Cloud Cuckoo Land (37 page)

In a child's cursive, beneath the crossed-out lines, Aethon's new line is handwritten in the margin, “The world as it is is enough.”

THE GREEN BEAUTY OF

THE BROKEN WORLD

1453–1494

T
hey live in the cottage the boy's grandfather built: stone walls, stone hearth, a peeled log for a ridge beam, thatch roof full of mice. Fourteen years of dung and straw and bits of food have compacted the dirt floor into something resembling concrete. No images hang inside, and only the simplest of ornaments adorn the bodies of his mother and sister: an iron ring, an agate strung on a piece of cord. Their crockery is heavy and plain, their leather untanned. The purpose of everything, from pots to people, seems to be to survive as long as possible, and anything that is not durable is not valued.

A few days after Anna and Omeir arrive, the boy's mother walks along the creek and digs up a pouch of coins and the boy heads alone down the river road and returns four days later with a castrated bull and a donkey on its last legs. With the bull he manages to plow an overgrown series of terraces above the cottage and plant some August barley.

The boy's mother and sister regard her with as much interest as they might a broken jar. And indeed, during those first months, what use is she? She can't understand the simplest directives, can't get the goat to stand still for milking, doesn't know how to care for fowls or make curds or harvest honey or bundle hay or irrigate the terraces above the cottage. Most days she feels like a thirteen-year-old infant, incapable of all but the very simplest tasks.

But the boy! He shares his food with her, murmurs to her in his strange language; he seems, as Chryse the cook might have said, as patient as Job and as gentle as a fawn. He teaches her how to check the barley for aphids, how to clean trout for smoking, how to fill the
kettle at the creek without getting sediment in the water. Sometimes she finds him alone in the wooden byre, touching old bird snares and spring-nets, or standing on a terrace above the river, three big white stones at his feet, with a stricken look on his face.

If she is his possession, he does not treat her as such. He teaches her the words for milk, water, fire, and dog; in the dark he sleeps beside her but does not touch her. On her feet she wears an outsize pair of wooden clogs that belonged to the boy's grandfather, and his mother helps her make a new dress from homespun wool, and the leaves turn yellow, and the moon waxes and wanes again.

One morning, frost sparkling in the trees, his sister and mother load the donkey with jars of honey, wrap themselves in cloaks, and head upriver. As soon as they round the bend, the boy calls Anna into the byre. He wraps pieces of honeycomb in a cheesecloth and sets it to boil. When the wax is rendered, he lifts out the cakes and mashes them into a paste. Then he unrolls a piece of oxhide across the crude table, and together they work the still-warm beeswax into the leather. When all the wax has been worked in, he rolls the hide and tucks it under his arm and beckons her up a faint trail at the head of the ravine to the old half-hollow yew on the bluff.

In daylight, the tree is magnificent: its trunk swirls with ten thousand intertwined gnarls; dozens of low branches, decked with bright red berries, eddy toward the ground like snakes. The boy clambers up through the limbs, squeezes himself into the hollow part of the trunk, and emerges holding Himerius's sack.

Together they examine the silk hood and snuffbox and book to make sure they're still dry. Then he unrolls the newly waxed oxhide across the ground, wraps the box and book with the silk inside the hide, and ties the whole thing shut. He stows it back inside the tree, and Anna understands that this will be their secret, that the manuscript, like the boy's face, will be feared and mistrusted, and she remembers the flaring pits of Kalaphates's eyes, his rage and exultation as he held Maria's unconscious face to the hearth and burned Licinius's quires to ash.

She learns the words for home, cold, pine, kettle, bowl, and hand. Mole, mouse, otter, horse, hare, hunger. By the time for spring planting, she is grasping nuance. To brag is to “pretend to be two and a half.” To get into trouble is to “wade into the onions.” The boy has multiple expressions for the various feelings one experiences in the rain: most convey wretchedness, but several do not. One is the same sound as joy.

In early spring she is hauling water up from the creek when she passes him and he pats the stone on which he sits. She sets down the pole and its two pots and sits beside him. “Sometimes,” he says, “when I feel like working, I just sit and wait for the feeling to pass,” and his eyes catch Anna's and she realizes that she understands the joke, and they laugh.

The snow retreats, the elderflowers bloom, the ewes lamb, a pair of wood pigeons nests in the thatch of the roof, and Nida and her mother sell honey and melons and pine nuts in the village market, and by late summer they have enough silver to buy a second bullock to pair with the first. Soon Omeir is using an old dray to cart felled trees down from the high forests, and sell them to mills downriver, and in the fall Nida is wed to a woodcutter in a village twenty miles away. During Anna's second winter in the ravine, the boy's mother, in her loneliness, begins to talk to her, slowly at first, then in torrents, about the secrets of cultivating bees, about Omeir's father and grandfather, and finally about her life in the little stony village nine miles downriver before Omeir was born.

As the days warm they sit beside the creek and watch Omeir work his spindly, uncooperative oxen, using the solicitous voice he reserves only for cattle, and his mother says that his gentleness is like a flame that he carries inside him, and in good weather Anna and Omeir walk together beneath trees, and he tells her stories of funny things that his grandfather used to say: that the breath of deer can kill snakes, or that the gall of an eagle, mixed with honey,
can restore a person's eyesight, and she comes to see that the little ravine beneath the broad-shouldered mountain is not as foreboding and steep and barbaric as it first seemed—that indeed in every season, at some unexpected moment, it will reveal a beauty that makes her eyes water and her heart thump in her chest, and she comes to believe that perhaps she has indeed journeyed to that better place she always imagined might lie beyond the city walls.

In time she ceases to notice the defect in Omeir's face: it becomes part of the world, no different than the mud of spring, the mosquitoes of summer, or the snows of winter. She gives birth to six sons and loses three, and Omeir buries the lost sons in the clearing above the river, where his grandfather and sisters are buried, and marks each grave with a white stone he carries down from a high place known only to him. The cottage grows crowded, and Anna manages to construct clothes for the boys, sometimes adding a clumsy vine or a lopsided bloom with thread, smiling when she thinks of how crude Maria would find her needlework, and Omeir takes his mother on the donkey to live with Nida, and then it is only the five of them in the ravine by the mouth of the cavern.

Sometimes in dreams she is back in the embroidery house, where Maria and the others remain bent over their tables, plying their needles, faint, phantasmal, and when she reaches to touch them, her fingers pass right through. Sometimes pains flash through the back of her head, and Anna wonders if the affliction that took Maria will come for her too. But in other moments those thoughts are far away, and she can no longer remember the faces of the women who raised her, and it seems that her life with Omeir is the only life she has ever known.

One morning in Anna's twenty-fifth winter, on a night cold enough to freeze the water across the top of the kettle, her youngest son descends into fever. His eyes smolder in their sockets, and he soaks his clothes with sweat. She sits on the stack of rugs where they sleep,
puts the sick boy's head in her lap, and strokes his hair, and Omeir paces, clenching and unclenching his fists. Finally he fills the lamp, lights it, and goes out, and returns covered with snow. From his coat he produces the bundle wrapped in waxed oxhide and hands it to her with great solemnity and she understands that he believes the book can save their son as he believes it saved them on their journey here more than a decade before.

Outside, the pines roar. The wind throws snow down the chimney, blowing ash around the room, and the two older boys crowd her on the carpets, dazzled by the glow of the lamp and by this strange new package their father has produced as though from nowhere. The donkey and goat stand close around them, and the whole world outside their door seems to bellow and seethe.

The oxhide has done its work: the contents are dry. One boy examines the snuffbox while the other runs his fingers over the samite hood, tracing the birds both finished and half-finished, and Omeir holds the lamp for Anna as she opens the book.

It has been years since she last tried to read the old Greek. But memory is a strange thing, and whether it's fear for one son or the excitement of the other two, when she peers into the even, steady script with its leftward cant, the meanings of the letters return.

A is alpha is
ἄλφα
. Β is beta is
βῆτα
.
Ω
is omega is
ὦ μέγα; Ἄστεα are cities;
νόον
is mind;
ἔγνω
is learned. Slowly, in the language of her second life, translating one word at a time, she begins.

“… the one they called birdbrain and nincompoop—yes, I, dull-witted muttonheaded lamebrained Aethon—once traveled all the way to the edge of the earth and beyond…”

She works as much from memory as from the manuscript, and inside the little stone cottage, something happens: the sick child in her lap, his forehead sheened with sweat, opens his eyes. When Aethon is accidentally transformed into an ass and the other boys
burst into laughter, he smiles. When Aethon reaches the frozen rim of the world, he bites his fingernails. And when Aethon finally sees the gates of the city in the clouds, tears spring to his eyes.

The lamp spits, the oil drawing low, and all three boys beg her to go on.

“Please,” they say, and their eyes glitter in the light. “Tell us what he found inside the goddess's magical book.”

“When Aethon peered into it,” she says, “he saw the heavens and the earth and all its lands scattered around the ocean, and all the animals and birds upon it. The cities were full of lanterns and gardens, and he could faintly hear music and singing, and he saw a wedding in one city with girls in bright linen robes, and boys with gold swords on silver belts, jumping through rings, doing handsprings and leaping and dancing in time. But on the next page he saw dark, flaming cities in which men were slaughtered in their fields, their wives enslaved in chains, and their children pitched over the walls onto pikes. He saw hounds eating corpses, and when he bent his ear low to the pages, he could hear the wailing. And as he looked, turning the leaf over and back, Aethon saw that the cities on both sides of the page, the dark ones and the bright ones, were one and the same, that there is no peace without war, no life without death, and he was afraid.”

The lamp sputters out; the chimney moans; the children draw closer around her. Omeir rewraps the book, and Anna holds their youngest son against her breast, and dreams of bright clean light falling across the pale walls of the city, and when they wake, late into the morning, the boy's fever is gone.

In years to come, if the children catch a rheum or simply get too insistent—always after dark, always when there is no one else for miles—Omeir will look at her and an understanding will pass between them. He'll light the oil lamp, disappear outside, and return with the bundle. She'll open the book and the boys will gather around her on the carpets.

“Tell again, Mama,” they say, “about the magician who lives inside the whale.”

“And about the nation of swans that lives among the stars.”

“And about the mile-high goddess and the book that contained all things.”

They act out parts; they beg to know what tortoises are, and honeycakes, and they seem to instinctively sense that the book wrapped in silk and again in waxed oxhide is an object of strange value, a secret that both enriches and endangers them. Each time she opens it, more text has been lost to illegibility, and she remembers the tall Italian standing in the candlelit workshop.

Time: the most violent war engine of all.

The oldest ox dies and Omeir brings home a new calf, and Anna's sons grow taller than she is and go to work on the mountain, bringing logs from the high forests and carting them down the river road to sell at the mills outside Edirne. She loses track of the winters, loses memories. At unexpected moments, when she's carrying water, or stitching a wound on Omeir's leg, or picking lice from his hair, time folds over itself and she sees Himerius's hands on the oars, or feels the vertiginous pull of gravity as she lowers herself down the wall of the priory. Toward the end of her life these memories intermingle with memories of the stories she has loved: homesick Ulysses abandoning his raft in the storm and swimming toward the island of the Phaeacians, Aethon-the-donkey wrapping his soft lips around a stinging nettle, all times and all stories being one and the same in the end.

She dies in May, on the finest day of the year, at the age of fifty-four, leaning against a stump beside the byre, with her three sons around her, the sky such a deep blue above the shoulder of the mountain that it hurts her teeth to look at it. Her husband buries her in the clearing above the river, between his grandfather and the sons they lost, with her sister's silk hood across her breast and a white stone to mark her place.