But as days turn to weeks, his initial wonder melts away. He and the bullocks are assigned to a team of eight hauling wagons of granite balls, quarried on the north shore of the Black Sea, from a landing stage along the Horn to the impromptu foundry outside the walls where stonecutters chisel and polish the balls to match the calibers of the bombards. The trip is four miles, uphill most of the way, and the guns’ appetite for new projectiles is unappeasable. The ox trains work dusk to dawn, few of the animals have recovered from their long journey here, and all exhibit signs of distress.
Moonlight takes more of the load for his lame brother every day, and in the evenings, as soon as they are unyoked, Tree manages a few strides before he lies down. Omeir spends most of his nighttime hours bringing fodder and water to him. Chin on the ground, neck bent, ribs rising falling rising falling: never in life would a healthy bullock lie like that. Men eye him, sensing a meal.
* * *
Rain, then fog, then sun hot enough to raise billowing clouds of flies. The sultan’s infantry, working among whistling projectiles, fills sections of the moat along the Lycus River with felled trees, collapsed siege engines, tent-cloth, anything and everything they can find, and every few days, the commanders whip the men into a fever, then send another wave across.
They die by the hundreds. Many risk everything to retrieve their dead, and are killed while gathering the corpses, leaving yet more dead to gather. Most mornings, as Omeir yokes his oxen, smoke from funeral pyres lifts into the sky.
The road to the landing stages along the Horn bisects a Christian graveyard which has been transformed into an open-air field hospital. Men lie injured and dying between the old headstones: Macedonians, Albanians, Wallachians, Serbians, some in so much agony that they seem reduced to something less than human, as though pain were a leveling wave, a mortar troweled over everything that person once was. Healers move among the wounded carrying sheaves of smoldering willow and medics lead donkeys carrying earthen jars and from the jars they produce great handfuls of maggots to clean wounds, and the men squirm or scream or faint and Omeir imagines the dead buried just feet below the dying, their flesh rotted green, their skeleton teeth champing, and he is wretched.
Donkey carts hurry past the oxen teams in both directions, the faces of the carters crimped with impatience or fear or anger or all three. Hatred, Omeir sees, is contagious, spreading through the ranks like a disease. Already, three weeks into the siege, some of the men fight no longer for God or the sultan or plunder but out of a fearful rage. Kill them all. Get this over with. Sometimes the anger flares inside Omeir too, and he wants nothing more than for God to plunge a fiery fist through the sky and start crushing buildings one after the next until all the Greeks are dead and he can go home.
On the first of May the sky knots with cloud. The Golden Horn turns slow and black and pocked with the circles of a hundred million raindrops. The wagon team waits as stevedores roll the huge granite balls, veined white with quartz, down the ramp and stack them in the wagon.
Far off, a trebuchet slings rocks that fly in wild arcs over the city walls and disappear. They are a half mile back up the road toward the foundry, deep in the ruts, the oxen drooling and panting, their tongues hanging, when Tree staggers. He manages to get back up, but a few strides later he staggers again. The entire train stops and men rush to brake the wagon as the traffic hurries past.
Omeir ducks in among the animals. When he touches Tree’s hind leg, the bullock shudders. Mucus drains in twin streams from his nostrils and he licks the roof of his mouth with his enormous tongue over and over and his eyes vibrate gently back and forth in their sockets. Their surfaces look worn and foggy and carry the distant dreaminess of cataracts. As though the past five months have aged him ten years.
Goad in hand, in his ruined shoes, Omeir walks the line of heaving oxen and stands below the quartermaster who sits scowling in the wagon atop the load.
“The animals need rest.”
The quartermaster gapes down half-bemused and half-disgusted and reaches for his bullwhip. Omeir feels his heart swing out over a black void. A memory rises: once, years before, Grandfather took him high on the mountain to watch the woodcutters bring down a huge, ancient silver fir, as tall as twenty-five men, a kingdom unto itself. They sang a low, determined song, driving their wedges into its trunk in rhythm as though hammering needles into the ankle of a giant, and Grandfather explained the names of the tools they used, caulks and punks and blocks and spars, but what Omeir remembers now, as the quartermaster rears back with his whip, is that when the tree tipped, its trunk exploding, the men shouting hallo, the air suddenly charged with the ripe, sharp aroma of cracking wood, what he felt was not joy but sorrow. All the timbermen seemed to exult in their collective power, watching branches that for generations knew only starlight and snow and ravens smash down through the undergrowth. But Omeir felt something close to despair, and sensed that, even at his age, his feelings would not be welcome, that he should hide them even from his own grandfather. Why mourn, Grandfather would say, what men can do? There’s something wrong with a child who sympathizes more with other beings than he does with men.