As darkness falls, boys all around him, still strangers to their own bodies, pray, worry, sharpen knives, sleep. Boys brought here by rage or curiosity or myth or faith or greed or force, some dreaming of glories in this life or in lives to come, some aching simply to wreak violence, to act against those who they believe have caused them pain. Men dream too: of earning honor in the eyes of God, of deserving the love of their fellow soldiers, of returning home to a familiar field. A bath, a lover, a drink from a jug of clean, cool water.
From where he sits outside the tents of the cannoneers Omeir can just see moonlight sifting across the cascading domes of the Hagia Sophia: as close as he’ll ever come. Watchfires burn in towers; a plume of white rises from the easternmost part of the city. Behind him the evening star brightens. In memories he hears Grandfather speak slowly about the merits of animals, about the weather, about the qualities of the grass, Grandfather’s patience like that of the trees. It has been a little more than half a year and yet the distance between those evenings and this one feels immense.
As he sits, his mother glides between the tents and places a hand on his cheek and leaves it there. What do I care, she whispers, for cities and princes and histories?
He is only a boy, Grandfather told the traveler and his servant.
You think that now but his true nature will show in time.
Maybe the servant was right; maybe Omeir does harbor a demon inside. Or a ghoul or a mage. Something formidable. He feels it stir and wake. It uncurls, rubs its eyes, gives a yawn.
Get up, it says. Go home.
He coils Moonlight’s rope and halter over one shoulder and rises. Steps over Maher where he sleeps on the bare ground. Picks his way through the company of frightened young men.
Come back to us, whispers his mother, and around her head swims a cloud of bees.
He skirts a company of drummers carrying oxhide bull-roarers as they make their way forward through the ranks, moving toward the front of the lines. Past the camp of the smiths with their anvils and aprons. Past the arrow fletchers and bow stringers. It is as if Omeir has been yoked and harnessed to a wagon full of stone balls, and now, with each step away from the city, the stone balls are rolling out behind him.
Shapes of horses and wagons and broken siege engines loom up out of the dark. Look at no one. You are good at hiding your face.
He trips over a tent rope, gets back to his feet, weaves to stay out of firelight. Any moment, he thinks, someone will ask me my errand, which unit I belong to, why I’m walking in the wrong direction. Any moment one of the sultan’s military police with their long curved blades will pull up his horse beside me and call me a deserter. But men sleep or pray or murmur or brood over the coming assault, and no one seems to notice him. Perhaps they assume he’s on his way to the pens to check on an animal. Perhaps, he thinks, I am already dead.
He keeps the road to Edirne off to his right. At the edge of the encampment the spring grasses have grown chest-high, the broom tall and yellow, and it is easy to duck below their crowns as he walks. Behind him, the drummers reach the front of the lines, spin double-headed drumsticks above their heads in figure eights, and begin pounding their drums so quickly that they seem less a pulse of drumbeats than a sustained roar.
From soldiers all through the Ottoman camps rise the clash of weapons against shields. Omeir waits for God to send a streak of light through a rift in the clouds and reveal him for what he is: traitor, coward, apostate. Boy with the ghoul’s face and the demon’s heart. Boy who killed his own father. Who, on the night he was to be left exposed on the mountain to die, bewitched his own grandfather into bringing him back. Everything the villagers intuited about him coming true.
In the dark he draws no notice. The clamor of drums and cymbals and voices builds at his back. Any moment now the first wave will be sent across the moat.