… I was a bird, I had wings, I flew! An entire man-of-war was skewered on the fangs of the leviathan, and the sailors howled at me as I flapped by, and I was out! For a day and night I flapped over the infinitude of the ocean, and the sky above stayed blue and so did the waves below, and there were no continents and no ships, nowhere for me to set down and rest my wings. On the second day I grew tired, and the face of the sea darkened and the wind began to sing a frightening, phantom song. Silver fire flew in all directions, and thunderheads split the heavens, and my black feathers crackled white.

Hadn’t I suffered enough? From the sea below rose a great spout of water, whirling and screaming, carrying islands and cows, boats, and houses, and when it caught my puny crow wings, it tore me from my flight, spinning me ever higher, until the white glow of the moon burned my beak as I spun past, so close I could see the moon-beasts charging along their ghostly plains and drinking milk from great white moon-lakes, as frightened by me looking down as I was of them looking up, and I dreamed again of the summer evenings in Arkadia when the clover grew deep upon the hills, and the happy bells of my ewes filled the air, and the shepherds sat with their pipes, and I wished I had never embarked upon this…

CONSTANTINOPLE

MAY 1453

Anna

It is the fifth week of the siege, or maybe the sixth, each day bleeding into the last. Anna sits with Maria’s head in her lap and her back against the wall and a fresh candle stuck to the floor among the melted stubs. Out in the lane something whumps and a horse whinnies and a man curses and the commotion is a long time fading.

“Anna?”

“I’m here.”

Maria’s world has gone entirely dark now. Her tongue does not cooperate when she tries to speak, and every few hours muscles in her back and neck seize. The eight embroideresses who still sleep inside the house of Kalaphates alternate between devotions and staring into space in nerve-shattered trances. Anna helps Chryse in the frost-stunted garden or scavenges what markets are still open for flour or fruit or beans. The rest of the time she sits with Maria.

She has grown quicker at deciphering the tidy, left-leaning script inside the old codex, and by now can lift lines off the page without trouble. Whenever she comes to a word she does not know, or lacunas where mold has obliterated the text, she invents replacements.