But at other moments his enthusiasm plummets. Mud sticks in great clods to the hooves of Tree and Moonlight, and chains creak and ropes groan and whistles blow up and down the train, and the air seethes with the sounds of suffering animals. Many of the oxen are on fixed yokes, not sliding ones like the kind Grandfather builds, and few of them are used to such heavy loads on uneven ground, and cattle are injured by the hour.
For Omeir each day offers a new lesson in how careless men can be. Some don’t bother to shoe their bullocks with two-piece shoes; others don’t examine the yokes for cracks and the cracks abrade the backs of the steers; others don’t let the animals recover by unyoking them as soon as they are done pulling; still others don’t cap their horns to avoid them hooking one another. There is always blood, always groaning, always distress.
Teams of road-builders move ahead of the columns, shoring up crossings, laying boards over muddy ground, but eight days out from Edirne the train reaches an unbridged creek, the water high and turbid, the current in the deepest section rising in a great murky swill. Drivers in the front warn that slick cobbles lurk in the streambed, but the lead teamster says they must push on.
The train is about halfway across when the animal directly in front of Tree slips. The yoke attached to his mate holds him upright for a moment, then the leg of the bullock breaks so loudly that Omeir can feel the crack in his chest. The wounded bullock goes sideways with his partner roaring beside him, the whole train pulled to its left, and Omeir feels Tree and Moonlight brace to take the extra weight as the two cattle flail in the current. A driver hurries forward with a long spear and runs it through first one, then the other thrashing ox, and their blood flows into the water while smiths hack at the chains to break them free, and teamsters hurry up and down the line, ho’ing and settling their animals. Soon riders are hitching horses to each of the two dead bullocks to drag them out of the water so they can be butchered, and the blacksmiths set up a forge and bellows on the muddy bank to repair the chain, and Omeir leads Moonlight and Tree into the grass and wonders if they understand what they have seen.
As darkness falls he grooms first Tree and then Moonlight while they graze, and cleans their hooves, and tells himself he will not eat the slain animals out of respect, but later, after dark, when the smell fills the cold air and the bowls of meat are passed, he cannot help himself. He chews and feels the weight of the sky on him and with it a dark confusion.
* * *
With each passing sundown, more light drains out of his oxen. Once in a while Tree blinks his huge wet eyes at Omeir, as though in forgiveness, and in the mornings before he is yoked, Moonlight remains curious, watching butterflies or a rabbit or twitching his nostrils to parse different scents in the wind. But most of the time when they are unyoked they hang their heads and eat as though too weary to do anything more.
The boy stands beside them, ankle-deep in mud, hiding his face inside his hood, and watches the patient, mild way Moonlight’s eyelashes glide up and down. His coat, which could look almost silver when he was young, full of little rainbows iridescing in the sun, now looks mouse gray. A cloud of flies floats over a suppurating wound on his shoulder—the first flies, Omeir realizes, of spring.
CONSTANTINOPLE
THOSE SAME MONTHS
Anna
The lead cup rises out of the trickling darkness, the water is mixed with quicksilver, and Maria drinks it down. On the walk home, sheets of snow sweep across the walls, erasing the road. Maria holds her shoulders back. “I can walk on my own,” she says, “I feel excellent,” but drifts into the path of a carter and is nearly crushed.
After dark she shivers in their cell. “I hear them whipping themselves in the street.”
Anna listens. The whole city is still. The only sound is of snow blowing down onto the rooftops.
“Who, sister?”
“Their cries sound so beautiful.”
Then come tremors. Anna swaddles her in every piece of clothing they own: linen undershirt, wool overskirt, cloak, scarf, blanket. She brings in coals in metal handwarmers, and still Maria shakes. All her life, her sister has been there. But for how much longer?
* * *
Above the city the skies remake themselves by the hour: purple, silver, gold, black. Graupel falls, then sleet, then hail. Widow Theodora peers out the shutters and murmurs verses from Matthew: Then shall appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man, and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn. In the scullery Chryse says that if the last days are upon them, they might as well finish all the wine.
The talk in the streets oscillates between the strange weather and numbers. The sultan, some say, is marching an army of twenty thousand from Edirne at this very moment. Others say his soldiers number closer to one hundred thousand. How many defenders can the dying city muster? Eight thousand? Others predict the number will be closer to four thousand, only three hundred of whom can properly use a crossbow.