“There are others who can do all that,” said Gwennec. “Fa—”
Fatima took his free hand and kissed it.
“When you bury me, someone must read the Rite of Committal,” he said, panting between his words. “Someone on the island will know it, someone—one of the Italians—”
Fatima did not see fit to tell him that half of the men and women he had greeted in the morning were dead. She had not counted the human corpses but guessed there to be between ten and a dozen—a third of the island’s visible inhabitants—and perhaps half as many jinn. Farther away, the leviathan was lolling in the surf, sloughing spars of wood and spearheads from its hide. The day had turned bright and clear; the wind carried the scent of wildflowers and mingled it with the salt of the sea.
“Everything will be done exactly as you say,” she said to Gwennec. Her lips lingered on his coarse palm. “I swear on anything.” She felt a hand on her shoulder and looked up to see Deng standing over her. Without speaking, he squatted down and tossed a satchel into the sand beside him. Opening it, he produced a slim knife and cut a slit in the side of Gwennec’s habit, where the poppy bloomed.
“Well?” demanded Hassan, watching as Deng frowned and probed the wound gently. Gwennec whimpered.
“Well?” said Hassan again, louder this time. “You’re hurting him.”
Deng sighed and rocked back on his heels, his fingers glistening with blood.
“I can give him something to ease the pain,” he said. “He should be kept warm and given water until he stops asking for it. There’s no point in moving him now.”
Hassan stared at his lover. His own hands were painted an emphatic red, along with the skirt of his robe and the sand beneath him, but he seemed not to realize how much blood it all amounted to, or what it meant.
“Can’t you do anything at all?” he said. “What good is all your exquisite learning if the only thing you can say is keep him warm?”
“Curse you all, don’t fight on my account,” muttered Gwennec. “I’ll not be held responsible. Only don’t go anywhere, any of you, and keep petting my hair or whatever silly thing it was that you were doing, it feels nice—” He broke off and closed his eyes, as if the effort of keeping them open pained him. Fatima lay down on the sand and whispered in his ear, proclaiming things that startled her even as she said them: she loved him, she would miss him all her life, she couldn’t bear it, she loved him. And though saying so shocked her, she knew it to be true. One could love many people. The heart was not a divided thing. Though part of hers would walk abroad into the unseen with Gwennec, it would not die. She nestled her face against his white wool shoulder and wept, as much for the things she now knew as for the man lying still and quiet beside her.
She couldn’t tell how much time had passed when she heard unsteady footsteps coming toward her across the beach. Luz was still wearing Fatima’s nightdress and had wrapped herself in a blanket, her hair loose, her mouth a raw wound. For one delirious moment, Fatima imagined she was the angel of death and half rose to send her away; it was only when Gwennec moaned that she sat again.
“Shall I go?” asked Luz. Her voice was unearthly, so ragged that it registered as neither male nor female in Fatima’s ear. She looked shrunken and hollow. Yet Fatima could not pity her.
“Yes, go,” she said, lying down again beside Gwennec.
“No, stay,” whispered Gwennec. “Hear my confession.”
Luz hesitated.
“I’m no priest,” she said.
“Not asking you to absolve me. Only to listen.”
Luz looked at Fatima warily. Fatima realized she would have to give up her place in order for Luz to hear the monk’s fading voice and was seized by a sudden, visceral sense of betrayal. Yet she bit her tongue and stood, moving aside as Luz sank to her knees and bent her ear toward Gwennec’s lips. She would never know what Gwennec said, but she saw Luz smile suddenly and then press her hand to her mouth, her eyes full of tears.
The light had yellowed and dimmed as the sun grew heavy, softening the awful cast on Gwennec’s face until he looked like an effigy of himself; his eyelids translucent, his mouth set in a soft line that was not quite a smile. Fatima kissed his forehead and one sunburned ear and the unsettled frontier between his brow and hair. He did not stir.
“It’s over,” said Deng gently.
Hassan continued to stroke the monk’s hair as though he had not heard.
“There are graves to dig,” pressed Deng. “Our duties to our friends don’t end in death.”
Hassan began to weep like a child, his blood-caked hands still entangled in Gwennec’s bright hair. Fatima took an unsteady breath.
“Who is left to read his funeral prayers?” she asked.
“I will,” said Luz, “if you can bear to hear me speak.”
Thanking her was out of the question. Fatima stood without bothering to conceal the tears that marked her cheeks, and forced herself to look out across the beach. Mary was there, the clever armor she had made for herself overturned in the sand like an abandoned shell. The boys were with her, Asher and his three brothers, covering the bodies that lay upon the beach in linen, the auburn of their hair lost in the glow of the sun. And there was the beast coming out of the surf, its hide streaming, gilded by the afternoon and not quite tame: it walked past Mary and the boys without looking at them and stretched itself along the base of the cliff, basking in what heat the day had left.
Fatima pulled her hair back in a leather thong and prepared to be the king once more. Her breath would come only in gasps, long stuttering things that burned her throat, but she took them, one after another, agreeing with each one to live a while longer. She made her way across the beach toward the stairs, looking only once at the leviathan, which raised its head as she passed, and blinked its eyes, and smiled.
Chapter 26
They buried the dead in the center of the island the following morning, beside the palm-encircled spring, where the shadow of the mountain of Qaf would lie over them. It was the only place, Fatima reasoned, that would stand still long enough for a proper burial; the only place where they could return to mourn and to sweep the graves. She did not speak, though the others looked to her to say something final and profound: the sight of so many shrouded bodies stopped her. They buried the Spanish soldiers alongside their friends, for doing otherwise seemed ominous. Luz recited the funeral prayers in her broken voice, and Hassan said the janazah, and afterward they covered the bodies in sandy earth, smoothing the graves until the only evidence that remained of death was a few dark smudges on the ground. Asher and his brothers grew bored and collected palm fronds from the blue shadows beneath the trees, swatting halfheartedly at pale butterflies that sunned themselves at the edge of the spring.
“Will there be no peace for us?” Mary asked when it was all over. “Even here? We won’t survive another attack. It were only thanks to you and that beast that we survived this one. How shall we manage?”
Fatima looked around herself at the faces assembled under the palm trees and beside the spring, slack with the heat of midday and the effort of digging so many graves. A numbness had returned: the fear of living that had marked them all as they arrived half drowned on the shores of the island. Fatima sighed, shutting her eyes; the afternoon was cloudless and windless.
“Vikram said something before he left,” she said. “Something about leaving before the way was shut. I didn’t understand, but I think perhaps I should.”
Hassan, his face wary, came toward her, wiping his hands; he had made his ablutions in the spring, and his arms and face glistened. He was wearing a clean robe that was too wide at the shoulders: Fatima realized, with a pang, that it was one of Deng’s.