Everyone 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.