Drunken, foolhardy Aethon mistakes a magical city in a play for a real place. He sets off for Thessaly, land of magic, and accidentally turns himself into a donkey. This time she is able to make quicker progress, and as she reads aloud, something curious happens: as long as she keeps a steady stream of words flowing past Maria’s ears, her sister doesn’t seem to suffer so much. Her muscles loosen; her head falls to Anna’s shoulder. Aethon-the-donkey is kidnapped by bandits, gets lashed to a wheel by the miller’s son, walks on his tired, cracking hooves to the place where nature comes to an end. Maria doesn’t moan in pain or whisper about invisible subterranean miners scratching beneath the floor. She sits beside her, blinking into the candlelight, amusement playing over her face.

“Do you think it’s really true, Anna? A fish so large it could swallow ships whole?”

A mouse scrabbles across the stone and rises onto its hind legs and stands twitching its nose at her with its head cocked as though awaiting her answer. Anna thinks of the last time she sat with Licinius. Μῦθος, he wrote, mýthos, a conversation, a tale, a legend from the darkness before the days of Christ.

“Some stories,” she says, “can be both false and true at the same time.”

Down the hall Widow Theodora touches the worn beads of her rosary in the moonlight. One cell away, Chryse the cook, half her teeth gone, drinks from a jug of wine and sets her cracked hands on her knees and dreams of a summer day outside the walls, walking beneath cherry trees, a sky full of crows. One mile east, in the belly of a carrack at anchor, the boy Himerius, drafted into the city’s stopgap naval defenses, sits with thirty other oarsmen, resting over the shaft of a great oar, his back throbbing, both palms bleeding, eight days left to live. In the underground cisterns beneath the church of the Hagia Sophia, three little boats float on the black mirror of the water, each packed with spring roses, while a priest intones a hymn into the echoing dark.

Omeir

The first time he comes north around the city walls and sees the estuary of the Golden Horn—a sheet of silver water a half mile wide, trundling slowly out to sea—it seems the most astonishing thing in the world. Gulls wheel overhead; wading birds as big as gods rise from reed brakes; two of the sultan’s barges glide past as if by magic. Grandfather said that the ocean was large enough to contain every dream everyone had ever dreamed, but until now he had no comprehension of what that meant.