… ahead, at her foot, surrounded by white ·[butterflies?]· on a pedestal so ornate it must have been fashioned by the smith-god himself, I saw it: the book the hoopoe said held the ·[solution?]· to my gnawing predicament. I fluttered above it, ·[prepared to read, when the goddess bent. Her great pupils loomed over me, each as big as a house. With one flick of one finger she could smite me out of the sky.]·

“I see,” she said, fifteen trees in each hand, “what you are, little crow. You are a pretender, a creature of clay, not a bird at all. In your heart you are still a feeble human, hammered from earth, with ·[the blaze of hunger inside]·…”

“… only wanted to ·[peek?]·…”

“Read from the book all you wish,” she said, “but if you read to the end you will become like us, free of desire…

“… never will you be able to return to your prior form. Go on, child,” said the flickering goddess. “Decide…”

EIGHT MILES WEST OF CONSTANTINOPLE

MAY–JUNE 1453

Omeir

A girl. A Greek girl. This fact is so startling, so unexpected, that he almost cannot recover his wits. He who wept at the castrations of Moonlight and Tree, who winced at the killing of trout and hens, has broken a branch over the head of a crop-headed fair-skinned Christian girl younger than his sister.

She lies in the leaf litter unmoving, the spitted partridge still in her hand. Her dress is filthy, her slippers hardly slippers anymore. In the starlight the blood running down her cheek looks black.

Smoke rises from the coals, frogs rasp in the dark, some clockwork inside the night advances one notch, and the girl moans. He binds her wrists with Moonlight’s old halter. She moans again, then thrashes. Blood runs into her right eye; she scrambles to her knees and brings her bound wrists to her teeth; when she sees him, she screams.

Omeir glances back through the trees, frightened.

“Quiet. Please.”

Is she calling to someone nearby? He was stupid to make a fire: too much of a risk. As he smothers the embers the girl howls a torrent of language he cannot understand. He tries to clap a hand over her mouth but comes away bitten.

She gets to her feet, takes several dizzy steps into the dark, then falls. Maybe she is drunk: the Greeks are always drunk, isn’t that what everyone says? Half-beasts permanently inebriated on their own somatic pleasure.

Yet she is so young.

Probably it is a trick, a witch’s disguise.