They die by the hundreds. Many risk everything to retrieve their dead, and are killed while gathering the corpses, leaving yet more dead to gather. Most mornings, as Omeir yokes his oxen, smoke from funeral pyres lifts into the sky.

The road to the landing stages along the Horn bisects a Christian graveyard which has been transformed into an open-air field hospital. Men lie injured and dying between the old headstones: Macedonians, Albanians, Wallachians, Serbians, some in so much agony that they seem reduced to something less than human, as though pain were a leveling wave, a mortar troweled over everything that person once was. Healers move among the wounded carrying sheaves of smoldering willow and medics lead donkeys carrying earthen jars and from the jars they produce great handfuls of maggots to clean wounds, and the men squirm or scream or faint and Omeir imagines the dead buried just feet below the dying, their flesh rotted green, their skeleton teeth champing, and he is wretched.

Donkey carts hurry past the oxen teams in both directions, the faces of the carters crimped with impatience or fear or anger or all three. Hatred, Omeir sees, is contagious, spreading through the ranks like a disease. Already, three weeks into the siege, some of the men fight no longer for God or the sultan or plunder but out of a fearful rage. Kill them all. Get this over with. Sometimes the anger flares inside Omeir too, and he wants nothing more than for God to plunge a fiery fist through the sky and start crushing buildings one after the next until all the Greeks are dead and he can go home.

On the first of May the sky knots with cloud. The Golden Horn turns slow and black and pocked with the circles of a hundred million raindrops. The wagon team waits as stevedores roll the huge granite balls, veined white with quartz, down the ramp and stack them in the wagon.

Far off, a trebuchet slings rocks that fly in wild arcs over the city walls and disappear. They are a half mile back up the road toward the foundry, deep in the ruts, the oxen drooling and panting, their tongues hanging, when Tree staggers. He manages to get back up, but a few strides later he staggers again. The entire train stops and men rush to brake the wagon as the traffic hurries past.

Omeir ducks in among the animals. When he touches Tree’s hind leg, the bullock shudders. Mucus drains in twin streams from his nostrils and he licks the roof of his mouth with his enormous tongue over and over and his eyes vibrate gently back and forth in their sockets. Their surfaces look worn and foggy and carry the distant dreaminess of cataracts. As though the past five months have aged him ten years.

Goad in hand, in his ruined shoes, Omeir walks the line of heaving oxen and stands below the quartermaster who sits scowling in the wagon atop the load.

“The animals need rest.”

The quartermaster gapes down half-bemused and half-disgusted and reaches for his bullwhip. Omeir feels his heart swing out over a black void. A memory rises: once, years before, Grandfather took him high on the mountain to watch the woodcutters bring down a huge, ancient silver fir, as tall as twenty-five men, a kingdom unto itself. They sang a low, determined song, driving their wedges into its trunk in rhythm as though hammering needles into the ankle of a giant, and Grandfather explained the names of the tools they used, caulks and punks and blocks and spars, but what Omeir remembers now, as the quartermaster rears back with his whip, is that when the tree tipped, its trunk exploding, the men shouting hallo, the air suddenly charged with the ripe, sharp aroma of cracking wood, what he felt was not joy but sorrow. All the timbermen seemed to exult in their collective power, watching branches that for generations knew only starlight and snow and ravens smash down through the undergrowth. But Omeir felt something close to despair, and sensed that, even at his age, his feelings would not be welcome, that he should hide them even from his own grandfather. Why mourn, Grandfather would say, what men can do? There’s something wrong with a child who sympathizes more with other beings than he does with men.

The tip of the quartermaster’s bullwhip cracks an inch from Omeir’s ear.

A white-bearded teamster who has been with them since Edirne calls, “Leave the boy be. So he is kind to beasts. The Prophet Himself, peace be upon Him, once cut off a piece of his robe rather than wake a cat that was sleeping on it.”

The quartermaster blinks down. “If we do not deliver this load,” he says, “we’ll all be lashed, myself included. And I’ll see to it that you and that face of yours get the worst of it. Move your beasts, or we’ll all be meat for the crows.”

The men turn back to their animals, and Omeir climbs the rutted, ruined road, and crouches beside Tree and says his name and the bullock stands. He touches Moonlight on the withers with his goad and the bullocks lean into the yoke and begin to pull again.

TWELVE

THE WIZARD INSIDE THE WHALE

* * *

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio M

… the waters inside the monster calmed and I grew hungry. As I gazed up, a delicious morsel, a shiny little anchovy, landed on the surface, floated, then danced in the most enticing way. With a flick of my tail I swam straight for it, opened my jaws as wide as I could, and…

“Ouch, ouch,” I cried, “my lip!” The fishermen had eyes like lamps and hands like fins and penises like trees and they lived on an island inside the whale with a mountain of bones at its center. “Unhook me,” I said. “I’m hardly a meal for men as strong as you. Besides, I’m not even a fish at all!”

The fishermen looked at each other and one said, “Is that you talking or is that the fish?” They carried me to a cave high on the mountain where a disheveled castaway wizard had lived for four hundred years and taught himself how to speak fish. “Great wizard,” I gasped. With every moment that passed it became harder to speak. “Transform me into a bird, please, a brave eagle, possibly, or a bright strong owl, so that I might fly to the city in the clouds where pain never visits and the west wind always blows.”

The wizard laughed. “Even if you grew wings, foolish fish, you could not fly to a place that is not real.”

“Wrong,” I said, “it does exist. Even if you don’t believe in it, I do. Otherwise what’s it all been for?”

“All right,” he said. “Show these fishermen where the big fish live, and I will give you wings.” I flapped my gills in agreement and he mumbled magic words and tossed me into the air, high over the mountain, to the very rim of the leviathan’s gums, where the gory pillars of his tusks sliced the moon…

THE ARGOS

MISSION YEAR 64

DAY 1–DAY 20 INSIDE VAULT ONE

Konstance

She wakes on the floor still wearing the bioplastic suit her father made. The machine flickers inside its tower.

Good afternoon, Konstance.

Scattered around her are the things Father pitched into the vestibule: Perambulator, inflatable cot, recycling toilet, dry-wipes, the sacks of Nourish powder, the food printer still in its wrapper. The oxygen hood lies beside her, its headlamp extinguished.

Drip by drip, horror trickles into her awareness. The two figures in the biohazard suits, the bronze mirror of their face shields reflecting back a warped version of the open doorway to Compartment 17. The tents in the Commissary. Father’s haggard face, his pink-rimmed eyes. The way he flinched every time the beam of the headlamp passed over him.