In the katholikon at Saint Theophano nuns keep a nonstop vigil of prayer rising toward the throne of God. One points to where Chryse should set the body, and another covers Maria with a shroud, and Anna sits on the stones beside her sister while a priest is fetched.
Omeir
After the death of his oxen, time disintegrates. He is sent to work behind the latrines with conscripted Christian boys and Indian slaves, burning the feces of the army. They dump the slop into pits, then throw hot pitch on top, and he and a few of the older boys use poles to stir the vile, smoking mess, the poles burning down from the tips, so that they grow ever shorter. The smell saturates his clothes, his hair, his skin, and soon Omeir has more than his face to make men scowl.
Birds of prey wheel overhead; big, merciless flies besiege them; outside the tents, as May tips toward June, there is no shade. The great cannon they worked so hard to bring here finally cracks, and the defenders of the city give up trying to repair their battered stockades, and everyone can sense the fate of the conflict tilting on a fulcrum. Either the starving city will capitulate, or the Ottomans will retreat before disease and hopelessness sweep through their camps.
The boys in Omeir’s company say that the sultan, may God bless and keep his kingdom, believes the decisive moment has come. The walls have been weakened at multiple spots, the defenders are exhausted, and a final assault will tip the balance. The best fighters, they say, will be held at the back while the least-equipped and least-trained among them are sent first across the fosse to soften the city’s defenses. We’ll be caught, one boy whispers, between a hailstorm of stones from the ramparts above and the whips of the sultan’s Chavushes behind. But another boy says that God will see them through, and that if they die their rewards in the next life will extend beyond number.
Omeir shuts his eyes. How grand it all felt when the curious would stop and gape at the size of Tree and Moonlight; when men came by the thousands with the hope of setting a finger to the gleaming cannon. A way for a small thing to destroy a much larger thing. But what is it that they have destroyed?
Maher sits beside him and unsheathes his knife and picks at rust along its blade with a fingernail. “I hear that we will be sent tomorrow. At sundown.” Both of Maher’s oxen have long since died too, and deep hollows haunt his eyes. “It will be wonderful,” he says, though he sounds unconvinced. “We will strike terror into their hearts.”
Around them the sons of farmers sit holding shields, clubs, javelins, axes, horseman’s hammers—even stones. Omeir is so tired. It will be a relief to die. He thinks of the Christians sitting up on the walls, and the people praying inside the houses and churches of the city, and he wonders at the mystery of how one god can manage the thoughts and terrors of so many.
Anna
At night she rejoins the crews of women and girls in the terrace between the inner and outer walls, hauling stones to the parapets so that they can be dropped onto the heads of the Saracens when they come. Everyone is hungry and under-rested; no one sings hymns or murmurs encouragements anymore. Just before midnight, monks haul a hydraulic organ up to the top of the outer wall and play an awful, screeching caterwaul, like the moans of a great beast dying in the night.
How do men convince themselves that others must die so they might live? She thinks of Maria, who owned so little and who left so quietly, and of Licinius telling her about the Greeks camped outside the walls of Troy for ten years, and of the Trojan women trapped inside, weaving and worrying, wondering whether they would ever walk the fields or swim in the sea again, or whether the gates would fall, and they would have to watch their babies be tossed over the ramparts to die.
She works until dawn and when she returns, Chryse tells her to wait in the courtyard, then reappears from the scullery with a wooden chair in one hand and Widow Theodora’s bone-handled scissors in the other. Anna sits and Chryse pulls back her hair and opens the blades and for a moment Anna worries the old cook is about to cut her throat.
“Tonight or tomorrow,” Chryse says, “the city will fall.”
Anna hears the blades rasp, feels her hair falling onto her feet.
“You’re sure?”
“I have dreamed it, child. And when it does, the soldiers will take everything they can get their hands on. Food, silver, silk. But the most valuable thing will be girls.”
Anna has a vision of the young sultan somewhere among the tents of his men, seated on a carpet with a model of the city in his lap, probing it with one finger, searching each tower, each crenellation, each battered section of the walls for a way in.