* * *

For returning late, Widow Theodora beats the sole of Anna’s left foot with the bastinado. For returning with one of the jugs half-empty, she beats the right. Ten strokes on each. Anna hardly cries. Half the night she inscribes letters across the surfaces of her mind, and all the following day, as she hobbles up and down the stairs, as she carries water, as she fetches eels for Chryse the cook, she sees the island kingdom of Alcinous, wreathed with clouds and blessed by the west wind, teeming with apples, pears, and olives, blue figs and red pomegranates, boys of gold on shining pedestals with burning torches in their hands.

Two weeks later she is coming back from the market, going out of her way to pass the rooming house, when she spies the goitrous tutor sitting in the sun like a potted plant. She sets down her basket of onions and with a finger in the dust writes,

Ὠκεανός

Around it she draws a circle.

“Eldest son of Sky and Earth. Here the known. Here the unknown.”

The man strains his head to one side and swivels his gaze to her, as though seeing her for the first time, and the wet in his eyes catches the light.

His name is Licinius. Before his misfortunes, he says, he served as tutor to a wealthy family in a city to the west, and he owned six books and an iron box to hold them: two lives of the saints, a book of orations by Horace, a testament of the miracles of Saint Elisabeth, a primer on Greek grammar, and Homer’s Odyssey. But then the Saracens captured his town, and he fled to the capital with nothing, and thank the angels in heaven for the city walls, whose foundation stones were laid by the Mother of God Herself.

From inside his coat Licinius produces three mottled bundles of parchment. Ulysses, he says, was once a general in the greatest army ever assembled, whose legions came from Hyrmine, from Dulichium, from the walled cities of Cnossos and Gortyn, from the farthest reaches of the sea, and they crossed the ocean in a thousand black ships to sack the fabled city of Troy, and from each ship spilled a thousand warriors, as innumerable, Licinius says, as the leaves in the trees, or as the flies that swarm over buckets of warm milk in shepherds’ stalls. For ten years they sieged Troy, and after they finally took it, the weary legions sailed home, and all arrived safely except Ulysses. The entire song of his journey home, Licinius explains, consisted of twenty-four books, one for each letter of the alphabet, and took several days to recite, but all Licinius has left are these three quires, each containing a half-dozen pages, relating the sections where Ulysses leaves the cave of Calypso, is broken by a storm, and washes up naked on the island of Scheria, home of brave Alcinous, lord of the Phaeacians.

There was a time, he continues, when every child in the empire knew every player in Ulysses’s story. But long before Anna was born, Latin Crusaders from the west burned the city, killing thousands, and stripped away much of its wealth. Then plagues halved the population, and halved it again, and the empress at the time had to sell her crown to Venice to pay her garrisons, and the current emperor wears a crown made of glass and can hardly afford the plates he eats from, and now the city limps through a long twilight, waiting for the second coming of Christ, and no one has time for the old stories anymore.

Anna’s attention remains fixed on the leaves in front of her. So many words! It would take seven lifetimes to learn them all.

* * *

Every time Chryse the cook sends Anna to the market, the girl finds a reason to visit Licinius. She brings him crusts of bread, a smoked fish, half a hoop of thrushes; twice she manages to steal a jug of Kalaphates’s wine.

In return, he teaches. A is ἄλφα is alpha; B is βῆτα is beta; Ω is ὦ μέγα is omega. As she sweeps the workroom floor, as she lugs another roll of fabric or another bucket of charcoal, as she sits in the workroom beside Maria, fingers numb, breath pluming over the silk, she practices her letters on the thousand blank pages of her mind. Each sign signifies a sound, and to link sounds is to form words, and to link words is to construct worlds. Weary Ulysses sets forth upon his raft from the cave of Calypso; the spray of the ocean wets his face; the shadow of the sea-god, kelp streaming from his blue hair, flashes beneath the surface.

“You fill your head with useless things,” whispers Maria. But knotted chain stitches, cable chain stitches, petal chain stitches—Anna will never learn it. Her most consistent skill with a needle seems to be accidentally pricking a fingertip and bleeding onto the cloth. Her sister says she should imagine the holy men who will perform the divine mysteries wearing the vestments she helped decorate, but Anna’s mind is constantly veering off to islands on the fringe of the sea where sweet springs run and goddesses streak down from the clouds upon a beam of light.

“Saints help me,” says Widow Theodora, “will you ever learn?” Anna is old enough to understand the precariousness of their situation: she and Maria have no family, no money; they belong to no one and maintain their place in the house of Kalaphates only because of Maria’s talent with a needle. The best life either of them can hope for is to sit at one of these tables embroidering crosses and angels and foliage into copes and chalice veils and chasubles from dawn until dusk until their spines are humped and their eyes give out.

Monkey. Mosquito. Hopeless. Yet she cannot stop.

* * *

“One word at a time.”

Once more she studies the muddle of marks on the parchment.

πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω

“I can’t.”

“You can.”

Ἄστεα are cities; νόον is mind; ἔγνω is learned.

She says, “He saw the cities of many men and learned their ways.”

The mass on Licinius’s neck quakes as his mouth curls into a smile.

“That’s it. That’s it exactly.”

Almost overnight, the streets glow with meaning. She reads inscriptions on coins, on cornerstones and tombstones, on lead seals and buttress piers and marble plaques embedded into the defensive walls—each twisting lane of the city a great battered manuscript in its own right.

Words glow on the chipped rim of a plate Chryse the cook keeps beside the hearth: Zoe the Most Pious. Over the entrance to a little forgotten chapel: Peace be to thee whoever enterest with gentle heart. Her favorite is chiseled into the lintel above the watchman’s door beside the Saint Theophano gate and takes her half of a Sunday to puzzle out:

Stop, ye thieves, robbers, murderers, horsemen and soldiers, in all humility, for we have tasted the rosy blood of Jesus.

The last time Anna sees Licinius, a cold wind is blowing, and his complexion is the color of a rainstorm. His eyes leak, the bread she has brought him remains untouched, and the goiter on his neck seems a more sinister creature entirely, inflamed and florid, as though tonight it will devour his face at last.

Today, he says, they will work on μῦθος, mýthos, which means a conversation or something said, but also a tale or a story, a legend from the time of the old gods, and he is explaining how it’s a delicate, mutable word, that it can suggest something false and true at the same time, when his attention frays.