Teams of road-builders move ahead of the columns, shoring up crossings, laying boards over muddy ground, but eight days out from Edirne the train reaches an unbridged creek, the water high and turbid, the current in the deepest section rising in a great murky swill. Drivers in the front warn that slick cobbles lurk in the streambed, but the lead teamster says they must push on.

The train is about halfway across when the animal directly in front of Tree slips. The yoke attached to his mate holds him upright for a moment, then the leg of the bullock breaks so loudly that Omeir can feel the crack in his chest. The wounded bullock goes sideways with his partner roaring beside him, the whole train pulled to its left, and Omeir feels Tree and Moonlight brace to take the extra weight as the two cattle flail in the current. A driver hurries forward with a long spear and runs it through first one, then the other thrashing ox, and their blood flows into the water while smiths hack at the chains to break them free, and teamsters hurry up and down the line, ho’ing and settling their animals. Soon riders are hitching horses to each of the two dead bullocks to drag them out of the water so they can be butchered, and the blacksmiths set up a forge and bellows on the muddy bank to repair the chain, and Omeir leads Moonlight and Tree into the grass and wonders if they understand what they have seen.

As darkness falls he grooms first Tree and then Moonlight while they graze, and cleans their hooves, and tells himself he will not eat the slain animals out of respect, but later, after dark, when the smell fills the cold air and the bowls of meat are passed, he cannot help himself. He chews and feels the weight of the sky on him and with it a dark confusion.

With each passing sundown, more light drains out of his oxen. Once in a while Tree blinks his huge wet eyes at Omeir, as though in forgiveness, and in the mornings before he is yoked, Moonlight remains curious, watching butterflies or a rabbit or twitching his nostrils to parse different scents in the wind. But most of the time when they are unyoked they hang their heads and eat as though too weary to do anything more.

The boy stands beside them, ankle-deep in mud, hiding his face inside his hood, and watches the patient, mild way Moonlight’s eyelashes glide up and down. His coat, which could look almost silver when he was young, full of little rainbows iridescing in the sun, now looks mouse gray. A cloud of flies floats over a suppurating wound on his shoulder—the first flies, Omeir realizes, of spring.

CONSTANTINOPLE

THOSE SAME MONTHS

Anna