Her hair newly shorn, Anna eats six green apricots and lies down with a stomachache and tumbles into sleep. In a nightmare she walks the floor of a vast atrium with a vaulted ceiling so high it seems to hold up the sky. On tiers of shelves running down either side are stacked hundreds upon hundreds of texts, like a library of the gods, but each time she opens a book, she finds it full of words in languages she does not know, incomprehensible word after incomprehensible word in book after book on shelf after shelf. She walks and walks, and it’s always the same, the library indecipherable and infinite, the sound of her footsteps tiny in all that immensity.

Dusk descends on the fifty-fifth evening of the siege. In the imperial palace of the Blachernae, tucked against the Golden Horn, the emperor gathers his captains around him in prayer. Up and down the outer walls, sentries count arrows, stoke fires beneath great pitchers of tar. Just beyond the fosse, inside the private tent of the sultan, a servant lights seven tapers, one for each of the heavens, and withdraws, and the young sovereign kneels to pray.

On the Fourth Hill of the city, above the once-great embroidery house of Kalaphates, a flock of gulls, soaring high over the roof, catches the last glow of the sun. Anna rises from her pallet, surprised to see that she has slept away the daylight.

In the scullery the embroideresses who are left, none younger than fifty, step away from the hearth so that Chryse can shove the pieces of a sewing table into the fire.

Widow Theodora comes inside with an armful of what looks to Anna like deadly nightshade. She strips away the leaves, drops the shiny black berries into a basin, and puts the roots into a mortar. As she crushes the roots, Widow Theodora tells them that their bodies are just dust, that all their lives their souls have yearned toward a more distant place. Now that they’re close, Widow Theodora says, their souls quiver with joy at the prospect of leaving the shells of their bodies behind to come home to God.

The last blue light of day is sucked away into night. In the firelight the faces of the women take on ancient suffering that is almost sublime: as though they suspected all along that things would end like this and are resigned to it. Chryse calls Anna into the storeroom and lights a candle. She hands her a few strips of salted sturgeon and a loaf of dark bread wrapped in cloth.

“If any child ever born,” Chryse whispers, “can outsmart them, outlast them, or outrun them, it is you. There is still life to be had. Go tonight, and I will send prayers at your heels.”

She can hear Widow Theodora, out in the scullery, say, “We leave our bodies behind in this world so that we may take flight into the next.”