Before dawn she is pushing her way through a spindly forest, rounding the edge of what looks like a large body of water, when she sees firelight twinkling between trunks. She is about to skirt it when the air brings the odor of roasting meat.

The smell is a hook through the gut. A few paces closer: just to see.

A little fire in the woods, flames no higher than her shins. She picks her way through the trees, her slippers crunching leaves. At the fire’s edge she can make out what looks like a single headless bird spitted beside the flames.

She tries not to breathe. No figures move; no horses nicker. For a hundred heartbeats she watches the flames burn down. No movement, no shadows: no one tends the meal. Just the bird: a partridge, she thinks. Is it a hallucination?

She can hear the fat sizzling. If it cooks much longer without being turned, the side facing the embers will burn. Maybe somebody was scared off. Maybe whoever made the fire heard news about the capture of the city and took his horse and left his meal.

For a breath she becomes Aethon-the-crow, bone-weary and disheveled, peering through the golden gates, watching a tortoise trudge past with a tower of cakes balanced on his shell.

Though it will seem simple at first, it’s actually quite complicated.

No, no, it will seem complicated at first, but it’s actually quite simple.

Logic deserts her. If she could just lift the bird from the coals. Her mind is already concocting the experience of tasting it, its flesh beneath her teeth, its juices spurting into her mouth. She tucks her sack behind a trunk, dashes, and uproots the spit. She has the bird in her left hand, one fraction of her consciousness registering a halter, rope, and oxhide cape at the edge of the firelight, the rest of her wholly bent on eating, when she hears an inhalation behind her.

Such is her hunger that her arm continues to bring the bird to her mouth even as a stroke of lightning cracks from the back of her head to the front, a long, branching fracture of white, as though the vault of the sky has splintered, and the world goes dark.

SEVENTEEN

THE WONDERS OF

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio P

… mild, fragrant…

… a river of cream…

… sloping glens and ·[orchards?]·…

… met by a bright hoopoe, who bowed his feathery crown and said, “I am the vice-undersecretary to the viceroy of Provisions and Accommodations,” and he draped a garland of ivy round my neck. Every bird swerved overhead in welcome, and sang its most tuneful…

… unchanging, everlasting, no months, no years, every hour like spring on the clearest, most gold-green morning, the dew like ·[diamonds?]·, the towers like honeycombs, and the western zephyr was the only breeze…

… plumpest raisins, finest custards, salmon and sardines…