After a time, the pale gray light I can detect through my left eye recedes into darkness, and the very air I breathe burns like swallowing live coals. Fat snowflakes filter through the canopy of trees. Wolves keen high in the woods above me, answered by their mates somewhere deeper in the vales below. A small creature cries out, an unearthly strangled noise, almost human. I pile leaves and pine needles in a nest and burrow beneath them like an animal, hoping they will hide my scent.
“I am come for her.” I speak aloud to God, as though He might be hovering in the frozen air, sitting impassive at the edge of the thicket. Here in the vast, rough expanse of mountain range that holds my beloved in its teeth, it is easy to imagine Him a different, more savage being than the God of my childhood.
The wolves’ voices melt together in one long howl. It sounds as though the earth itself is moaning, and I shiver again as the thought of Lamia passes before me. Lamia, roving the hills below, calling up all the wild and pale-toothed things of the earth against me. The wind her skirts, churning the dead leaves to fall anew.
“I am come for her,” I repeat, and it makes me feel more human to hear the words falling back to my ear, muted by the soft snow. I curl into the leaves and try to imagine they are Sofia’s body pressed close, the backs of her knees tucked against mine, her hair soft on my face, safe.
The squeak of boots on snow starts me awake. I freeze, rigid and alert beneath the layers of leaves and animal skins. I tighten my grip on the knife.
“Ishaq?” Adán calls quietly. “Where are you?”
I push myself up. “Here.”
“Ishaq.” Adán hurries to me and crouches at my side. “Are you well?”
“Cold,” I say. My teeth knock against each other.
“I’ll build a fire,” he says. He clears an empty space on the ground and digs a trench around it. I hear him snapping branches and the tap-click of his flints striking flame into the kindling.
Warm, red light flares in my good eye, and I think for a moment I can even make out the shadow of Adán’s body as he moves between me and the flames. Waves of heat push the cold from my face and hands. Adán sits beside me and wraps us together in the same bearskin so we can share warmth. We wait in silence for our bodies to stop shaking.
“I saw her,” he says.
My heart jolts. “Is she… ? Have they… ?”
“They’ve married her to Henri du Cerét, one of her uncle’s knights.”
I feel as though someone has sprinkled salt on my heart. The fire pops and sizzles as snowflakes turn to vapor in its flames.
“She served our meal, but she wouldn’t speak to any of us,” Adán says.
I swallow. “And Lamia?”
“She was there, at the seat nearest the fire,” Adán says. “She seemed… I don’t know, sick, diminished. Not at all as you described her. They had her wrapped in furs, and she was coughing so hard, she could barely hold the wine cup to her lips. They say some sickness has entered her lungs.”
The shock of his words saps all the feeling from my limbs. I had imagined Lamia ever as she was, clear-eyed and cruel in her command of man and earth. I know if I were righteous, I would ask God to show mercy, true mercy, even to this, my enemy. But in truth the only feeling I can muster is relief. So she is not afoot beneath the moon, in communion with the wolves and winds. She is flesh and blood after all, and I am glad of it.
Adán clears his throat. “There’s more.”
“What more?” I ask.
“They say Sofia has two children.”
“Children?” I hear myself say, although it sounds as if someone else is speaking those words from the far side of the thicket.
“Twins,” Adán says. “A boy and a girl, a little over a year old.”
The earth moves too fast, and my body is spinning opposite its turn. I see Sofia laid out on the bed, under some other man. I shove the knife Adán gave me down to its hilt in the mossy soil.
“Ishaq.” Adán repeats the words slowly. “Over a year old.”
I force myself calm enough to figure what he means. I count the months. Four for my journey from al Andalus to Roussillon. Close to a year on the streets of Córdoba. Six months lost to healing in the doctor’s home. A year and ten months in all since I last lay with Sofia. I grab Adán’s arm and stand. The bearskin falls to the dirt at our feet.
Adán tries to hide a laugh. “They say her children have dark hair, and they share their mother’s eyes, but not her complexion. There are whispers Henri du Cerét might have been cuckolded before he was even wed.”
“Take me to her,” I say. I can hear the twist of pleading in my voice. I feel for the furs Adán left me earlier in the day and begin hurriedly wrapping them around me. “I’ll go now. Show me the way.”
“Easy. Calm,” Adán says. “It isn’t that simple.”
I sit down again and let out a breath in frustration. “You’re right. I know.”
“We could steal her away,” Adán says. “You could send some sign with me, and with her help and my men, we could do it.”
I touch the braid of hair around my throat.
“But they would give chase, and if it’s known you’re the one who’s taken her, you risk bringing all the fury of the Christian armies down wherever you go. You could never return to al Andalus to retake the caliphate.”
I nod and swallow.
“So you decide. Will you take her from this place and go on being no one, or will you forget her and become Ishaq ibn Hisham of the Umayyad line again?” Adán says.
A log resettles itself in the fire. The flames flare, and then shrink.
Adán touches my arm. “You know if you ride south, I would go with you. I would raise an army for you.”
I rub my forehead. “Give me the night,” I say. “I need to think.”
“As you say.”
Adán piles more branches on the fire and rolls himself in the bearskin to sleep. I feel my way to the edge of the thicket and turn my face up to the sky. The snow has stopped falling, but the wind trails its cold fingers over my face.
God, are You there? I ask.
Until now, I never truly understood the story of the Hebrew king Suleiman asking God not for long life, or wealth, or the death of his enemies, but the boon of wisdom. Would that God would offer me such a bargain. Would that He would speak to me as He spoke to the prophets. Would that He would send me His messenger angel.
If You speak to my heart, I will listen. Will You speak to me? Are You there?
The wind makes a hollow sound in the treetops.
I kneel and touch my head to the wet leaves rotting on the ground, unsure if I am facing Mecca or if I am turned away.
I am lost, I pray. For the tug of vengeance and duty pulls me back to al Andalus, but my heart fills with panic and a terrible blackness when I think of coming so close to Sofia, only to slip away again, to leave her at the mercy of Lamia, to abandon my own children. Does God wish me to be a man or a king?
What is Your will? I ask. What I feel in my heart, is this Your will? Or are You testing me as You tested Ibrahim? Would You have me leave my people in anarchy? Would You have me leave my beloved and my children in the care of the men who tried to murder me? How can I know Your will if You will not speak to me?
The cold creeps into me, but still I kneel, my head to the earth, my hands tight around Sofia’s braid. Dim light seeps into the thicket. I raise my head. My limbs pop and my joints grind with stiffness as I right myself. I draw in the first cold breath of day. “You will not answer for me, will You?” I say aloud.