It’s as though the finger of God reaches down through the clouds and flicks the planet out of orbit. The thousand-pound stone ball moves too fast to see: there is only the roar of its passage lacerating the air as it screams over the field—but before the sound has even begun to register in Omeir’s consciousness, a tree at the opposite end of the field shatters.
A second tree a quarter mile farther also vaporizes, seemingly simultaneously, and for a heartbeat he wonders if the ball will travel forever, beyond the horizon, smashing through tree after tree, wall after wall, until it flies off the edge of the world.
In the distance, what must be a mile away, rocks and mud spray in all directions, as though an invisible plow rakes a great furrow in the earth, and the report of the detonation reverberates in the marrow of his bones. The cheer that comes up from the gathered crowd is less a cheer of triumph than of stupefaction.
Up on its brace, the mouth of the apparatus leaks smoke. Of the two gunners, one stands with both hands to his ears looking down at what little is left of the man in the red cap.
Wind carries the smoke out over the platform. “Fear of the thing,” Maher murmurs, more to himself than to Omeir, “will be more powerful than the thing itself.”
Anna
She and Maria queue outside the Church of Saint Mary of the Spring with a dozen other penitents. Beneath their wimples the faces of the nuns of the order resemble dried thistles, colorless and brittle: none look younger than a century. One collects Anna’s silver in a bowl and a second takes the bowl and tips it into a fold inside her tunic and a third waves them down a flight of stairs.
Here and there in candlelit reliquaries rest the finger-and toe-bones of saints. At the far end, deep beneath the church, they squeeze past a crude altar crusted a foot deep with candlewax and fumble their way into a grotto.
A well gurgles; the soles of Anna’s and Maria’s slippers slide on the wet stones. An abbess lowers a lead cup into a basin, draws it back up, pours in a significant measure of quicksilver, and gives it a swirl.
Anna holds the cup for her sister.
“How does it taste?”
“Cold.”
Prayers echo in the damp.
“Did you drink it all?”
“Yes, sister.”
Back aboveground, the world is all color and wind. Leaves blow everywhere, scraping through the churchyard, and the bands of limestone in the city walls catch the low-angled light and glow.
“Can you see the clouds?”
Maria turns her face to the sky. “I think so. I feel the world is brighter now.”
“Can you see the banners flapping above the gate?”
“Yes. I see them.”
Anna lofts prayers of thanks into the wind. Finally, she thinks, I have done something right.
* * *
For two days Maria is clear-minded and serene, threading her own needles, sewing dawn to dusk. But on the third day after drinking the holy mixture, her headache returns, invisible goblins chewing away once more at the peripheries of her vision. By afternoon her forehead shines with sweat and she cannot rise from her bench without help.
“I must have spilled some,” she whispers as Anna helps her down the stairs. “Or I did not drink enough?”
At the evening meal everyone is preoccupied. “I hear,” Eudokia says, “the sultan has brought in a thousand more masons to complete his fortress upstream of the city.”
“I hear,” Irene says, “that they have their heads cut off if they work too slowly.”
“We can relate,” Helena says, but no one laughs.
“Know what he’s calling the fort? In the infidel language?” Chryse glances over her shoulder. Her eyes glow, a mix of relish and fear. “The Throat Cutter.”
Widow Theodora says that this sort of talk will not improve anyone’s needlework, that the city walls are impregnable, that their gates have turned back barbarians on elephants, and Persians with stone-hurling machines from China, and the armies of Krum the Bulgar, who used human skulls as wine cups. Five hundred years ago, she says, a barbarian fleet so large that it stretched to the horizon blockaded the city for five years, and all the citizens ate shoe leather until the day the emperor took the robe of the Virgin from the holy chapel at Blachernae, paraded it around the walls, then dipped it in the sea, and the Mother of God called up a storm and smashed the fleet on the rocks, and every single one of the godless barbarians drowned, and still the walls stood.
Faith, says Widow Theodora, will be our breastplate and piety our sword, and the women fall quiet. The ones with families head home while the others drift back to their cells, and Anna stands at the well filling the water jugs. Kalaphates’s donkey nibbles at a thin pile of hay. Doves flutter beneath the eaves; the night turns cold. Maybe Maria is right; maybe she didn’t drink enough of the holy mixture. Anna thinks of the eager Italians with their silk doublets and velvet coats and ink-stained hands.