Water flows beneath the door in sheets and streams trickle down the walls and Clover stands blinking up to her hocks in the rising water. At dawn he wades through dung and bark and debris and checks on the hens and leads Clover up to the highest terrace to nibble what grasses she can find and finally he looks up at the limestone bluff overlooking the ravine and panic lurches through him.
The old half-hollow yew has fallen in the night. He claws his way up the trail, sliding in mud. Moss-decked branches splay everywhere and the huge root network lies unearthed like a second tree ripped out of the earth. The smell is of sap and shattered wood and things long buried lifted into the light.
It takes him a long time to locate Anna’s bundle in the wreckage. The oxhide is soaked. Little jangles of alarm ride through him as he carries the sodden bundle down to the cottage. He shovels mud out of the hearth and manages to start a smoky fire and hangs his sleeping rugs in the byre to dry and finally unwraps the book.
It is wringing wet. Leaves separate from the binding as he teases them apart, and the dense strings of symbols upon them—all those little sooty bird-tracks crammed together—seem more faded than he remembers.
He can still hear Anna’s shriek when he first touched the sack. The way the book protected them as they left the city; the way it summoned a flock of stone-curlews to his snares; the way it brought their son back from fever. The quick humor in Anna’s eyes as she bent over the lines, translating as she went.
He banks up the fire and strings webs of cording around the cottage and hangs bifolios over the lines to dry as if he were smoking game birds, and all this time his heart races, as though the codex were a living thing left to his trust and he has endangered it—as though he were charged with a single, simple responsibility, to keep this one thing alive, and has bungled it.
* * *
When the leaves are dry, he reassembles the book, uncertain that he is putting the folios back in the correct order, and wraps it in a new square of waxed leather. He waits for the first migrating storks to come over the ravine, a lopsided chevron of them following their ancient directive, leaving whatever distant place in the south where they have spent the winter and heading to whatever distant place in the north where they will spend the summer. Then he takes his best blanket, two skins of water, several dozen pots of honey, the book, and Anna’s snuffbox, and pulls shut the door of the cottage. He calls to Clover and she comes trotting, ears up, and the dog rises from the splash of sunlight where it drowses beside the byre.
First to the house of his son, where he gives his daughter-in-law the three hens and half his silver and tries to give away the dog too, though the dog will have none of it. His granddaughter loops a wreath of spring roses around Clover’s neck, and he starts northwest around the mountain, Omeir on foot and Clover, half-blind, climbing steadily beside, the dog at their heels.
He avoids inns, markets, crowds. When he passes through hamlets he generally keeps the dog close and his face hidden beneath the drooping brim of his hat. He sleeps outdoors, and chews the blue starflowers Grandfather used to chew to soothe aches in his back, and takes heart from Clover and her levelheaded gait. The few people they pass are charmed, and ask him where he found such a bright and pretty little donkey, and he feels blessed.
Now and then he gathers enough courage to show travelers the little enameled painting on the lid of the snuffbox. A few speculate that it might depict a fortress in Kosovo and others a palazzo in the Republic of Florence. But one day, as he draws near the Sava River, two merchants on horseback with two servants each stop him. One asks his business in Anna’s language, and the other says, “He’s a wandering Mohammedan with one foot in the grave, he can’t understand a word you say,” and Omeir removes his hat and says, “Good afternoon, sirs, I understand you well enough.”
They laugh, and offer him water and dates, and when he passes over the snuffbox, one holds it to the sun, turning it this way and that, and says, “Ah, Urbino,” and hands it to his companion.
“Fair Urbino,” says the second, “in the mountains of the Marche.”
“It’s a long journey,” says the first, and gestures vaguely to the west. He looks at Omeir and Clover. “Particularly for one so gray in the beard. That donkey is no filly either.”
“Surely to live so long with a face like that must have taken some ingenuity,” says the second.
* * *
He wakes creaking and stiff, his feet swollen, and checks Clover’s hooves for cracks, and some days it’s noon before he can shake feeling into his fingers. As they turn south through the Veneto, the countryside grows hilly again, and the roads steepen, little castles sitting atop crags, peasants in fields, olive groves around tiny churches, sunflowers rolling down to tangled creeks. He runs out of silver, trades his last pot of honey. At night, dreams and memories mix: he sees a city, shimmering in the distance, and hears the voices of his sons when they were small.