On both sides of the road, around the teams, men and beasts hurry past like a river flows around a boulder: mules loaded with saddlebags, camels with dozens of earthen jugs hung over their backs, carts laden with provisions and planks and ropes and cloth. How diverse the world is! Omeir sees fortune-tellers, dervishes, astrologers, scholars, bakers, munitions men, blacksmiths, mystics in tattered robes, chroniclers and healers and standard-bearers carrying banners of every color. Some wear leather armor, some have feathers tied to their caps, some are barefoot, some wear boots of shiny Damascene leather to their knees. He sees a group of slaves with three horizontal scars on their foreheads (one, Maher explains, for each of their masters who has died); he sees a man whose brow is so callused from prostrating himself in prayer that it seems he carries a great waxy fingernail on his head.

One afternoon: a mule driver wearing bearskin with a gap in his upper lip not at all unlike Omeir’s, moving past the teams, head down. As he passes, their eyes meet, and the mule driver looks away, and Omeir never sees him again.

He oscillates between amazement and dejection. Going to bed beside a fire and waking beside the embers, frost sparkling on his clothes, sitting beside the other teamsters as the fire is stirred back to life, everyone eating cracked barley and herbs and bits of horsemeat from the same copper pot, he feels a sense of acceptance he has never come close to feeling before, of everyone participating in a massive and justified endeavor, an undertaking so worthy that it makes room even for a boy with a face like his—everyone moving east toward the great city as though called by a magical piper in one of Grandfather’s stories. Each morning dawn arrives earlier, the hours of daylight expanding, flocks of migratory cranes, then ducks, then songbirds pouring overhead, as though the darkness is losing and victory is preordained.

But at other moments his enthusiasm plummets. Mud sticks in great clods to the hooves of Tree and Moonlight, and chains creak and ropes groan and whistles blow up and down the train, and the air seethes with the sounds of suffering animals. Many of the oxen are on fixed yokes, not sliding ones like the kind Grandfather builds, and few of them are used to such heavy loads on uneven ground, and cattle are injured by the hour.

For Omeir each day offers a new lesson in how careless men can be. Some don’t bother to shoe their bullocks with two-piece shoes; others don’t examine the yokes for cracks and the cracks abrade the backs of the steers; others don’t let the animals recover by unyoking them as soon as they are done pulling; still others don’t cap their horns to avoid them hooking one another. There is always blood, always groaning, always distress.