Eight miles of sea walls, four miles of land walls, 192 total towers, and they’re going to defend them all with four thousand men?
Arms are requisitioned by the emperor’s guard for redistribution, but in the courtyard in front of the gates of Saint Theophano, Anna sees a soldier presiding over a sad pile of rusted blades. In one hour she hears that the young sultan is a wonder-worker who speaks seven languages and recites ancient poetry, that he is a diligent student of astronomy and geometry, a mild and merciful monarch, tolerant of all faiths. In the next hour he’s a bloodthirsty fiend who ordered his baby brother drowned in his bath, then beheaded the man he sent to drown him.
In the workshop, Widow Theodora forbids the needleworkers from speaking of the looming threat: the only talk should be of needles, stitchwork, and the glory of God. Wrap the wire in dyed thread, group the wrapped wires in threes, place a stitch, turn the frame. One morning with great ceremony Widow Theodora rewards Maria for her diligence with the job of embroidering twelve birds, one for each apostle, into a green samite hood that will be attached to a bishop’s cope. Maria, her fingers trembling, sets straight to work, murmuring a prayer as she locks the bright green silk in her hoop and twists floss through the eye of a needle. Anna watches and wonders: To what saints’ days will bishops wear brocaded copes if the time of man on earth is ending?
* * *
Snow falls, freezes, melts, and an icy fog shrouds the city. Anna hurries through the courtyard and down to the harbor and finds Himerius shivering beside his skiff. Ice glazes the wales and oar shafts and glistens on the creases of his sleeves and on the chains of the few merchant ships still at anchor in the harbor. He sets a brazier in the bottom of the boat, lights a piece of charcoal, and runs out the fishing lines, and Anna takes a melancholic pleasure in watching sparks lift into the fog and melt away behind them. Himerius produces a string of dried figs from inside his coat, and the brazier glows at their feet like a warm and happy secret, a pot of honey hidden for some special night. The oars drip, and they eat, and Himerius sings a fisherman’s song about a mermaid with breasts the size of lambs, and water laps against the hull, and his voice turns serious when he says that he has heard that Genoese captains will smuggle anybody who can pay enough across the sea to Genoa before the attack of the Saracens begins.
“You would flee?”
“They’ll put me to oars. All day, all night, working the shafts belowdecks, wet to your waist in your own piss? While twenty Saracen ships try to ram you or set you afire?”
“But the walls,” she says. “They have survived so many sieges before.”
Himerius resumes rowing, the oarlocks creaking, the breakwater gliding past. “My uncle says that last summer a Hungarian foundry man visited our emperor. This man was renowned for making war engines that can turn stone walls to dust. But the Hungarian required ten times more bronze than we have in the whole city. And our emperor, Uncle says, cannot afford to hire one hundred bowmen from Thrace. He can hardly afford to keep himself out of the rain.”
The sea laps against the breakwater. Himerius holds the oar blades in the air, his breath pluming.
“And?”
“The emperor couldn’t pay. So the Hungarian went to find someone who could.”
Anna looks at Himerius: his big eyeballs, his knobby knees, his duck-feet; he looks like an amalgam of seven different creatures. She hears the voice of the tall scribe: The sultan has new war engines that can bring down walls as though they were air.
“You mean the Hungarian does not care to what purposes his engines are put?”
“There are many people in this world,” Himerius says, “who do not care to what purposes their engines are put. So long as they are paid.”
They reach the wall; up she goes, a dancer; the world thins, and there is only the movement of her body, and the memory of finger-and footholds. Finally the crawl through the mouth of the lion, the relief of solidity beneath her feet.
In the ruined library she spends longer than usual pawing through the doorless cupboards from which she has already pillaged most everything of promise. She gathers some worm-eaten rolls of paper—bills of sale, she guesses—moving halfheartedly and without expectation through the gloom. In the back, behind several waterlogged stacks of parchment, she finds a small stained brown codex, bound in what feels like goat leather, lifts it out, and tucks it into the sack.
The fog thickens and the quality of the moonlight dims. Pigeons coo somewhere above the broken roof. She whispers a prayer to Saint Koralia, ties the sack, hauls it down the stairs, crawls through the scupper, down-climbs the wall, and drops into the boat without a word. Gaunt and shivering, Himerius rows them back to the harbor, and the charcoal in the brazier burns out, and the icy fog seems to cinch down around them like a trap. Beneath the archway into the Venetian quarter, there are no men-at-arms, and when they reach the house of the Italians, everything is dark. In the courtyard the fig tree stands glazed with ice, the geese nowhere to be seen. Boy and girl shiver against the wall and Anna wills the sun to rise.