piece of linen with slow, precise movements, so that it was perfectly square, and placed it just below Luz’s brow bone. She looked up at him, her visible eye drunk with pain or fatigue but struggling to focus, as if Deng, frowning above her, was the whole of the universe.
“It’s all right,” Deng said to her. “We’re not going anywhere, you and I. Let them fight—we’ll be quite comfortable just as we are. Would you like more water?”
Luz shook her head almost imperceptibly. Fatima watched them together, tethered by the particular tenderness of patient and physician, and thought that there was goodness in the world of a sort she couldn’t fathom.
“He was the only person I ever chose,” she blurted, confessing. “Everyone else was forced on me, one way or another. I don’t want him to be unhappy. It’s just that he was my only friend.”
Deng looked up at her, his face impassive.
“He’s not your only friend anymore, Fatima,” he said, and turned back to his patient. There was noise from the western archway: shouts and one halfhearted attempt at a battle cry. Fatima palmed her sling. Mary came running into the main hall, barefoot but wearing a clever leather vest, a sort of hauberk, which she appeared to have made from pieces of a disused saddle; her familiar followed behind her, flapping its tiny wings in the encroaching dawn. Fatima wanted to laugh.