Get up, it says. Go home.

He coils Moonlight’s rope and halter over one shoulder and rises. Steps over Maher where he sleeps on the bare ground. Picks his way through the company of frightened young men.

Come back to us, whispers his mother, and around her head swims a cloud of bees.

He skirts a company of drummers carrying oxhide bull-roarers as they make their way forward through the ranks, moving toward the front of the lines. Past the camp of the smiths with their anvils and aprons. Past the arrow fletchers and bow stringers. It is as if Omeir has been yoked and harnessed to a wagon full of stone balls, and now, with each step away from the city, the stone balls are rolling out behind him.

Shapes of horses and wagons and broken siege engines loom up out of the dark. Look at no one. You are good at hiding your face.

He trips over a tent rope, gets back to his feet, weaves to stay out of firelight. Any moment, he thinks, someone will ask me my errand, which unit I belong to, why I’m walking in the wrong direction. Any moment one of the sultan’s military police with their long curved blades will pull up his horse beside me and call me a deserter. But men sleep or pray or murmur or brood over the coming assault, and no one seems to notice him. Perhaps they assume he’s on his way to the pens to check on an animal. Perhaps, he thinks, I am already dead.

He keeps the road to Edirne off to his right. At the edge of the encampment the spring grasses have grown chest-high, the broom tall and yellow, and it is easy to duck below their crowns as he walks. Behind him, the drummers reach the front of the lines, spin double-headed drumsticks above their heads in figure eights, and begin pounding their drums so quickly that they seem less a pulse of drumbeats than a sustained roar.

From soldiers all through the Ottoman camps rise the clash of weapons against shields. Omeir waits for God to send a streak of light through a rift in the clouds and reveal him for what he is: traitor, coward, apostate. Boy with the ghoul’s face and the demon’s heart. Boy who killed his own father. Who, on the night he was to be left exposed on the mountain to die, bewitched his own grandfather into bringing him back. Everything the villagers intuited about him coming true.

In the dark he draws no notice. The clamor of drums and cymbals and voices builds at his back. Any moment now the first wave will be sent across the moat.

Anna

Even a mile away, inside the house of Kalaphates, the noise of the drums penetrates: a weapon in itself, the forefinger of the sultan probing the alleys, searching, searching. Anna glances back toward the scullery, where Widow Theodora holds the mortar full of crushed nightshade. In the shadows she sees Kalaphates drag Maria by her hair down the corridor past her feet, sees Licinius’s mottled quires go up in flames.

One bad-tempered abbot, the tall scribe said, one clumsy friar, one invading barbarian, an overturned candle, a hungry worm—and all those centuries are undone. You can cling to this world for a thousand years and still be plucked out of it in a breath.

She wraps the old goatskin codex and the snuffbox in Maria’s silk hood and puts them in the bottom of Himerius’s sack. Then she sets the bread and salt fish on top and ties the bag shut. All she owns in the world.

Out in the streets, the pounding of the drums mixes with distant shouts: the final assault has begun. She hurries toward the harbor. In many houses there are no signs of life, while in others multiple lamps burn as though the occupants have decided to use up every last thing they own and leave nothing for the invaders. Details leap out bright and sharp: the centuries-old grooves of chariot wheels in the paving stones in front of the Philadelphion. Green paint flaking off a door to a carpenter’s workshop. The breeze lifting petals from a flowering cherry and tumbling them through the moonlight. Each a sight she may be seeing for the last time.

A single arrow covered with pitch bounces off a roof and clatters onto the stones and smokes. A child, no older than six, emerges from a doorway, picks it up, and holds it like something he is considering eating.

The sultan’s cannons fire, three five seven, and a distant clamor rises. Is this the moment? Are they breaching the gates? The tower of Belisarius, at the base of which she used to meet Himerius, is dark, and the little fisherman’s gate is unmanned, all the sentries sent to shore up weak points in the land walls.

She clutches the sack. West, she thinks, this is all she knows, west where the sun goes down, west across the Propontis, and her mind sends up visions of the blessed island of Scheria, and of the bright oil and soft bread of Urbino, and of Aethon’s city in the clouds, each paradise blurring into the last. It does exist, Aethon-the-fish told the wizard inside the whale. Otherwise what’s it all been for?

She finds Himerius’s skiff in its customary spot above the tideline on the cobbled beach, the least seaworthy craft in the world. A moment of terror: What if the oars are not there? But they are stowed beneath the boat where he always kept them.

The noise of the hull scraping over stones on the way to the waterline is perilously loud. In the shallows float shapes the size of corpses: don’t look. She sets the skiff afloat, climbs in, and kneels with the sack on the thwart in front of her, and pulls the starboard oar, then the port one, making little diagonal stitches toward the breakwater. The night stays blessedly dark.

Three gulls bobbing in the black water watch her glide past. Three a lucky number, Chryse always said: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Birth, life, death. Past, present, future.

She cannot seem to keep the skiff going in a straight line, and the knocking of the oars against the oarlocks is far too loud; she never appreciated Himerius’s skill until now. But with each heartbeat the shore appears to retreat, and she keeps rowing with the sea at her back and the city walls before her, the rower facing what she has already passed.

As she nears the breakwater, she pauses to bail the skiff with the earthenware jug, as Himerius used to do. Somewhere inside the city walls, a glow rises: a sunrise in the wrong place and time. Strange how suffering can look beautiful if you get far enough away.

She clings to the words of Himerius: When the tide is wrong, a current comes here that would sweep us straight out to sea. Now she needs the wrong tide to be right.

Just off the bow, in the swells beyond the breakwater, she glimpses a long, dark shape. A ship. Is it Saracen or Greek? Does its captain call to his rowers, do gunners ready their guns? She crouches as low as she can, flattens herself down into the hull, the sack on her chest, cold water seeping around her back, and it is here that Anna’s courage finally wanes. Fear comes slipping in from a thousand fissures: tentacles rise from the gloom on either side of the boat, and Kalaphates’s vulture eyes blink down from the starless sky.

Girls don’t go to tutors.

It was you? All along?

The current catches the little skiff and carries it. She thinks of how Aethon must have felt, trapped inside all those different bodies, unable to speak his own language, mistreated, derided—it was a horrible fate and she was cruel to laugh.

No one shouts and no arrows whistle past. The skiff turns, wobbles, and slips beyond the breakwater into the dark.

FOURTEEN

THE GATES OF CLOUD CUCKOO LAND

* * *

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio Ξ

Folios from the second half of the Diogenes codex are considerably more deteriorated than the first, and the gaps in the manuscript present significant challenges for both translator and reader. Folio Ξ has been at least sixty percent effaced. Illegible portions are indicated by ellipses and conjectural representations are delivered inside brackets. Translation by Zeno Ninis.