Up and down the western banks of the estuary, Ottoman landing stages swarm with activity. As the ox train descends toward the wharfs, Omeir makes out cranes and winches, stevedores unloading barrels and munitions, draft horses waiting with their carts, and is certain he will never see anything so resplendent again.

But as days turn to weeks, his initial wonder melts away. He and the bullocks are assigned to a team of eight hauling wagons of granite balls, quarried on the north shore of the Black Sea, from a landing stage along the Horn to the impromptu foundry outside the walls where stonecutters chisel and polish the balls to match the calibers of the bombards. The trip is four miles, uphill most of the way, and the guns’ appetite for new projectiles is unappeasable. The ox trains work dusk to dawn, few of the animals have recovered from their long journey here, and all exhibit signs of distress.

Moonlight takes more of the load for his lame brother every day, and in the evenings, as soon as they are unyoked, Tree manages a few strides before he lies down. Omeir spends most of his nighttime hours bringing fodder and water to him. Chin on the ground, neck bent, ribs rising falling rising falling: never in life would a healthy bullock lie like that. Men eye him, sensing a meal.

Rain, then fog, then sun hot enough to raise billowing clouds of flies. The sultan’s infantry, working among whistling projectiles, fills sections of the moat along the Lycus River with felled trees, collapsed siege engines, tent-cloth, anything and everything they can find, and every few days, the commanders whip the men into a fever, then send another wave across.

They die by the hundreds. Many risk everything to retrieve their dead, and are killed while gathering the corpses, leaving yet more dead to gather. Most mornings, as Omeir yokes his oxen, smoke from funeral pyres lifts into the sky.

The road to the landing stages along the Horn bisects a Christian graveyard which has been transformed into an open-air field hospital. Men lie injured and dying between the old headstones: Macedonians, Albanians, Wallachians, Serbians, some in so much agony that they seem reduced to something less than human, as though pain were a leveling wave, a mortar troweled over everything that person once was. Healers move among the wounded carrying sheaves of smoldering willow and medics lead donkeys carrying earthen jars and from the jars they produce great handfuls of maggots to clean wounds, and the men squirm or scream or faint and Omeir imagines the dead buried just feet below the dying, their flesh rotted green, their skeleton teeth champing, and he is wretched.