She is chopping scavenged wood in the courtyard when the guns fire again, a dozen in succession, followed by the distant rumble of stonework falling to pieces. Days ago the thunder of the sultan’s war engines could start half of the women in the workshop weeping. This morning they merely sign crosses in the air over their boiled eggs. A jug wobbles on a shelf and Chryse reaches up and settles it.
Anna drags the wood into the scullery and builds up the fire and the eight embroideresses who are left eat and shuffle back upstairs to work. It’s cold and nobody sews with urgency. Kalaphates has fled with the gold, silver, and seed pearls, there’s not much silk left, and what clergymen are buying embroidered vestments anyway? Everyone seems to agree that the world will end soon and the only essential task is to cleanse the besmirchment from one’s soul before that day comes.
Widow Theodora stands at the workshop window, leaning on her stick. Maria holds her embroidery frame inches from her eyes as she glides her needle through the samite hood.
In the evenings, after she has settled Maria in their cell, Anna treks the mile to join other women and girls in the terrace between the inner and outer walls. They work in teams to fill barrels with turf, soil, and chunks of masonry. She sees nuns, still in their habits, helping to attach barrels to pulleys; she sees mothers taking turns with newborns so others can pitch in.
The barrels are hoisted by donkey-powered cranes to the battlements of the outer walls. After dark, impossibly brave soldiers, in full view of the Saracen armies, crawl over hastily built stockades, lower the barrels in, and pack the empty spaces around them with branches and straw. Anna sees whole bushes and saplings get lowered into the stockades—even carpets and tapestries. Anything to soften the blows of the terrible stone balls.
Out there, up against the outer wall, when the sultan’s guns roar, she feels the detonations roll through her bones and shake her heart where it hangs inside its cage. Sometimes a ball overshoots its mark and goes screaming off into the city, and she hears it bury itself in an orchard or a ruin or a house. Other times the balls strike the stockades, and rather than shatter, they swallow the balls whole, and the defenders along the ramparts cheer.
The quiet moments frighten her more: when the work pauses and she can hear the songs of the Saracens out beyond the walls, the creaking of their siege machines, the nickering of their horses and bleats of their camels. When the wind is right, she can smell the food they’re cooking. To be so close to men who want her dead. To know that only a partition of masonry prevents them from doing their will.
She works until she cannot see her hands in front of her face, then trudges home to the house of Kalaphates, takes a candle from the scullery, and climbs onto the pallet beside Maria, her fingernails broken, her hands veined with dirt, and pulls the blanket around them and opens the little brown goatskin codex.
The reading goes slowly. Some leaves are partially obscured by mold, and the scribe who copied the story did not separate the words with spaces, and the tallow candles give off a weak and sputtery light, and she is often so tired that the lines seem to ripple and dance in front of her eyes.
The shepherd in the story accidentally turns himself into an ass, then a fish, and now he swims through the innards of an enormous leviathan, touring the continents while dodging beasts who try to eat him: it’s silly, absurd; this cannot possibly be the sort of compendium of marvels the Italians sought, can it?
And yet. When the stream of the old Greek picks up, and she climbs into the story, as though climbing the wall of the priory on the rock—handhold here, foothold there—the damp chill of the cell dissipates, and the bright, ridiculous world of Aethon takes its place.
Our sea monster battled with another, bigger and more monstrous even than he was, and the waters around us quaked, and ships with a hundred sailors on each sank in front of me, and whole uprooted islands were carried past. I closed my eyes in terror, and fixed my thoughts on the golden city in the clouds…
Turn a page, walk the lines of sentences: the singer steps out, and conjures a world of color and noise in the space inside your head.
Not only, Chryse announces one night, has the sultan used his Throat Cutter to strangle the city from the east, not only has he positioned his navy to blockade the sea from the west, not only has he turned out a limitless army with terrifying artillery pieces—now he has brought in crews of Serbian silver tunnelers, the best miners in the world, to dig passages beneath the walls.
From the moment Maria hears this, a terror of these men seizes her. She places bowls of water around their cell and crouches over them, studying their surfaces for any evidence of subterranean activity. At night she wakes Anna to listen to the scraping of picks and shovels beneath the floor.
“They’re growing louder.”
“I don’t hear anything, Maria.”
“Is the floor shifting?”
Anna wraps her arms around her. “Try to sleep, sister.”
“I hear their voices. They are talking directly below us.”
“It’s only the wind in the chimney.”
Yet, despite logic, Anna feels the fear slipping in. She imagines a platoon of men in caftans crouched in a hole just beneath their pallet, their faces black with soil, their eyes huge in the dark. She holds her breath; she hears the tips of their knives scratch against the undersides of the flagstones.
One evening at the end of the month, walking the eastern section of the city, scrounging for food, Anna is rounding the great weathered bulk of the Hagia Sophia when she stops. Between the houses, tucked against the harbor, the priory on the rock stands silhouetted against the sea and it is on fire. Flames flicker in crumbled windows, and a pillar of black smoke twists into the sky.
Bells ring—whether to urge people to fight the fire or for another purpose, she could not say. Perhaps they ring simply to exhort the people to carry on. An abbot, eyes closed, shuffles past carrying an icon, trailed by two monks, each with a smoking censer, and the smoke from the priory lingers in the dusk. She thinks of those dank, rotting halls, the moldering library beneath its broken arches. The codex back in her cell.
Day after day, the tall Italian said, year after year, time wipes the old books from the world.
A charwoman with scars on her face stops in front of her. “Get home, child. The bells are calling the monks to bury the dead, and this is no time to be out.”
When she returns home, she finds Maria sitting rigid in their cell in complete darkness.
“Is that smoke? I smell smoke.”
“It’s only a candle.”
“I feel faint.”
“It’s probably hunger, sister.”
Anna sits and wraps the blanket around them and lifts the samite hood from her sister’s lap, five of her twelve birds finished—the dove of the Holy Spirit, the peacock of the Resurrection, the crossbill who tried to pry the nails from Jesus’s crucified hands. She rolls Maria’s thimble and scissors inside it and retrieves the battered old codex from the corner and thumbs to the first leaf: TO MY DEAREST NIECE WITH HOPE THAT THIS BRINGS YOU HEALTH AND LIGHT.
“Maria,” she says, “listen,” and starts at the beginning.
Drunken, foolhardy Aethon mistakes a magical city in a play for a real place. He sets off for Thessaly, land of magic, and accidentally turns himself into a donkey. This time she is able to make quicker progress, and as she reads aloud, something curious happens: as long as she keeps a steady stream of words flowing past Maria’s ears, her sister doesn’t seem to suffer so much. Her muscles loosen; her head falls to Anna’s shoulder. Aethon-the-donkey is kidnapped by bandits, gets lashed to a wheel by the miller’s son, walks on his tired, cracking hooves to the place where nature comes to an end. Maria doesn’t moan in pain or whisper about invisible subterranean miners scratching beneath the floor. She sits beside her, blinking into the candlelight, amusement playing over her face.
“Do you think it’s really true, Anna? A fish so large it could swallow ships whole?”
A mouse scrabbles across the stone and rises onto its hind legs and stands twitching its nose at her with its head cocked as though awaiting her answer. Anna thinks of the last time she sat with Licinius. Μῦθος, he wrote, mýthos, a conversation, a tale, a legend from the darkness before the days of Christ.
“Some stories,” she says, “can be both false and true at the same time.”
Down the hall Widow Theodora touches the worn beads of her rosary in the moonlight. One cell away, Chryse the cook, half her teeth gone, drinks from a jug of wine and sets her cracked hands on her knees and dreams of a summer day outside the walls, walking beneath cherry trees, a sky full of crows. One mile east, in the belly of a carrack at anchor, the boy Himerius, drafted into the city’s stopgap naval defenses, sits with thirty other oarsmen, resting over the shaft of a great oar, his back throbbing, both palms bleeding, eight days left to live. In the underground cisterns beneath the church of the Hagia Sophia, three little boats float on the black mirror of the water, each packed with spring roses, while a priest intones a hymn into the echoing dark.