But the boy! He shares his food with her, murmurs to her in his strange language; he seems, as Chryse the cook might have said, as patient as Job and as gentle as a fawn. He teaches her how to check the barley for aphids, how to clean trout for smoking, how to fill the kettle at the creek without getting sediment in the water. Sometimes she finds him alone in the wooden byre, touching old bird snares and spring-nets, or standing on a terrace above the river, three big white stones at his feet, with a stricken look on his face.
* * *
If she is his possession, he does not treat her as such. He teaches her the words for milk, water, fire, and dog; in the dark he sleeps beside her but does not touch her. On her feet she wears an outsize pair of wooden clogs that belonged to the boy’s grandfather, and his mother helps her make a new dress from homespun wool, and the leaves turn yellow, and the moon waxes and wanes again.
One morning, frost sparkling in the trees, his sister and mother load the donkey with jars of honey, wrap themselves in cloaks, and head upriver. As soon as they round the bend, the boy calls Anna into the byre. He wraps pieces of honeycomb in a cheesecloth and sets it to boil. When the wax is rendered, he lifts out the cakes and mashes them into a paste. Then he unrolls a piece of oxhide across the crude table, and together they work the still-warm beeswax into the leather. When all the wax has been worked in, he rolls the hide and tucks it under his arm and beckons her up a faint trail at the head of the ravine to the old half-hollow yew on the bluff.
In daylight, the tree is magnificent: its trunk swirls with ten thousand intertwined gnarls; dozens of low branches, decked with bright red berries, eddy toward the ground like snakes. The boy clambers up through the limbs, squeezes himself into the hollow part of the trunk, and emerges holding Himerius’s sack.
Together they examine the silk hood and snuffbox and book to make sure they’re still dry. Then he unrolls the newly waxed oxhide across the ground, wraps the box and book with the silk inside the hide, and ties the whole thing shut. He stows it back inside the tree, and Anna understands that this will be their secret, that the manuscript, like the boy’s face, will be feared and mistrusted, and she remembers the flaring pits of Kalaphates’s eyes, his rage and exultation as he held Maria’s unconscious face to the hearth and burned Licinius’s quires to ash.
* * *
She learns the words for home, cold, pine, kettle, bowl, and hand. Mole, mouse, otter, horse, hare, hunger. By the time for spring planting, she is grasping nuance. To brag is to “pretend to be two and a half.” To get into trouble is to “wade into the onions.” The boy has multiple expressions for the various feelings one experiences in the rain: most convey wretchedness, but several do not. One is the same sound as joy.
In early spring she is hauling water up from the creek when she passes him and he pats the stone on which he sits. She sets down the pole and its two pots and sits beside him. “Sometimes,” he says, “when I feel like working, I just sit and wait for the feeling to pass,” and his eyes catch Anna’s and she realizes that she understands the joke, and they laugh.
* * *
The snow retreats, the elderflowers bloom, the ewes lamb, a pair of wood pigeons nests in the thatch of the roof, and Nida and her mother sell honey and melons and pine nuts in the village market, and by late summer they have enough silver to buy a second bullock to pair with the first. Soon Omeir is using an old dray to cart felled trees down from the high forests, and sell them to mills downriver, and in the fall Nida is wed to a woodcutter in a village twenty miles away. During Anna’s second winter in the ravine, the boy’s mother, in her loneliness, begins to talk to her, slowly at first, then in torrents, about the secrets of cultivating bees, about Omeir’s father and grandfather, and finally about her life in the little stony village nine miles downriver before Omeir was born.
As the days warm they sit beside the creek and watch Omeir work his spindly, uncooperative oxen, using the solicitous voice he reserves only for cattle, and his mother says that his gentleness is like a flame that he carries inside him, and in good weather Anna and Omeir walk together beneath trees, and he tells her stories of funny things that his grandfather used to say: that the breath of deer can kill snakes, or that the gall of an eagle, mixed with honey, can restore a person’s eyesight, and she comes to see that the little ravine beneath the broad-shouldered mountain is not as foreboding and steep and barbaric as it first seemed—that indeed in every season, at some unexpected moment, it will reveal a beauty that makes her eyes water and her heart thump in her chest, and she comes to believe that perhaps she has indeed journeyed to that better place she always imagined might lie beyond the city walls.