Sin and Contrition -- Retribution owed,
And cancell'd -- Pilgrim, Pilgrimage, and Road,
Was but Myself toward Myself; and Your
Arrival but Myself at my own Door

--Farid ud-Din Attar (12th c.)

The King's Bird

Alif, dal, nun, she heard herself say; or perhaps it was the wind off the desert, eeling its way through the passage and into the shadowed alcove where she crouched.

Alif, dal, nun.

She was thirsty. Djaq had told her once that being sick stole the water from the body, but she thought she'd best save what was left in the skin bottle she'd taken when she ran. It was Djaq's voice she heard. She remembered now.

La Denah, Djaq had said, grinning, because Marian had made her tell the whole story. As it was she only ever got the scraps and ends of what Robin's gang really got up to while she was walking the stone floors of the castle, treacherous as sheet ice under her feet.

And then Djaq -- Saffiyah -- had turned the words somehow, so they poured into each other: Ulladina -- the first sound so dark it seemed to close her throat, and the final one so heavy on her tongue it added the last, cut-off a- in spite of itself.

Ull-ah-deen(a).

Djaq had swept the litter away from the forest floor and scratched curves into the dirt with her dagger, her wrist so supple Marian had felt an instant's resentment. But she wanted to hear the story. Alif, Djaq said. Dal. Nun.

Warrant, she said, her voice hard at first because, Marian thought, it was painful to remember her home, and Djaq treated pain sternly. But then the dagger scratched again, the same curving lines, and her voice softened. It means, she said, permission, authorization. Leave, license. Warrant. The king's bird is the king's warrant. My uncle knew the man who kept them.

Kept the king's birds, she'd said.

And Marian had made Djaq repeat it until her own echo of the sounds no longer made Djaq wrinkle her nose: Alif, dal, nun: Adin. Al-Adin.

The sudden small thunderclap of wings turned her head. Four white shapes flashed across the blue gap between mud walls, heading up and out -- west, thought Marian. North and west. Her skin prickled as it used to when she'd throw the doors at Knighton open in midwinter, laughing at the steel-edged cold and her father's bellowed protests.

Alif, dal, nun, she whispered, and adjusted the folds of the gauze drape she'd stolen to conceal her face, looking up out of the shadowy maze.

She had a dagger. She'd found it concealed in the bedclothes as she'd played charwoman, abandoned by the Sheriff to whatever his Syrian satrap cared to do with her, no hint of why. She knew who'd left it there.

She'd dreamed last night that he'd killed her, shoved his sword right through her belly. She'd had a really splendid death, with Robin and King Richard himself by her side. Her doomed killer had fled in agonized remorse, naturally. She'd allowed him a rescue, though she was sure the Sheriff would in fact have arranged otherwise.

She'd thought of him as she drove the dagger into the Syrian Houmam's liver, and then into his heart. Wondered if he'd ever sicked up his dinner after killing a man, the way she had. Blood and bile; she stank of it. At least there was no white silk to ruin. She looked up again.

Sunlight skimmed the tops of the low buildings like a stone over Locksley pond. Night would fall soon.

The birds had come from the rooftop yonder. Marian closed her eyes and saw again the curving strokes of Djaq's dagger, knew she could draw them again, granted but a sliver of kindness, or curiosity, in the man or woman whom she would beckon to watch her do it. To hear her say it.

Here, in Acre, in outremer: over-the-sea.

She would wear the pilgrim's scallop-shell when she returned home.

She shifted back on her haunches in the cool of the alcove and waited for dark, rather regretting the white silk. Al-Adin is the fairest, fastest, truest, Djaq had told her. Always finds the way home. The king's bird always comes back.

Saffiyah, she repeated silently; al-Adin. She wet her lips with a few drops from the water-skin and whispered: Alif, dal, nun.

[end

A/N: Gratitude to Fatema and Arwa for the Arabic consult. All errors and infelicities therein are mine alone. The epigraph is from The Conference of Birds by the 12th-century Persian Sufi Farid ud-Din Attar, translated by Edward Fitzgerald.