Cloud Cuckoo Land (16 page)

E
veryone studies the weltering skies; everyone grows uneasy. Out loud the teamsters say that the sultan is patient and generous, that he recognizes what he has asked of them, that in his wisdom he understands that the bombard will arrive at the battlefield when it is most needed. But after so much exertion, Omeir senses an unspoken agitation running through the men. The weather lurches from storm to storm; whips crack; resentments simmer. Sometimes he can feel men staring with naked suspicion at his face, and he becomes used to rising from the fire and stepping into the shadows.

An uphill section of road can take all day, but the descents cause the most trouble. Brakes snap, axles bend, the cattle bawl in terror and misery; more than once a jointed section of pole splinters and drives an ox to its knees, and every few days another bullock is butchered. Omeir tells himself that what they're doing—all this exertion, all these lives put to the task of moving the cannon—is right. A necessary campaign, the will of God. But at unpredictable moments homesickness buries him: a sharp, smoky scent, the nickering of someone's horse in the night, and it's there again—the dripping of the trees, the burble of the creek. Mother rendering beeswax over the hearth. Nida singing among the ferns. Arthritic, eight-toed Grandfather limping to the byre in his wooden shoes.

“But how will he ever find a wife?” Nida asked once. “With that face of his?”

“It's not going to be his face that stops them,” Grandfather said, “it'll be the odor of his toes,” and grabbed one of Omeir's feet and
brought it to his nose and took a big whiff, and everyone laughed, and Grandfather dragged the boy into a great embrace.

Eighteen days into their journey, several of the iron bands holding the monstrous cannon to the cart give way, and it rolls off. Everyone groans. The twenty-ton gun gleams in the clay like an instrument discarded by the gods.

As though on cue, it begins to rain. All afternoon they work to winch the cannon back onto the cart, and haul the cart back onto the road, and that night holy scholars move among the cookfires trying to raise morale. The people in the city, they say, cannot even raise horses properly and have to buy ours. They lie on plush couches all day; they train their miniature dogs to run about and lick each other's genitals. The siege will begin any day now, the scholars say, and the weapon that they pull will secure victory, click the wheels of fate in their favor. Because of their efforts, taking the city will be easier than peeling an egg. Easier than lifting a single hair from a cup of milk.

Smoke rises into the sky. As the men settle into sleep, Omeir feels a trickle of apprehension. He finds Moonlight just outside the firelight, trailing his halter rope.

“What is it?”

Moonlight leads him to where his brother stands beneath a tree, alone, favoring a hind leg.

Though the sultan has willed it and God has ordained it, to move something so heavy so far is, in the end, on the farthest threshold of what is possible. In the last miles, for every step forward, the train of oxen seems also to take a step downward through the earth, as though it travels not a road toward the Queen of Cities but a declivity into the underworld.

Despite Omeir's care, by the end of the journey Tree shows no
interest in putting weight on his left hind leg, and Moonlight can hardly raise his head, the twins pulling, it seems, just to please Omeir, as though the only thing left that matters to them is to meet this one demand, no matter how incomprehensible, because the boy has wished it so.

He walks beside them with tears in his eyes.

They reach the fields outside the land walls of Constantinople during the second week of April. Trumpets blare, cheers rise, and men rush to get a glimpse of the great cannon. In daydreams Omeir imagined countless different iterations of the city: claw-toed fiends pacing atop towers, hellhounds dragging chains below, but when they come round a final bend and he sees it for the first time, he gasps. Ahead lies a great waste crowded with tents, equipment, animals, fires, and soldiers, pressed up against a moat as wide as a river. On the far side of the moat, past a low scarp, the walls ride the land for miles in either direction like a series of silent and insuperable cliffs.

In the strange, smoky light, beneath a low gray sky, the walls look endless and pale, as though they safeguard a city made of bones. Even with the cannon, how could they ever penetrate such a barrier? They will be fleas jumping at the eye of an elephant. Ants at the foot of a mountain.

S
he is enlisted with several hundred other children to help shore up deteriorated sections of the walls. They haul paving stones, flagstones, even grave stones, and hand them up to bricklayers who mortar them into place. As though the whole city is being disassembled and rebuilt as an endless wall.

All day she lifts stones, carries buckets; among the masons working on scaffolding above her are a baker and two fishermen she recognizes. No one speaks the sultan's name aloud, as though saying it might cause his army to materialize inside the city. As the day wears on, a cold wind rises, the sun subsumed under swirls of cloud, and the spring afternoon feels like a winter night. Along the ramparts above them, barefoot monks carry a reliquary behind a crossbearer, chanting a low and somber song. Which, she wonders, will be more effective at keeping out invaders: mortar or prayer?

That night, the second of April, as the children drift back toward their homes, cold and hungry, Anna picks her way through the orchards near the Fifth Military Gate to the old archer's turret.

The postern is still there, full of debris. Six turns to the top. She yanks away a few creepers of ivy; the fresco of the silver and bronze city still floats among the clouds, gradually flaking away. On her tiptoes, Anna reaches to touch the donkey, eternally stuck on the wrong side of the sea, then climbs out the west-facing archer's loop.

What she sees, beyond the outer wall, beyond the fosse, turns
her cold. Groves and orchards like the ones she and Maria passed through a month before on their way to Saint Mary of the Spring have been hacked down and in their place stretches a wasteland bordered by wooden posts, sharpened at their ends and rammed into the earth like the teeth of enormous combs. Beyond the spike walls and palisades, which extend as far as she can see in both directions, lies a second city haloed around the first.

Thousands of Saracen tents flap out in the wind. Fires, camels, horses, carts, a great distant whirling blur of dust and men, all in quantities so large she does not possess the numerals to count them. How was it that old Licinius described the armies of the Greeks as they assembled outside the walls of Troy?

But ne'er till now such numbers charged a field:

Thick as autumnal leaves or driving sand,

The moving squadrons blacken all the strand.

The wind shifts and a thousand cookfires flare brighter, and a thousand banners flap on a thousand standards, and Anna's mouth goes dry. Even if a person were able to slip out a gate and try to flee, how would she ever pick her way through all that?

From a drawer in her memory comes something Widow Theodora once said:
We have provoked the Lord, child, and now he will open the ground beneath us.
She whispers a prayer to Saint Koralia that if there is any hope at all to send her a sign, and she watches and trembles, and the wind blows, and no stars show, and no sign comes.

The master has fled and the watchman is gone. The door to Widow Theodora's cell is barred. Anna takes a candle from the scullery cabinet—who do they belong to now?—and lights it in the hearth and lets herself into their cell, where Maria lies against the wall, thin as a needle. All her life she has been told to believe, tried to believe,
wanted to believe, that if a person suffers long enough, works hard enough, then she—like Ulysses washing up on the shore of the kingdom of brave Alcinous—will ultimately reach a better place. That through suffering we are redeemed. That by dying we live again. And maybe in the end that's the easier thing. But Anna is tired of suffering. And she is not ready to die.

Little wooden Saint Koralia watches her from her niche, two fingers raised. In the sputtering candlelight, wrapped in her headscarf, Anna reaches beneath the pallet, draws out the sack she collected with Himerius days before, and removes the various wads of damp paper. Harvest records, taxation records. Finally the little stained codex bound in goatskin.

Water stains splotch the leather; the edges of the folios are speckled black. But her heart jolts when she sees the writing on the leaves: neat, inclined to the left, as though leaning into a wind. Something about a sick niece and men walking the earth as beasts.

On the next leaf:

… a palace of golden towers stacked on clouds, ringed by falcons, redshanks, quails, moorhens, and cuckoos, where rivers of broth gushed from spigots, and…

She flips forward:

… this hair growing out of my legs—why, these aren't feathers! My mouth—it doesn't feel like a beak! And these aren't wings—they're hooves!

A dozen leaves farther on:

… I crossed mountain passes, rounded amber-bearing forests, staggered over mountains webbed with ice, to the frozen rim of the world, where on the solstice the people lost the sun for forty days, and they wept until
messengers on the mountaintops glimpsed the returning light…

Maria moans in her sleep. Anna shakes, shocks of recognition flashing through her. A city in the clouds. A donkey at the edge of the sea. An account that contains the entire world. And the mysteries beyond.

AT THE FROZEN RIM OF THE WORLD

1952–1953

I
n winter stalagmites of frozen urine reach up out of the latrines. The river freezes, the Chinese heat fewer bunkhouses, and the Americans and Brits are merged. Blewitt grumbles that they're already packed tighter than two coats of paint, but Zeno feels excitement as the British prisoners shuffle in. He and Rex meet each other's gaze, and soon their straw mats are next to each other, up against the wall, and every morning he wakes with the promise of finding Rex on the floor an arm's reach away, and the knowledge that there's nowhere else for either of them to go.

Each day, as they climb the frozen hills, cutting, collecting, and carrying brush for firewood, Rex produces a new lesson like a gift.

Γράφω,
gráphō
,
to scratch, draw, scrape, or write: the root of calligraphy, geography, photography.

Φωνή,
phōnḗ
, sound, voice, language: the root of symphony, saxophone, microphone, megaphone, telephone.

Θεός,
theós
: a god.

“Boil the words you already know down to their bones,” Rex says, “and usually you find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, staring back up.”

Who says such things? And still Zeno steals glances: Rex's mouth, his hair, his hands; there is the same pleasure in gazing at this man as in gazing at a fire.

Dysentery comes for Zeno as it does for all of them. The minute he returns from the latrine, he has to beg permission to go
back again. Blewitt says he'd carry Zeno to the camp hospital but the camp hospital is just a shed where so-called doctors cut open prisoners and put chicken livers inside their ribs to “cure them” and that he'd be better off dying right here so Blewitt can have his socks.

Soon he is too weak to even make it to the latrine. At his lowest point he curls on his mat, locked in a thiamine-deficiency paralysis, and believes he is eight years old again, at home, shivering atop the frozen lake in his funeral shoes, inching forward into the swirling white. Just ahead he glimpses a city studded with towers: it flickers and gutters. All he has to do is step forward and he'll reach its gates. But each time he tries, Athena tugs him back.

Sometimes he returns to awareness long enough to find Blewitt beside him, force-feeding him gruel and saying things like “Nuh-uh, no way, kid, you do not get to die, not without me.” At other hours it's Rex who sits beside him, wiping Zeno's forehead, the frames of his eyeglasses held together with rusted wire. With a fingernail, into the frost on the wall, he scratches a verse in Greek, as though drawing mysterious glyphs to scare away thieves.

As soon as he can walk, Zeno is forced back into his duty as a fireman. Some days he is too weak to carry his meager bundle more than a few paces before setting it down again. Rex squats beside him and with a piece of charcoal writes Ἄ
λφάβητος
on the trunk of a tree.

A is
ἄλφα
is alpha: the inverted head of an ox. Β is
βῆτα
is beta: based on the floor plan of a house.
Ω
is
ὦ μέγα
is omega, the mega O: a great whale's mouth opening to swallow all the letters before it.

Zeno says, “Alphabet.”

“Good. How about this?”

Rex writes, ὁ
νόστος.

Zeno rummages in the compartments of his mind.

“Nostos.”

“
Nostos
, yes. The act of homecoming, a safe arrival. Of course,
mapping a single English word onto a Greek one is almost always slippery. A
nostos
also means a song about a homecoming.”

Zeno rises, light-headed, and picks up his bundle.

Rex buttons his piece of charcoal into his pocket. “In a time,” he says, “when disease, war, and famine haunted practically every hour, when so many died before their time, their bodies swallowed by the sea or earth, or simply lost over the horizon, never to return, their fates unknown…” He gazes across the frozen fields to the low, dark buildings of Camp Five. “Imagine how it felt to hear the old songs about heroes returning home. To believe that it was possible.”

Out on the ice of the Yalu far below, the wind drives the snow in long, eddying swirls. Rex sinks deeper into his collar. “It's not so much the contents of the song. It's that the song was still being sung.”

Singular and plural, noun stems and verb cases: Rex's enthusiasm for ancient Greek carries them through the worst hours. One February night, after dark, huddled around the fire in the kitchen shed, Rex uses his piece of charcoal to scratch two lines of Homer onto a board and passes it over.

τὸν δὲ θεοὶ μὲν τεῦξαν, ἐπεκλώσαντο δ᾽ ὄλεθρον ἀνθρώποις, ἵνα ᾖσι καὶ ἐσσομένοισιν ἀοιδή

Through gaps in the shed walls, stars hang above the mountains. Zeno feels the cold at his back, the light pressure of Rex's frame against his own: they are hardly more than skeletons.

θεοὶ
is the gods, nominative plural.

ἐπεκλώσαντο
means they spun, aorist indicative.

ἀνθρώποις
is for men, dative plural.

Zeno breathes, the fire sputters, the walls of the shed fall away, and in a crease of his mind, unreachable by the guards, hunger, or pain, the meaning of the verse ascends through the centuries.

“
That's what the gods do
,” he says, “
they spin threads of ruin
through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come
.”

Rex looks at the Greek on the board, at Zeno, back at the Greek. He shakes his head. “Well, that's just brilliant. Absolutely bloody brilliant.”