“They’ll strip you to the skin and either keep you for themselves or bring you to a market and sell you. Our side or theirs, it is always the same in war. Do you know how I know this?”
The blades flash so near to her eyes that Anna is afraid to turn her head.
“Because that is what happened with me.”
* * *
Her hair newly shorn, Anna eats six green apricots and lies down with a stomachache and tumbles into sleep. In a nightmare she walks the floor of a vast atrium with a vaulted ceiling so high it seems to hold up the sky. On tiers of shelves running down either side are stacked hundreds upon hundreds of texts, like a library of the gods, but each time she opens a book, she finds it full of words in languages she does not know, incomprehensible word after incomprehensible word in book after book on shelf after shelf. She walks and walks, and it’s always the same, the library indecipherable and infinite, the sound of her footsteps tiny in all that immensity.
Dusk descends on the fifty-fifth evening of the siege. In the imperial palace of the Blachernae, tucked against the Golden Horn, the emperor gathers his captains around him in prayer. Up and down the outer walls, sentries count arrows, stoke fires beneath great pitchers of tar. Just beyond the fosse, inside the private tent of the sultan, a servant lights seven tapers, one for each of the heavens, and withdraws, and the young sovereign kneels to pray.
On the Fourth Hill of the city, above the once-great embroidery house of Kalaphates, a flock of gulls, soaring high over the roof, catches the last glow of the sun. Anna rises from her pallet, surprised to see that she has slept away the daylight.
In the scullery the embroideresses who are left, none younger than fifty, step away from the hearth so that Chryse can shove the pieces of a sewing table into the fire.
Widow Theodora comes inside with an armful of what looks to Anna like deadly nightshade. She strips away the leaves, drops the shiny black berries into a basin, and puts the roots into a mortar. As she crushes the roots, Widow Theodora tells them that their bodies are just dust, that all their lives their souls have yearned toward a more distant place. Now that they’re close, Widow Theodora says, their souls quiver with joy at the prospect of leaving the shells of their bodies behind to come home to God.
The last blue light of day is sucked away into night. In the firelight the faces of the women take on ancient suffering that is almost sublime: as though they suspected all along that things would end like this and are resigned to it. Chryse calls Anna into the storeroom and lights a candle. She hands her a few strips of salted sturgeon and a loaf of dark bread wrapped in cloth.
“If any child ever born,” Chryse whispers, “can outsmart them, outlast them, or outrun them, it is you. There is still life to be had. Go tonight, and I will send prayers at your heels.”
She can hear Widow Theodora, out in the scullery, say, “We leave our bodies behind in this world so that we may take flight into the next.”
Omeir
As darkness falls, boys all around him, still strangers to their own bodies, pray, worry, sharpen knives, sleep. Boys brought here by rage or curiosity or myth or faith or greed or force, some dreaming of glories in this life or in lives to come, some aching simply to wreak violence, to act against those who they believe have caused them pain. Men dream too: of earning honor in the eyes of God, of deserving the love of their fellow soldiers, of returning home to a familiar field. A bath, a lover, a drink from a jug of clean, cool water.
From where he sits outside the tents of the cannoneers Omeir can just see moonlight sifting across the cascading domes of the Hagia Sophia: as close as he’ll ever come. Watchfires burn in towers; a plume of white rises from the easternmost part of the city. Behind him the evening star brightens. In memories he hears Grandfather speak slowly about the merits of animals, about the weather, about the qualities of the grass, Grandfather’s patience like that of the trees. It has been a little more than half a year and yet the distance between those evenings and this one feels immense.
As he sits, his mother glides between the tents and places a hand on his cheek and leaves it there. What do I care, she whispers, for cities and princes and histories?
He is only a boy, Grandfather told the traveler and his servant.
You think that now but his true nature will show in time.
Maybe the servant was right; maybe Omeir does harbor a demon inside. Or a ghoul or a mage. Something formidable. He feels it stir and wake. It uncurls, rubs its eyes, gives a yawn.
Get up, it says. Go home.
He coils Moonlight’s rope and halter over one shoulder and rises. Steps over Maher where he sleeps on the bare ground. Picks his way through the company of frightened young men.