On the far side two mule carts make it across and Omeir turns and faces his oxen and steps backward out over the void. The logs are slick with manure and in the gaps between them, beneath his boots, he can see whitewater flashing over boulders.

Tree and Moonlight lumber out. The bridge is scarcely wider than the axle of the dray. They make it one revolution, two three four; then the wheel on Tree’s side slips off. The cart lists and the oxen stop and multiple pieces of firewood go rolling off the back.

Moonlight spreads his legs, bearing most of the weight of the load by himself, waiting for his brother, but Tree has immobilized with fright. His eyes roll and all around them shouts and bellows echo off the rocks.

Omeir swallows. If the axle slips any farther, the weight of the cart will pull it off the bridge and drag the oxen with it.

“Pull, boys, pull.” The bullocks do not move. Mist rises from the rapids below and little birds swoop from rock to rock and Tree pants as though trying to draw the entire scene up through his nostrils. Omeir runs his hands over Tree’s muzzle and strokes his long brown face. His ear twitches, and his thick front legs tremble from strain or terror or both.

The boy can feel gravity pulling at their bodies, at the cart, at the bridge, at the water below. If he was never born, his father would still be alive. His mother would still live in the village. She could talk with other women, trade honey and gossip, share her life. His older sisters might still be alive.

Don’t look down. Show the oxen that you can meet all of their needs. If you stay calm so will they. His heels hanging over the chasm, Omeir ducks Moonlight’s horns, shimmies around his flank, and speaks directly into the bullock’s ear. “Come, brother, pull. Pull for me, and your twin will follow.” The ox tilts his horns to one side, as though considering the merits of the boy’s request, the bridge and cliffs and sky reproduced in miniature in the dome of his huge, wet pupil, and just when Omeir is convinced that the matter is lost, Moonlight leans into the harness, veins rising visibly in his chest, and hauls the wheel of the dray back onto the bridge.

“Good boy, steady now, that’s it.”

Moonlight pushes forward, and Tree comes with him, placing one hoof in front of the next on the slick logs, and Omeir grabs the back of the dray as it passes, and in a few more heartbeats they are across.

* * *

From there the gorge opens, and the mountains turn into hills, and hills into rolling flatlands, and muddy bridleways into proper roads. Moonlight and Tree move easily along the wide surface, their big hipbones rising and falling, happy to be on sure ground. With every passing village, the heralds recruit more men and beasts. Always their pitch is the same: the sultan (God be pleased with him) calls you to the capital where he gathers forces to take the Queen of Cities. Its streets overflow with jewels, silks, and girls; you will have your pick.

Thirteen days after leaving home, Omeir and his oxen reach Edirne. Everywhere gleam mountains of peeled logs and the air smells of wet sawdust and children run the roadsides selling bread and skins of milk or just to gape at the caravan as it rumbles past, and after dark criers on ponies meet the heralds and sort the animals by torchlight.

Omeir, Tree, and Moonlight are directed with the largest and strongest of the cattle to a vast, treeless field on the outskirts of the capital. At one end glows a tent larger than any he has ever imagined—a whole forest could grow beneath it. Inside men work by torchlight, unloading wagons, cutting trenches, and excavating a casting pit like the grave bed for a giant. Inside the pit lie matching cylindrical molds made from clay, one nested in the other, each thirty feet long.

Every daylight hour Omeir and the oxen walk a mile to a charcoal pit and haul cartloads of charcoal back to the enormous tent. As more and more charcoal is brought in, the area inside the tent grows hotter, the animals balking at the heat as they approach, and the teamsters unload the carts while foundry men pitch the charcoal into furnaces, and groups of mullahs pray, and still more men work in teams of three at great bellows, soaked to their bones in sweat, pumping air into the furnaces. In lulls between the chanting, Omeir can hear the fires burn: a sound like something huge inside the tent chewing, chewing, chewing.

At night he approaches the drivers who will tolerate his face and asks what they have been brought here to help create. One says he has heard that the sultan is casting a propeller from iron but that he does not know what a propeller is. Another calls it a thunder catapult, another a torment, another the Destroyer of Cities.

“Inside that tent,” explains a gray-bearded man with gold rings through his earlobes, “the sultan is making an apparatus that will change history forever.”

“What does it do?”

“The apparatus,” says the man, “is a way for a small thing to destroy a much larger thing.”

* * *

New teams of oxen arrive carrying pallets of tin, trunks of iron, even church bells, the teamsters whisper, from sacked Christian cities, dragged here over hundreds of miles. The whole world, it seems, has sent tributes: copper coin, bronze coffin lids of noblemen centuries forgotten; the sultan, Omeir hears, has even brought the wealth of an entire nation he conquered in the east, enough to make five thousand men rich for five thousand lifetimes, and this too will be pitched in—the gold and silver becoming part of the apparatus too.

Back cold, front burning, the fabric of the tent swimming behind heat blurs, Omeir watches transfixed. The foundry men, their arms and hands wrapped in cowhide gloves, approach the blearing, wavering inferno and climb scaffolding and pitch raw pieces of brass into an enormous cauldron and skim away the dross. Some constantly check the melting metal for any sign of moisture while others check the sky while others pray prayers specifically bent on the weather—the slightest raindrop, a man beside Omeir whispers, could set the entire cauldron hissing and cracking with all the fires of hell.

When it is time to add tin to the molten brass, turbaned soldiers drive everyone out. During this delicate moment, they say, the metal cannot be looked at with impure eyes, and only the blessed may go in. The doors of the tent are drawn and tied, and Omeir wakes in the night to see a glow rising from the far end of the field, and it appears that the ground beneath the tent glows also, as though drawing some stupendous power up from the center of the earth.

Moonlight lies on his side and presses his ear against Omeir’s shoulder, and the boy curls up in the damp grass, and Tree stands to the side, his back to the tents, still grazing, as though bored by the ridiculous fanaticisms of men.

Grandfather, Omeir thinks, already I have seen things I did not know how to dream.

* * *

For two more days the massive tent glows, sparks rising through its chimney holes, and the weather stays fair, and on the third day the foundry men release the molten alloy from the cauldron, directing it through channels until it disappears into the molds belowground. Men move up and down the lines of flowing bronze, knocking out bubbles with iron poles, while others throw shovels of wet sand upon the casting pit, and the tent is dismantled and teams of mullahs take turns praying beside the mounds as they cool.

At dawn they dig away the sand, break apart the molds, and send tunnelers beneath the apparatus to sling chains around its girth. These chains they tether to ropes and the lead teamsters gather oxen in five teams of ten each to try to drag the Destroyer of Cities out of the earth.