She hoped that over the course of the night she would be swept to a new land, Genoa or Venice or Scheria, the kingdom of brave Alcinous, where a goddess might conceal her in magical mist and escort her to a palace. But she has been carried only a few miles up the coast. The city is still visible in the distance, a saw’s blade of rooftops capped by the clustered domes of the Hagia Sophia. A few spires of smoke lift into the sky. Are armed men pouring through the neighborhoods, breaking into houses, herding everyone into the streets? Unbidden, an image rises of Widow Theodora and Agata and Thekla and Eudokia dead in the scullery, tea of nightshade in the center of the table, and she forces it away.
Birdsong rises from the vines. She glimpses a group of soldiers on horseback, maybe a half mile away, moving in the direction of the city, silhouetted against the sky, and she lies as flat as she can against the ground with the damp sack beside her as a fog of gnats clusters around her head.
When the men are out of sight, she creeps to the bottom of the vineyard and wades a stream and hurries up a second rise away from the sea. Atop the next hill, a stand of hazel trees huddle around a well as though frightened. A single cart track leads in and out. She crawls beneath the low-slung boughs and waits in the leaf litter as the silence of the morning beats down upon the fields.
In the quiet she can almost hear the bells of Saint Theophano, the clatter of the streets, broom and pan, needle and thread. The sound of Widow Theodora climbing the stairs to the workroom, opening the shutters, unlocking the thread cabinet. Blessed One, protect us from idleness. For we have committed sins without number.
She lays out the book and samite hood to dry in the early sun and devours the rest of the salt fish as cicadas sing in the branches above her. The leaves of the codex are saturated, but at least the ink has not bled. All through the brightest hours of the day she sits with her knees against her chest, sleeping and waking and sleeping again.
* * *
Thirst twists through her as shadows pool in the grove of trees. She has seen no one come to the well and she wonders if it has been poisoned against the invaders so she does not risk a drink. It’s dusk when she reassembles her sack and climbs back through the boughs and moves through the coastal scrub, keeping the sea to her left. A waning quarter-moon holds pace with her as she scrambles over one boundary wall, then another, and she wishes the night were darker.
Every few hundred yards her passage is stymied by water: inlets she must circumnavigate, a brook tumbling through brambles that she drinks from before crashing through. Twice she skirts villages that appear abandoned: no figures moving, no smoke rising. Maybe a few last families hide there, crouched in cellars, but no one calls to her.
Behind her lies slavery and terror and worse. Ahead lies what? Saracens, mountain ranges, ferries where extortionists demand payment for river crossings. The moon sinks away and the thick band of stars that Chryse calls the Way of the Birds stretches wide and gold overhead. Step step step: there comes a point where the pressure of relentless fear perforates rationality and the body moves independently of the mind. It’s like climbing the wall of the priory: foothold, handhold, up you go.
* * *
Before dawn she is pushing her way through a spindly forest, rounding the edge of what looks like a large body of water, when she sees firelight twinkling between trunks. She is about to skirt it when the air brings the odor of roasting meat.
The smell is a hook through the gut. A few paces closer: just to see.
A little fire in the woods, flames no higher than her shins. She picks her way through the trees, her slippers crunching leaves. At the fire’s edge she can make out what looks like a single headless bird spitted beside the flames.
She tries not to breathe. No figures move; no horses nicker. For a hundred heartbeats she watches the flames burn down. No movement, no shadows: no one tends the meal. Just the bird: a partridge, she thinks. Is it a hallucination?
She can hear the fat sizzling. If it cooks much longer without being turned, the side facing the embers will burn. Maybe somebody was scared off. Maybe whoever made the fire heard news about the capture of the city and took his horse and left his meal.
For a breath she becomes Aethon-the-crow, bone-weary and disheveled, peering through the golden gates, watching a tortoise trudge past with a tower of cakes balanced on his shell.
Though it will seem simple at first, it’s actually quite complicated.
No, no, it will seem complicated at first, but it’s actually quite simple.
Logic deserts her. If she could just lift the bird from the coals. Her mind is already concocting the experience of tasting it, its flesh beneath her teeth, its juices spurting into her mouth. She tucks her sack behind a trunk, dashes, and uproots the spit. She has the bird in her left hand, one fraction of her consciousness registering a halter, rope, and oxhide cape at the edge of the firelight, the rest of her wholly bent on eating, when she hears an inhalation behind her.