She turns twelve, though no one marks the day. She no longer runs through ruins, playing at being Ulysses as he steals into the palace of brave Alcinous: it’s as if, when Kalaphates pitched Licinius’s parchment into the flames, the kingdom of the Phaeacians went to ashes too.
Maria’s hair has grown back where Kalaphates tore it out and the bruises around her eyes have long since faded, but some deeper injury persists. She grimaces in sunlight, forgets the names of things, leaves phrases half-finished. Headaches send her scurrying for the dark. And one bright morning, before the noon bell, Maria drops her needle and scissors and claws at her eyes.
“Anna, I cannot see.”
Widow Theodora frowns on her stool; the other embroideresses glance up, then back at their work. Kalaphates is just downstairs, entertaining some diocesan. Maria knocks things off her table as she sweeps her arms around. A spool of thread rolls past her feet, slowly unwinding.
“Is there smoke?”
“There’s no smoke, sister. Come.”
Anna leads her down the stone steps to their cell and prays, Saint Koralia, help me be better, help me learn the stitches, help me make this right, and it is another hour before Maria can see her hand in front of her face. At the evening meal the women attempt various diagnoses. Strangury? Quartan agues? Eudokia offers a talisman; Agata recommends tea of astragalus and betony. But what the needleworkers do not voice aloud is their belief that Licinius’s old manuscript has worked some dark magic—that despite its destruction, it continues to blight the sisters with misfortune.
What witchcraft is this?
You fill your head with useless things.
After evening prayers Widow Theodora enters their cell with herbs smoldering in a brazier and sits beside Maria and folds her long legs beneath her. “A lifetime ago,” she says, “I knew a lime-burner who would see the world one hour and nothing the next. Over time his world went as dark as the darks of hell, and none of the doctors, local or foreign, could do a thing. But his wife put her faith in the Lord, and scraped together every piece of silver she could, and took him out the God-protected gate of the Silivri to the shrine of the Virgin of the Source, where the sisters let him drink from the holy well. And when the lime-burner came back—”
Theodora draws a cross in the air, remembering it, and the smoke drifts from wall to wall.
“What?” whispers Anna. “What happened when the lime-burner came back?”
“He saw the gulls in the sky and the ships on the sea and the bees visiting the flowers. And every time people saw him, for the rest of his life, they spoke of this miracle.”
Maria sits on the pallet, hands in her lap like broken sparrows.
Anna asks, “How much silver?”
A month later at dusk she stops in an alley beneath the wall of the convent of Saint Theophano. Look. Listen. Up she goes. At the top she squeezes through the iron grillwork. From there it’s a short drop to the roof of the buttery, where she crouches a moment, listening.
Smoke rises from the kitchens; a low chant filters from the chapel. She thinks of Maria sitting on their pallet right now, squinting to unknot and remake a simple wreath Anna tried to embroider earlier today. In the gathering darkness she sees Kalaphates seize Maria’s hair. He drags her down the hall, her head strikes the stair, and it is as though Anna’s own head is being struck, sparks exploding across her field of vision.
She lowers herself off the roof, enters the laying house, and grabs a hen. It squawks once before she breaks its neck and shoves it into her dress. Then back onto the roof of the buttery, back through the iron pickets, down through the ivy.
Over the past weeks she has sold four stolen chickens in the market for six coppers—hardly enough to buy her sister a blessing at the shrine of the Virgin of the Source. As soon as her slippers touch the ground, she hurries down the alley, keeping the nunnery wall on her left, and reaches the street where a stream of men and beasts moves in both directions through the failing light. Head down, one arm folded over the hen, she makes her way into the market, invisible as a shadow. Then a hand falls on the back of her dress.
It’s a boy, about her age. Bulge-eyed, huge-handed, barefoot, so skinny he seems all eyeballs—she knows him: a fisherman’s nephew named Himerius, the kind of boy Chryse the cook would say is as bad as a tooth-pulling and as useless as singing psalms to a dead horse. A heavy shank of hair lies across his forehead and the handle of a knife shows above the waistband of his breeches and he smiles the smile of someone who has the upper hand.
“Stealing from the servants of God?”
Her heart booms so loudly that she is surprised passersby cannot hear it. The gate to Saint Theophano is within sight: he could drag her to it, denounce her, make her open her dress. She has seen thieves on gibbets before: last autumn three were dressed as harlots and seated backward on donkeys and driven to the gallows in the Amastrianum and the youngest of them could not have been much older than Anna is now.
Would they hang her for stealing fowl? The boy looks back up the alley at the wall she just descended, calculating. “Do you know the priory on the rock?”
She gives a wary nod. It’s a ruin on the edge of the city, near the harbor of Sophia, a forbidding place surrounded on three sides by water. Centuries ago it might once have been a welcoming abbey but now it seems a frightening and desolate relic. The Fourth Hill boys have told her that soul-eating wraiths haunt it, that they carry their chamberlain from room to room on a throne of bones.
Two Castilians, wrapped in brocaded coats and doused liberally with perfume, pass on horses and the boy bows lightly as he steps out of their way. “I’ve heard,” Himerius says, “that inside the priory are many things of great antiquity: ivory cups, gloves covered with sapphires, the skins of lions. I’ve heard the Patriarch kept shards of the Holy Spirit glowing inside golden jars.” The bells of a dozen basilicas begin their slow toll and he looks over her head, blinking those huge eyes, as though seeing gemstones twinkle in the night. “There are foreigners in this city who will pay a great deal for old things. I row us to the priory, you climb up, fill a sack, and we sell whatever you find. Find me beneath the tower of Belisarius on the next night the sea smoke comes. Or I will tell the holy sisters about the fox who steals their chickens.”
Sea smoke: he means fog. Every afternoon she checks the workshop windows, but the autumn days stay fine, the sky a crisp, heart-aching blue, the weather clear enough, Chryse says, to see into the bedroom of Jesus. From the narrow lanes, between houses, Anna sometimes glimpses the priory in the distance: a collapsed tower, soaring walls, windows blockaded with bricks. It’s a ruin. Gloves sewn with sapphires, the skins of lions—Himerius is a fool and only a fool would believe his tales. Yet, beneath her apprehension, a thread of hope rises. As though some part of her wishes the fog would come.
One afternoon, it does: a swirling torrent of white pours off the Propontis at dusk, thick, cool, silent, and drowns the city. From the workshop window she watches the central dome of the Church of the Holy Apostles disappear, then the walls of Saint Theophano, then the courtyard below.
After dark, after prayers, she crawls from beneath the blanket she shares with Maria, and slips to the door.
“You’re going out?”
“Only to the toilet. Rest, sister.”
Down the corridor, through the side of the courtyard so as to skirt the watchman, and into the lattice of streets. The fog dissolves walls, reshuffles sounds, transforms figures to shades. She hurries, trying not to think of the nightly terrors she has been warned about: roving witches, airborne maladies, rogues and wretches, the dogs of night slinking through shadows. She slips past the houses of metalworkers, furriers, shoemakers: all settled in behind barred doors, all obeying their god. She descends the steep lanes to the base of the tower and waits and trembles. Moonlight pours into the fog like milk.
With a mixture of relief and disappointment, she decides that Himerius must have abandoned his scheme, but then he steps from the shadows. Over his right shoulder is a rope and in his left hand is a sack and he leads her without speaking through a fishermen’s gate and across the cobbled beach past a dozen upturned boats to a skiff hauled up onto the gravel.
So covered with patches, so rotted in the boards, it hardly qualifies as a boat. Himerius sets the rope and sack in the bow and drags the craft to the waterline and stands submerged to his shins.
“It will stay afloat?”
He looks offended. She climbs in, and he pushes the skiff off the gravel and swings his body neatly over the wale. He settles the oars into their locks and waits a moment and the blades of the oars drip drip drip and a cormorant passes overhead and both boy and girl watch it come out of the fog and disappear again.
She sinks her fingernails into the thwart as he rows them into the harbor. A carrack at anchor looms suddenly close, dirty and barnacled and huge, the railings impossibly high, black water sucking at its hull, at the weed-wrapped anchor chains. She had imagined boats were swift and majestic; up close they make her hair stand on end.
Every breath she waits for someone to stop them but no one does. They reach a breakwater and Himerius ships the oars and hangs two unbaited lines off the stern. “If anyone asks,” he whispers, “we are fishing,” and rattles one of the lines as though in evidence.
The skiff wobbles; the air reeks of shellfish; out beyond the breakwater, waves shatter onto rocks. This is as far from home as she has ever been.
Every now and then the boy leans forward and uses a widemouthed jug to bail water from between his bare feet. Behind them the great towers of the Portus Palatii are lost in the fog and there is only the faraway boom of surf against rocks and the knocking of the oars against the boat and her simultaneous terror and exhilaration.
When they reach a gap in the breakwater, the boy gestures with his chin toward the heaving blackness beyond. “When the tide is wrong, a current comes here that would sweep us straight out to sea.” They keep on a while longer and he feathers the oars and hands her the sack and the rope. The fog is so thick that at first she does not see the wall and when she finally does it seems the oldest, weariest thing in the world.
The skiff rises and falls and somewhere inside the city, as though on the far edge of the world, bells toll once. From the catacombs of her mind leak horrors: blind wraiths, the demonic chamberlain on his throne of bones, his lips dark with the blood of children.
“Near the top,” whispers Himerius, “can you see the drainage holes?”
She sees only a towering crumble of brick, encrusted with mussels where the wall rises out of the water, striated with weeds and discolorations, rising higher into the fog as though into infinity.
“Reach one of those and you should be able to crawl through.”
“And then?”
In the dark his enormous eyeballs seem almost to glow.
“Fill the sack and lower it to me.”
Himerius holds the bow as close as he can to the wall; Anna gazes upward and trembles.
“It’s a good rope,” he says, as though the quality of the rope were her objection. A single bat flies a figure eight over the skiff and departs. If not for her, Maria’s vision would be clear. Maria could be Widow Theodora’s most skilled embroideress; God would smile on her. It is Anna who cannot sit still, who cannot learn, who has made everything wrong. She watches the dark, glassy water and imagines it closing over her head. And would she not deserve it?
She hangs the rope and sack around her neck and scratches letters across the surface of her mind. A is ἄλφα is alpha; Β is βῆτα is beta. Ἄστεα are cities; νόον is mind; ἔγνω is learned. When she stands, the boat wobbles dangerously. By pushing first one oar, then the other, Himerius holds the stern against the base of the wall, the skiff scraping as it falls, shuddering as it rises, and Anna grabs a hank of seaweed growing from a crevice with her right hand, finds a little shelf for her left, swings one foot off the boat, and brings her body to the wall, and the skiff falls away beneath her.
She clings to the brick as Himerius backs the skiff away. All that remains below her feet is black water flowing Saint Koralia knows how deep and Saint Koralia knows how cold and alive with Saint Koralia knows what terrors. The only way is up.
Masons and time have left the butt ends of bricks sticking out here and there, so finding holds isn’t difficult, and despite the fear, the rhythm of climbing soon absorbs her. One handhold, two, one toehold, two; before long, the fog erases Himerius and the water below and she climbs as if ascending a ladder into the clouds. Too little fear and you don’t pay enough attention; too much and you freeze. Reach, cling, push, ascend, reach. No room in the mind for anything else.
Rope and sack around her neck, Anna rises through a stratigraphy of rotting brick, from the first emperor to the last, and soon the holes Himerius spoke of are upon her: a series of ornamented scuppers shaped like the heads of lions, each as big as she is. She manages to pull herself up and through the open mouth of one. As soon as she has weight beneath her knees, she twists her shoulders, and crawls through a cradle of muck.
Damp and streaked with mud, she lowers herself into what, centuries ago, might have been a refectory. Somewhere ahead rats scrabble in the dark.
Stop. Listen. Much of the timbered ceiling has caved in, and in the fog-scattered moonlight she can see a debris-littered table as long as Kalaphates’s workshop running through the center of the room with a garden of ferns growing on top. A rain-ruined tapestry hangs on one wall; when she touches the hem, invisible things behind it go flapping deeper into the shadows. On the wall her fingers find an iron bracket, perhaps for a torch, badly rusted. Could this be worth something? Himerius had conjured visions of forgotten treasures—she imagined the palace of brave Alcinous—but this is hardly a treasury; everything has been corroded by weather and time; it is an empire of rats, and whatever chamberlain once watched over this place must be three hundred years dead.
To Anna’s right gapes what might be a sheer drop, but turns out to be a staircase. She feels her way along the wall, one step at a time; the stairs twist, branch, and branch again. She tries a third hall and finds cells like the cells of monks running down both sides of a corridor. Here’s a pile of what might be bones, the rustle of dried leaves, a crevice in the floor waiting to swallow her.
She turns around, stumbles forward, and in the spectral quarter-light space and time muddle. How long has she been in here? Has Maria fallen asleep, or is she awake and frightened, still waiting for Anna to return from the toilet? Has Himerius waited for her, is his rope long enough, have he and his derelict skiff been swallowed by the sea?
Weariness crashes over her. She has risked everything for nothing; soon cocks will crow, matins will begin, and Widow Theodora will open her eyes. She’ll reach for her rosary, lower her kneecaps onto the cold stone.
Anna manages to feel her way back to the staircase and climb to a small wooden door. She pushes through into a round room, partially open to the sky, that smells of mud and moss and time. And something else.
Parchment.
What ceiling remains is blank, smooth, and unadorned, as though she has climbed inside the braincase of a big, punctured skull, and on the walls of this little chamber, scarcely visible in the moonlit fog, doorless cupboards run from floor to ceiling. Some are filled with debris and moss. But others are full of books.
Her breath stops. Here a heap of rotting paper, here a crumbling scroll, here a stack of bound codices wet with rain. From her memory comes the voice of Licinius: But books, like people, die too.
She fills the sack with a dozen manuscripts, as many as it will hold, and drags it back down the staircase, down the corridor, guessing at various turns. When she finds the great room with the tapestry, she ties the throat of the sack to one end of the rope and scrambles up a pile of rubble and crawls through the scupper, pushing the sack before her.
The taut rope makes a high, ratcheting whine as she lowers it down the wall. Just as she decides that he is gone, that he has left her here to die—Himerius and his skiff emerge next to the wall, wrapped in fog and much smaller than she expected them to look. The rope goes slack, the weight comes off, and she drops the end.
Now to climb down. To glance below her feet starts a feeling in her abdomen like she will be sick, so she looks only at her hands, then her toes, easing her way down through the ivy and capers and clumps of wild thyme, and in another minute her left foot touches the thwart, then her right, and she is in the boat.
Her fingertips are raw, her dress grimed, her nerves frayed. “You were gone too long,” hisses Himerius. “Was there gold? What did you find?”
The hem of night is already pulling away as they come round the edge of the breakwater into the harbor. Himerius pulls so hard on the oars she worries the shafts will snap, and she removes a first manuscript from the sack. It is large and bloated and she tears the first leaf trying to turn it. The page appears to be full of little vertical scratches. The next is the same, column after column of tally marks. The whole book seems to be like this. Receipts? A register of something? She withdraws a second book, a smaller one, but this too appears to be full of columns with unvarying marks in them, though this one is water-stained and possibly charred as well.
Her heart drops.
The fog suffuses with a pale lavender light, and Himerius ships the oars a moment and takes the second codex from her and smells it and stares at her with his brows bunched.
“What is this?”
He expected leopard hides. Ivory wine cups inlaid with jewels. She searches her memory, finds Licinius there, his lips like pale worms inside the nest of his beard. “Even if what they contain is not valuable, the skins they are written on are. They can be scraped and reused—”
Himerius drops the codex back in the sack and jabs it with his toe, vexed, and continues rowing. The big carrack at anchor seems to float on a looking glass, and Himerius beaches the skiff and drags it above tideline and turns it over and coils the rope carefully over one shoulder and sets off with the sack over the other, Anna trailing behind, like some ogre and his slave from a nursemaid’s rhyme.
They head through the Genoese quarter, where the houses grow fine and tall, many with windowglass and some with mosaics set into the facades and ornate sun balconies overlooking the sea walls fronting the Golden Horn. At the entrance to the Venetian quarter, men-at-arms stand yawning beneath an archway and let the children walk by with no more than a glance.
They pass a series of workshops and stop outside a gate. “If you speak,” says Himerius, “call me Brother. But don’t speak.”
A servant with a clubfoot leads them into a courtyard where a lone fig tree struggles for light and they lean against a wall and cocks crow and dogs bark and Anna imagines the bell ringers climbing right now into the fog, reaching for ropes to wake the city, wool brokers raising shutters, pickpockets slinking home, monks submitting themselves to the first lash of the day, crabs drowsing beneath boats, terns diving for breakfast in the shallows, Chryse stirring the hearth-fire to life. Widow Theodora ascending the stone stairs to the workroom.
Blessed One, protect us from idleness.
For we have committed sins without number.
Five gray stones at the opposite end of the courtyard transform into geese that wake and flap and stretch and cluck at them. Soon the sky is the color of concrete and carts are moving out in the streets. Maria will tell Widow Theodora that Anna has a rheum or a fever. But how long can such a ruse last?
Eventually a door opens and a drowsy Italian in a velvet coat with half-length sleeves looks at Himerius long enough to decide he is insignificant and shuts the door again. Anna digs among the damp manuscripts in the burgeoning light. The leaves of the first she pulls out are so splotched with mold that she cannot make out a single character.
Licinius used to swoon about vellum—parchment made from the skin of a calf cut out of the womb of its mother before it was born. He said that to write on vellum was like hearing the finest music, but the membrane from which these books are made feels coarse and bristly and smells like rancid broth. Himerius is right: these will be worth nothing at all.
A maidservant comes past carrying a basin of milk, taking small steps so as not to spill it, and the hunger in Anna’s gut is enough to make the courtyard swim. She has failed again. Widow Theodora will beat her with the bastinado, Himerius will denounce her for stealing chickens from the convent, Maria will never have enough silver for a blessing from the shrine of the Virgin of the Source, and when Anna’s body swings from the gibbet the throngs will say alleluia.
How does a life get to be like this? Where she wears her sister’s castoff underlinen and a thrice-patched dress while men like Kalaphates go about in silk and velvet with servants trotting behind? While foreigners like these have basins of milk and courtyards of geese and a different coat for every feast day? She feels a scream building inside her, a shriek to shatter glass, when Himerius hands her a small battered codex with clasps on the binding.
“What’s this?”
She opens to a leaf in the middle. The old Greek Licinius taught her proceeds across the page line after systematic line. India, it reads,
produces horses with one horn, they say, and the same country fosters asses with a single horn. And from these horns they make drinking-vessels, and if anyone puts deadly poison in them, and a man drinks, the plot will do him no harm.
On the next page:
The Seal, I am told, vomits up the curdled milk from its stomach so that epileptics may not be cured thereby. Upon my word the Seal is indeed a malignant creature.
“This,” she whispers, her pulse accelerating. “Show them this.”
Himerius takes it back.
“Hold it the other way. Like so.”
The boy kneads the great orbs of his eyeballs. The lettering is beautiful and practiced. Anna glimpses, I have heard the people say that the Pigeon is of all birds the most temperate and restrained in its sexual relations—is it a treatise about animals?—but now the clubfooted servant calls to Himerius and he takes the book and sack and follows the servant into the house.
The geese watch her.
Himerius is not gone fifty heartbeats before he comes back out.
“What?”
“They want to speak to you.”
Up two stone stairs, past a storeroom stacked with barrels, and into a room that smells of ink. Across three large tables are scattered tapers, quills, inkpots, nibs, awls, blades, sealing wax, reed pens, and little sandbags to hold down parchment. Charts line one wall, rolls of paper lean against another, and goose droppings are coiled here and there on the tiles, some of it stepped in and smeared about. Around the center table, three clean-shaven foreigners study the pages of the codex she has found and speak their rapid language like excited birds. The darkest and smallest of them looks at her with some incredulity. “The boy claims you can decipher this?”
“We are not as proficient in the old Greek as we would prefer,” says the mid-sized one.
Her finger does not shake as she sets it to the parchment. “Nature,” she reads,
has made the Hedgehog prudent and experienced in providing for its own wants. Thus, since it needs food to last a whole year, and since every…
All three men resume trilling like sparrows. The smallest begs her to continue, and she muddles through another few lines, strange observations about the habits of anchovies, then of some creature called a clapperbill, and the tallest and best-dressed of them stops her and walks among the scrolls and homiliaries and writing implements and stands staring into a cupboard as though into a distant landscape.
Beneath a table, a melon rind foams with ants. Anna feels as if she has entered some slip of Homer’s song about Ulysses, as if the gods are whispering to each other high on Olympus, then reaching down through the clouds to arrange her fate. In his splintery Greek the tall one asks: “Where did you get this?”
Himerius says, “A hidden place, very hard to get to.”
“A monastery?” asks the tall man.
Himerius gives a tentative nod, and all three Italians look at each other, and Himerius nods some more, and soon everyone is nodding.
“Where in the monastery,” says the smallest of them, removing the other manuscripts from the sack, “did you find it?”
“A chamber.”
“A large chamber?”
“Small to average to large,” says Himerius.
All three men start talking at once.
“And are there other manuscripts like this one?”
“How are they arranged?”
“On their backs?”
“Or stood up in stacks?”
“How many are there?”
“How is the room decorated?”
Himerius puts a fist to his chin, pretending to sift through his memory, and the three Italians watch him.
“The room is not large,” Anna says. “I could not see any adornments. It was round and once had arches in its ceiling. But the roof is broken now. There were other books and scrolls stacked in recesses like cookware.”
Excitement cascades through the three men. The tallest one rummages inside his fur-trimmed coat and takes out a bag of money and pours coins into his palm. Anna sees gold ducats and silver stavrata and morning light dances across the writing tables and she is suddenly dizzy.
“Our lord,” says the tall Italian, “he puts a finger in every dish, you know this phrase? Shipping, trade, liturgical, soldiering. But his real interest, his love, so to speak, is locating manuscripts from the antique world. He believes all the best thinking was done a thousand years ago.”
The man shrugs. Anna cannot take her eyes off the money.
“For the animal text,” he says, and gives Himerius a dozen coins, and Himerius gapes, and the medium-sized man picks up a quill and trims its tip with a blade, and the smallest says, “Bring us more and we will pay you more.”
As they leave the courtyard, the morning is glorious, the sky rosy, the fog burning away, and Anna follows Himerius’s long strides as they wind their way through a row of tall, beautiful wooden houses—which seem taller and more beautiful now—joy cartwheeling through her, and at the first market they pass a vendor is already frying flatcakes stuffed with cheese and honey and bay leaves, and they buy four, and stuff them into their mouths, the grease hot on the back of her throat, and Himerius counts out her share of the money, and she buries the heavy, bright coins beneath the sash of her dress, and hurries through the shadow of the church of Saint Barbara, then through a second, larger market full of carts and fabrics, oil in wide-lipped jugs, a knife-sharpener setting up his wheel, a woman reaching to pull the cloth off a birdcage, a child carrying October roses in bunches, the avenue filling with horses and donkeys, Genoese and Georgians, Jews and Pisans, deacons and nuns, moneychangers, musicians and messengers, two gamblers already throwing oxhorn dice, a notary carrying documents, a nobleman pausing at a stall while a servant holds a parasol high above his head, and if Maria wants to buy angels, she can buy them now; they’ll flutter around her head and batter her eyes with their wings.