The wind lifts one of the quires from his fingers and Anna chases it down and brushes it off and returns it to his lap. Licinius rests his eyelids a long time. “Repository,” he finally says, “you know this word? A resting place. A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.”

His eyes open very widely then, as though he peers into a great darkness.

“But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”

He winces, and his breathing comes slow and ragged. Leaves scrape down the lane and bright clouds stream above the rooftops and several packhorses pass, their riders bundled against the cold, and she shivers. Should she fetch the housekeeper? The bloodletter?

Licinius’s arm rises; in the claw of his hand are the three battered quires.

“No, Teacher,” says Anna. “Those are yours.”

But he pushes them into her hands. She glances down the lane: the rooming house, the wall, the rattling trees. She says a prayer and tucks the leaves of parchment inside her dress.

Omeir

The oldest daughter dies of worms, fever takes the middle one, but the boy grows. At three, he can hold himself upright on the sledge as Leaf and Needle clear, then plow a hayfield. At four, he can fill the kettle at the creek and lug it through the boulders to the one-room stone house Grandfather has built. Twice his mother pays the farrier’s wife to travel nine miles upriver from the village to stitch together the gap in the boy’s lip with a needle and twine and twice the project fails. The cleft, which extends through his upper mandible into his nose, does not close. But though his inner ears sometimes burn, and his jaw sometimes aches, and broth regularly escapes his mouth and dribbles onto his clothes, he is sturdy, quiet, and never ill.

His earliest memories are three:

1. Standing in the creek between Leaf and Needle as they drink, watching drops fall from their huge round chins and catch the light.

2. His sister Nida grimacing over him as she prepares to jab a stick into his upper lip.

3. Grandfather unbuckling the bright pink body of a pheasant from its feathers, as though undressing it, and spitting it over the hearth.

The few children he manages to meet make him play the monsters when they act out the adventures of Bulukiya and ask him if it’s true that his face can cause mares to miscarry and wrens to drop from the sky mid-flight. But they also show him how to find quail eggs and which holes in the river hold the largest trout, and they point out a half-hollow black yew growing from a karst bluff high above the ravine which they say harbors evil spirits and can never die.

Many of the woodcutters and their wives won’t come near him. More than once a merchant, traveling along the river, spurs his horse up through the trees rather than risk passing Omeir on the road. If a stranger has ever looked at him without fear or suspicion, he cannot remember it.

His favorite days come in summer, when the trees dance in the wind and the moss glows emerald green on the boulders and swallows chase each other through the ravine. Nida sings as she takes the goats to graze, and their mother lies on a stone above the creek, her mouth open, as though inhaling the light, and Grandfather takes his nets and pots of birdlime and leads Omeir high on the mountain to trap birds.

Though his spine is hunched and he’s missing two toes, Grandfather moves quickly, and Omeir has to take two strides for every one of his. As they climb, Grandfather proselytizes about the superiority of oxen: how they’re calmer and steadier than horses, how they don’t need oats, how their dung doesn’t scorch barley like horse dung does, how they can be eaten when they’re old, how they mourn each other when one dies, how if they lie on their left side it means fair weather is coming but if they lie on their right it means rain. The beech forests give way to pine, and the pines give way to gentians and primrose, and by evening Grandfather has caught a dozen grouse with his snares.

At dusk they stop for the night in a boulder-strewn glade, and the dogs swirl around them, testing the air for wolves, and Omeir starts a fire and Grandfather dresses and roasts four of the grouse, and the ridges of the mountains below fall away in a cascade of deepening blues. They eat, the fire burns to embers, Grandfather drinks from a gourd of plum brandy, and with the purest happiness the boy waits, feels it trundling toward him like a lamplit cart, full of cakes and honey, about to round a bend in the road.

“Have I ever told you,” Grandfather will say, “about the time I climbed on the back of a giant beetle and visited the moon?”

Or: “Have I ever told you about my journey to the island made of rubies?”

He tells Omeir about a glass city, far to the north, where everyone speaks in whispers so they don’t break anything; he says he once turned into an earthworm and tunneled his way to the underworld. The tales always end with Grandfather’s safe return to the mountain, having survived another terrifying and wondrous adventure, and the embers burn to ash, and Grandfather begins to snore, and Omeir looks up into the night and wonders what worlds drift among the faraway lights of the stars.

When he asks his mother if beetles can fly all the way to the moon or if Grandfather ever spent an entire year inside a sea monster, she smiles and says that as far as she knows, Grandfather has never left the mountain, and now could Omeir please concentrate on helping her render the beeswax?

Still the boy often wanders alone up the trail to the half-hollow yew on the bluff, climbs into its branches, peers down at the river where it disappears around the bend, and imagines the adventures that might lay beyond: forests where trees walk; deserts where men with horse-bodies run as fast as swifts fly; a realm at the top of the earth where the seasons end and sea dragons swim between mountains of ice and a race of blue giants lives forever.

* * *

He’s ten when Beauty, the family’s swaybacked old cow, goes into labor for the final time. For most of an afternoon, two little hooves, dripping with mucus and steaming in the cold, stick out beneath the raised arch of her tail, and Beauty grazes as though nothing in the world has ever changed, and eventually she gives a spasm and a mud-brown calf slides the rest of the way out.

Omeir takes a step forward but Grandfather tugs him back, a question on his face. Beauty licks her calf, its little body rocking beneath the weight of her tongue, and Grandfather whispers a prayer, and a gentle rain falls, and the calf does not stand.

Then he sees what Grandfather saw. A second pair of hooves has appeared beneath Beauty’s tail. A snout with a little pink tongue stuck between its jaws soon joins the hooves, followed by a single eye, and finally a second calf—this one gray—is born.

Twins. Both males.

Almost as soon as the gray calf touches the ground, he stands and begins to nurse. The brown one keeps its chin planted. “Something wrong with that one,” whispers Grandfather, and curses the breeder who charged him for the services of his bull, but Omeir decides the calf is just taking his time. Trying to solve this strange new mix of gravity and bones.

The gray one suckles on its bent-twig legs; the firstborn remains wet and folded in the ferns. Grandfather sighs, but just then the first calf stands, and takes a step toward them as if to say, “Which of you doubted me?” and Grandfather and Omeir laugh, and the family’s wealth is doubled.