Pistol in one hand, page in the other, Seymour stands on the stage and gazes at the painting on the drop curtain. The towers floating on clouds, trees winding up through the center—it seems like an image from a dream he had long ago. The hand-printed sign on the library door comes back to him:
The world: it’s all he ever loved. The forest behind Arcady Lane, the busy meanderings of ants, the zip and swerve of dragonflies, the rustling of the aspens, the tart sweetness of the first huckleberries of July, the sentinels of the ponderosas, older and more patient than any beings he would ever know, and Trustyfriend the owl on his branch overseeing it all.
Are bombs going off in other cities, other nations right now? Are Bishop’s warriors mobilizing? And is Seymour the only one who has failed?
He steps off the stage and is moving toward the corner, where three bookcases have been arranged to create an alcove, when the wounded man calls from the bottom of the stairs.
“Hey, kid! I have your backpack. If you don’t come downstairs right now, I am going to carry it outside and give it to the police.”
SIXTEEN
THE RIDDLE OF THE OWLS
* * *
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio ∏
Though there have been many guesses, the riddle of the owls guarding the gates has been lost to time. The solution here has been inserted by the translator and was not part of the original text. Translation by Zeno Ninis.
… I thought, “Simple but actually complicated. Or was it complicated but actually simple? ·[He that knows all that Learning ever writ. Could the answer be water? An egg? A horse?”]·
… Though the tortoise with his honeycakes had plodded out of sight, I could still smell them. I ·[paced?]· on my crow feet, my talons sinking into the soft pillow of the clouds. The rich scents of cinnamon and honey and roasting pork flowed over me from the far side of the gates, and I flapped through the caverns of my mind, traveling from one end to the other, but I found nothing there.
The other shepherds were right to call me a dimwit and an airhead, a muttonheaded lamebrain. I turned to the two enormous owls with their golden spears and said, “I know ·[nothing]·.”
The two owls ·[stood straight up and the first guardian said, “That is correct, little crow. The answer is nothing,” and the second guardian said, “？‘He that knows all that Learning ever writ, knows only this—that he knows nothing yet.’？”]·
… they stepped aside and ·[as though I’d said the magic words]· the golden gates swung wide…
FOUR MILES WEST OF CONSTANTINOPLE
MAY 1453
Anna
From the top of the occasional swell, she can glimpse the now-distant shape of the city to the northeast, glowing faintly. In all other directions lies nothing but heaving blackness. Wet, exhausted, and seasick, the sack clamped to her chest, Anna ships the oars and gives up bailing. The sea is too large and the boat is too small. Maria, you were always the better sister, the wiser sister, moving on to the next world just as this one broke in half. An angel in one child, Widow Theodora used to say, and a wolf in the other.
In something deeper than a dream she hurries again across the tiled floor of a vast atrium lined on both sides with tiers of books. She breaks into a run, but no matter how far she seems to travel, the hall does not end, and the light dims, and her fear and desolation deepen with every stride. Finally she approaches a light ahead where a lone girl huddles beside a candle with a single book on a table. The girl raises the book she’s holding, and Anna is trying to read the title when Himerius’s skiff grinds onto a rock and turns broadside to the waves.
She has just enough time to gather the sack against her dress before she is dumped overboard.
She thrashes, inhales seawater. A swell sucks her out, throws her forward, and her knee strikes a submerged stone: the water is only waist deep. She sputters to the surface and drives her body toward shore, the sack soaked through but still clutched to her chest.
Anna crawls onto a stony beach and huddles over her throbbing knee and opens the neck of the sack. The silk, the book, the bread: all drenched. Out among the dark seething waves Himerius’s skiff is nowhere.
The beach draws an arc in the predawn light: no cover here. She climbs through a storm-driven barrier of driftwood at the tideline into a land of devastation: burned houses, every tree in an olive grove hacked down, the earth rutted as though God has raked away soil with his hands.
At first light she ascends a gentle hillside terraced with grapevines. The rumble of the waves recedes. She takes off her dress and wrings it dry and puts it back on and chews a piece of sturgeon and runs a hand over her cropped hair as dawn traces a pink line over the horizon.