From a drawer in her memory comes something Widow Theodora once said: We have provoked the Lord, child, and now he will open the ground beneath us. She whispers a prayer to Saint Koralia that if there is any hope at all to send her a sign, and she watches and trembles, and the wind blows, and no stars show, and no sign comes.

The master has fled and the watchman is gone. The door to Widow Theodora’s cell is barred. Anna takes a candle from the scullery cabinet—who do they belong to now?—and lights it in the hearth and lets herself into their cell, where Maria lies against the wall, thin as a needle. All her life she has been told to believe, tried to believe, wanted to believe, that if a person suffers long enough, works hard enough, then she—like Ulysses washing up on the shore of the kingdom of brave Alcinous—will ultimately reach a better place. That through suffering we are redeemed. That by dying we live again. And maybe in the end that’s the easier thing. But Anna is tired of suffering. And she is not ready to die.

Little wooden Saint Koralia watches her from her niche, two fingers raised. In the sputtering candlelight, wrapped in her headscarf, Anna reaches beneath the pallet, draws out the sack she collected with Himerius days before, and removes the various wads of damp paper. Harvest records, taxation records. Finally the little stained codex bound in goatskin.

Water stains splotch the leather; the edges of the folios are speckled black. But her heart jolts when she sees the writing on the leaves: neat, inclined to the left, as though leaning into a wind. Something about a sick niece and men walking the earth as beasts.

On the next leaf:

… a palace of golden towers stacked on clouds, ringed by falcons, redshanks, quails, moorhens, and cuckoos, where rivers of broth gushed from spigots, and…

She flips forward:

… this hair growing out of my legs—why, these aren’t feathers! My mouth—it doesn’t feel like a beak! And these aren’t wings—they’re hooves!

A dozen leaves farther on:

… I crossed mountain passes, rounded amber-bearing forests, staggered over mountains webbed with ice, to the frozen rim of the world, where on the solstice the people lost the sun for forty days, and they wept until messengers on the mountaintops glimpsed the returning light…

Maria moans in her sleep. Anna shakes, shocks of recognition flashing through her. A city in the clouds. A donkey at the edge of the sea. An account that contains the entire world. And the mysteries beyond.

NINE

AT THE FROZEN RIM OF THE WORLD

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio I