They act out parts; they beg to know what tortoises are, and honeycakes, and they seem to instinctively sense that the book wrapped in silk and again in waxed oxhide is an object of strange value, a secret that both enriches and endangers them. Each time she opens it, more text has been lost to illegibility, and she remembers the tall Italian standing in the candlelit workshop.

Time: the most violent war engine of all.

The oldest ox dies and Omeir brings home a new calf, and Anna’s sons grow taller than she is and go to work on the mountain, bringing logs from the high forests and carting them down the river road to sell at the mills outside Edirne. She loses track of the winters, loses memories. At unexpected moments, when she’s carrying water, or stitching a wound on Omeir’s leg, or picking lice from his hair, time folds over itself and she sees Himerius’s hands on the oars, or feels the vertiginous pull of gravity as she lowers herself down the wall of the priory. Toward the end of her life these memories intermingle with memories of the stories she has loved: homesick Ulysses abandoning his raft in the storm and swimming toward the island of the Phaeacians, Aethon-the-donkey wrapping his soft lips around a stinging nettle, all times and all stories being one and the same in the end.

She dies in May, on the finest day of the year, at the age of fifty-four, leaning against a stump beside the byre, with her three sons around her, the sky such a deep blue above the shoulder of the mountain that it hurts her teeth to look at it. Her husband buries her in the clearing above the river, between his grandfather and the sons they lost, with her sister’s silk hood across her breast and a white stone to mark her place.

THAT SAME RAVINE

1505

Omeir

He sleeps beneath the same smoke-stained roof beam that he slept beneath as a child. His left elbow occasionally locks up, his inner ear throbs before storms, and he has had to pull out two of his own molars. His primary companions are three laying hens, a large black dog who frightens people but at heart is harmless, and Clover, a twenty-year-old donkey with breath like a graveyard and chronic gas but a sweet temperament.

Two of his sons have moved into forests farther to the north and the third lives with a woman in the village nine miles away. When Omeir visits with Clover, the children still shy from his face, and some openly burst into tears, but his youngest granddaughter does not, and if he sits very still, she’ll climb into his lap and touch his upper lip with her fingers.