Not a single bird crosses the sky. Thunder rolls over the houses. A gust snuffs half the candles in the parade, and the chanting falters. In the stillness that follows, Anna can hear a drummer, out in the camps of the Saracens, pounding his drum.
“Sister?” asks Maria, her cheek pressed to Chryse’s spine. “What is happening?”
“A storm.”
Forks of lightning lash the domes of the Hagia Sophia. Trees thrash, shutters bang, sheets of hail assault the rooftops, and the procession scatters. At its head, the wind rips the gold canopy sheltering the icon from its standards and carries it off between houses.
Chryse scrambles for cover, but Anna waits a moment longer, watching the monk at the front of the train try to keep carrying the Hodegetria up the hill. Wind drives him back, whipping debris past his feet. Still he pushes higher. He nearly crests the hill. Then he staggers, and slips, and the thirteen-hundred-year-old painting falls crucifixion-side-down onto the rain-soaked street.
* * *
Agata rocks at the table with her head in her hands; Widow Theodora mumbles into the cold hearth; Chryse curses over the wreckage of her vegetable garden. The hallowed Hodegetria has failed; the Mother of God has forsaken them; the beast of the apocalypse rises from the sea. The Antichrist scratches at the gate. Time is a circle, Licinius used to say, and every circle eventually must close.
As darkness falls, Anna crawls onto the horsehair pallet and sits with Maria’s head in her lap, the old manuscript open in front of them. The storm propels Aethon-the-crow past the moon and tumbles him into the blackness between the stars. There is not much left to go.
Omeir
That same afternoon the ox train is rumbling toward the Golden Horn to collect yet another load of stone cannonballs, a hundred yards from the landing stage, the air rinsed clean by the morning’s storm, the estuary blue-green and aglitter with sunlight, when Moonlight—not Tree—stops in his tracks, tucks his forelegs under his body, lowers himself to the ground, and dies.
He is dragged forward a body length and the train stops.
Tree stands in his harness, his three good legs splayed, the yoke cocked against the weight of his brother. Red spume leaks from Moonlight’s nostrils; a little white petal, carried on the breeze, sticks to his open eye. Omeir leans into the harness, tries to lend his little strength to the bullock’s great one, but the animal’s heart no longer beats.
The other teamsters, accustomed to seeing animals fail in the yoke, squat or sit on the edge of the road. The quartermaster shouts toward the quay and four porters start up from the docks.
Tree bends to make it easier for Omeir to remove the yoke. The porters and four teamsters, two on each leg, drag Moonlight to the edge of the road, and the oldest among them gives thanks to God, draws his knife, and opens the animal’s throat.
Halter and rope in one hand, Omeir leads Tree down a cattle trail into the rushes at the edge of the Bosporus. Through the dazzle of sunlight swim memories of Moonlight as a little calf. He liked to scratch his ribs against one particular pine tree beside the byre. He loved to wade into the creek up to his belly and call to his brother in delight. He wasn’t very good at hide-and-seek. He was frightened of bees.
Tree’s hide shivers up and down his back and a mantle of flies takes off and settles again. From here the city and its girdle of walls look small, a pale stone beneath the sky.
A few hundred paces away, two porters build a fire while the two others disassemble Moonlight, carving off his head, cutting away the tongue, spitting the heart, liver, and each of the kidneys. They wrap the thigh muscles in fat and secure them to pikes, and lean the pikes over the fire, and bargemen and stevedores and teamsters walk up the road in groups and squat on their heels as the meat cooks. At Omeir’s feet hundreds of little blue butterflies sip minerals from a patch of tidal mud.
Moonlight: his ropy tail, his shaggy cloven hooves. God knits him together in the womb of Beauty beside his brother and he lives for three winters and dies hundreds of miles from home and for what? Tree lies down in the reeds and fouls the air around him and Omeir wonders what the animal understands and what will happen to Moonlight’s two beautiful horns and every breath sends another crack through his heart.
* * *
That evening the guns fire seemingly nonstop, battering the towers and walls, and the men are ordered to light as many torches, candles, and cookfires as possible. Omeir helps two teamsters fell olive trees and drag them to a great bonfire. The sultan’s ulema move between the fires delivering encouragement. “The Christians,” they say, “are devious and arrogant. They worship bones and die for mummies. They cannot sleep unless it’s on feather beds and cannot go an hour without wine. They think the city is theirs, but it already belongs to us.”