Around them the sons of farmers sit holding shields, clubs, javelins, axes, horseman’s hammers—even stones. Omeir is so tired. It will be a relief to die. He thinks of the Christians sitting up on the walls, and the people praying inside the houses and churches of the city, and he wonders at the mystery of how one god can manage the thoughts and terrors of so many.

Anna

At night she rejoins the crews of women and girls in the terrace between the inner and outer walls, hauling stones to the parapets so that they can be dropped onto the heads of the Saracens when they come. Everyone is hungry and under-rested; no one sings hymns or murmurs encouragements anymore. Just before midnight, monks haul a hydraulic organ up to the top of the outer wall and play an awful, screeching caterwaul, like the moans of a great beast dying in the night.

How do men convince themselves that others must die so they might live? She thinks of Maria, who owned so little and who left so quietly, and of Licinius telling her about the Greeks camped outside the walls of Troy for ten years, and of the Trojan women trapped inside, weaving and worrying, wondering whether they would ever walk the fields or swim in the sea again, or whether the gates would fall, and they would have to watch their babies be tossed over the ramparts to die.

She works until dawn and when she returns, Chryse tells her to wait in the courtyard, then reappears from the scullery with a wooden chair in one hand and Widow Theodora’s bone-handled scissors in the other. Anna sits and Chryse pulls back her hair and opens the blades and for a moment Anna worries the old cook is about to cut her throat.

“Tonight or tomorrow,” Chryse says, “the city will fall.”

Anna hears the blades rasp, feels her hair falling onto her feet.

“You’re sure?”

“I have dreamed it, child. And when it does, the soldiers will take everything they can get their hands on. Food, silver, silk. But the most valuable thing will be girls.”

Anna has a vision of the young sultan somewhere among the tents of his men, seated on a carpet with a model of the city in his lap, probing it with one finger, searching each tower, each crenellation, each battered section of the walls for a way in.

“They’ll strip you to the skin and either keep you for themselves or bring you to a market and sell you. Our side or theirs, it is always the same in war. Do you know how I know this?”

The blades flash so near to her eyes that Anna is afraid to turn her head.

“Because that is what happened with me.”