Church bells no longer keep the hours. She drifts through the scullery, the hunger in her gut a snake uncoiling, then stands in the open doorway looking at the sky above the courtyard. Himerius used to say that as long as the moon was getting larger, the world could never end. But now it wanes.
“First,” Widow Theodora whispers into the hearth, “wars rage among the peoples of the earth. Then the false prophets rise. Soon the planets will fall from the sky, followed by the sun, and everyone will become ash.”
Maria’s legs are discolored now, and she has to be carried to the toilet. They are in the last parts of the codex, and some leaves are so deteriorated that Anna can make out only one line of text for every three. Still she keeps Aethon’s journey going for her sister. The crow flaps through the void, tumbling through the Zodiac.
From these Icarian heights, my feathers powdered with the dust of the stars, I saw the earth far below as it really was, a little mud-heap in a great vastness, its kingdoms only cobwebs, its armies only crumbs. Storm-broken and singed, worn out and wind-plucked, half my feathers lost, I drifted among the constellations at the end of hope, when I glimpsed a distant glow, a golden filigree of towers, the puff of clouds—
The text peters out, the lines dissolved beneath a water stain, but for her sister Anna conjures it: a city made of silver and bronze towers, windows glowing, banners flapping from rooftops, birds of every size and color wheeling round. The weary crow spirals down out of the stars.
Cannonballs thud in the distance. The flame of the candle bows.
“He never stops believing,” whispers Maria. “Even when he is so tired.”
Anna blows out the candle and closes the codex. She thinks of Ulysses washing onto the island of the Phaeacians. “He could smell jasmine among the stars,” she says, “and violets, and laurel, and roses, grapes and pears, apples upon apples, figs on figs.”
“I smell them, Anna.”
Beside the icon of Saint Koralia sits the little snuffbox she took from the abandoned workshop of the Italians, its cracked lid painted with a miniature of a turreted palace. There are men in Urbino, the scribes said, who make lenses that let you see thirty miles. Men who can draw a lion so real it looks as though it will walk off the page and eat you.
Our master dreams of constructing a library to surpass the pope’s, they said, a library to contain every text ever written. To last until the end of time.
Maria dies on the twenty-seventh of May, the women of the household praying around her. Anna sets a palm on her sister’s forehead and feels the heat leave her. “When you see her again,” Widow Theodora says, “she’ll be clothed in light.” Chryse lifts Maria’s body as easily as she might lift a piece of linen dried stiff in the sun, and carries her across the courtyard to the gates of Saint Theophano.
Anna rolls up the samite hood—five finished birds entwined by blooming vines. In some other universe, perhaps, a great bright community weeps: their mother and father, aunts and cousins, a little chapel packed with spring roses, a thousand organ pipes resounding with song, Maria’s soul afloat among cherubs, grapevines, and peacocks—like a design from one of her embroideries.
In the katholikon at Saint Theophano nuns keep a nonstop vigil of prayer rising toward the throne of God. One points to where Chryse should set the body, and another covers Maria with a shroud, and Anna sits on the stones beside her sister while a priest is fetched.