At night she rejoins the crews of women and girls in the terrace between the inner and outer walls, hauling stones to the parapets so that they can be dropped onto the heads of the Saracens when they come. Everyone is hungry and under-rested; no one sings hymns or murmurs encouragements anymore. Just before midnight, monks haul a hydraulic organ up to the top of the outer wall and play an awful, screeching caterwaul, like the moans of a great beast dying in the night.
How do men convince themselves that others must die so they might live? She thinks of Maria, who owned so little and who left so quietly, and of Licinius telling her about the Greeks camped outside the walls of Troy for ten years, and of the Trojan women trapped inside, weaving and worrying, wondering whether they would ever walk the fields or swim in the sea again, or whether the gates would fall, and they would have to watch their babies be tossed over the ramparts to die.
She works until dawn and when she returns, Chryse tells her to wait in the courtyard, then reappears from the scullery with a wooden chair in one hand and Widow Theodora’s bone-handled scissors in the other. Anna sits and Chryse pulls back her hair and opens the blades and for a moment Anna worries the old cook is about to cut her throat.
“Tonight or tomorrow,” Chryse says, “the city will fall.”
Anna hears the blades rasp, feels her hair falling onto her feet.
“You’re sure?”
“I have dreamed it, child. And when it does, the soldiers will take everything they can get their hands on. Food, silver, silk. But the most valuable thing will be girls.”
Anna has a vision of the young sultan somewhere among the tents of his men, seated on a carpet with a model of the city in his lap, probing it with one finger, searching each tower, each crenellation, each battered section of the walls for a way in.
“They’ll strip you to the skin and either keep you for themselves or bring you to a market and sell you. Our side or theirs, it is always the same in war. Do you know how I know this?”
The blades flash so near to her eyes that Anna is afraid to turn her head.
“Because that is what happened with me.”
Her hair newly shorn, Anna eats six green apricots and lies down with a stomachache and tumbles into sleep. In a nightmare she walks the floor of a vast atrium with a vaulted ceiling so high it seems to hold up the sky. On tiers of shelves running down either side are stacked hundreds upon hundreds of texts, like a library of the gods, but each time she opens a book, she finds it full of words in languages she does not know, incomprehensible word after incomprehensible word in book after book on shelf after shelf. She walks and walks, and it’s always the same, the library indecipherable and infinite, the sound of her footsteps tiny in all that immensity.
Dusk descends on the fifty-fifth evening of the siege. In the imperial palace of the Blachernae, tucked against the Golden Horn, the emperor gathers his captains around him in prayer. Up and down the outer walls, sentries count arrows, stoke fires beneath great pitchers of tar. Just beyond the fosse, inside the private tent of the sultan, a servant lights seven tapers, one for each of the heavens, and withdraws, and the young sovereign kneels to pray.
On the Fourth Hill of the city, above the once-great embroidery house of Kalaphates, a flock of gulls, soaring high over the roof, catches the last glow of the sun. Anna rises from her pallet, surprised to see that she has slept away the daylight.
In the scullery the embroideresses who are left, none younger than fifty, step away from the hearth so that Chryse can shove the pieces of a sewing table into the fire.
Widow Theodora comes inside with an armful of what looks to Anna like deadly nightshade. She strips away the leaves, drops the shiny black berries into a basin, and puts the roots into a mortar. As she crushes the roots, Widow Theodora tells them that their bodies are just dust, that all their lives their souls have yearned toward a more distant place. Now that they’re close, Widow Theodora says, their souls quiver with joy at the prospect of leaving the shells of their bodies behind to come home to God.
The last blue light of day is sucked away into night. In the firelight the faces of the women take on ancient suffering that is almost sublime: as though they suspected all along that things would end like this and are resigned to it. Chryse calls Anna into the storeroom and lights a candle. She hands her a few strips of salted sturgeon and a loaf of dark bread wrapped in cloth.
“If any child ever born,” Chryse whispers, “can outsmart them, outlast them, or outrun them, it is you. There is still life to be had. Go tonight, and I will send prayers at your heels.”
She can hear Widow Theodora, out in the scullery, say, “We leave our bodies behind in this world so that we may take flight into the next.”