You, me, your mother, your father, everyone and everything.
She says, “But I don’t want to die.”
Mrs. Flowers smiles. “I know, dear. You won’t, not for a long time. You have an extraordinary journey to help complete. Come, it’s time to go; time moves strangely in here and Third Meal is beginning.” She takes Konstance’s hand and they rise together up from the tower, the city falling away, a strait becoming visible, then seas, continents, the Earth dwindling until it’s just a pinprick again, and they step back through the Atlas into the Library.
In the atrium the little dog wags its tail and paws at Konstance’s leg and Mrs. Flowers looks at her kindly as the huge frayed Atlas closes, rises, and floats back to its shelf. The sky above the vault is lavender now. Fewer books fly through the air. Most of the crew members are gone.
Her palms are damp and her feet hurt. When she thinks of the younger children darting down the corridors right now, on their way to Third Meal, a long ache runs through her like a blade. Mrs. Flowers gestures at the measureless shelves. “Each of these books, child, is a door, a gateway to another place and time. You have your whole life in front of you, and for all of it, you’ll have this. It will be enough, don’t you think?”
EIGHT
ROUND AND ROUND
* * *
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio Θ
… north, north, for weeks the miller and his son rode me north. Cramps gnawed my muscles and cracks splintered my hooves, and I longed to rest and eat some bread, maybe a slice of lamb or two, some nice fish soup and a cup of wine, but no sooner had we arrived at their craggy, frozen farm than the miller brought me to the millhouse and harnessed me to the wheel.
I plodded in endless circles turning the stone, grinding wheat and barley for every farmer, it seemed, in the whole wretched, frigid country, and if I slowed for even a step, the miller’s son was sure to take his stick from the corner and whack me on the hind legs. When at last they turned me out to pasture, ice rained from the sky and the wind blew with a frosty rage, and the horses were not pleased to share what little wisps of grass they had. Worse, they suspected me of seducing their wives, though I had no interest! There could be no roses here for months.
I watched birds flit overhead, on their way to greener places, and longing flared inside my ribs. Why were the gods so cruel? Had I not suffered enough for my curiosities? All I ever did in that brutish valley was grind the wheel, round and round, round and round, turn-sick and dizzy, until I felt I was drilling down to the underworld, and would soon stand to my belly in the boiling waters of Acheron, the river of pain, and look Hades in the face…
THE ROAD TO CONSTANTINOPLE
JANUARY–APRIL 1453
Omeir
It is 140 miles from the testing ground in Edirne to the Queen of Cities and they bring the cannon there at a pace slower than a man can crawl. The train of oxen pulling it runs to thirty pairs, each harnessed to a jointed pole in the middle, a train so long and with so many potential points of failure that it comes to a halt dozens of times a day. Behind and in front of them, other oxen pull culverins and catapults and arquebuses, perhaps thirty artillery pieces in all, while still others pull wagons of powder or stone balls, some so large Omeir could not wrap his arms around them.
On both sides of the road, around the teams, men and beasts hurry past like a river flows around a boulder: mules loaded with saddlebags, camels with dozens of earthen jugs hung over their backs, carts laden with provisions and planks and ropes and cloth. How diverse the world is! Omeir sees fortune-tellers, dervishes, astrologers, scholars, bakers, munitions men, blacksmiths, mystics in tattered robes, chroniclers and healers and standard-bearers carrying banners of every color. Some wear leather armor, some have feathers tied to their caps, some are barefoot, some wear boots of shiny Damascene leather to their knees. He sees a group of slaves with three horizontal scars on their foreheads （one, Maher explains, for each of their masters who has died）; he sees a man whose brow is so callused from prostrating himself in prayer that it seems he carries a great waxy fingernail on his head.
One afternoon: a mule driver wearing bearskin with a gap in his upper lip not at all unlike Omeir’s, moving past the teams, head down. As he passes, their eyes meet, and the mule driver looks away, and Omeir never sees him again.
He oscillates between amazement and dejection. Going to bed beside a fire and waking beside the embers, frost sparkling on his clothes, sitting beside the other teamsters as the fire is stirred back to life, everyone eating cracked barley and herbs and bits of horsemeat from the same copper pot, he feels a sense of acceptance he has never come close to feeling before, of everyone participating in a massive and justified endeavor, an undertaking so worthy that it makes room even for a boy with a face like his—everyone moving east toward the great city as though called by a magical piper in one of Grandfather’s stories. Each morning dawn arrives earlier, the hours of daylight expanding, flocks of migratory cranes, then ducks, then songbirds pouring overhead, as though the darkness is losing and victory is preordained.