Cloud Cuckoo Land (25 page)

T
hat same afternoon the ox train is rumbling toward the Golden Horn to collect yet another load of stone cannonballs, a hundred yards from the landing stage, the air rinsed clean by the morning's storm, the estuary blue-green and aglitter with sunlight, when Moonlight—not Tree—stops in his tracks, tucks his forelegs under his body, lowers himself to the ground, and dies.

He is dragged forward a body length and the train stops.

Tree stands in his harness, his three good legs splayed, the yoke cocked against the weight of his brother. Red spume leaks from Moonlight's nostrils; a little white petal, carried on the breeze, sticks to his open eye. Omeir leans into the harness, tries to lend his little strength to the bullock's great one, but the animal's heart no longer beats.

The other teamsters, accustomed to seeing animals fail in the yoke, squat or sit on the edge of the road. The quartermaster shouts toward the quay and four porters start up from the docks.

Tree bends to make it easier for Omeir to remove the yoke. The porters and four teamsters, two on each leg, drag Moonlight to the edge of the road, and the oldest among them gives thanks to God, draws his knife, and opens the animal's throat.

Halter and rope in one hand, Omeir leads Tree down a cattle trail into the rushes at the edge of the Bosporus. Through the dazzle of sunlight swim memories of Moonlight as a little calf. He liked to scratch his ribs against one particular pine tree beside the byre. He loved to wade into the creek up to his belly and call to his brother in delight. He wasn't very good at hide-and-seek. He was frightened of bees.

Tree's hide shivers up and down his back and a mantle of flies
takes off and settles again. From here the city and its girdle of walls look small, a pale stone beneath the sky.

A few hundred paces away, two porters build a fire while the two others disassemble Moonlight, carving off his head, cutting away the tongue, spitting the heart, liver, and each of the kidneys. They wrap the thigh muscles in fat and secure them to pikes, and lean the pikes over the fire, and bargemen and stevedores and teamsters walk up the road in groups and squat on their heels as the meat cooks. At Omeir's feet hundreds of little blue butterflies sip minerals from a patch of tidal mud.

Moonlight: his ropy tail, his shaggy cloven hooves. God knits him together in the womb of Beauty beside his brother and he lives for three winters and dies hundreds of miles from home and for what? Tree lies down in the reeds and fouls the air around him and Omeir wonders what the animal understands and what will happen to Moonlight's two beautiful horns and every breath sends another crack through his heart.

That evening the guns fire seemingly nonstop, battering the towers and walls, and the men are ordered to light as many torches, candles, and cookfires as possible. Omeir helps two teamsters fell olive trees and drag them to a great bonfire. The sultan's ulema move between the fires delivering encouragement. “The Christians,” they say, “are devious and arrogant. They worship bones and die for mummies. They cannot sleep unless it's on feather beds and cannot go an hour without wine. They think the city is theirs, but it already belongs to us.”

Night becomes like day. Moonlight's flesh travels the intestines of fifty men. Grandfather, Omeir thinks, would have known what to do. He would have recognized the early signals of lameness, would have taken better care of Moonlight's hooves, would have known some remedy involving herbs and ointment and beeswax. Grandfather, who could see signs of game birds where Omeir saw nothing, who could steer Leaf and Needle with a click of his tongue.

He shuts his eyes against the smoke and remembers a story a teamster told in the fields outside Edirne about a man in hell. The devils there, the teamster said, would cut the man every morning, many thousands of times, but the cuts were just small enough that they would not kill him. All day the wounds would dry, and scab over, and the next morning, just as the cuts began to heal, they were opened up again.

After morning prayer he goes to find Tree in the pasture where he has staked him and the ox cannot get up. He lies on his side, one horn pointing to the sky. The world has swallowed his brother and Tree is ready to join him. Omeir kneels and runs his hands over the bullock's flank and watches the reflection of the sky quake in the bullock's trembling eye.

Does Grandfather look up this morning at this same cloud, and Nida, and their mother, and he and Tree, all five of them looking up at this same drifting white shape as it passes over them all?

C
hurch bells no longer keep the hours. She drifts through the scullery, the hunger in her gut a snake uncoiling, then stands in the open doorway looking at the sky above the courtyard. Himerius used to say that as long as the moon was getting larger, the world could never end. But now it wanes.

“First,” Widow Theodora whispers into the hearth, “wars rage among the peoples of the earth. Then the false prophets rise. Soon the planets will fall from the sky, followed by the sun, and everyone will become ash.”

Maria's legs are discolored now, and she has to be carried to the toilet. They are in the last parts of the codex, and some leaves are so deteriorated that Anna can make out only one line of text for every three. Still she keeps Aethon's journey going for her sister. The crow flaps through the void, tumbling through the Zodiac.

From these Icarian heights, my feathers powdered with the dust of the stars, I saw the earth far below as it really was, a little mud-heap in a great vastness, its kingdoms only cobwebs, its armies only crumbs. Storm-broken and singed, worn out and wind-plucked, half my feathers lost, I drifted among the constellations at the end of hope, when I glimpsed a distant glow, a golden filigree of towers, the puff of clouds—

The text peters out, the lines dissolved beneath a water stain, but for her sister Anna conjures it: a city made of silver and bronze towers, windows glowing, banners flapping from rooftops, birds of every size and color wheeling round. The weary crow spirals down out of the stars.

Cannonballs thud in the distance. The flame of the candle bows.

“He never stops believing,” whispers Maria. “Even when he is so tired.”

Anna blows out the candle and closes the codex. She thinks of Ulysses washing onto the island of the Phaeacians. “He could smell jasmine among the stars,” she says, “and violets, and laurel, and roses, grapes and pears, apples upon apples, figs on figs.”

“I smell them, Anna.”

Beside the icon of Saint Koralia sits the little snuffbox she took from the abandoned workshop of the Italians, its cracked lid painted with a miniature of a turreted palace. There are men in Urbino, the scribes said, who make lenses that let you see thirty miles. Men who can draw a lion so real it looks as though it will walk off the page and eat you.

Our master dreams of constructing a library to surpass the pope's, they said, a library to contain every text ever written. To last until the end of time.

Maria dies on the twenty-seventh of May, the women of the household praying around her. Anna sets a palm on her sister's forehead and feels the heat leave her. “When you see her again,” Widow Theodora says, “she'll be clothed in light.” Chryse lifts Maria's body as easily as she might lift a piece of linen dried stiff in the sun, and carries her across the courtyard to the gates of Saint Theophano.

Anna rolls up the samite hood—five finished birds entwined by blooming vines. In some other universe, perhaps, a great bright community weeps: their mother and father, aunts and cousins, a little chapel packed with spring roses, a thousand organ pipes resounding with song, Maria's soul afloat among cherubs, grapevines, and peacocks—like a design from one of her embroideries.

In the
katholikon
at Saint Theophano nuns keep a nonstop vigil of prayer rising toward the throne of God. One points to where Chryse should set the body, and another covers Maria with a shroud, and Anna sits on the stones beside her sister while a priest is fetched.

A
fter the death of his oxen, time disintegrates. He is sent to work behind the latrines with conscripted Christian boys and Indian slaves, burning the feces of the army. They dump the slop into pits, then throw hot pitch on top, and he and a few of the older boys use poles to stir the vile, smoking mess, the poles burning down from the tips, so that they grow ever shorter. The smell saturates his clothes, his hair, his skin, and soon Omeir has more than his face to make men scowl.

Birds of prey wheel overhead; big, merciless flies besiege them; outside the tents, as May tips toward June, there is no shade. The great cannon they worked so hard to bring here finally cracks, and the defenders of the city give up trying to repair their battered stockades, and everyone can sense the fate of the conflict tilting on a fulcrum. Either the starving city will capitulate, or the Ottomans will retreat before disease and hopelessness sweep through their camps.

The boys in Omeir's company say that the sultan, may God bless and keep his kingdom, believes the decisive moment has come. The walls have been weakened at multiple spots, the defenders are exhausted, and a final assault will tip the balance. The best fighters, they say, will be held at the back while the least-equipped and least-trained among them are sent first across the fosse to soften the city's defenses. We'll be caught, one boy whispers, between a hailstorm of stones from the ramparts above and the whips of the sultan's Chavushes behind. But another boy says that God will see them through, and that if they die their rewards in the next life will extend beyond number.

Omeir shuts his eyes. How grand it all felt when the curious would stop and gape at the size of Tree and Moonlight; when men came by the thousands with the hope of setting a finger to the gleaming cannon.
A way for a small thing to destroy a much larger thing.
But what is it that they have destroyed?

Maher sits beside him and unsheathes his knife and picks at rust along its blade with a fingernail. “I hear that we will be sent tomorrow. At sundown.” Both of Maher's oxen have long since died too, and deep hollows haunt his eyes. “It will be wonderful,” he says, though he sounds unconvinced. “We will strike terror into their hearts.”

Around them the sons of farmers sit holding shields, clubs, javelins, axes, horseman's hammers—even stones. Omeir is so tired. It will be a relief to die. He thinks of the Christians sitting up on the walls, and the people praying inside the houses and churches of the city, and he wonders at the mystery of how one god can manage the thoughts and terrors of so many.

A
t night she rejoins the crews of women and girls in the terrace between the inner and outer walls, hauling stones to the parapets so that they can be dropped onto the heads of the Saracens when they come. Everyone is hungry and under-rested; no one sings hymns or murmurs encouragements anymore. Just before midnight, monks haul a hydraulic organ up to the top of the outer wall and play an awful, screeching caterwaul, like the moans of a great beast dying in the night.

How do men convince themselves that others must die so they might live? She thinks of Maria, who owned so little and who left so quietly, and of Licinius telling her about the Greeks camped outside the walls of Troy for ten years, and of the Trojan women trapped inside, weaving and worrying, wondering whether they would ever walk the fields or swim in the sea again, or whether the gates would fall, and they would have to watch their babies be tossed over the ramparts to die.

She works until dawn and when she returns, Chryse tells her to wait in the courtyard, then reappears from the scullery with a wooden chair in one hand and Widow Theodora's bone-handled scissors in the other. Anna sits and Chryse pulls back her hair and opens the blades and for a moment Anna worries the old cook is about to cut her throat.

“Tonight or tomorrow,” Chryse says, “the city will fall.”

Anna hears the blades rasp, feels her hair falling onto her feet.

“You're sure?”

“I have dreamed it, child. And when it does, the soldiers will take
everything they can get their hands on. Food, silver, silk. But the most valuable thing will be girls.”

Anna has a vision of the young sultan somewhere among the tents of his men, seated on a carpet with a model of the city in his lap, probing it with one finger, searching each tower, each crenellation, each battered section of the walls for a way in.

“They'll strip you to the skin and either keep you for themselves or bring you to a market and sell you. Our side or theirs, it is always the same in war. Do you know how I know this?”

The blades flash so near to her eyes that Anna is afraid to turn her head.

“Because that is what happened with me.”

Her hair newly shorn, Anna eats six green apricots and lies down with a stomachache and tumbles into sleep. In a nightmare she walks the floor of a vast atrium with a vaulted ceiling so high it seems to hold up the sky. On tiers of shelves running down either side are stacked hundreds upon hundreds of texts, like a library of the gods, but each time she opens a book, she finds it full of words in languages she does not know, incomprehensible word after incomprehensible word in book after book on shelf after shelf. She walks and walks, and it's always the same, the library indecipherable and infinite, the sound of her footsteps tiny in all that immensity.

Dusk descends on the fifty-fifth evening of the siege. In the imperial palace of the Blachernae, tucked against the Golden Horn, the emperor gathers his captains around him in prayer. Up and down the outer walls, sentries count arrows, stoke fires beneath great pitchers of tar. Just beyond the fosse, inside the private tent of the sultan, a servant lights seven tapers, one for each of the heavens, and withdraws, and the young sovereign kneels to pray.

On the Fourth Hill of the city, above the once-great embroidery house of Kalaphates, a flock of gulls, soaring high over the roof, catches the last glow of the sun. Anna rises from her pallet, surprised to see that she has slept away the daylight.

In the scullery the embroideresses who are left, none younger than fifty, step away from the hearth so that Chryse can shove the pieces of a sewing table into the fire.

Widow Theodora comes inside with an armful of what looks to Anna like deadly nightshade. She strips away the leaves, drops the shiny black berries into a basin, and puts the roots into a mortar. As she crushes the roots, Widow Theodora tells them that their bodies are just dust, that all their lives their souls have yearned toward a more distant place. Now that they're close, Widow Theodora says, their souls quiver with joy at the prospect of leaving the shells of their bodies behind to come home to God.

The last blue light of day is sucked away into night. In the firelight the faces of the women take on ancient suffering that is almost sublime: as though they suspected all along that things would end like this and are resigned to it. Chryse calls Anna into the storeroom and lights a candle. She hands her a few strips of salted sturgeon and a loaf of dark bread wrapped in cloth.

“If any child ever born,” Chryse whispers, “can outsmart them, outlast them, or outrun them, it is you. There is still life to be had. Go tonight, and I will send prayers at your heels.”

She can hear Widow Theodora, out in the scullery, say, “We leave our bodies behind in this world so that we may take flight into the next.”