That evening the guns fire seemingly nonstop, battering the towers and walls, and the men are ordered to light as many torches, candles, and cookfires as possible. Omeir helps two teamsters fell olive trees and drag them to a great bonfire. The sultan’s ulema move between the fires delivering encouragement. “The Christians,” they say, “are devious and arrogant. They worship bones and die for mummies. They cannot sleep unless it’s on feather beds and cannot go an hour without wine. They think the city is theirs, but it already belongs to us.”

Night becomes like day. Moonlight’s flesh travels the intestines of fifty men. Grandfather, Omeir thinks, would have known what to do. He would have recognized the early signals of lameness, would have taken better care of Moonlight’s hooves, would have known some remedy involving herbs and ointment and beeswax. Grandfather, who could see signs of game birds where Omeir saw nothing, who could steer Leaf and Needle with a click of his tongue.

He shuts his eyes against the smoke and remembers a story a teamster told in the fields outside Edirne about a man in hell. The devils there, the teamster said, would cut the man every morning, many thousands of times, but the cuts were just small enough that they would not kill him. All day the wounds would dry, and scab over, and the next morning, just as the cuts began to heal, they were opened up again.

After morning prayer he goes to find Tree in the pasture where he has staked him and the ox cannot get up. He lies on his side, one horn pointing to the sky. The world has swallowed his brother and Tree is ready to join him. Omeir kneels and runs his hands over the bullock’s flank and watches the reflection of the sky quake in the bullock’s trembling eye.

Does Grandfather look up this morning at this same cloud, and Nida, and their mother, and he and Tree, all five of them looking up at this same drifting white shape as it passes over them all?

Anna

Church bells no longer keep the hours. She drifts through the scullery, the hunger in her gut a snake uncoiling, then stands in the open doorway looking at the sky above the courtyard. Himerius used to say that as long as the moon was getting larger, the world could never end. But now it wanes.

“First,” Widow Theodora whispers into the hearth, “wars rage among the peoples of the earth. Then the false prophets rise. Soon the planets will fall from the sky, followed by the sun, and everyone will become ash.”