The boy kneads the great orbs of his eyeballs. The lettering is beautiful and practiced. Anna glimpses, I have heard the people say that the Pigeon is of all birds the most temperate and restrained in its sexual relations—is it a treatise about animals?—but now the clubfooted servant calls to Himerius and he takes the book and sack and follows the servant into the house.

The geese watch her.

Himerius is not gone fifty heartbeats before he comes back out.

“What?”

“They want to speak to you.”

Up two stone stairs, past a storeroom stacked with barrels, and into a room that smells of ink. Across three large tables are scattered tapers, quills, inkpots, nibs, awls, blades, sealing wax, reed pens, and little sandbags to hold down parchment. Charts line one wall, rolls of paper lean against another, and goose droppings are coiled here and there on the tiles, some of it stepped in and smeared about. Around the center table, three clean-shaven foreigners study the pages of the codex she has found and speak their rapid language like excited birds. The darkest and smallest of them looks at her with some incredulity. “The boy claims you can decipher this?”

“We are not as proficient in the old Greek as we would prefer,” says the mid-sized one.

Her finger does not shake as she sets it to the parchment. “Nature,” she reads,

has made the Hedgehog prudent and experienced in providing for its own wants. Thus, since it needs food to last a whole year, and since every…

All three men resume trilling like sparrows. The smallest begs her to continue, and she muddles through another few lines, strange observations about the habits of anchovies, then of some creature called a clapperbill, and the tallest and best-dressed of them stops her and walks among the scrolls and homiliaries and writing implements and stands staring into a cupboard as though into a distant landscape.

Beneath a table, a melon rind foams with ants. Anna feels as if she has entered some slip of Homer’s song about Ulysses, as if the gods are whispering to each other high on Olympus, then reaching down through the clouds to arrange her fate. In his splintery Greek the tall one asks: “Where did you get this?”

Himerius says, “A hidden place, very hard to get to.”

“A monastery?” asks the tall man.

Himerius gives a tentative nod, and all three Italians look at each other, and Himerius nods some more, and soon everyone is nodding.

“Where in the monastery,” says the smallest of them, removing the other manuscripts from the sack, “did you find it?”

“A chamber.”

“A large chamber?”

“Small to average to large,” says Himerius.

All three men start talking at once.

“And are there other manuscripts like this one?”

“How are they arranged?”

“On their backs?”

“Or stood up in stacks?”

“How many are there?”

“How is the room decorated?”