Moonlight: his ropy tail, his shaggy cloven hooves. God knits him together in the womb of Beauty beside his brother and he lives for three winters and dies hundreds of miles from home and for what? Tree lies down in the reeds and fouls the air around him and Omeir wonders what the animal understands and what will happen to Moonlight’s two beautiful horns and every breath sends another crack through his heart.

* * *

That evening the guns fire seemingly nonstop, battering the towers and walls, and the men are ordered to light as many torches, candles, and cookfires as possible. Omeir helps two teamsters fell olive trees and drag them to a great bonfire. The sultan’s ulema move between the fires delivering encouragement. “The Christians,” they say, “are devious and arrogant. They worship bones and die for mummies. They cannot sleep unless it’s on feather beds and cannot go an hour without wine. They think the city is theirs, but it already belongs to us.”

Night becomes like day. Moonlight’s flesh travels the intestines of fifty men. Grandfather, Omeir thinks, would have known what to do. He would have recognized the early signals of lameness, would have taken better care of Moonlight’s hooves, would have known some remedy involving herbs and ointment and beeswax. Grandfather, who could see signs of game birds where Omeir saw nothing, who could steer Leaf and Needle with a click of his tongue.

He shuts his eyes against the smoke and remembers a story a teamster told in the fields outside Edirne about a man in hell. The devils there, the teamster said, would cut the man every morning, many thousands of times, but the cuts were just small enough that they would not kill him. All day the wounds would dry, and scab over, and the next morning, just as the cuts began to heal, they were opened up again.

* * *

After morning prayer he goes to find Tree in the pasture where he has staked him and the ox cannot get up. He lies on his side, one horn pointing to the sky. The world has swallowed his brother and Tree is ready to join him. Omeir kneels and runs his hands over the bullock’s flank and watches the reflection of the sky quake in the bullock’s trembling eye.

Does Grandfather look up this morning at this same cloud, and Nida, and their mother, and he and Tree, all five of them looking up at this same drifting white shape as it passes over them all?

Anna

Church bells no longer keep the hours. She drifts through the scullery, the hunger in her gut a snake uncoiling, then stands in the open doorway looking at the sky above the courtyard. Himerius used to say that as long as the moon was getting larger, the world could never end. But now it wanes.

“First,” Widow Theodora whispers into the hearth, “wars rage among the peoples of the earth. Then the false prophets rise. Soon the planets will fall from the sky, followed by the sun, and everyone will become ash.”

Maria’s legs are discolored now, and she has to be carried to the toilet. They are in the last parts of the codex, and some leaves are so deteriorated that Anna can make out only one line of text for every three. Still she keeps Aethon’s journey going for her sister. The crow flaps through the void, tumbling through the Zodiac.

From these Icarian heights, my feathers powdered with the dust of the stars, I saw the earth far below as it really was, a little mud-heap in a great vastness, its kingdoms only cobwebs, its armies only crumbs. Storm-broken and singed, worn out and wind-plucked, half my feathers lost, I drifted among the constellations at the end of hope, when I glimpsed a distant glow, a golden filigree of towers, the puff of clouds—

The text peters out, the lines dissolved beneath a water stain, but for her sister Anna conjures it: a city made of silver and bronze towers, windows glowing, banners flapping from rooftops, birds of every size and color wheeling round. The weary crow spirals down out of the stars.

Cannonballs thud in the distance. The flame of the candle bows.

“He never stops believing,” whispers Maria. “Even when he is so tired.”

Anna blows out the candle and closes the codex. She thinks of Ulysses washing onto the island of the Phaeacians. “He could smell jasmine among the stars,” she says, “and violets, and laurel, and roses, grapes and pears, apples upon apples, figs on figs.”

“I smell them, Anna.”

Beside the icon of Saint Koralia sits the little snuffbox she took from the abandoned workshop of the Italians, its cracked lid painted with a miniature of a turreted palace. There are men in Urbino, the scribes said, who make lenses that let you see thirty miles. Men who can draw a lion so real it looks as though it will walk off the page and eat you.

Our master dreams of constructing a library to surpass the pope’s, they said, a library to contain every text ever written. To last until the end of time.

* * *

Maria dies on the twenty-seventh of May, the women of the household praying around her. Anna sets a palm on her sister’s forehead and feels the heat leave her. “When you see her again,” Widow Theodora says, “she’ll be clothed in light.” Chryse lifts Maria’s body as easily as she might lift a piece of linen dried stiff in the sun, and carries her across the courtyard to the gates of Saint Theophano.

Anna rolls up the samite hood—five finished birds entwined by blooming vines. In some other universe, perhaps, a great bright community weeps: their mother and father, aunts and cousins, a little chapel packed with spring roses, a thousand organ pipes resounding with song, Maria’s soul afloat among cherubs, grapevines, and peacocks—like a design from one of her embroideries.

In the katholikon at Saint Theophano nuns keep a nonstop vigil of prayer rising toward the throne of God. One points to where Chryse should set the body, and another covers Maria with a shroud, and Anna sits on the stones beside her sister while a priest is fetched.

Omeir

After the death of his oxen, time disintegrates. He is sent to work behind the latrines with conscripted Christian boys and Indian slaves, burning the feces of the army. They dump the slop into pits, then throw hot pitch on top, and he and a few of the older boys use poles to stir the vile, smoking mess, the poles burning down from the tips, so that they grow ever shorter. The smell saturates his clothes, his hair, his skin, and soon Omeir has more than his face to make men scowl.

Birds of prey wheel overhead; big, merciless flies besiege them; outside the tents, as May tips toward June, there is no shade. The great cannon they worked so hard to bring here finally cracks, and the defenders of the city give up trying to repair their battered stockades, and everyone can sense the fate of the conflict tilting on a fulcrum. Either the starving city will capitulate, or the Ottomans will retreat before disease and hopelessness sweep through their camps.

The boys in Omeir’s company say that the sultan, may God bless and keep his kingdom, believes the decisive moment has come. The walls have been weakened at multiple spots, the defenders are exhausted, and a final assault will tip the balance. The best fighters, they say, will be held at the back while the least-equipped and least-trained among them are sent first across the fosse to soften the city’s defenses. We’ll be caught, one boy whispers, between a hailstorm of stones from the ramparts above and the whips of the sultan’s Chavushes behind. But another boy says that God will see them through, and that if they die their rewards in the next life will extend beyond number.