Aethon has managed to become a bird at last: not the resplendent owl he hoped, but a bedraggled crow. He flaps across a limitless sea, searching for the end of the earth, only to be swept up by a waterspout. So long as Anna keeps reading, Maria seems to be at peace, her face calm, as though she sits not in a damp cell in a besieged city listening to a silly tale, but in a garden in the hereafter listening to the hymns of the angels, and Anna remembers something Licinius said: that a story is a way of stretching time.

In the days, he said, when bards traveled from town to town carrying the old songs in their memories, performing them for anyone who would listen, they would delay the outcomes of their tales for as long as they could, improvising one last verse, one last obstacle for the heroes to overcome, because, Licinius said, if the singers could hold their listeners’ attention for one more hour, they might be granted one more cup of wine, one more piece of bread, one more night out of the rain. Anna imagines Antonius Diogenes, whoever he was, setting knife to quill, quill to ink, ink to scroll, placing one more barricade in front of Aethon, stretching time for another purpose: to detain his niece in the living world for a little longer.

“He suffers so much,” murmurs Maria. “But he keeps on.”

Maybe Kalaphates was right: maybe dark magic does live inside the old books. Maybe as long as she still has more lines to read to her sister, as long as Aethon persists on his harebrained journey, flapping his way toward his dream in the clouds, then the city gates will hold; maybe death will stay outside their door for one more day.

* * *

On a bright, redolent May morning, when it feels as though the unseasonable cold has finally loosened its grip, the Hodegetria, the city’s most venerated icon—a painting with the Virgin and Christ child on one side and the crucifixion on the other, purportedly made by the apostle Luke on a three-hundred-pound piece of slate and conveyed to the city from the Holy Lands by an empress a thousand years before Anna was born—is carried out of the church built to hold it.

If anything can save the city it is this: an object of immense power, the icon of icons, credited with safeguarding the city from numerous sieges in the past. Chryse picks up Maria and slings her over her back, and the embroideresses walk to the square to be a part of the procession, and when the icon comes out the church doors into the sunlight it blazes so brightly that it stamps Anna’s vision with swimming designs of gold.

The six priests carrying the painting set it onto the shoulders of a hulking monk in crimson velvet with a thick embroidered band across his chest. Wobbling under his load, the icon-bearer processes barefoot through the city from church to church, going wherever the Hodegetria leads him. Two deacons follow his every step, propping a golden canopy over the icon, dignitaries with staves behind them, novices and nuns and citizens and slaves and soldiers in the back, many carrying candles and performing an eerie and beautiful chant. Children run alongside holding garlands of roses or little pieces of cotton that they hope to touch to the Virgin’s likeness.

Anna and Chryse, with Maria draped over Chryse’s back, march in the wake of the procession as the Hodegetria winds toward the Third Hill. All morning the city glows. Wildflowers carpet the ruins; a breeze scatters little white flower petals across the cobblestones; chestnut trees wave the ivory candles of their blooms. But as the parade climbs toward the huge crumbling fountain of the nymphaeum, the day darkens. The air turns chill, black clouds appear as if from nowhere, doves stop warbling, dogs start barking, and Anna glances up.

Not a single bird crosses the sky. Thunder rolls over the houses. A gust snuffs half the candles in the parade, and the chanting falters. In the stillness that follows, Anna can hear a drummer, out in the camps of the Saracens, pounding his drum.

“Sister?” asks Maria, her cheek pressed to Chryse’s spine. “What is happening?”

“A storm.”

Forks of lightning lash the domes of the Hagia Sophia. Trees thrash, shutters bang, sheets of hail assault the rooftops, and the procession scatters. At its head, the wind rips the gold canopy sheltering the icon from its standards and carries it off between houses.

Chryse scrambles for cover, but Anna waits a moment longer, watching the monk at the front of the train try to keep carrying the Hodegetria up the hill. Wind drives him back, whipping debris past his feet. Still he pushes higher. He nearly crests the hill. Then he staggers, and slips, and the thirteen-hundred-year-old painting falls crucifixion-side-down onto the rain-soaked street.

* * *

Agata rocks at the table with her head in her hands; Widow Theodora mumbles into the cold hearth; Chryse curses over the wreckage of her vegetable garden. The hallowed Hodegetria has failed; the Mother of God has forsaken them; the beast of the apocalypse rises from the sea. The Antichrist scratches at the gate. Time is a circle, Licinius used to say, and every circle eventually must close.

As darkness falls, Anna crawls onto the horsehair pallet and sits with Maria’s head in her lap, the old manuscript open in front of them. The storm propels Aethon-the-crow past the moon and tumbles him into the blackness between the stars. There is not much left to go.

Omeir

That same afternoon the ox train is rumbling toward the Golden Horn to collect yet another load of stone cannonballs, a hundred yards from the landing stage, the air rinsed clean by the morning’s storm, the estuary blue-green and aglitter with sunlight, when Moonlight—not Tree—stops in his tracks, tucks his forelegs under his body, lowers himself to the ground, and dies.

He is dragged forward a body length and the train stops.

Tree stands in his harness, his three good legs splayed, the yoke cocked against the weight of his brother. Red spume leaks from Moonlight’s nostrils; a little white petal, carried on the breeze, sticks to his open eye. Omeir leans into the harness, tries to lend his little strength to the bullock’s great one, but the animal’s heart no longer beats.

The other teamsters, accustomed to seeing animals fail in the yoke, squat or sit on the edge of the road. The quartermaster shouts toward the quay and four porters start up from the docks.

Tree bends to make it easier for Omeir to remove the yoke. The porters and four teamsters, two on each leg, drag Moonlight to the edge of the road, and the oldest among them gives thanks to God, draws his knife, and opens the animal’s throat.

Halter and rope in one hand, Omeir leads Tree down a cattle trail into the rushes at the edge of the Bosporus. Through the dazzle of sunlight swim memories of Moonlight as a little calf. He liked to scratch his ribs against one particular pine tree beside the byre. He loved to wade into the creek up to his belly and call to his brother in delight. He wasn’t very good at hide-and-seek. He was frightened of bees.

Tree’s hide shivers up and down his back and a mantle of flies takes off and settles again. From here the city and its girdle of walls look small, a pale stone beneath the sky.

A few hundred paces away, two porters build a fire while the two others disassemble Moonlight, carving off his head, cutting away the tongue, spitting the heart, liver, and each of the kidneys. They wrap the thigh muscles in fat and secure them to pikes, and lean the pikes over the fire, and bargemen and stevedores and teamsters walk up the road in groups and squat on their heels as the meat cooks. At Omeir’s feet hundreds of little blue butterflies sip minerals from a patch of tidal mud.