After the death of his oxen, time disintegrates. He is sent to work behind the latrines with conscripted Christian boys and Indian slaves, burning the feces of the army. They dump the slop into pits, then throw hot pitch on top, and he and a few of the older boys use poles to stir the vile, smoking mess, the poles burning down from the tips, so that they grow ever shorter. The smell saturates his clothes, his hair, his skin, and soon Omeir has more than his face to make men scowl.
Birds of prey wheel overhead; big, merciless flies besiege them; outside the tents, as May tips toward June, there is no shade. The great cannon they worked so hard to bring here finally cracks, and the defenders of the city give up trying to repair their battered stockades, and everyone can sense the fate of the conflict tilting on a fulcrum. Either the starving city will capitulate, or the Ottomans will retreat before disease and hopelessness sweep through their camps.
The boys in Omeir’s company say that the sultan, may God bless and keep his kingdom, believes the decisive moment has come. The walls have been weakened at multiple spots, the defenders are exhausted, and a final assault will tip the balance. The best fighters, they say, will be held at the back while the least-equipped and least-trained among them are sent first across the fosse to soften the city’s defenses. We’ll be caught, one boy whispers, between a hailstorm of stones from the ramparts above and the whips of the sultan’s Chavushes behind. But another boy says that God will see them through, and that if they die their rewards in the next life will extend beyond number.
Omeir shuts his eyes. How grand it all felt when the curious would stop and gape at the size of Tree and Moonlight; when men came by the thousands with the hope of setting a finger to the gleaming cannon. A way for a small thing to destroy a much larger thing. But what is it that they have destroyed?
Maher sits beside him and unsheathes his knife and picks at rust along its blade with a fingernail. “I hear that we will be sent tomorrow. At sundown.” Both of Maher’s oxen have long since died too, and deep hollows haunt his eyes. “It will be wonderful,” he says, though he sounds unconvinced. “We will strike terror into their hearts.”
Around them the sons of farmers sit holding shields, clubs, javelins, axes, horseman’s hammers—even stones. Omeir is so tired. It will be a relief to die. He thinks of the Christians sitting up on the walls, and the people praying inside the houses and churches of the city, and he wonders at the mystery of how one god can manage the thoughts and terrors of so many.