The Bird King

by G. Willow Wilson

That was all Al Andalus was now: an empire indoors.

“This is a reminder,” she said to Fatima, reaching out to stroke the papers she had just arranged. “This is what it looks like to live at the end of history. There was a time when the most flea-ridden dervish could recite the entirety of The Conference from memory. Now, like the birds, we’ve forgotten more than lesser peoples have ever remembered.”

She drew up one foot. It was milk-white on top and rosy underneath; the foot of a saint from a sacked altarpiece.

dear lord, what a line.

“Fear can make anything real,” said Vikram. “The black-cloaks are afraid you’re a sorcerer. If they condemn you as a sorcerer and burn you for it, then you are, for all practical purposes, a sorcerer, whether you began as one or not. Fear doesn’t need to make sense in order to have consequences.”

“A raw olive is a different animal from a cured one, apparently. God bless the man who first taught the world how to cure olives. He and the man who invented cheese are two unsung pillars of civilization.” “They were probably women,” muttered Fatima, fanning her face with the sleeve of her robe. “If they were men, we would remember their names.”

How quickly the earth and air reclaimed the dead, stripping fur from flesh and flesh from bone, leaving behind only an outline, a tailor’s pattern, pinned together with vertebrae. Fatima felt as though she was intruding on something sacred. It was as if a tailor was there in the room, unstitching the work of man, returning the house and the beasts to rubble and loam, and Fatima was not meant to see.

“This isn’t the end of the world, little Fatima,” he said in a voice that was almost kind. “It’s only the end of the world you know.”

Fatima woke again in the bluest part of the night. Habit roused her: in the Alhambra she nearly always awoke to the voice of the palace muezzin as he called for the daybreak prayer. His invitation, melodious though it might be, was heeded only by the most pious of the women, among whom Fatima did not number. Lady Aisha was different: her shrewdness was tempered in those lucid hours by a more spiritual impulse, which caused her to rise, cloak herself in a plain shawl, and go to the courtyard to kneel.

Yet it seemed the continual summonses of the muezzin had done their work: she was awake now, called by a voice she could no longer hear but still heeded.

“That is a vicious lie,” said Luz calmly. “There is an empire south of the Great Desert larger than any in Europe. The best doctors in the world are trained at its capital. All they lack is faith. If ignorant men like you would not stand in our way, sir, perhaps we could bring it to them.”

How had the brutality she had witnessed occurred on this very same road? Every time she blinked she saw the little spot of blood and heard the thunder of the birds, and wondered how it could all be cut from the same eternal cloth as the sun, the grass, the unseen ocean.

Fatima reached for his hand. He took it and flung himself into the mud beside her. She wanted to disappear, to fuse with the familiar scent of his clothes, his hair. She searched her mind for some means of escape they hadn’t yet considered and could think of nothing. Birds had wings, but they did not, and so they were left at the mercy of lesser kings.

The speck squirmed, swimming against the white of Luz’s eye, a feeble horror, a worm culled from some other earth.

They would live, they would smile again, but they would not laugh, and no amount of pleading by adults would make them into children.

Civilization was, Fatima realized, something very simple; it was the right of these small rituals to perpetuate themselves in peace.