Nine miles from home they pass the village where he was born. The caravan halts in the road while heralds ride among the houses enlisting more men and animals. Rain falls steadily and Omeir shivers inside his oxhide cape and watches the river roar past, full of debris and foam, and remembers how Grandfather would say that the littlest streams, high on the mountain, small enough to dam with your hand, would eventually join the river, and that the river, though quick and violent, was but a drop in the eye of the great Ocean that encircles all the lands of the world, and contains every dream everyone has ever dreamed.
Daylight drains from the valley. How will his mother and Nida and Grandfather survive the winter? Practically all of their stores have disappeared into the mouths of the riders around him. Piled on the dray behind Tree and Moonlight is most of the family’s seasoned wood, and half of their barley. They have Leaf and Needle and the goat. A last few pots of honey. They have hope that Omeir will return with spoils from war.
Moonlight and Tree stand patiently in their yoke, horns dripping, backs steaming, and the boy checks their hooves for stones and their shoulders for cuts and envies that they seem to live only in the moment, without dread for what is to come.
That first night the company camps in a field. Karst megaliths stand on ridge lines high above them like the watchtowers of races long since perished, and ravens go squawking up over the camp in great noisy legions. After dark the clouds tear away and the frayed banner of the Milky Way unfurls overhead. Around the fire nearest Omeir teamsters speak in myriad accents about the city they are traveling to conquer. The Queen of Cities, they call it, bridge between East and West, crossroads of the universe. In one version it is a seedbed of sin where heathens eat babies and copulate with their mothers; in the next it is a place of unthinkable prosperity, where even the paupers wear earrings of gold and the whores use pisspots encrusted with emeralds.
An old man says he has heard the city is protected by huge, impenetrable walls and everyone falls silent a moment until a young oxherd named Maher says, “But the women. Even a boy as ugly as him can wet his dick in that place.” He points at Omeir and there is laughter.
Omeir drifts off into the dark and finds Moonlight and Tree grazing at the far end of the field. He rubs their flanks and tells them not to be afraid but it’s not clear if he is trying to soothe the animals or himself.
In the morning the road drops into a gorge of dark limestone and the wagons bottleneck at a bridge. Riders dismount and drivers shout and strike animals with whips and switches, and both Tree and Moonlight defecate from fear.
A terrible lowing flows through the animals. Slowly Omeir talks the oxen forward. When they reach the bridge he sees that it has no curb or rail but consists only of skinned logs lashed together with chains. Sheer walls, studded here and there with spruce trees growing from impossibly steep perches, drop almost straight down, and far below the log-deck, the river roars fast and loud and white.
On the far side two mule carts make it across and Omeir turns and faces his oxen and steps backward out over the void. The logs are slick with manure and in the gaps between them, beneath his boots, he can see whitewater flashing over boulders.
Tree and Moonlight lumber out. The bridge is scarcely wider than the axle of the dray. They make it one revolution, two three four; then the wheel on Tree’s side slips off. The cart lists and the oxen stop and multiple pieces of firewood go rolling off the back.
Moonlight spreads his legs, bearing most of the weight of the load by himself, waiting for his brother, but Tree has immobilized with fright. His eyes roll and all around them shouts and bellows echo off the rocks.
Omeir swallows. If the axle slips any farther, the weight of the cart will pull it off the bridge and drag the oxen with it.
“Pull, boys, pull.” The bullocks do not move. Mist rises from the rapids below and little birds swoop from rock to rock and Tree pants as though trying to draw the entire scene up through his nostrils. Omeir runs his hands over Tree’s muzzle and strokes his long brown face. His ear twitches, and his thick front legs tremble from strain or terror or both.
The boy can feel gravity pulling at their bodies, at the cart, at the bridge, at the water below. If he was never born, his father would still be alive. His mother would still live in the village. She could talk with other women, trade honey and gossip, share her life. His older sisters might still be alive.
Don’t look down. Show the oxen that you can meet all of their needs. If you stay calm so will they. His heels hanging over the chasm, Omeir ducks Moonlight’s horns, shimmies around his flank, and speaks directly into the bullock’s ear. “Come, brother, pull. Pull for me, and your twin will follow.” The ox tilts his horns to one side, as though considering the merits of the boy’s request, the bridge and cliffs and sky reproduced in miniature in the dome of his huge, wet pupil, and just when Omeir is convinced that the matter is lost, Moonlight leans into the harness, veins rising visibly in his chest, and hauls the wheel of the dray back onto the bridge.
“Good boy, steady now, that’s it.”
Moonlight pushes forward, and Tree comes with him, placing one hoof in front of the next on the slick logs, and Omeir grabs the back of the dray as it passes, and in a few more heartbeats they are across.
From there the gorge opens, and the mountains turn into hills, and hills into rolling flatlands, and muddy bridleways into proper roads. Moonlight and Tree move easily along the wide surface, their big hipbones rising and falling, happy to be on sure ground. With every passing village, the heralds recruit more men and beasts. Always their pitch is the same: the sultan (God be pleased with him) calls you to the capital where he gathers forces to take the Queen of Cities. Its streets overflow with jewels, silks, and girls; you will have your pick.
Thirteen days after leaving home, Omeir and his oxen reach Edirne. Everywhere gleam mountains of peeled logs and the air smells of wet sawdust and children run the roadsides selling bread and skins of milk or just to gape at the caravan as it rumbles past, and after dark criers on ponies meet the heralds and sort the animals by torchlight.
Omeir, Tree, and Moonlight are directed with the largest and strongest of the cattle to a vast, treeless field on the outskirts of the capital. At one end glows a tent larger than any he has ever imagined—a whole forest could grow beneath it. Inside men work by torchlight, unloading wagons, cutting trenches, and excavating a casting pit like the grave bed for a giant. Inside the pit lie matching cylindrical molds made from clay, one nested in the other, each thirty feet long.
Every daylight hour Omeir and the oxen walk a mile to a charcoal pit and haul cartloads of charcoal back to the enormous tent. As more and more charcoal is brought in, the area inside the tent grows hotter, the animals balking at the heat as they approach, and the teamsters unload the carts while foundry men pitch the charcoal into furnaces, and groups of mullahs pray, and still more men work in teams of three at great bellows, soaked to their bones in sweat, pumping air into the furnaces. In lulls between the chanting, Omeir can hear the fires burn: a sound like something huge inside the tent chewing, chewing, chewing.
At night he approaches the drivers who will tolerate his face and asks what they have been brought here to help create. One says he has heard that the sultan is casting a propeller from iron but that he does not know what a propeller is. Another calls it a thunder catapult, another a torment, another the Destroyer of Cities.
“Inside that tent,” explains a gray-bearded man with gold rings through his earlobes, “the sultan is making an apparatus that will change history forever.”
“What does it do?”
“The apparatus,” says the man, “is a way for a small thing to destroy a much larger thing.”
New teams of oxen arrive carrying pallets of tin, trunks of iron, even church bells, the teamsters whisper, from sacked Christian cities, dragged here over hundreds of miles. The whole world, it seems, has sent tributes: copper coin, bronze coffin lids of noblemen centuries forgotten; the sultan, Omeir hears, has even brought the wealth of an entire nation he conquered in the east, enough to make five thousand men rich for five thousand lifetimes, and this too will be pitched in—the gold and silver becoming part of the apparatus too.
Back cold, front burning, the fabric of the tent swimming behind heat blurs, Omeir watches transfixed. The foundry men, their arms and hands wrapped in cowhide gloves, approach the blearing, wavering inferno and climb scaffolding and pitch raw pieces of brass into an enormous cauldron and skim away the dross. Some constantly check the melting metal for any sign of moisture while others check the sky while others pray prayers specifically bent on the weather—the slightest raindrop, a man beside Omeir whispers, could set the entire cauldron hissing and cracking with all the fires of hell.
When it is time to add tin to the molten brass, turbaned soldiers drive everyone out. During this delicate moment, they say, the metal cannot be looked at with impure eyes, and only the blessed may go in. The doors of the tent are drawn and tied, and Omeir wakes in the night to see a glow rising from the far end of the field, and it appears that the ground beneath the tent glows also, as though drawing some stupendous power up from the center of the earth.
Moonlight lies on his side and presses his ear against Omeir’s shoulder, and the boy curls up in the damp grass, and Tree stands to the side, his back to the tents, still grazing, as though bored by the ridiculous fanaticisms of men.
Grandfather, Omeir thinks, already I have seen things I did not know how to dream.
For two more days the massive tent glows, sparks rising through its chimney holes, and the weather stays fair, and on the third day the foundry men release the molten alloy from the cauldron, directing it through channels until it disappears into the molds belowground. Men move up and down the lines of flowing bronze, knocking out bubbles with iron poles, while others throw shovels of wet sand upon the casting pit, and the tent is dismantled and teams of mullahs take turns praying beside the mounds as they cool.
At dawn they dig away the sand, break apart the molds, and send tunnelers beneath the apparatus to sling chains around its girth. These chains they tether to ropes and the lead teamsters gather oxen in five teams of ten each to try to drag the Destroyer of Cities out of the earth.
Tree and Moonlight are placed on the second team. The order is given and the animals are goaded. Ropes groan, yokes squeak, and the oxen march slowly in place, churning the soil to a sea of mud.
“Pull, boys, all your strength,” Omeir calls. The entire team drives their hooves deeper into the clay. The teamsters add a sixth chain, a sixth rope, a sixth team of ten. By now it is nearly dusk and the bullocks stand heaving in the shafts. With a sharp cry, the air fills with “Ho!” and “Hai!” and sixty oxen begin to pull.
The animals lean forward, are hauled back as one by the incredible weight, then lean forward again, earning one step, another, drivers yelling, switching their animals, the bullocks bellowing in fear and confusion.
The immense load is a whale swimming out of the earth. They haul it maybe fifty yards before the order is given to stop. Vapor gushes from the bullocks’ nostrils and Omeir checks Tree’s and Moonlight’s yoke and shoes, and already scrapers and polishers are scrambling over the apparatus where it smokes in the cold twilight, the bronze still warm.
Maher crosses his skinny arms. He says, to no one in particular, “They will need to invent an entirely different kind of cart.”
To pull the apparatus the mile from the foundry to the sultan’s testing ground takes three days. Three times the spokes on the wagon’s wheels splinter and the rims fall out of round; wheelwrights rush around it, working day and night; the load is so heavy that every hour it sits on the cart it drives the wheels another inch into the ground.
In a field within sight of the sultan’s new palace, a crane is used to hoist the huge hooped tube of the apparatus onto a wooden platform. An impromptu bazaar springs up: traders sell bulgur and butter, roasted thrushes and smoked ducks, sacks of dates and silver necklaces and wool bonnets. Fox fur is everywhere, as though every fox in the world has been slain and turned into a cape, and some men wear gowns of snow-white ermine, and others wear mantles of fine felt upon which raindrops bead up and skitter off, and Omeir cannot take his eyes off any of them.
At midday the crowd is parted to either side of the field. He and Maher climb a tree at the edge of the testing ground so they can see over the assembled heads. A parade of shorn sheep painted red and white and ornamented with rings are driven toward the platform, followed by a hundred riders riding bareback on black horses, followed by slaves reenacting salient episodes of the sultan’s life. Maher whispers that somewhere at the end of the procession must be the sovereign himself, may God bless and greet him, but Omeir can see only attendants and banners and musicians with cymbals and a drum so large that it takes a boy on either side to strike it.
The bite of Grandfather’s saw, the ever-present cud-chewing of the cattle, and the nickering of the goat and the panting of dogs and the burbling of the creek and the singing of starlings and the scurryings of mice—a month ago he would have said the ravine at home overflowed with sound. But all of that was silence compared to this: hammers, bells, shouts, trumpets, the groaning of ropes, the whinnying of horses—the noise is an assault.
In the afternoon buglers blow six bright notes and everyone looks to the great polished implement where it gleams on its platform. A man in a red cap crawls inside and disappears entirely and a second man crawls in behind with a sheet of sheepskin, and someone at the foot of the tree says that they must be packing powder into place, though what this means the boy cannot guess. The two men crawl out and next comes a huge piece of granite chiseled and polished into a sphere; a crew of nine rolls it to the front of the barrel and tips it inside.
The heavy, eerie rasp it makes as it rolls slowly down the inclined barrel carries all the way to Omeir over the gathered heads. An imam leads a prayer, and cymbals clash and trumpets blow, and along the top of the apparatus the first man, the one in the red cap, packs what looks like dried grass into a hole in the back, touches a lit taper to the grass, then leaps off the platform.
The onlookers go quiet. The sun swings imperceptibly lower, and a chill falls across the field. Once, Maher says, in his home village, a stranger appeared on a hilltop and claimed he would fly. All day a crowd gathered, he says, and every now and then the man would announce, “Soon I will fly,” and would point out various places in the distance he would fly to, and he walked around stretching and shaking his arms. When the crowd had grown large, so large that not everyone could see, and the sun was nearly down, the man, not knowing what to do, pulled down his pants and showed everybody his ass.
Omeir smiles. Up on the rostrum men are scrambling around the apparatus again, and a few snow crystals sift down from the sky, and the crowd shifts, restless now, and the cymbals start up a third time, and at the head of the field, where the sultan may or may not be watching, a breeze lifts the hundreds of horsetails strung from his banners. Omeir leans against the bole of the tree, trying to stay warm, and the two men clamber over the bronze cylinder, the one in the red cap peering into its mouth, and just then the huge cannon fires.
It’s as though the finger of God reaches down through the clouds and flicks the planet out of orbit. The thousand-pound stone ball moves too fast to see: there is only the roar of its passage lacerating the air as it screams over the field—but before the sound has even begun to register in Omeir’s consciousness, a tree at the opposite end of the field shatters.
A second tree a quarter mile farther also vaporizes, seemingly simultaneously, and for a heartbeat he wonders if the ball will travel forever, beyond the horizon, smashing through tree after tree, wall after wall, until it flies off the edge of the world.
In the distance, what must be a mile away, rocks and mud spray in all directions, as though an invisible plow rakes a great furrow in the earth, and the report of the detonation reverberates in the marrow of his bones. The cheer that comes up from the gathered crowd is less a cheer of triumph than of stupefaction.
Up on its brace, the mouth of the apparatus leaks smoke. Of the two gunners, one stands with both hands to his ears looking down at what little is left of the man in the red cap.
Wind carries the smoke out over the platform. “Fear of the thing,” Maher murmurs, more to himself than to Omeir, “will be more powerful than the thing itself.”