The front appear’d with radiant splendors gay, bright as the lamp of night, or orb of day.
The ark has hit the rocks, child.
You fill your head with useless things.
* * *
One night the scribes riffle through another sack of bloated, musty manuscripts and shake their heads. “What we seek,” says the smallest one, slurring his Greek, “is nothing like these.” Scattered among their parchment and penknives are plates of half-eaten turbot and dried grapes. “What our master seeks in particular are compendiums of marvels.”
“We believe that the ancients traveled to distant places—”
“—all four corners of the world—”
“—lands known to them but as yet unknown to us.”
Anna stands with her back to the fire and thinks of Licinius writing ?κεαν?? into the dust. Here the known. Here the unknown. Out of the corner of her eye she can see Himerius pilfering raisins. “Our master,” says the tall scribe, “believes that somewhere, perhaps in this old city, slumbering beneath a ruin, is an account that contains the entire world.”
The mid-sized one nods, eyes shining. “And the mysteries beyond.”
Himerius looks up, his mouth full. “And if we were to find it?”
“Our master would be very pleased.”
Anna blinks. A book containing the entire world and the mysteries beyond? Such a book would be enormous. She’d never be able to carry it.
SEVEN
THE MILLER AND THE CLIFF
* * *
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio H
… the bandits prodded me right to the cliff’s edge and talked about what a worthless donkey I was. One argued they should drive me off the precipice to be split open on the rocks so the buzzards could pick my flesh, and a second suggested they put a sword in my side and a third, the worst of them, said, “Why not do both?” Put a sword in my side, then drive me off! I urinated all over my hooves as I looked over the edge at the terrible drop.
What a muddle I’d made for myself! I didn’t belong here, high on a crag, among rocks and thorns; I belonged high in the blue, sailing through the clouds, heading to the city where there is no baking sun nor icy wind, where the zephyrs nourish every flower and the hills are always clad in green and no one wants for anything. What a fool I was. What was this hunger that drove me to seek more than what I already had?
Just then a potbellied miller and his potbellied son rounded the bend on their way north. The miller said, “What plans have you for this worn-out donkey?” The bandits replied, “He is feeble and gutless and never stops complaining, so we are going to pitch him off this cliff, but first we are debating whether to stick a sword in his ribs.” The miller said, “My feet are smarting, and my son can hardly breathe, so we’ll give you two coppers for him and let’s see if he has a few more miles left in him.”
The bandits were happy to be rid of me for two coppers, and I was elated not to be thrown off the cliff. The miller climbed on my back and his son too, and though my spine ached, my head filled with visions of a pretty little miller’s cottage and a pretty little miller’s wife and a garden chockablock with roses…
KOREA
1951
Zeno
Polish this, swab that, carry this, grin when they call you a pussy, sleep the sleep of the dead. For the first time in his memory Zeno is not the darkest-skinned person in the group. Halfway across the South Pacific someone nicknames him Z, and he likes being Z, the skinny Idaho kid slipping through the clanging darkness of the lower decks, male bodies everywhere he looks, young and crew-cut, torsos flowering up out of narrow belts, veins twining round forearms, men with trunks like inverted triangles, men with chins like cowcatchers at the fronts of trains. With each mile he puts between himself and Lakeport, his sense of possibility builds.
In Pyongyang, ice glazes the river. The quartermaster issues him a quilted field jacket, a knit cap, and a lightweight pair of cushion-sole cotton-blend socks; Zeno wears two pairs of Utah Woolen Mills socks instead. A motor transport officer assigns him and a freckled private from New Jersey named Blewitt to drive a Dodge M37 supply truck from the air base in the city to forward outposts. Most of the roads are unpaved, single-lane, and snow-packed, hardly roads at all, and in early March of 1951, eleven days after his arrival in Korea, Zeno and Blewitt are driving a load of rations and fresh produce around a hairpin turn, following a jeep up a steep grade, Blewitt behind the wheel, both of them singing
I’m forever blowing bubbles,