By mid-afternoon the embroideresses who are married and have children have abandoned their worktables. From out in the street come the clopping of hooves and the splashing of wheels and the cries of carters. Anna watches Maria squint over her silk hood. She hears the voice of the tall scribe: The ark has hit the rocks, child. And the tide is washing in.

Omeir

Everyone studies the weltering skies; everyone grows uneasy. Out loud the teamsters say that the sultan is patient and generous, that he recognizes what he has asked of them, that in his wisdom he understands that the bombard will arrive at the battlefield when it is most needed. But after so much exertion, Omeir senses an unspoken agitation running through the men. The weather lurches from storm to storm; whips crack; resentments simmer. Sometimes he can feel men staring with naked suspicion at his face, and he becomes used to rising from the fire and stepping into the shadows.

An uphill section of road can take all day, but the descents cause the most trouble. Brakes snap, axles bend, the cattle bawl in terror and misery; more than once a jointed section of pole splinters and drives an ox to its knees, and every few days another bullock is butchered. Omeir tells himself that what they’re doing—all this exertion, all these lives put to the task of moving the cannon—is right. A necessary campaign, the will of God. But at unpredictable moments homesickness buries him: a sharp, smoky scent, the nickering of someone’s horse in the night, and it’s there again—the dripping of the trees, the burble of the creek. Mother rendering beeswax over the hearth. Nida singing among the ferns. Arthritic, eight-toed Grandfather limping to the byre in his wooden shoes.

“But how will he ever find a wife?” Nida asked once. “With that face of his?”

“It’s not going to be his face that stops them,” Grandfather said, “it’ll be the odor of his toes,” and grabbed one of Omeir’s feet and brought it to his nose and took a big whiff, and everyone laughed, and Grandfather dragged the boy into a great embrace.

Eighteen days into their journey, several of the iron bands holding the monstrous cannon to the cart give way, and it rolls off. Everyone groans. The twenty-ton gun gleams in the clay like an instrument discarded by the gods.