* * *
One evening at the end of the month, walking the eastern section of the city, scrounging for food, Anna is rounding the great weathered bulk of the Hagia Sophia when she stops. Between the houses, tucked against the harbor, the priory on the rock stands silhouetted against the sea and it is on fire. Flames flicker in crumbled windows, and a pillar of black smoke twists into the sky.
Bells ring—whether to urge people to fight the fire or for another purpose, she could not say. Perhaps they ring simply to exhort the people to carry on. An abbot, eyes closed, shuffles past carrying an icon, trailed by two monks, each with a smoking censer, and the smoke from the priory lingers in the dusk. She thinks of those dank, rotting halls, the moldering library beneath its broken arches. The codex back in her cell.
Day after day, the tall Italian said, year after year, time wipes the old books from the world.
A charwoman with scars on her face stops in front of her. “Get home, child. The bells are calling the monks to bury the dead, and this is no time to be out.”
When she returns home, she finds Maria sitting rigid in their cell in complete darkness.
“Is that smoke? I smell smoke.”
“It’s only a candle.”
“I feel faint.”
“It’s probably hunger, sister.”
Anna sits and wraps the blanket around them and lifts the samite hood from her sister’s lap, five of her twelve birds finished—the dove of the Holy Spirit, the peacock of the Resurrection, the crossbill who tried to pry the nails from Jesus’s crucified hands. She rolls Maria’s thimble and scissors inside it and retrieves the battered old codex from the corner and thumbs to the first leaf: TO MY DEAREST NIECE WITH HOPE THAT THIS BRINGS YOU HEALTH AND LIGHT.
“Maria,” she says, “listen,” and starts at the beginning.
Drunken, foolhardy Aethon mistakes a magical city in a play for a real place. He sets off for Thessaly, land of magic, and accidentally turns himself into a donkey. This time she is able to make quicker progress, and as she reads aloud, something curious happens: as long as she keeps a steady stream of words flowing past Maria’s ears, her sister doesn’t seem to suffer so much. Her muscles loosen; her head falls to Anna’s shoulder. Aethon-the-donkey is kidnapped by bandits, gets lashed to a wheel by the miller’s son, walks on his tired, cracking hooves to the place where nature comes to an end. Maria doesn’t moan in pain or whisper about invisible subterranean miners scratching beneath the floor. She sits beside her, blinking into the candlelight, amusement playing over her face.
“Do you think it’s really true, Anna? A fish so large it could swallow ships whole?”
A mouse scrabbles across the stone and rises onto its hind legs and stands twitching its nose at her with its head cocked as though awaiting her answer. Anna thinks of the last time she sat with Licinius. Μ?θο?, he wrote, mythos, a conversation, a tale, a legend from the darkness before the days of Christ.
“Some stories,” she says, “can be both false and true at the same time.”
Down the hall Widow Theodora touches the worn beads of her rosary in the moonlight. One cell away, Chryse the cook, half her teeth gone, drinks from a jug of wine and sets her cracked hands on her knees and dreams of a summer day outside the walls, walking beneath cherry trees, a sky full of crows. One mile east, in the belly of a carrack at anchor, the boy Himerius, drafted into the city’s stopgap naval defenses, sits with thirty other oarsmen, resting over the shaft of a great oar, his back throbbing, both palms bleeding, eight days left to live. In the underground cisterns beneath the church of the Hagia Sophia, three little boats float on the black mirror of the water, each packed with spring roses, while a priest intones a hymn into the echoing dark.
Omeir
The first time he comes north around the city walls and sees the estuary of the Golden Horn—a sheet of silver water a half mile wide, trundling slowly out to sea—it seems the most astonishing thing in the world. Gulls wheel overhead; wading birds as big as gods rise from reed brakes; two of the sultan’s barges glide past as if by magic. Grandfather said that the ocean was large enough to contain every dream everyone had ever dreamed, but until now he had no comprehension of what that meant.
Up and down the western banks of the estuary, Ottoman landing stages swarm with activity. As the ox train descends toward the wharfs, Omeir makes out cranes and winches, stevedores unloading barrels and munitions, draft horses waiting with their carts, and is certain he will never see anything so resplendent again.