The bundle is wrapped in dark silk, embroidered with blossoms and birds, and inside is a stack of animal skin stripped of hair, beaten flat, trimmed into rectangles, and bound along one edge. A book. Its leaves are damp and smell like fungus and their surfaces are covered with glyphs in neat lines and upon seeing them he is afraid.
He remembers a tale Grandfather once told about a book left behind by the old gods when they fled the earth. The book, Grandfather said, was locked inside a golden box, which was in turn locked inside a bronze box, then inside an iron box, inside a wooden chest, and the gods placed the chest at the bottom of a lake, and set water-dragons a hundred feet long swimming around it that not even the bravest men could kill. But if you ever could retrieve the book, Grandfather said, and read it, you would understand the languages of the birds in the sky and of the crawling things beneath the ground and if you were a spirit you would resume again the shape you had on earth.
Omeir rewraps the parcel with trembling hands and re-stores it inside the sack and studies the sleeping girl in the moon shadow. The bite mark on his hand throbs. Could she be a ghost made flesh again? Could the book she carries contain the magic of the old gods? But if her witchcraft were so powerful, why would she be alone, desperate enough to steal his partridge from his fire? Couldn’t she have simply turned him into a meal and eaten him? Turned all the sultan’s soldiers into beetles, for that matter, and stomped them dead?
Besides, he tries to reassure himself, Grandfather’s stories were just stories.
The night wanes and he longs to be home. In another hour the sun will rise over the mountain, and his mother will pick her way through the mossy boulders to fill the kettle at the creek. Grandfather will restart the fire, and the sun will send shadows quivering through the ravine, and Nida will sigh beneath her blanket, chasing one last dream. Omeir imagines climbing into the warmth beside his sister and twining his limbs with hers as they did when they were little, and when he wakes it is late morning and the girl has untied herself and she is holding her sack and standing over him, studying the gap in his upper lip.
* * *
After that he does not bother to bind her wrists. They move northwest along undulating plains, hurrying across open fields from copse to copse, the road to Edirne occasionally coming into view far to the northeast. The wound on the girl’s head no longer weeps and she seems to never tire, while Omeir has to rest every hour or so, fatigue sunk into his marrow, and sometimes as he walks he hears the creak of the wagons and the bellowing of animals, and senses Moonlight and Tree beside him, huge and docile beneath the beam of their yoke.
By their fourth morning together, they grow dangerously hungry. Even the girl stumbles every few steps and he knows they cannot go much farther without food. At midday he spies dust rising behind them and they crouch off the road in a little brake of thorns and wait.
First come two banner men, blades knocking against their saddles, the very image of conquerors returning. Then drivers with pack camels loaded with plunder: rolled carpets, bulging sacks, a torn Greek ensign. Behind the camels in loose double-file through the dust march twenty bound women and girls. One howls with grief while the others shuffle in silence, their hair uncovered, and their faces betray a wretchedness that makes Omeir look away.
Behind the women a rawboned ox pulls a wagon crowded with marble statuary: the torsos of angels; a robed and curly headed philosopher with his nose flaked off; a single enormous foot, bone white in the June light. Finally in the rear rides an archer with a shield slung across his back and a bow across his saddle, murmuring a song to himself or to his horse, looking off into the fields as they pass. Across the rump of his horse a little slain goat is tied, and seeing it, hunger vaults inside Omeir. He rises and is about to step out of the brake to call to them when he feels the girl’s hand on his arm.
She sits holding her sack, arms scratched, head shorn, desperation written into every line of her face. Little brown birds rustle in the thorns above his head. She taps her chest with two fingers and stares at him, and his heart pounds, and he sits, and in another minute the wagons are past.
* * *
That afternoon rain falls. The girl clasps her bundle as she walks, trying everything she can to keep it dry. They make their way through a muddy field and find an abandoned house blackened by fire and sit starving beneath the thatch, and an oceanic fatigue enters him. He shuts his eyes and hears Grandfather pluck and dress two pheasants, stuff them with leeks and coriander, and set them to roast over a fire. He smells the cooking meat, hears the rain hiss and spit in the coals, but when he opens his eyes there is no fire and no pheasants, only the girl shivering at his side in the growing darkness, bent over her sack, and rain slashing onto the fields.