“No, no,” Zeno says, trying to keep his voice quiet. “You’re doing wonderfully. All of you. It’s very funny. It’s brilliant. Everyone is going to love it.” The cicadas and crickets drone from the speaker. The cardboard clouds twist on their threads. All five kids watch him. What is he supposed to do?

“So,” Olivia-the-bandit says, and twirls her plastic sword, “should we keep the story going?”

SIX

THE BANDITS’ HIDEOUT

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio Z

… through my big nostrils I could smell roses growing in the last gardens at the edge of town. Oh, what sweet, melancholy perfume! But each time I veered to investigate, the cruel robbers beat me with their sticks and swords. My load poked my ribs through the saddlebags, and my unshod hooves ached, and the road wound higher into parched, stony mountains in the north of Thessaly, and again I cursed my luck. Each time I opened my mouth to sob, what came out was a loud, pathetic bray, and the knaves only whacked me harder.

The stars sank away and the sun rose hot and white, and they drove me higher into the mountains, until hardly anything grew at all. Flies hounded me, my back roasted, and there were only rocks and cliffs for as far as I could see. When we stopped, I was left to nibble spiky nettles that stung my tender lips, while my saddlebags were loaded with everything they had stolen from the inn, not only the jeweled bracelets and headdresses of the innkeeper’s wife, but soft white loaves and salted meats and sheep’s cheeses.

At nightfall, high on a rocky pass, we reached the mouth of a cave. More thieves came out to embrace the thieves who brought me here, and they prodded me through room after room twinkling with stolen gold and silver, and left me in a miserable unlit cavern. All I had to eat was fusty straw, and all I had to drink from was a little seep bubbling through the rock, and all night I could hear the echoes of the marauders laughing as they feasted. I wept at my…

CONSTANTINOPLE

AUTUMN 1452

Anna

She turns twelve, though no one marks the day. She no longer runs through ruins, playing at being Ulysses as he steals into the palace of brave Alcinous: it’s as if, when Kalaphates pitched Licinius’s parchment into the flames, the kingdom of the Phaeacians went to ashes too.

Maria’s hair has grown back where Kalaphates tore it out and the bruises around her eyes have long since faded, but some deeper injury persists. She grimaces in sunlight, forgets the names of things, leaves phrases half-finished. Headaches send her scurrying for the dark. And one bright morning, before the noon bell, Maria drops her needle and scissors and claws at her eyes.

“Anna, I cannot see.”