Before midnight they are driven out with hayforks and torches. The child caused the death of his father, bewitched his grandfather into carrying him back from the trees. He harbors a demon inside, and the flaw in his face is proof.

They leave behind the byre and hayfield and root cellar and seven wicker beehives and the cottage that Grandfather’s father built six decades before. Dawn finds them cold and frightened several miles upriver. Grandfather tramps beside the oxen through the slush, and the oxen pull the dray, atop which the girls clutch hens and earthenware. Beauty the cow trails behind, balking at every shadow, and in the rear the boy’s mother rides the mare, the baby blinking up from his bundle, watching the sky.

By nightfall they are in a trackless ravine nine miles from the village. A creek winds between ice-capped boulders, and wayward clouds, as big as gods, drag through the crowns of the trees, whistling strangely, and spook the cattle. They camp beneath a limestone overhang inside which hominids painted cave bears and aurochs and flightless birds eons ago. The girls crowd their mother and Grandfather builds a fire and the goat whimpers and the dogs tremble and the baby’s eyes catch the firelight.

“Omeir,” says his mother. “We will call him Omeir. One who lives long.”

Anna

She is eight and returning from the vintner’s with three jugs of Kalaphates’s dark, head-splitting wine, when she pauses to rest outside a rooming house. From a shuttered window she hears, in accented Greek:

Meanwhile Ulysses at the palace waits,

There stops, and anxious with his soul debates,

Fix’d in amaze before the royal gates.

The front appear’d with radiant splendors gay,

Bright as the lamp of night, or orb of day,

The walls were massy brass: the cornice high

Blue metals crown’d in colors of the sky,

Rich plates of gold the folding doors incase;

The pillars silver, on a brazen base;

Silver the lintels deep-projecting o’er,

And gold the ringlets that command the door.

Two rows of stately dogs, on either hand,

In sculptured gold and labor’d silver stand

These Vulcan form’d with art divine, to wait

Immortal guardians at Alcinous’s gate…

Anna forgets the handcart, the wine, the hour—everything. The accent is strange but the voice is deep and liquid, and the meter catches hold of her like a rider galloping past. Now come the voices of boys, repeating the verses, and the first voice resumes: