Up and down the city walls, sentry fires are being lit. Omeir tries to imagine swimming the moat, clambering over the scarp on the far side, somehow scaling the outer wall, fighting across the battlements, then dropping into a no-man’s-land before the huge bulwark of the inner wall, its towers as tall as twelve men. You would need wings; you would need to be a god.

“Tomorrow night,” says Maher. “Tomorrow night two of those houses will be ours.”

* * *

The following morning ablutions are made and prayers recited. Then flagbearers pick their way through the tents to the very front of the lines and raise bright standards in the dawn light. Drums and tambourines and castanets sound throughout the company, a racket meant as much to frighten as to inspire. Omeir and Maher watch the powder makers—many missing fingers, many with burns on their throats and faces—prepare the huge gun. Their expressions are strained from the constant fear of working with unstable explosives and they reek of sulfur and they murmur to one another in their strange dialect like necromancers, and Omeir prays that their eyes will not meet his, that if something goes wrong they will not blame the defect in his face.

Along the almost four miles of land wall, the cannons have been organized into fourteen batteries, none larger than the great bombard Omeir and Maher have helped drag here. More familiar siege weapons—trebuchets, slings, catapults—are loaded too, but all of them seem primitive compared to the burnished guns and the dark horses and carts and powder-stained tunics of the artillerymen. Bright spring clouds cruise above them like vessels sailing to a parallel war, and the sun pushes above the city’s rooftops, momentarily blinding the armies outside the walls, and finally, at some signal from the sultan, hidden by a shimmer of fabric atop his tower, the drums and cymbals go quiet and the flagbearers drop their standards.

At more than sixty cannons, cannoneers set tapers to priming powder. The whole army, from barefoot conscripted shepherds in the vanguard with clubs and scythes to the imams and viziers—from the attendants and grooms and cooks and arrowsmiths to the elite corps of Janissaries in their spotless white headdresses—watches. People inside the city watch too, in sporadic lines along the outer and inner walls: archers, horsemen, counter-sappers, monks, the curious and the incautious. Omeir shuts his eyes and clamps his forearms over his ears and feels the pressure build, feels the huge cannon draw up its abominable energy, and for an instant prays that he is asleep, that when he opens his eyes he’ll find himself at home, resting against the trunk of the half-hollow yew, waking from an immense dream.

One after another the bombards fire, white smoke ejecting forward from their barrels as the guns smash backward with the recoil, rocking the earth, and sixty-plus stone balls fly toward the city faster than eyes can track them.

Up and down the walls clouds of dust and pulverized stone rise. Fragments of brick and limestone rain onto men a quarter mile away, and a roar rolls through the assembled armies.

As the smoke drifts away, Omeir sees that a section of one tower in the outer wall has partially crumbled. Otherwise the walls appear unaffected. The gunners are pouring olive oil over the huge gun to cool it, and an officer prepares his crew to load a second thousand-pound ball, and Maher is blinking in disbelief, and it is a long time before the cheers subside enough for Omeir to hear the screaming.

Anna

She is chopping scavenged wood in the courtyard when the guns fire again, a dozen in succession, followed by the distant rumble of stonework falling to pieces. Days ago the thunder of the sultan’s war engines could start half of the women in the workshop weeping. This morning they merely sign crosses in the air over their boiled eggs. A jug wobbles on a shelf and Chryse reaches up and settles it.

Anna drags the wood into the scullery and builds up the fire and the eight embroideresses who are left eat and shuffle back upstairs to work. It’s cold and nobody sews with urgency. Kalaphates has fled with the gold, silver, and seed pearls, there’s not much silk left, and what clergymen are buying embroidered vestments anyway? Everyone seems to agree that the world will end soon and the only essential task is to cleanse the besmirchment from one’s soul before that day comes.

Widow Theodora stands at the workshop window, leaning on her stick. Maria holds her embroidery frame inches from her eyes as she glides her needle through the samite hood.

In the evenings, after she has settled Maria in their cell, Anna treks the mile to join other women and girls in the terrace between the inner and outer walls. They work in teams to fill barrels with turf, soil, and chunks of masonry. She sees nuns, still in their habits, helping to attach barrels to pulleys; she sees mothers taking turns with newborns so others can pitch in.

The barrels are hoisted by donkey-powered cranes to the battlements of the outer walls. After dark, impossibly brave soldiers, in full view of the Saracen armies, crawl over hastily built stockades, lower the barrels in, and pack the empty spaces around them with branches and straw. Anna sees whole bushes and saplings get lowered into the stockades—even carpets and tapestries. Anything to soften the blows of the terrible stone balls.

Out there, up against the outer wall, when the sultan’s guns roar, she feels the detonations roll through her bones and shake her heart where it hangs inside its cage. Sometimes a ball overshoots its mark and goes screaming off into the city, and she hears it bury itself in an orchard or a ruin or a house. Other times the balls strike the stockades, and rather than shatter, they swallow the balls whole, and the defenders along the ramparts cheer.

The quiet moments frighten her more: when the work pauses and she can hear the songs of the Saracens out beyond the walls, the creaking of their siege machines, the nickering of their horses and bleats of their camels. When the wind is right, she can smell the food they’re cooking. To be so close to men who want her dead. To know that only a partition of masonry prevents them from doing their will.

She works until she cannot see her hands in front of her face, then trudges home to the house of Kalaphates, takes a candle from the scullery, and climbs onto the pallet beside Maria, her fingernails broken, her hands veined with dirt, and pulls the blanket around them and opens the little brown goatskin codex.

* * *

The reading goes slowly. Some leaves are partially obscured by mold, and the scribe who copied the story did not separate the words with spaces, and the tallow candles give off a weak and sputtery light, and she is often so tired that the lines seem to ripple and dance in front of her eyes.

The shepherd in the story accidentally turns himself into an ass, then a fish, and now he swims through the innards of an enormous leviathan, touring the continents while dodging beasts who try to eat him: it’s silly, absurd; this cannot possibly be the sort of compendium of marvels the Italians sought, can it?

And yet. When the stream of the old Greek picks up, and she climbs into the story, as though climbing the wall of the priory on the rock—handhold here, foothold there—the damp chill of the cell dissipates, and the bright, ridiculous world of Aethon takes its place.

Our sea monster battled with another, bigger and more monstrous even than he was, and the waters around us quaked, and ships with a hundred sailors on each sank in front of me, and whole uprooted islands were carried past. I closed my eyes in terror, and fixed my thoughts on the golden city in the clouds…