She squirms away from him. Maybe this creature, too, is alone. Maybe she also has abandoned some post. When he notices that she is crawling toward an object at the base of a tree, he steps in and takes up her sack and she riots. Inside is a little ornamental box and a bundle wrapped in what might be silk—impossible to tell in the dark. She rolls again to her knees, screeching curses in her language, then emits a scream so high and plaintive that it seems more lamb than human.

Terror rockets up his spine. “Please be quiet.” He imagines her scream traveling out through the trees in every direction: across the dark body of water ahead, down the roads leading to the city, directly into the ear of the sultan.

He pushes the sack closer to her and she grabs it with her bound wrists, then staggers again. She is weak. It was hunger that drew her.

Omeir places what’s left of the still-warm bird on the ground near her and she picks it up with her teeth and eats like a dog and in the quiet he tries to gather his thoughts. They are far too close to the city. Any moment men, either beaten or triumphant, will come through here on horses. She will be taken as a slave and he will be hanged for desertion. But, he considers, if they find the two of them together, maybe the girl can serve as a kind of shield: a prize he has won. Maybe, traveling with her, he will draw less suspicion than if he were alone.

Her eyes stay fixed on him as she sucks the partridge bones and a breeze rises and the still-new leaves tremble in the darkness. As he tears a strip from his linen shirt a memory ambushes him: of standing with Grandfather in morning light, their trousers wet to the knees with dew, fitting Moonlight and Tree to their first yoke.

The girl remains still and does not scream as he ties the linen over the wound on her head. Then he hitches Moonlight’s lead to the halter binding her hands. “Come,” he whispers. “We must go.”

He puts her sack over his shoulder and pulls her by the lead as though she were a recalcitrant donkey. They pick their way around the rushes fringing a broad wetland, the girl stumbling now and then as the sun rises behind them. In the early light he finds a patch of brown-capped hog mushrooms and squats in their midst eating the caps.

He holds some out to her and she watches him for a bit, then eats as well. The bandage seems to have staunched the bleeding and the blood on her neck and throat has dried to the color of rusted iron. In the noon light they give wide berth to a burned village. A pack of five or six skeletal dogs rushes them and draws dangerously close before Omeir drives them off with stones.

* * *

By evening they traverse a landscape pocked with ruins—orchards raided, dovecotes emptied, vineyards burned. When he kneels beside creeks to drink, she does too. Just before nightfall they discover peas in a half-trampled garden and eat, and well after midnight, he finds a little hollow inside a hedgerow beside an unplanted field and secures her lead around the trunk of a cypress. She looks at him, her eyelids slipping, and he watches sleep overcome her terror.

In the moonlight he drags the sack away from her and removes the snuffbox. It’s empty, smells of tobacco. A scene Omeir cannot quite make out is painted on the lid. A tall house beneath a sky. Perhaps it is her home?

The bundle is wrapped in dark silk, embroidered with blossoms and birds, and inside is a stack of animal skin stripped of hair, beaten flat, trimmed into rectangles, and bound along one edge. A book. Its leaves are damp and smell like fungus and their surfaces are covered with glyphs in neat lines and upon seeing them he is afraid.

He remembers a tale Grandfather once told about a book left behind by the old gods when they fled the earth. The book, Grandfather said, was locked inside a golden box, which was in turn locked inside a bronze box, then inside an iron box, inside a wooden chest, and the gods placed the chest at the bottom of a lake, and set water-dragons a hundred feet long swimming around it that not even the bravest men could kill. But if you ever could retrieve the book, Grandfather said, and read it, you would understand the languages of the birds in the sky and of the crawling things beneath the ground and if you were a spirit you would resume again the shape you had on earth.

Omeir rewraps the parcel with trembling hands and re-stores it inside the sack and studies the sleeping girl in the moon shadow. The bite mark on his hand throbs. Could she be a ghost made flesh again? Could the book she carries contain the magic of the old gods? But if her witchcraft were so powerful, why would she be alone, desperate enough to steal his partridge from his fire? Couldn’t she have simply turned him into a meal and eaten him? Turned all the sultan’s soldiers into beetles, for that matter, and stomped them dead?

Besides, he tries to reassure himself, Grandfather’s stories were just stories.

The night wanes and he longs to be home. In another hour the sun will rise over the mountain, and his mother will pick her way through the mossy boulders to fill the kettle at the creek. Grandfather will restart the fire, and the sun will send shadows quivering through the ravine, and Nida will sigh beneath her blanket, chasing one last dream. Omeir imagines climbing into the warmth beside his sister and twining his limbs with hers as they did when they were little, and when he wakes it is late morning and the girl has untied herself and she is holding her sack and standing over him, studying the gap in his upper lip.

* * *

After that he does not bother to bind her wrists. They move northwest along undulating plains, hurrying across open fields from copse to copse, the road to Edirne occasionally coming into view far to the northeast. The wound on the girl’s head no longer weeps and she seems to never tire, while Omeir has to rest every hour or so, fatigue sunk into his marrow, and sometimes as he walks he hears the creak of the wagons and the bellowing of animals, and senses Moonlight and Tree beside him, huge and docile beneath the beam of their yoke.

By their fourth morning together, they grow dangerously hungry. Even the girl stumbles every few steps and he knows they cannot go much farther without food. At midday he spies dust rising behind them and they crouch off the road in a little brake of thorns and wait.

First come two banner men, blades knocking against their saddles, the very image of conquerors returning. Then drivers with pack camels loaded with plunder: rolled carpets, bulging sacks, a torn Greek ensign. Behind the camels in loose double-file through the dust march twenty bound women and girls. One howls with grief while the others shuffle in silence, their hair uncovered, and their faces betray a wretchedness that makes Omeir look away.

Behind the women a rawboned ox pulls a wagon crowded with marble statuary: the torsos of angels; a robed and curly headed philosopher with his nose flaked off; a single enormous foot, bone white in the June light. Finally in the rear rides an archer with a shield slung across his back and a bow across his saddle, murmuring a song to himself or to his horse, looking off into the fields as they pass. Across the rump of his horse a little slain goat is tied, and seeing it, hunger vaults inside Omeir. He rises and is about to step out of the brake to call to them when he feels the girl’s hand on his arm.

She sits holding her sack, arms scratched, head shorn, desperation written into every line of her face. Little brown birds rustle in the thorns above his head. She taps her chest with two fingers and stares at him, and his heart pounds, and he sits, and in another minute the wagons are past.

* * *