Many of the men wear cloaks and mantles like woodsmen but others dress in coats of fox fur or camel hide and at least one wears ermine with the teeth still attached. Most have daggers attached to girdles around their waists and everyone speaks of the spoils they are going to win from a great city to the south.

It’s after midnight when Omeir finds Grandfather at his bench in the byre working in the light of the oil lamp—an expense Omeir has rarely seen him be so reckless with before—fashioning what looks like a new yoke beam. The sultan, may God keep him, Grandfather says, is gathering men and animals in his capital at Edirne. He requires fighters, herders, cooks, farriers, smiths, porters. Everyone who goes will be rewarded, in this life or in the next.

Little whorls of sawdust rise through the lamplight and melt back into shadow. “When they saw your oxen,” he says, “their heads nearly fell off their necks,” but he does not laugh and does not look up from his work.

Omeir sits against the wall. A particular combination of dung and smoke and straw and wood shavings make a familiar warm tang in the back of his throat and he bites back tears. Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.

Images of the city to the south speed through his consciousness, but he has seen neither a city nor a likeness of one and does not know what to imagine, and his visions intermingle with Grandfather’s tales of talking foxes and moon-spiders, of towers made of glass and bridges between stars.

Out in the night a donkey brays. Omeir says, “They’re going to take Tree and Moonlight.”

“And a teamster to drive them.” Grandfather lifts the beam, studies it, sets it back down. “The animals won’t follow anyone else.”

An axe falls through Omeir. All his life he has wondered what adventures await beyond the shadow of the mountain, but now he wants only to crouch here against the logs of the byre until the seasons have turned and these visitors are a memory and everything has gone back to the way it was.

“I won’t go.”

“Once,” Grandfather says, finally looking at him, “the people of an entire city, from beggars to butchers to the king, refused the call of God and were turned to stone. A whole city, every woman, every child, turned to stone. There is no refusing this.”

Against the opposite wall, Tree and Moonlight sleep, their ribs rising and falling in tandem.

“You will gain glory,” Grandfather says, “and then you will return.”

THREE

THE CRONE’S WARNING

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio Γ