It is 140 miles from the testing ground in Edirne to the Queen of Cities and they bring the cannon there at a pace slower than a man can crawl. The train of oxen pulling it runs to thirty pairs, each harnessed to a jointed pole in the middle, a train so long and with so many potential points of failure that it comes to a halt dozens of times a day. Behind and in front of them, other oxen pull culverins and catapults and arquebuses, perhaps thirty artillery pieces in all, while still others pull wagons of powder or stone balls, some so large Omeir could not wrap his arms around them.
On both sides of the road, around the teams, men and beasts hurry past like a river flows around a boulder: mules loaded with saddlebags, camels with dozens of earthen jugs hung over their backs, carts laden with provisions and planks and ropes and cloth. How diverse the world is! Omeir sees fortune-tellers, dervishes, astrologers, scholars, bakers, munitions men, blacksmiths, mystics in tattered robes, chroniclers and healers and standard-bearers carrying banners of every color. Some wear leather armor, some have feathers tied to their caps, some are barefoot, some wear boots of shiny Damascene leather to their knees. He sees a group of slaves with three horizontal scars on their foreheads (one, Maher explains, for each of their masters who has died); he sees a man whose brow is so callused from prostrating himself in prayer that it seems he carries a great waxy fingernail on his head.
One afternoon: a mule driver wearing bearskin with a gap in his upper lip not at all unlike Omeir’s, moving past the teams, head down. As he passes, their eyes meet, and the mule driver looks away, and Omeir never sees him again.
He oscillates between amazement and dejection. Going to bed beside a fire and waking beside the embers, frost sparkling on his clothes, sitting beside the other teamsters as the fire is stirred back to life, everyone eating cracked barley and herbs and bits of horsemeat from the same copper pot, he feels a sense of acceptance he has never come close to feeling before, of everyone participating in a massive and justified endeavor, an undertaking so worthy that it makes room even for a boy with a face like his—everyone moving east toward the great city as though called by a magical piper in one of Grandfather’s stories. Each morning dawn arrives earlier, the hours of daylight expanding, flocks of migratory cranes, then ducks, then songbirds pouring overhead, as though the darkness is losing and victory is preordained.
But at other moments his enthusiasm plummets. Mud sticks in great clods to the hooves of Tree and Moonlight, and chains creak and ropes groan and whistles blow up and down the train, and the air seethes with the sounds of suffering animals. Many of the oxen are on fixed yokes, not sliding ones like the kind Grandfather builds, and few of them are used to such heavy loads on uneven ground, and cattle are injured by the hour.
For Omeir each day offers a new lesson in how careless men can be. Some don’t bother to shoe their bullocks with two-piece shoes; others don’t examine the yokes for cracks and the cracks abrade the backs of the steers; others don’t let the animals recover by unyoking them as soon as they are done pulling; still others don’t cap their horns to avoid them hooking one another. There is always blood, always groaning, always distress.
Teams of road-builders move ahead of the columns, shoring up crossings, laying boards over muddy ground, but eight days out from Edirne the train reaches an unbridged creek, the water high and turbid, the current in the deepest section rising in a great murky swill. Drivers in the front warn that slick cobbles lurk in the streambed, but the lead teamster says they must push on.
The train is about halfway across when the animal directly in front of Tree slips. The yoke attached to his mate holds him upright for a moment, then the leg of the bullock breaks so loudly that Omeir can feel the crack in his chest. The wounded bullock goes sideways with his partner roaring beside him, the whole train pulled to its left, and Omeir feels Tree and Moonlight brace to take the extra weight as the two cattle flail in the current. A driver hurries forward with a long spear and runs it through first one, then the other thrashing ox, and their blood flows into the water while smiths hack at the chains to break them free, and teamsters hurry up and down the line, ho’ing and settling their animals. Soon riders are hitching horses to each of the two dead bullocks to drag them out of the water so they can be butchered, and the blacksmiths set up a forge and bellows on the muddy bank to repair the chain, and Omeir leads Moonlight and Tree into the grass and wonders if they understand what they have seen.
As darkness falls he grooms first Tree and then Moonlight while they graze, and cleans their hooves, and tells himself he will not eat the slain animals out of respect, but later, after dark, when the smell fills the cold air and the bowls of meat are passed, he cannot help himself. He chews and feels the weight of the sky on him and with it a dark confusion.
With each passing sundown, more light drains out of his oxen. Once in a while Tree blinks his huge wet eyes at Omeir, as though in forgiveness, and in the mornings before he is yoked, Moonlight remains curious, watching butterflies or a rabbit or twitching his nostrils to parse different scents in the wind. But most of the time when they are unyoked they hang their heads and eat as though too weary to do anything more.
The boy stands beside them, ankle-deep in mud, hiding his face inside his hood, and watches the patient, mild way Moonlight’s eyelashes glide up and down. His coat, which could look almost silver when he was young, full of little rainbows iridescing in the sun, now looks mouse gray. A cloud of flies floats over a suppurating wound on his shoulder—the first flies, Omeir realizes, of spring.