He puts her sack over his shoulder and pulls her by the lead as though she were a recalcitrant donkey. They pick their way around the rushes fringing a broad wetland, the girl stumbling now and then as the sun rises behind them. In the early light he finds a patch of brown-capped hog mushrooms and squats in their midst eating the caps.

He holds some out to her and she watches him for a bit, then eats as well. The bandage seems to have staunched the bleeding and the blood on her neck and throat has dried to the color of rusted iron. In the noon light they give wide berth to a burned village. A pack of five or six skeletal dogs rushes them and draws dangerously close before Omeir drives them off with stones.

By evening they traverse a landscape pocked with ruins—orchards raided, dovecotes emptied, vineyards burned. When he kneels beside creeks to drink, she does too. Just before nightfall they discover peas in a half-trampled garden and eat, and well after midnight, he finds a little hollow inside a hedgerow beside an unplanted field and secures her lead around the trunk of a cypress. She looks at him, her eyelids slipping, and he watches sleep overcome her terror.

In the moonlight he drags the sack away from her and removes the snuffbox. It’s empty, smells of tobacco. A scene Omeir cannot quite make out is painted on the lid. A tall house beneath a sky. Perhaps it is her home?

The bundle is wrapped in dark silk, embroidered with blossoms and birds, and inside is a stack of animal skin stripped of hair, beaten flat, trimmed into rectangles, and bound along one edge. A book. Its leaves are damp and smell like fungus and their surfaces are covered with glyphs in neat lines and upon seeing them he is afraid.

He remembers a tale Grandfather once told about a book left behind by the old gods when they fled the earth. The book, Grandfather said, was locked inside a golden box, which was in turn locked inside a bronze box, then inside an iron box, inside a wooden chest, and the gods placed the chest at the bottom of a lake, and set water-dragons a hundred feet long swimming around it that not even the bravest men could kill. But if you ever could retrieve the book, Grandfather said, and read it, you would understand the languages of the birds in the sky and of the crawling things beneath the ground and if you were a spirit you would resume again the shape you had on earth.