Now and then he gathers enough courage to show travelers the little enameled painting on the lid of the snuffbox. A few speculate that it might depict a fortress in Kosovo and others a palazzo in the Republic of Florence. But one day, as he draws near the Sava River, two merchants on horseback with two servants each stop him. One asks his business in Anna’s language, and the other says, “He’s a wandering Mohammedan with one foot in the grave, he can’t understand a word you say,” and Omeir removes his hat and says, “Good afternoon, sirs, I understand you well enough.”

They laugh, and offer him water and dates, and when he passes over the snuffbox, one holds it to the sun, turning it this way and that, and says, “Ah, Urbino,” and hands it to his companion.

“Fair Urbino,” says the second, “in the mountains of the Marche.”

“It’s a long journey,” says the first, and gestures vaguely to the west. He looks at Omeir and Clover. “Particularly for one so gray in the beard. That donkey is no filly either.”

“Surely to live so long with a face like that must have taken some ingenuity,” says the second.

He wakes creaking and stiff, his feet swollen, and checks Clover’s hooves for cracks, and some days it’s noon before he can shake feeling into his fingers. As they turn south through the Veneto, the countryside grows hilly again, and the roads steepen, little castles sitting atop crags, peasants in fields, olive groves around tiny churches, sunflowers rolling down to tangled creeks. He runs out of silver, trades his last pot of honey. At night, dreams and memories mix: he sees a city, shimmering in the distance, and hears the voices of his sons when they were small.

Tell again, Mama, about the shepherd whose name means blazing.

And about the lakes of milk on the moon.

The eyes of his youngest blink. Tell us, he says, what the fool does next.

He approaches Urbino under an autumn sky, silver sheafs of light dropping through rifts in the clouds onto the twisting road ahead. The city emerges atop a hill, built from limestone and adorned with bell towers, the brickwork looking as though it has grown out of the bedrock.

As he winds upward, the huge double-turreted facade of the palazzo with its tiers of balconies looms against the sky, the painting on the snuffbox made real: it’s like a construction from a dream, if not one of his own, perhaps one of Anna’s, as though now, in his last years, he moves along the paths of her dreams rather than his.