In the workshop, Widow Theodora forbids the needleworkers from speaking of the looming threat: the only talk should be of needles, stitchwork, and the glory of God. Wrap the wire in dyed thread, group the wrapped wires in threes, place a stitch, turn the frame. One morning with great ceremony Widow Theodora rewards Maria for her diligence with the job of embroidering twelve birds, one for each apostle, into a green samite hood that will be attached to a bishop’s cope. Maria, her fingers trembling, sets straight to work, murmuring a prayer as she locks the bright green silk in her hoop and twists floss through the eye of a needle. Anna watches and wonders: To what saints’ days will bishops wear brocaded copes if the time of man on earth is ending?

Snow falls, freezes, melts, and an icy fog shrouds the city. Anna hurries through the courtyard and down to the harbor and finds Himerius shivering beside his skiff. Ice glazes the wales and oar shafts and glistens on the creases of his sleeves and on the chains of the few merchant ships still at anchor in the harbor. He sets a brazier in the bottom of the boat, lights a piece of charcoal, and runs out the fishing lines, and Anna takes a melancholic pleasure in watching sparks lift into the fog and melt away behind them. Himerius produces a string of dried figs from inside his coat, and the brazier glows at their feet like a warm and happy secret, a pot of honey hidden for some special night. The oars drip, and they eat, and Himerius sings a fisherman’s song about a mermaid with breasts the size of lambs, and water laps against the hull, and his voice turns serious when he says that he has heard that Genoese captains will smuggle anybody who can pay enough across the sea to Genoa before the attack of the Saracens begins.

“You would flee?”

“They’ll put me to oars. All day, all night, working the shafts belowdecks, wet to your waist in your own piss? While twenty Saracen ships try to ram you or set you afire?”

“But the walls,” she says. “They have survived so many sieges before.”

Himerius resumes rowing, the oarlocks creaking, the breakwater gliding past. “My uncle says that last summer a Hungarian foundry man visited our emperor. This man was renowned for making war engines that can turn stone walls to dust. But the Hungarian required ten times more bronze than we have in the whole city. And our emperor, Uncle says, cannot afford to hire one hundred bowmen from Thrace. He can hardly afford to keep himself out of the rain.”

The sea laps against the breakwater. Himerius holds the oar blades in the air, his breath pluming.

“And?”

“The emperor couldn’t pay. So the Hungarian went to find someone who could.”