The lamp sputters out; the chimney moans; the children draw closer around her. Omeir rewraps the book, and Anna holds their youngest son against her breast, and dreams of bright clean light falling across the pale walls of the city, and when they wake, late into the morning, the boy’s fever is gone.
* * *
In years to come, if the children catch a rheum or simply get too insistent—always after dark, always when there is no one else for miles—Omeir will look at her and an understanding will pass between them. He’ll light the oil lamp, disappear outside, and return with the bundle. She’ll open the book and the boys will gather around her on the carpets.
“Tell again, Mama,” they say, “about the magician who lives inside the whale.”
“And about the nation of swans that lives among the stars.”
“And about the mile-high goddess and the book that contained all things.”
They act out parts; they beg to know what tortoises are, and honeycakes, and they seem to instinctively sense that the book wrapped in silk and again in waxed oxhide is an object of strange value, a secret that both enriches and endangers them. Each time she opens it, more text has been lost to illegibility, and she remembers the tall Italian standing in the candlelit workshop.
Time: the most violent war engine of all.
The oldest ox dies and Omeir brings home a new calf, and Anna’s sons grow taller than she is and go to work on the mountain, bringing logs from the high forests and carting them down the river road to sell at the mills outside Edirne. She loses track of the winters, loses memories. At unexpected moments, when she’s carrying water, or stitching a wound on Omeir’s leg, or picking lice from his hair, time folds over itself and she sees Himerius’s hands on the oars, or feels the vertiginous pull of gravity as she lowers herself down the wall of the priory. Toward the end of her life these memories intermingle with memories of the stories she has loved: homesick Ulysses abandoning his raft in the storm and swimming toward the island of the Phaeacians, Aethon-the-donkey wrapping his soft lips around a stinging nettle, all times and all stories being one and the same in the end.
* * *
She dies in May, on the finest day of the year, at the age of fifty-four, leaning against a stump beside the byre, with her three sons around her, the sky such a deep blue above the shoulder of the mountain that it hurts her teeth to look at it. Her husband buries her in the clearing above the river, between his grandfather and the sons they lost, with her sister’s silk hood across her breast and a white stone to mark her place.
THAT SAME RAVINE
1505
Omeir
He sleeps beneath the same smoke-stained roof beam that he slept beneath as a child. His left elbow occasionally locks up, his inner ear throbs before storms, and he has had to pull out two of his own molars. His primary companions are three laying hens, a large black dog who frightens people but at heart is harmless, and Clover, a twenty-year-old donkey with breath like a graveyard and chronic gas but a sweet temperament.
Two of his sons have moved into forests farther to the north and the third lives with a woman in the village nine miles away. When Omeir visits with Clover, the children still shy from his face, and some openly burst into tears, but his youngest granddaughter does not, and if he sits very still, she’ll climb into his lap and touch his upper lip with her fingers.
Memories fail him now. Banners and bombards, the screaming of wounded men, the reek of sulfur, the deaths of Moonlight and Tree—sometimes his recollections of the siege on the city seem no more than the residue of bad dreams, lifting into consciousness for a moment before dissipating. Forgetting, he is learning, is how the world heals itself.
He has heard that the new sultan （bless and keep him forever） takes his trees from forests even farther away, and that the Christians have sailed ships to new lands at the farthest edge of the ocean where there are entire cities made of gold, but he has little use for such stories anymore. Sometimes as he stares into his fire, the tale Anna used to tell comes back to him, of a man transformed into a donkey, then a fish, then a crow, journeying across earth, ocean, and stars to find a land without suffering, only to choose to return home in the end, and live a last few years among his animals.
* * *
One day in early spring, long after he has lost all track of his age, a series of storms sweeps over the mountain. The river turns brown, and mudslides block the road, and the rumble of falling rocks echoes through the gorges. The worst night finds Omeir huddled atop his table with the dog beside him listening to a sloshing fill the cottage: not the usual dripping and trickling, but a flood.