She sits as close to the fire as she dares and this time braces the infant’s chin and jaw with her right hand, and with her left expresses jets of milk down the back of his throat. Milk leaks from the baby’s nose and from the gap in his palate, but he swallows. The girls slip through the doorway, boiling with the mystery of it, and the flames rise, and Grandfather shivers. “I got back on the horse. He was so quiet. He just looked up into the trees. A little shape in the snow.”
The child gasps, swallows again. The dogs whine outside the door. Grandfather looks at his shaking hands. How long before the rest of the village learns of this?
“I could not leave him.”
* * *
Before midnight they are driven out with hayforks and torches. The child caused the death of his father, bewitched his grandfather into carrying him back from the trees. He harbors a demon inside, and the flaw in his face is proof.
They leave behind the byre and hayfield and root cellar and seven wicker beehives and the cottage that Grandfather’s father built six decades before. Dawn finds them cold and frightened several miles upriver. Grandfather tramps beside the oxen through the slush, and the oxen pull the dray, atop which the girls clutch hens and earthenware. Beauty the cow trails behind, balking at every shadow, and in the rear the boy’s mother rides the mare, the baby blinking up from his bundle, watching the sky.
By nightfall they are in a trackless ravine nine miles from the village. A creek winds between ice-capped boulders, and wayward clouds, as big as gods, drag through the crowns of the trees, whistling strangely, and spook the cattle. They camp beneath a limestone overhang inside which hominids painted cave bears and aurochs and flightless birds eons ago. The girls crowd their mother and Grandfather builds a fire and the goat whimpers and the dogs tremble and the baby’s eyes catch the firelight.
“Omeir,” says his mother. “We will call him Omeir. One who lives long.”
Anna
She is eight and returning from the vintner’s with three jugs of Kalaphates’s dark, head-splitting wine, when she pauses to rest outside a rooming house. From a shuttered window she hears, in accented Greek:
Meanwhile Ulysses at the palace waits,
There stops, and anxious with his soul debates,
Fix’d in amaze before the royal gates.
The front appear’d with radiant splendors gay,
Bright as the lamp of night, or orb of day,
The walls were massy brass: the cornice high
Blue metals crown’d in colors of the sky,
Rich plates of gold the folding doors incase;
The pillars silver, on a brazen base;
Silver the lintels deep-projecting o’er,
And gold the ringlets that command the door.
Two rows of stately dogs, on either hand,
In sculptured gold and labor’d silver stand
These Vulcan form’d with art divine, to wait
Immortal guardians at Alcinous’s gate…
Anna forgets the handcart, the wine, the hour—everything. The accent is strange but the voice is deep and liquid, and the meter catches hold of her like a rider galloping past. Now come the voices of boys, repeating the verses, and the first voice resumes:
Close to the gates a spacious garden lies, From storms defended and inclement skies.
Four acres was the allotted space of ground,
Fenced with a green enclosure all around.
Tall thriving trees confess’d the fruitful mold:
The reddening apple ripens here to gold.
Here the blue fig with luscious juice o’erflows,
With deeper red the full pomegranate glows;
The branch here bends beneath the weighty pear,
And verdant olives flourish round the year,
The balmy spirit of the western gale
Eternal breathes on fruits, unthought to fail:
Each dropping pear a following pear supplies,
On apples apples, figs on figs arise…
What palace is this, where the doors gleam with gold and the pillars are silver and the trees never stop fruiting? As though hypnotized, she advances to the rooming house wall and scales the gate and peers through the shutter. Inside, four boys in doublets sit around an old man with a goiter ballooning from his throat. The boys repeat the verses in a bloodless monotone, and the man manipulates what looks like leaves of parchment in his lap, and Anna leans as close as she dares.
She has seen books only twice before: a leather-bound Bible, winking with gems, conducted up the central aisle by elders at Saint Theophano; and a medical catalogue in the market that the herb seller snapped shut when Anna tried to peer inside. This one looks older and grimier: letters are packed onto its parchment like the tracks of a hundred shorebirds.