That evening in the pasture where they feed the oxen Maher finds Omeir sitting atop a fallen block of limestone and squats beside him and picks at a scab on his knee. They gaze across the encampment to the moat and the chalk-white towers, striped red with brick. In the setting sun the jumble of rooftops on the far side of the walls seems to burn.

“Do you think by this time tomorrow, all of that will be ours?”

Omeir says nothing. He is ashamed to say that the size of the city terrifies him. How could men have built such a place?

Maher enthuses about the house he’ll choose for himself, how it will have two stories and channels of water running through a garden with pear trees and jasmine, and how he’ll have a dark-eyed wife, and five sons, and at least a dozen three-legged stools—Maher is always talking about three-legged stools. Omeir thinks of the stone cottage in the ravine, his mother making curds, Grandfather toasting pine nuts, and homesickness rolls through him.

Atop a low hill on their left, surrounded by shields, a series of ditches, and a curtain-wall of fabric, the sultan’s compound of tents ruffles in the breeze. There are tents for his bodyguards, tents for his council and treasury, for his holy relics and his falconry, his astrologers and scholars and food-tasters; kitchen tents, toilet tents, contemplation tents. Beside an observation tower ripples the sultan’s personal tent—red, gold, and as large as a grove of trees. Its interior is painted, Omeir has heard, the colors of paradise, and he aches to see it.

“Our prince, in his infinite wisdom,” says Maher, following Omeir’s gaze, “has discovered a weakness. A flaw. Do you see where the river enters the city? Where the walls dip beside that gate? Water has been running there since the days of the Prophet, peace be upon Him, collecting, seeping, chewing away. The foundations there are weak, and the mitering of the stones has begun to fail. It is there that we will smash through.”

Up and down the city walls, sentry fires are being lit. Omeir tries to imagine swimming the moat, clambering over the scarp on the far side, somehow scaling the outer wall, fighting across the battlements, then dropping into a no-man’s-land before the huge bulwark of the inner wall, its towers as tall as twelve men. You would need wings; you would need to be a god.

“Tomorrow night,” says Maher. “Tomorrow night two of those houses will be ours.”