She is enlisted with several hundred other children to help shore up deteriorated sections of the walls. They haul paving stones, flagstones, even grave stones, and hand them up to bricklayers who mortar them into place. As though the whole city is being disassembled and rebuilt as an endless wall.
All day she lifts stones, carries buckets; among the masons working on scaffolding above her are a baker and two fishermen she recognizes. No one speaks the sultan’s name aloud, as though saying it might cause his army to materialize inside the city. As the day wears on, a cold wind rises, the sun subsumed under swirls of cloud, and the spring afternoon feels like a winter night. Along the ramparts above them, barefoot monks carry a reliquary behind a crossbearer, chanting a low and somber song. Which, she wonders, will be more effective at keeping out invaders: mortar or prayer?
That night, the second of April, as the children drift back toward their homes, cold and hungry, Anna picks her way through the orchards near the Fifth Military Gate to the old archer’s turret.
The postern is still there, full of debris. Six turns to the top. She yanks away a few creepers of ivy; the fresco of the silver and bronze city still floats among the clouds, gradually flaking away. On her tiptoes, Anna reaches to touch the donkey, eternally stuck on the wrong side of the sea, then climbs out the west-facing archer’s loop.
What she sees, beyond the outer wall, beyond the fosse, turns her cold. Groves and orchards like the ones she and Maria passed through a month before on their way to Saint Mary of the Spring have been hacked down and in their place stretches a wasteland bordered by wooden posts, sharpened at their ends and rammed into the earth like the teeth of enormous combs. Beyond the spike walls and palisades, which extend as far as she can see in both directions, lies a second city haloed around the first.
Thousands of Saracen tents flap out in the wind. Fires, camels, horses, carts, a great distant whirling blur of dust and men, all in quantities so large she does not possess the numerals to count them. How was it that old Licinius described the armies of the Greeks as they assembled outside the walls of Troy?
But ne’er till now such numbers charged a field:
Thick as autumnal leaves or driving sand,
The moving squadrons blacken all the strand.
The wind shifts and a thousand cookfires flare brighter, and a thousand banners flap on a thousand standards, and Anna’s mouth goes dry. Even if a person were able to slip out a gate and try to flee, how would she ever pick her way through all that?
From a drawer in her memory comes something Widow Theodora once said: We have provoked the Lord, child, and now he will open the ground beneath us. She whispers a prayer to Saint Koralia that if there is any hope at all to send her a sign, and she watches and trembles, and the wind blows, and no stars show, and no sign comes.
The master has fled and the watchman is gone. The door to Widow Theodora’s cell is barred. Anna takes a candle from the scullery cabinet—who do they belong to now?—and lights it in the hearth and lets herself into their cell, where Maria lies against the wall, thin as a needle. All her life she has been told to believe, tried to believe, wanted to believe, that if a person suffers long enough, works hard enough, then she—like Ulysses washing up on the shore of the kingdom of brave Alcinous—will ultimately reach a better place. That through suffering we are redeemed. That by dying we live again. And maybe in the end that’s the easier thing. But Anna is tired of suffering. And she is not ready to die.
Little wooden Saint Koralia watches her from her niche, two fingers raised. In the sputtering candlelight, wrapped in her headscarf, Anna reaches beneath the pallet, draws out the sack she collected with Himerius days before, and removes the various wads of damp paper. Harvest records, taxation records. Finally the little stained codex bound in goatskin.
Water stains splotch the leather; the edges of the folios are speckled black. But her heart jolts when she sees the writing on the leaves: neat, inclined to the left, as though leaning into a wind. Something about a sick niece and men walking the earth as beasts.
On the next leaf:
… a palace of golden towers stacked on clouds, ringed by falcons, redshanks, quails, moorhens, and cuckoos, where rivers of broth gushed from spigots, and…
She flips forward:
… this hair growing out of my legs—why, these aren’t feathers! My mouth—it doesn’t feel like a beak! And these aren’t wings—they’re hooves!
A dozen leaves farther on:
… I crossed mountain passes, rounded amber-bearing forests, staggered over mountains webbed with ice, to the frozen rim of the world, where on the solstice the people lost the sun for forty days, and they wept until messengers on the mountaintops glimpsed the returning light…
Maria moans in her sleep. Anna shakes, shocks of recognition flashing through her. A city in the clouds. A donkey at the edge of the sea. An account that contains the entire world. And the mysteries beyond.