They live in the cottage the boy’s grandfather built: stone walls, stone hearth, a peeled log for a ridge beam, thatch roof full of mice. Fourteen years of dung and straw and bits of food have compacted the dirt floor into something resembling concrete. No images hang inside, and only the simplest of ornaments adorn the bodies of his mother and sister: an iron ring, an agate strung on a piece of cord. Their crockery is heavy and plain, their leather untanned. The purpose of everything, from pots to people, seems to be to survive as long as possible, and anything that is not durable is not valued.

A few days after Anna and Omeir arrive, the boy’s mother walks along the creek and digs up a pouch of coins and the boy heads alone down the river road and returns four days later with a castrated bull and a donkey on its last legs. With the bull he manages to plow an overgrown series of terraces above the cottage and plant some August barley.

The boy’s mother and sister regard her with as much interest as they might a broken jar. And indeed, during those first months, what use is she? She can’t understand the simplest directives, can’t get the goat to stand still for milking, doesn’t know how to care for fowls or make curds or harvest honey or bundle hay or irrigate the terraces above the cottage. Most days she feels like a thirteen-year-old infant, incapable of all but the very simplest tasks.

But the boy! He shares his food with her, murmurs to her in his strange language; he seems, as Chryse the cook might have said, as patient as Job and as gentle as a fawn. He teaches her how to check the barley for aphids, how to clean trout for smoking, how to fill the kettle at the creek without getting sediment in the water. Sometimes she finds him alone in the wooden byre, touching old bird snares and spring-nets, or standing on a terrace above the river, three big white stones at his feet, with a stricken look on his face.

If she is his possession, he does not treat her as such. He teaches her the words for milk, water, fire, and dog; in the dark he sleeps beside her but does not touch her. On her feet she wears an outsize pair of wooden clogs that belonged to the boy’s grandfather, and his mother helps her make a new dress from homespun wool, and the leaves turn yellow, and the moon waxes and wanes again.