She works as much from memory as from the manuscript, and inside the little stone cottage, something happens: the sick child in her lap, his forehead sheened with sweat, opens his eyes. When Aethon is accidentally transformed into an ass and the other boys burst into laughter, he smiles. When Aethon reaches the frozen rim of the world, he bites his fingernails. And when Aethon finally sees the gates of the city in the clouds, tears spring to his eyes.

The lamp spits, the oil drawing low, and all three boys beg her to go on.

“Please,” they say, and their eyes glitter in the light. “Tell us what he found inside the goddess’s magical book.”

“When Aethon peered into it,” she says, “he saw the heavens and the earth and all its lands scattered around the ocean, and all the animals and birds upon it. The cities were full of lanterns and gardens, and he could faintly hear music and singing, and he saw a wedding in one city with girls in bright linen robes, and boys with gold swords on silver belts, jumping through rings, doing handsprings and leaping and dancing in time. But on the next page he saw dark, flaming cities in which men were slaughtered in their fields, their wives enslaved in chains, and their children pitched over the walls onto pikes. He saw hounds eating corpses, and when he bent his ear low to the pages, he could hear the wailing. And as he looked, turning the leaf over and back, Aethon saw that the cities on both sides of the page, the dark ones and the bright ones, were one and the same, that there is no peace without war, no life without death, and he was afraid.”

The lamp sputters out; the chimney moans; the children draw closer around her. Omeir rewraps the book, and Anna holds their youngest son against her breast, and dreams of bright clean light falling across the pale walls of the city, and when they wake, late into the morning, the boy’s fever is gone.

In years to come, if the children catch a rheum or simply get too insistent—always after dark, always when there is no one else for miles—Omeir will look at her and an understanding will pass between them. He’ll light the oil lamp, disappear outside, and return with the bundle. She’ll open the book and the boys will gather around her on the carpets.

“Tell again, Mama,” they say, “about the magician who lives inside the whale.”

“And about the nation of swans that lives among the stars.”

“And about the mile-high goddess and the book that contained all things.”