Her gut lurches. Himerius inches toward the coins on the table.

“The ark has hit the rocks, child. And the tide is washing in.”

* * *

Her life splits in two. There are her hours in the house of Kalaphates, a monotony of fatigue and dread: broom and pan, thread and wire, fetch water fetch charcoal fetch wine fetch another bale of linen. Seemingly every day a new story about the sultan filters into the workshop. He has trained himself not to sleep; he is leading teams of surveyors outside the city walls; his soldiers at the Throat Cutter have launched a ball that shattered a Venetian galley carrying food and armor from the Black Sea to the city.

For a second time Anna leads Maria to the shrine of the Virgin of the Source, where they buy a blessing from the stooped and withered nuns for eleven stavrata, and Maria swallows the mixture of water and mercury and feels better for a day before feeling worse. Her hands throb; she suffers from cramps; some nights she says she feels as though the claws of some devil have closed around her limbs and he is trying to tear her apart.

Then there’s Anna’s other life, when fog shrouds the city and she hurries through the echoing streets, and Himerius rows her around the breakwater to scale the wall of the priory. If asked, she would say she does it to make money to relieve her sister’s suffering—but is there not another part of her that also wants to climb that wall? To bring another sack of mildewed books to the copyists in their ink-filled shop? Twice more she fills a sack with books and twice more it turns out to contain only moldy inventories. But the Italians ask her and Himerius to keep bringing whatever they find, that soon they may unearth something as precious as the Aelian or better—a lost tragedy from Athens or a series of orations by a Greek statesman or a seismobrontologion that reveals the secrets of the weather and the wind.

The Italians are not, she learns, from Venice, which they call a mink’s den of mercenaries and greed, nor from Rome, which they say is a nest of parasites and whores. They’re from a city called Urbino, where they say the granaries are always full and the oil presses overflow and the streets gleam with virtue. Inside the walls of Urbino, they say, even the poorest child, girl or boy, studies numbers and literature, and there is no season of killing malaria as there is in Rome nor a season of chilling fog, like in this city. The smallest of them shows her a collection of eight snuffboxes, on the lids of which are painted miniatures: a great domed church; a fountain in a town square; Justice holding her scales; Courage holding a marble column; Moderation diluting wine with water.

“Our master, the virtuous count and lord of Urbino, never loses,” he says, “in battle or otherwise,” and the mid-sized scribe adds, “He is magnanimous in all ways, and will listen to anyone who wishes to speak with him at any hour of the day,” and the tall one says, “When His Magnificence dines, even when he is on the field of war, he asks that the old texts be read to him.”

“He dreams,” says the first, “of erecting a library to surpass the pope’s, a library to contain every text ever written, a library to last until the end of time, and his books will be free to anyone who can read them.” Their eyes glow like coals; their lips are stained with wine; they show her treasures that they have already procured for their master on their travels—a terra-cotta centaur made in the time of Isaac, an inkpot that they say was used by Marcus Aurelius, and a book from China they say was written not by a scribe with quill and ink but by a carpenter turning a wheel of movable bamboo blocks, and they say this machine can make ten copies of a text in the time it takes a scribe to make one.

It all leaves Anna breathless. All her life she has been led to believe that she is a child born at the end of things: the empire, the era, the reign of men on earth. But in the glow of the scribes’ enthusiasm, she senses that in a city like Urbino, beyond the horizon, other possibilities might exist, and in daydreams she takes flight across the Aegean, ships and islands and storms passing far below, the wind streaming through her spread fingers, until she alights in a bright clean palace, full of Justice and Moderation, its rooms lined with books, free to anyone who can read them.

The front appear’d with radiant splendors gay, bright as the lamp of night, or orb of day.

The ark has hit the rocks, child.

You fill your head with useless things.

* * *

One night the scribes riffle through another sack of bloated, musty manuscripts and shake their heads. “What we seek,” says the smallest one, slurring his Greek, “is nothing like these.” Scattered among their parchment and penknives are plates of half-eaten turbot and dried grapes. “What our master seeks in particular are compendiums of marvels.”

“We believe that the ancients traveled to distant places—”

“—all four corners of the world—”

“—lands known to them but as yet unknown to us.”

Anna stands with her back to the fire and thinks of Licinius writing Ὠκεανός into the dust. Here the known. Here the unknown. Out of the corner of her eye she can see Himerius pilfering raisins. “Our master,” says the tall scribe, “believes that somewhere, perhaps in this old city, slumbering beneath a ruin, is an account that contains the entire world.”

The mid-sized one nods, eyes shining. “And the mysteries beyond.”

Himerius looks up, his mouth full. “And if we were to find it?”

“Our master would be very pleased.”

Anna blinks. A book containing the entire world and the mysteries beyond? Such a book would be enormous. She’d never be able to carry it.

SEVEN

THE MILLER AND THE CLIFF

* * *

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio H

… the bandits prodded me right to the cliff’s edge and talked about what a worthless donkey I was. One argued they should drive me off the precipice to be split open on the rocks so the buzzards could pick my flesh, and a second suggested they put a sword in my side and a third, the worst of them, said, “Why not do both?” Put a sword in my side, then drive me off! I urinated all over my hooves as I looked over the edge at the terrible drop.

What a muddle I’d made for myself! I didn’t belong here, high on a crag, among rocks and thorns; I belonged high in the blue, sailing through the clouds, heading to the city where there is no baking sun nor icy wind, where the zephyrs nourish every flower and the hills are always clad in green and no one wants for anything. What a fool I was. What was this hunger that drove me to seek more than what I already had?

Just then a potbellied miller and his potbellied son rounded the bend on their way north. The miller said, “What plans have you for this worn-out donkey?” The bandits replied, “He is feeble and gutless and never stops complaining, so we are going to pitch him off this cliff, but first we are debating whether to stick a sword in his ribs.” The miller said, “My feet are smarting, and my son can hardly breathe, so we’ll give you two coppers for him and let’s see if he has a few more miles left in him.”

The bandits were happy to be rid of me for two coppers, and I was elated not to be thrown off the cliff. The miller climbed on my back and his son too, and though my spine ached, my head filled with visions of a pretty little miller’s cottage and a pretty little miller’s wife and a garden chockablock with roses…