CONSTANTINOPLE
MAY 1453
Anna
It is the fifth week of the siege, or maybe the sixth, each day bleeding into the last. Anna sits with Maria’s head in her lap and her back against the wall and a fresh candle stuck to the floor among the melted stubs. Out in the lane something whumps and a horse whinnies and a man curses and the commotion is a long time fading.
“Anna?”
“I’m here.”
Maria’s world has gone entirely dark now. Her tongue does not cooperate when she tries to speak, and every few hours muscles in her back and neck seize. The eight embroideresses who still sleep inside the house of Kalaphates alternate between devotions and staring into space in nerve-shattered trances. Anna helps Chryse in the frost-stunted garden or scavenges what markets are still open for flour or fruit or beans. The rest of the time she sits with Maria.
She has grown quicker at deciphering the tidy, left-leaning script inside the old codex, and by now can lift lines off the page without trouble. Whenever she comes to a word she does not know, or lacunas where mold has obliterated the text, she invents replacements.
Aethon has managed to become a bird at last: not the resplendent owl he hoped, but a bedraggled crow. He flaps across a limitless sea, searching for the end of the earth, only to be swept up by a waterspout. So long as Anna keeps reading, Maria seems to be at peace, her face calm, as though she sits not in a damp cell in a besieged city listening to a silly tale, but in a garden in the hereafter listening to the hymns of the angels, and Anna remembers something Licinius said: that a story is a way of stretching time.
In the days, he said, when bards traveled from town to town carrying the old songs in their memories, performing them for anyone who would listen, they would delay the outcomes of their tales for as long as they could, improvising one last verse, one last obstacle for the heroes to overcome, because, Licinius said, if the singers could hold their listeners’ attention for one more hour, they might be granted one more cup of wine, one more piece of bread, one more night out of the rain. Anna imagines Antonius Diogenes, whoever he was, setting knife to quill, quill to ink, ink to scroll, placing one more barricade in front of Aethon, stretching time for another purpose: to detain his niece in the living world for a little longer.
“He suffers so much,” murmurs Maria. “But he keeps on.”
Maybe Kalaphates was right: maybe dark magic does live inside the old books. Maybe as long as she still has more lines to read to her sister, as long as Aethon persists on his harebrained journey, flapping his way toward his dream in the clouds, then the city gates will hold; maybe death will stay outside their door for one more day.
* * *
On a bright, redolent May morning, when it feels as though the unseasonable cold has finally loosened its grip, the Hodegetria, the city’s most venerated icon—a painting with the Virgin and Christ child on one side and the crucifixion on the other, purportedly made by the apostle Luke on a three-hundred-pound piece of slate and conveyed to the city from the Holy Lands by an empress a thousand years before Anna was born—is carried out of the church built to hold it.
If anything can save the city it is this: an object of immense power, the icon of icons, credited with safeguarding the city from numerous sieges in the past. Chryse picks up Maria and slings her over her back, and the embroideresses walk to the square to be a part of the procession, and when the icon comes out the church doors into the sunlight it blazes so brightly that it stamps Anna’s vision with swimming designs of gold.
The six priests carrying the painting set it onto the shoulders of a hulking monk in crimson velvet with a thick embroidered band across his chest. Wobbling under his load, the icon-bearer processes barefoot through the city from church to church, going wherever the Hodegetria leads him. Two deacons follow his every step, propping a golden canopy over the icon, dignitaries with staves behind them, novices and nuns and citizens and slaves and soldiers in the back, many carrying candles and performing an eerie and beautiful chant. Children run alongside holding garlands of roses or little pieces of cotton that they hope to touch to the Virgin’s likeness.
Anna and Chryse, with Maria draped over Chryse’s back, march in the wake of the procession as the Hodegetria winds toward the Third Hill. All morning the city glows. Wildflowers carpet the ruins; a breeze scatters little white flower petals across the cobblestones; chestnut trees wave the ivory candles of their blooms. But as the parade climbs toward the huge crumbling fountain of the nymphaeum, the day darkens. The air turns chill, black clouds appear as if from nowhere, doves stop warbling, dogs start barking, and Anna glances up.