Eventually Himerius tries the door and finds it unlatched. Inside the workshop, all the tables stand empty. The hearth is cold. Himerius pushes open the shutters and the room fills with flat, glacial light. The looking glass is gone, as is the terra-cotta centaur, and the board of pinned butterflies, the rolls of parchment, the scrapers and awls and penknives. The servants dismissed, the geese gone or cooked. A few chopped quills are scattered across the tiles; spills of ink stain the floor; the room is a vault stripped bare.
Himerius drops the sack. For a moment in the dawn light he looks hunched and gray, the old man he won’t live long enough to become. Somewhere else in the quarter a man yells, “You know what I hate?” and a rooster crows and a woman starts to cry. The world in its final days. Anna remembers something Chryse once said: The houses of the rich burn quick as any other.
For all their talk of rescuing the voices of antiquity, of using the wisdom of the ancients to fertilize the seeds of a new future, were the scribes of Urbino any better than tomb robbers? They came and waited for what was left of the city to be split open so they could beetle in and scavenge whatever last treasures came spilling out. Then they ran for cover.
In the bottom of a bare cupboard something catches her eye: a little enameled snuffbox, one of the scribe’s collection of eight. On its cracked lid, a rosy sky braces over the facade of a palace, flanked by twin turrets and tiered with three levels of balconies.
Himerius is gazing out the window, lost in disappointment, and Anna tucks the box into her dress. Somewhere above the fog, the sun comes up pale and faraway. She turns her face toward it but cannot feel any warmth at all.
* * *
She carries the sack of wet books to the house of Kalaphates and hides it in the cell she shares with Maria and no one bothers to ask where she has been or what she has done. All day the embroideresses, bent like winter grass, work in silence, blowing on their hands or putting them inside mittens to warm them, the tall, half-finished figures of monastic saints taking shape on the silk in front of them.
“Faith,” says Widow Theodora as she walks between the tables, “offers passage through any affliction.” Maria hunches over the samite hood, drawing her needle back and forth, the tip of her tongue clamped in her teeth, conjuring a nightingale from thread and patience. In the afternoon a wind howls off the sea and glues snow to the seaward sides of the dome of the Hagia Sophia, and the embroideresses say that this is a sign, and by nightfall the trees freeze again, the branches jacketed in ice, and the embroideresses say that this, too, is a sign.
The evening meal is broth and black bread. Some women say that the Christian nations to the west could save them if they wish, that Venice or Pisa or Genoa could send a flotilla of weapons and cavalry to crush the sultan, but others say that all the Italian republics care about are shipping lanes and trade routes, that they already have contracts in place with the sultan, that it would be better to die on the tips of Saracen arrows than let the pope come here and take credit for victory.
Parousia, the Second Coming, the end of time. At the monastery of Saint George, Agata says, the elders keep a grid made of tiles, twelve along one side and twelve along the other, and each time an emperor dies, his name is etched in the appropriate place. “In the whole grid there is but one blank tile left,” she says, “and as soon as our emperor’s name is written, the grid will be full, and the ring of history will be complete.”
In the flames of the hearth Anna sees the shapes of soldiers hurrying past. She touches the snuffbox where it rests inside her dress, and helps Maria dip her spoon in her bowl, but Maria spills the broth before she can raise it to her mouth.
* * *
The following morning all twenty needleworkers are at their benches when the servant of Master Kalaphates scampers up the stairs—out of breath and red-faced with urgency—and rushes to the thread cabinet and shoves the gold and silver wire and the pearls and the spools of silk into a leather case, and scurries back downstairs without a word.
Widow Theodora follows him out. The needleworkers go to the windows to watch: down in the courtyard, the porter loads wrapped rolls of silk onto Kalaphates’s donkey, his boots sliding in the mud, while Widow Theodora says things to the servant that they cannot hear. Eventually he hurries off, and Widow Theodora comes back up the stairs with rain on her face and mud on her dress and says for everyone to keep sewing, and tells Anna to pick up the pins the servant spilled on the floor, but it’s plain to all of them that their master is deserting them.