Eventually Himerius tries the door and finds it unlatched. Inside the workshop, all the tables stand empty. The hearth is cold. Himerius pushes open the shutters and the room fills with flat, glacial light. The looking glass is gone, as is the terra-cotta centaur, and the board of pinned butterflies, the rolls of parchment, the scrapers and awls and penknives. The servants dismissed, the geese gone or cooked. A few chopped quills are scattered across the tiles; spills of ink stain the floor; the room is a vault stripped bare.

Himerius drops the sack. For a moment in the dawn light he looks hunched and gray, the old man he won’t live long enough to become. Somewhere else in the quarter a man yells, “You know what I hate?” and a rooster crows and a woman starts to cry. The world in its final days. Anna remembers something Chryse once said: The houses of the rich burn quick as any other.

For all their talk of rescuing the voices of antiquity, of using the wisdom of the ancients to fertilize the seeds of a new future, were the scribes of Urbino any better than tomb robbers? They came and waited for what was left of the city to be split open so they could beetle in and scavenge whatever last treasures came spilling out. Then they ran for cover.

In the bottom of a bare cupboard something catches her eye: a little enameled snuffbox, one of the scribe’s collection of eight. On its cracked lid, a rosy sky braces over the facade of a palace, flanked by twin turrets and tiered with three levels of balconies.

Himerius is gazing out the window, lost in disappointment, and Anna tucks the box into her dress. Somewhere above the fog, the sun comes up pale and faraway. She turns her face toward it but cannot feel any warmth at all.

* * *

She carries the sack of wet books to the house of Kalaphates and hides it in the cell she shares with Maria and no one bothers to ask where she has been or what she has done. All day the embroideresses, bent like winter grass, work in silence, blowing on their hands or putting them inside mittens to warm them, the tall, half-finished figures of monastic saints taking shape on the silk in front of them.

“Faith,” says Widow Theodora as she walks between the tables, “offers passage through any affliction.” Maria hunches over the samite hood, drawing her needle back and forth, the tip of her tongue clamped in her teeth, conjuring a nightingale from thread and patience. In the afternoon a wind howls off the sea and glues snow to the seaward sides of the dome of the Hagia Sophia, and the embroideresses say that this is a sign, and by nightfall the trees freeze again, the branches jacketed in ice, and the embroideresses say that this, too, is a sign.

The evening meal is broth and black bread. Some women say that the Christian nations to the west could save them if they wish, that Venice or Pisa or Genoa could send a flotilla of weapons and cavalry to crush the sultan, but others say that all the Italian republics care about are shipping lanes and trade routes, that they already have contracts in place with the sultan, that it would be better to die on the tips of Saracen arrows than let the pope come here and take credit for victory.

Parousia, the Second Coming, the end of time. At the monastery of Saint George, Agata says, the elders keep a grid made of tiles, twelve along one side and twelve along the other, and each time an emperor dies, his name is etched in the appropriate place. “In the whole grid there is but one blank tile left,” she says, “and as soon as our emperor’s name is written, the grid will be full, and the ring of history will be complete.”

In the flames of the hearth Anna sees the shapes of soldiers hurrying past. She touches the snuffbox where it rests inside her dress, and helps Maria dip her spoon in her bowl, but Maria spills the broth before she can raise it to her mouth.

* * *

The following morning all twenty needleworkers are at their benches when the servant of Master Kalaphates scampers up the stairs—out of breath and red-faced with urgency—and rushes to the thread cabinet and shoves the gold and silver wire and the pearls and the spools of silk into a leather case, and scurries back downstairs without a word.

Widow Theodora follows him out. The needleworkers go to the windows to watch: down in the courtyard, the porter loads wrapped rolls of silk onto Kalaphates’s donkey, his boots sliding in the mud, while Widow Theodora says things to the servant that they cannot hear. Eventually he hurries off, and Widow Theodora comes back up the stairs with rain on her face and mud on her dress and says for everyone to keep sewing, and tells Anna to pick up the pins the servant spilled on the floor, but it’s plain to all of them that their master is deserting them.

At midday criers ride through the streets declaring that the gates of the city will be bolted at sundown. The boom, a chain as thick around as a man’s waist and hung with floats, meant to prevent boats from sailing up the Golden Horn and attacking from the north, is drawn across the harbor and fixed to the walls of Galata across the mouth of the Bosporus. Anna imagines Kalaphates hunched on the deck of a Genoese ship, frantically checking his traveling trunks as the city dwindles behind him. She imagines Himerius standing barefoot among the fishermen as the city’s admirals look them over. The cut of his hair, the leather-handled knife in his waistband—he tries so hard to give off an illusion of experience and daring, but really he is just a boy, tall and big-eyed, wearing his patched coat in the rain.

By mid-afternoon the embroideresses who are married and have children have abandoned their worktables. From out in the street come the clopping of hooves and the splashing of wheels and the cries of carters. Anna watches Maria squint over her silk hood. She hears the voice of the tall scribe: The ark has hit the rocks, child. And the tide is washing in.

Omeir

Everyone studies the weltering skies; everyone grows uneasy. Out loud the teamsters say that the sultan is patient and generous, that he recognizes what he has asked of them, that in his wisdom he understands that the bombard will arrive at the battlefield when it is most needed. But after so much exertion, Omeir senses an unspoken agitation running through the men. The weather lurches from storm to storm; whips crack; resentments simmer. Sometimes he can feel men staring with naked suspicion at his face, and he becomes used to rising from the fire and stepping into the shadows.

An uphill section of road can take all day, but the descents cause the most trouble. Brakes snap, axles bend, the cattle bawl in terror and misery; more than once a jointed section of pole splinters and drives an ox to its knees, and every few days another bullock is butchered. Omeir tells himself that what they’re doing—all this exertion, all these lives put to the task of moving the cannon—is right. A necessary campaign, the will of God. But at unpredictable moments homesickness buries him: a sharp, smoky scent, the nickering of someone’s horse in the night, and it’s there again—the dripping of the trees, the burble of the creek. Mother rendering beeswax over the hearth. Nida singing among the ferns. Arthritic, eight-toed Grandfather limping to the byre in his wooden shoes.

“But how will he ever find a wife?” Nida asked once. “With that face of his?”

“It’s not going to be his face that stops them,” Grandfather said, “it’ll be the odor of his toes,” and grabbed one of Omeir’s feet and brought it to his nose and took a big whiff, and everyone laughed, and Grandfather dragged the boy into a great embrace.