The Bird King

by G. Willow Wilson

The people who want to burn you alive will find a reason to do it, whether you pretend to agree with them or not.”

She could not envision a God who demanded such particularity of belief, whose mercy and forgiveness were confined to such a precise segment of humankind.

They hate me because I do in the daylight what their own kings are ashamed to do in the dark.

“You’re always so angry,” he said. “I don’t understand. You have pretty clothes, entertainments, food when others go hungry. You have the love of a sultan. What else could you possibly want?” Fatima licked the dry, taut line of her lips. “To be sultan,” she said.

It seemed strange that she should mourn a place in which friendships had been so few and so tenuous, yet she did mourn. The palace was her home and home was not a matter of loving or hating; to leave it was to do violence to the past.

The real struggle on this earth is not between those who want peace and those who want war. It’s between those who want peace and those who want justice. If justice is what you want, then you may often be right, but you will rarely be happy.”

“Once a story leaves the hands of its author, it belongs to the reader. And the reader may see any number of things, conflicting things, contradictory things. The author goes silent. If what he intended mattered so very much, there would be no need for inquisitions and schisms and wars. But he is silent, silent. The author of the poem is silent, the author of the world is silent. We are left with no intentions but our own.”

Little men had waged this war. Together they could muster enough steel and gunpowder to be formidable, but singly they were soft, wretched things, squinting in the sun.

“Sometimes I look at you and I think, ‘There goes my heart, walking outside my body,’” he said. “And yet—oh, Fa. How can this end any way but in a mess? Where are the princes with their legendary swords and white steeds, who love where they ought and fight what they ought? Why is it only us, all muddled up?”

Some ideas are so beautiful that even evil people believe in them. I thought the abbey would be full of saintly folk, but it wasn’t. Isn’t. It used to depress me. But I’ve come to realize that I must share God with the things that God has set askew.”

And she had escaped: she was free, and though freedom was neither happiness nor safety, though it was in fact a crueler and lonelier thing than she could have imagined, it was real, just as the ship was real, and like the ship, it was hers.

It was less frightening, Fatima supposed, to be confronted by something that was honest about its capacity for violence than to dread the smiles and false assurances of something that believed in its own goodness even as it murdered and mutilated.

They suffused the extraordinary landscape with what was small and tender and banal: the anxious muttering of hens settling down to roost, the sound of washing water poured into basins, the gentle unmelodic snores of those who slept. Civilization was, Fatima realized, something very simple; it was the right of these small rituals to perpetuate themselves in peace.

Love was awful; this she had always known, but it was other things as well. It was real enough to thwart empires, to summon land out of the barren sea, even when the sentiment of it was entirely used up, even when the pleasure of it was gone, even when it was no longer a feeling at all, but a purpose.

“You are the Bird King,” she said to it. “I am the Bird King. Hassan is. Even Luz. We all are, none of us are. Nothing is so frightening or evil that it doesn’t come from the same thing that made the stars.”

One could love many people. The heart was not a divided thing.