“Girls don’t go to tutors. And you don’t have any money.”

She lifts a jug from the cart. “I have wine.”

He comes alert. One arm reaches for the jug.

“First,” she says, “a lesson.”

“You’ll never learn it.”

She does not budge. The old teacher groans. With the end of his stick in the wet dirt he writes:

Ὠκεανός

“Ōkeanos, Ocean, eldest son of Sky and Earth.” He draws a circle around it and pokes its center. “Here the known.” Then he pokes the outside. “Here the unknown. Now the wine.”

She passes it to him and he drinks with both hands. She crouches on her heels. Ὠκεανός. Seven marks in the mud. And yet they contain the lonely traveler and the brass-walled palace with its golden watchdogs and the goddess with her mist?

For returning late, Widow Theodora beats the sole of Anna’s left foot with the bastinado. For returning with one of the jugs half-empty, she beats the right. Ten strokes on each. Anna hardly cries. Half the night she inscribes letters across the surfaces of her mind, and all the following day, as she hobbles up and down the stairs, as she carries water, as she fetches eels for Chryse the cook, she sees the island kingdom of Alcinous, wreathed with clouds and blessed by the west wind, teeming with apples, pears, and olives, blue figs and red pomegranates, boys of gold on shining pedestals with burning torches in their hands.

Two weeks later she is coming back from the market, going out of her way to pass the rooming house, when she spies the goitrous tutor sitting in the sun like a potted plant. She sets down her basket of onions and with a finger in the dust writes,

Ὠκεανός

Around it she draws a circle.

“Eldest son of Sky and Earth. Here the known. Here the unknown.”

The man strains his head to one side and swivels his gaze to her, as though seeing her for the first time, and the wet in his eyes catches the light.

His name is Licinius. Before his misfortunes, he says, he served as tutor to a wealthy family in a city to the west, and he owned six books and an iron box to hold them: two lives of the saints, a book of orations by Horace, a testament of the miracles of Saint Elisabeth, a primer on Greek grammar, and Homer’s Odyssey. But then the Saracens captured his town, and he fled to the capital with nothing, and thank the angels in heaven for the city walls, whose foundation stones were laid by the Mother of God Herself.