That same afternoon the ox train is rumbling toward the Golden Horn to collect yet another load of stone cannonballs, a hundred yards from the landing stage, the air rinsed clean by the morning’s storm, the estuary blue-green and aglitter with sunlight, when Moonlight—not Tree—stops in his tracks, tucks his forelegs under his body, lowers himself to the ground, and dies.
He is dragged forward a body length and the train stops.
Tree stands in his harness, his three good legs splayed, the yoke cocked against the weight of his brother. Red spume leaks from Moonlight’s nostrils; a little white petal, carried on the breeze, sticks to his open eye. Omeir leans into the harness, tries to lend his little strength to the bullock’s great one, but the animal’s heart no longer beats.
The other teamsters, accustomed to seeing animals fail in the yoke, squat or sit on the edge of the road. The quartermaster shouts toward the quay and four porters start up from the docks.
Tree bends to make it easier for Omeir to remove the yoke. The porters and four teamsters, two on each leg, drag Moonlight to the edge of the road, and the oldest among them gives thanks to God, draws his knife, and opens the animal’s throat.
Halter and rope in one hand, Omeir leads Tree down a cattle trail into the rushes at the edge of the Bosporus. Through the dazzle of sunlight swim memories of Moonlight as a little calf. He liked to scratch his ribs against one particular pine tree beside the byre. He loved to wade into the creek up to his belly and call to his brother in delight. He wasn’t very good at hide-and-seek. He was frightened of bees.
Tree’s hide shivers up and down his back and a mantle of flies takes off and settles again. From here the city and its girdle of walls look small, a pale stone beneath the sky.
A few hundred paces away, two porters build a fire while the two others disassemble Moonlight, carving off his head, cutting away the tongue, spitting the heart, liver, and each of the kidneys. They wrap the thigh muscles in fat and secure them to pikes, and lean the pikes over the fire, and bargemen and stevedores and teamsters walk up the road in groups and squat on their heels as the meat cooks. At Omeir’s feet hundreds of little blue butterflies sip minerals from a patch of tidal mud.
Moonlight: his ropy tail, his shaggy cloven hooves. God knits him together in the womb of Beauty beside his brother and he lives for three winters and dies hundreds of miles from home and for what? Tree lies down in the reeds and fouls the air around him and Omeir wonders what the animal understands and what will happen to Moonlight’s two beautiful horns and every breath sends another crack through his heart.
That evening the guns fire seemingly nonstop, battering the towers and walls, and the men are ordered to light as many torches, candles, and cookfires as possible. Omeir helps two teamsters fell olive trees and drag them to a great bonfire. The sultan’s ulema move between the fires delivering encouragement. “The Christians,” they say, “are devious and arrogant. They worship bones and die for mummies. They cannot sleep unless it’s on feather beds and cannot go an hour without wine. They think the city is theirs, but it already belongs to us.”
Night becomes like day. Moonlight’s flesh travels the intestines of fifty men. Grandfather, Omeir thinks, would have known what to do. He would have recognized the early signals of lameness, would have taken better care of Moonlight’s hooves, would have known some remedy involving herbs and ointment and beeswax. Grandfather, who could see signs of game birds where Omeir saw nothing, who could steer Leaf and Needle with a click of his tongue.
He shuts his eyes against the smoke and remembers a story a teamster told in the fields outside Edirne about a man in hell. The devils there, the teamster said, would cut the man every morning, many thousands of times, but the cuts were just small enough that they would not kill him. All day the wounds would dry, and scab over, and the next morning, just as the cuts began to heal, they were opened up again.
After morning prayer he goes to find Tree in the pasture where he has staked him and the ox cannot get up. He lies on his side, one horn pointing to the sky. The world has swallowed his brother and Tree is ready to join him. Omeir kneels and runs his hands over the bullock’s flank and watches the reflection of the sky quake in the bullock’s trembling eye.
Does Grandfather look up this morning at this same cloud, and Nida, and their mother, and he and Tree, all five of them looking up at this same drifting white shape as it passes over them all?