The noise of the hull scraping over stones on the way to the waterline is perilously loud. In the shallows float shapes the size of corpses: don’t look. She sets the skiff afloat, climbs in, and kneels with the sack on the thwart in front of her, and pulls the starboard oar, then the port one, making little diagonal stitches toward the breakwater. The night stays blessedly dark.
Three gulls bobbing in the black water watch her glide past. Three a lucky number, Chryse always said: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Birth, life, death. Past, present, future.
She cannot seem to keep the skiff going in a straight line, and the knocking of the oars against the oarlocks is far too loud; she never appreciated Himerius’s skill until now. But with each heartbeat the shore appears to retreat, and she keeps rowing with the sea at her back and the city walls before her, the rower facing what she has already passed.
As she nears the breakwater, she pauses to bail the skiff with the earthenware jug, as Himerius used to do. Somewhere inside the city walls, a glow rises: a sunrise in the wrong place and time. Strange how suffering can look beautiful if you get far enough away.
She clings to the words of Himerius: When the tide is wrong, a current comes here that would sweep us straight out to sea. Now she needs the wrong tide to be right.
Just off the bow, in the swells beyond the breakwater, she glimpses a long, dark shape. A ship. Is it Saracen or Greek? Does its captain call to his rowers, do gunners ready their guns? She crouches as low as she can, flattens herself down into the hull, the sack on her chest, cold water seeping around her back, and it is here that Anna’s courage finally wanes. Fear comes slipping in from a thousand fissures: tentacles rise from the gloom on either side of the boat, and Kalaphates’s vulture eyes blink down from the starless sky.
Girls don’t go to tutors.
It was you? All along?
The current catches the little skiff and carries it. She thinks of how Aethon must have felt, trapped inside all those different bodies, unable to speak his own language, mistreated, derided—it was a horrible fate and she was cruel to laugh.
No one shouts and no arrows whistle past. The skiff turns, wobbles, and slips beyond the breakwater into the dark.
FOURTEEN
THE GATES OF CLOUD CUCKOO LAND
* * *
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio Ξ
Folios from the second half of the Diogenes codex are considerably more deteriorated than the first, and the gaps in the manuscript present significant challenges for both translator and reader. Folio Ξ has been at least sixty percent effaced. Illegible portions are indicated by ellipses and conjectural representations are delivered inside brackets. Translation by Zeno Ninis.
… In the Pleiades I saw a nation of swans eating bright fruits, and on the far shores of the Sun I drank from ·[a river of steaming wine]·, though it singed my beak. I visited a thousand strange lands but never did I find one where tortoises carried honeycakes on their backs and war was unknown and suffering unheard of.
… from these Icarian heights, my feathers powdered with the dust of the stars, I saw the earth far below as it really was, a little mud-heap in a great vastness, its kingdoms only cobwebs, its armies only crumbs.
… I ·[glimpsed?]· a distant glow, a golden filigree of towers, the puff of clouds, just as I envisioned that day in the square in Arkadia…
… except that it was grander, more ravishing, more heavenly…
… ringed by falcons, redshanks, quails, moorhens, and cuckoos…
… hyacinth and laurel, phlox and apple, gardenia and sweet alyssum…
… delirious with joy, weary as the world, I dropped…
THE ARGOS
MISSION YEAR 64
DAY 45–DAY 46 INSIDE VAULT ONE
Konstance
She stands in the Library alone. From the nearest desk she takes a slip of paper, writes Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, and drops it into the slot. Documents volley toward her from multiple sections and arrange themselves in a dozen stacks. Many are academic papers in German, Chinese, French, Japanese. Nearly all seem to have been written during the second decade of the twenty-first century. She opens the first book at hand in English: Selected Ancient Greek Novels.
The 2019 discovery of the late Greek prose tale Cloud Cuckoo Land inside a badly corrupted codex in the Vatican Library briefly set the world of Greco-Roman scholarship aflame. Alas, what archivists were able to salvage of the text left plenty to be desired: twenty-four mangled folios, each damaged to some degree. Chronology confuses and lacunae abound.
From the next volume, foot-high projections of two men emerge and walk to opposing podiums. This was a text, says the first, a bow-tied man with a silver beard, intended for a single reader, a young girl on her deathbed, and therefore it’s a narrative about death-anxiety…