ELEVEN
IN THE BELLY OF THE WHALE
* * *
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio Λ
… I shadowed my scaly brothers through the endless deeps, fleeing the quick and terrible dolphins. Without warning, a leviathan came upon us, hugest of all living creatures, with a mouth as wide as the gates of Troy and teeth as tall as the pillars of Hercules, their points as sharp as the sword of Perseus.
His jaw gaped wide to swallow us, and I waited for death. I’d never make it to the city in the clouds. I’d never see the tortoise or taste a honeycake from the stack on his shell. I’d die in the cold sea, my fish bones lost in the belly of a beast. The whole school of us were swept into the cavern of its mouth, but the wickets of its enormous fangs proved too large to impale us, and we spilled past unharmed, down into its gullet.
Sloshing about inside the guts of the great monster, as though trapped inside a second sea, we zoomed over all of creation. Every time it opened its mouth, I rose to the surface and glimpsed something new: the crocodiles of Ethiopia, the palaces of Carthage, the snow thick upon the caves of the troglodytes along the girdle of the world.
Eventually I grew weary: I had traveled so far, yet was no closer to my destination than when I began. I was a fish inside a sea inside a bigger fish inside a bigger sea, and I wondered if the world itself swam also inside the belly of a much greater fish, all of us fish inside fish inside fish, and then, tired of so much wondering, I shut my scaly eyes and slept…
CONSTANTINOPLE
APRIL–MAY 1453
Omeir
For a mile in either direction, hammers ring, axes chop, camels bray, bark, and bleat. He passes camps of arrow makers, camps of harness makers, cobblers and blacksmiths; tailors are fabricating tents inside yet larger tents; boys scurry here and there with baskets of rice; fifty carpenters construct scaling ladders from debarked logs. Ditches have been cut to carry away human and animal waste; drinking water is stored in mountains of barrels; a great portable foundry has been constructed at the rear.
Men approach from every corner of the camp to ogle the cannon where it gleams, immense and bright, on its cart. The oxen, wary of the commotion, stick close together: Moonlight appears to sleep on his feet as he chews, unable to raise his head above his backline, and Tree finds a place beside him and lies on his side, twitching one ear. Omeir rubs a mixture of spit and crushed calendula leaves into his left hind leg, as Grandfather would have done, and worries.
At dusk the men who have brought the cannon from Edirne gather around steaming cauldrons. A captain climbs to a dais to announce that the sultan’s gratitude is immense. As soon as the city is won, he says, they will each be able to choose which house will be theirs, and which garden, and which women will be their wives.
All night Omeir’s sleep is broken by the noise of carpenters building a cradle to hold the cannon and a palisade to conceal it, and all the next day the teamsters and oxen work to hoist it into place. An occasional crossbow bolt comes whistling out from the crenelated parapet atop the city’s outer wall and sticks into a board or into the mud. Maher shakes a fist at the walls. “We have something a little bigger than that to throw back at you,” he calls, and everyone who hears him laughs.
That evening in the pasture where they feed the oxen Maher finds Omeir sitting atop a fallen block of limestone and squats beside him and picks at a scab on his knee. They gaze across the encampment to the moat and the chalk-white towers, striped red with brick. In the setting sun the jumble of rooftops on the far side of the walls seems to burn.
“Do you think by this time tomorrow, all of that will be ours?”
Omeir says nothing. He is ashamed to say that the size of the city terrifies him. How could men have built such a place?
Maher enthuses about the house he’ll choose for himself, how it will have two stories and channels of water running through a garden with pear trees and jasmine, and how he’ll have a dark-eyed wife, and five sons, and at least a dozen three-legged stools—Maher is always talking about three-legged stools. Omeir thinks of the stone cottage in the ravine, his mother making curds, Grandfather toasting pine nuts, and homesickness rolls through him.
Atop a low hill on their left, surrounded by shields, a series of ditches, and a curtain-wall of fabric, the sultan’s compound of tents ruffles in the breeze. There are tents for his bodyguards, tents for his council and treasury, for his holy relics and his falconry, his astrologers and scholars and food-tasters; kitchen tents, toilet tents, contemplation tents. Beside an observation tower ripples the sultan’s personal tent—red, gold, and as large as a grove of trees. Its interior is painted, Omeir has heard, the colors of paradise, and he aches to see it.