“Pull, boys, all your strength,” Omeir calls. The entire team drives their hooves deeper into the clay. The teamsters add a sixth chain, a sixth rope, a sixth team of ten. By now it is nearly dusk and the bullocks stand heaving in the shafts. With a sharp cry, the air fills with “Ho!” and “Hai!” and sixty oxen begin to pull.
The animals lean forward, are hauled back as one by the incredible weight, then lean forward again, earning one step, another, drivers yelling, switching their animals, the bullocks bellowing in fear and confusion.
The immense load is a whale swimming out of the earth. They haul it maybe fifty yards before the order is given to stop. Vapor gushes from the bullocks’ nostrils and Omeir checks Tree’s and Moonlight’s yoke and shoes, and already scrapers and polishers are scrambling over the apparatus where it smokes in the cold twilight, the bronze still warm.
Maher crosses his skinny arms. He says, to no one in particular, “They will need to invent an entirely different kind of cart.”
To pull the apparatus the mile from the foundry to the sultan’s testing ground takes three days. Three times the spokes on the wagon’s wheels splinter and the rims fall out of round; wheelwrights rush around it, working day and night; the load is so heavy that every hour it sits on the cart it drives the wheels another inch into the ground.
* * *
In a field within sight of the sultan’s new palace, a crane is used to hoist the huge hooped tube of the apparatus onto a wooden platform. An impromptu bazaar springs up: traders sell bulgur and butter, roasted thrushes and smoked ducks, sacks of dates and silver necklaces and wool bonnets. Fox fur is everywhere, as though every fox in the world has been slain and turned into a cape, and some men wear gowns of snow-white ermine, and others wear mantles of fine felt upon which raindrops bead up and skitter off, and Omeir cannot take his eyes off any of them.
At midday the crowd is parted to either side of the field. He and Maher climb a tree at the edge of the testing ground so they can see over the assembled heads. A parade of shorn sheep painted red and white and ornamented with rings are driven toward the platform, followed by a hundred riders riding bareback on black horses, followed by slaves reenacting salient episodes of the sultan’s life. Maher whispers that somewhere at the end of the procession must be the sovereign himself, may God bless and greet him, but Omeir can see only attendants and banners and musicians with cymbals and a drum so large that it takes a boy on either side to strike it.
The bite of Grandfather’s saw, the ever-present cud-chewing of the cattle, and the nickering of the goat and the panting of dogs and the burbling of the creek and the singing of starlings and the scurryings of mice—a month ago he would have said the ravine at home overflowed with sound. But all of that was silence compared to this: hammers, bells, shouts, trumpets, the groaning of ropes, the whinnying of horses—the noise is an assault.
In the afternoon buglers blow six bright notes and everyone looks to the great polished implement where it gleams on its platform. A man in a red cap crawls inside and disappears entirely and a second man crawls in behind with a sheet of sheepskin, and someone at the foot of the tree says that they must be packing powder into place, though what this means the boy cannot guess. The two men crawl out and next comes a huge piece of granite chiseled and polished into a sphere; a crew of nine rolls it to the front of the barrel and tips it inside.
The heavy, eerie rasp it makes as it rolls slowly down the inclined barrel carries all the way to Omeir over the gathered heads. An imam leads a prayer, and cymbals clash and trumpets blow, and along the top of the apparatus the first man, the one in the red cap, packs what looks like dried grass into a hole in the back, touches a lit taper to the grass, then leaps off the platform.
The onlookers go quiet. The sun swings imperceptibly lower, and a chill falls across the field. Once, Maher says, in his home village, a stranger appeared on a hilltop and claimed he would fly. All day a crowd gathered, he says, and every now and then the man would announce, “Soon I will fly,” and would point out various places in the distance he would fly to, and he walked around stretching and shaking his arms. When the crowd had grown large, so large that not everyone could see, and the sun was nearly down, the man, not knowing what to do, pulled down his pants and showed everybody his ass.
Omeir smiles. Up on the rostrum men are scrambling around the apparatus again, and a few snow crystals sift down from the sky, and the crowd shifts, restless now, and the cymbals start up a third time, and at the head of the field, where the sultan may or may not be watching, a breeze lifts the hundreds of horsetails strung from his banners. Omeir leans against the bole of the tree, trying to stay warm, and the two men clamber over the bronze cylinder, the one in the red cap peering into its mouth, and just then the huge cannon fires.