Donkey carts hurry past the oxen teams in both directions, the faces of the carters crimped with impatience or fear or anger or all three. Hatred, Omeir sees, is contagious, spreading through the ranks like a disease. Already, three weeks into the siege, some of the men fight no longer for God or the sultan or plunder but out of a fearful rage. Kill them all. Get this over with. Sometimes the anger flares inside Omeir too, and he wants nothing more than for God to plunge a fiery fist through the sky and start crushing buildings one after the next until all the Greeks are dead and he can go home.

On the first of May the sky knots with cloud. The Golden Horn turns slow and black and pocked with the circles of a hundred million raindrops. The wagon team waits as stevedores roll the huge granite balls, veined white with quartz, down the ramp and stack them in the wagon.

Far off, a trebuchet slings rocks that fly in wild arcs over the city walls and disappear. They are a half mile back up the road toward the foundry, deep in the ruts, the oxen drooling and panting, their tongues hanging, when Tree staggers. He manages to get back up, but a few strides later he staggers again. The entire train stops and men rush to brake the wagon as the traffic hurries past.

Omeir ducks in among the animals. When he touches Tree’s hind leg, the bullock shudders. Mucus drains in twin streams from his nostrils and he licks the roof of his mouth with his enormous tongue over and over and his eyes vibrate gently back and forth in their sockets. Their surfaces look worn and foggy and carry the distant dreaminess of cataracts. As though the past five months have aged him ten years.

Goad in hand, in his ruined shoes, Omeir walks the line of heaving oxen and stands below the quartermaster who sits scowling in the wagon atop the load.

“The animals need rest.”