The quartermaster gapes down half-bemused and half-disgusted and reaches for his bullwhip. Omeir feels his heart swing out over a black void. A memory rises: once, years before, Grandfather took him high on the mountain to watch the woodcutters bring down a huge, ancient silver fir, as tall as twenty-five men, a kingdom unto itself. They sang a low, determined song, driving their wedges into its trunk in rhythm as though hammering needles into the ankle of a giant, and Grandfather explained the names of the tools they used, caulks and punks and blocks and spars, but what Omeir remembers now, as the quartermaster rears back with his whip, is that when the tree tipped, its trunk exploding, the men shouting hallo, the air suddenly charged with the ripe, sharp aroma of cracking wood, what he felt was not joy but sorrow. All the timbermen seemed to exult in their collective power, watching branches that for generations knew only starlight and snow and ravens smash down through the undergrowth. But Omeir felt something close to despair, and sensed that, even at his age, his feelings would not be welcome, that he should hide them even from his own grandfather. Why mourn, Grandfather would say, what men can do? There’s something wrong with a child who sympathizes more with other beings than he does with men.

The tip of the quartermaster’s bullwhip cracks an inch from Omeir’s ear.

A white-bearded teamster who has been with them since Edirne calls, “Leave the boy be. So he is kind to beasts. The Prophet Himself, peace be upon Him, once cut off a piece of his robe rather than wake a cat that was sleeping on it.”

The quartermaster blinks down. “If we do not deliver this load,” he says, “we’ll all be lashed, myself included. And I’ll see to it that you and that face of yours get the worst of it. Move your beasts, or we’ll all be meat for the crows.”

The men turn back to their animals, and Omeir climbs the rutted, ruined road, and crouches beside Tree and says his name and the bullock stands. He touches Moonlight on the withers with his goad and the bullocks lean into the yoke and begin to pull again.

TWELVE

THE WIZARD INSIDE THE WHALE

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio M

… the waters inside the monster calmed and I grew hungry. As I gazed up, a delicious morsel, a shiny little anchovy, landed on the surface, floated, then danced in the most enticing way. With a flick of my tail I swam straight for it, opened my jaws as wide as I could, and…