Today, he says, they will work on μῦθος, mýthos, which means a conversation or something said, but also a tale or a story, a legend from the time of the old gods, and he is explaining how it’s a delicate, mutable word, that it can suggest something false and true at the same time, when his attention frays.

The wind lifts one of the quires from his fingers and Anna chases it down and brushes it off and returns it to his lap. Licinius rests his eyelids a long time. “Repository,” he finally says, “you know this word? A resting place. A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.”

His eyes open very widely then, as though he peers into a great darkness.

“But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”

He winces, and his breathing comes slow and ragged. Leaves scrape down the lane and bright clouds stream above the rooftops and several packhorses pass, their riders bundled against the cold, and she shivers. Should she fetch the housekeeper? The bloodletter?

Licinius’s arm rises; in the claw of his hand are the three battered quires.

“No, Teacher,” says Anna. “Those are yours.”

But he pushes them into her hands. She glances down the lane: the rooming house, the wall, the rattling trees. She says a prayer and tucks the leaves of parchment inside her dress.

Omeir

The oldest daughter dies of worms, fever takes the middle one, but the boy grows. At three, he can hold himself upright on the sledge as Leaf and Needle clear, then plow a hayfield. At four, he can fill the kettle at the creek and lug it through the boulders to the one-room stone house Grandfather has built. Twice his mother pays the farrier’s wife to travel nine miles upriver from the village to stitch together the gap in the boy’s lip with a needle and twine and twice the project fails. The cleft, which extends through his upper mandible into his nose, does not close. But though his inner ears sometimes burn, and his jaw sometimes aches, and broth regularly escapes his mouth and dribbles onto his clothes, he is sturdy, quiet, and never ill.

His earliest memories are three:

1. Standing in the creek between Leaf and Needle as they drink, watching drops fall from their huge round chins and catch the light.

2. His sister Nida grimacing over him as she prepares to jab a stick into his upper lip.

3. Grandfather unbuckling the bright pink body of a pheasant from its feathers, as though undressing it, and spitting it over the hearth.