He expected leopard hides. Ivory wine cups inlaid with jewels. She searches her memory, finds Licinius there, his lips like pale worms inside the nest of his beard. “Even if what they contain is not valuable, the skins they are written on are. They can be scraped and reused—”

Himerius drops the codex back in the sack and jabs it with his toe, vexed, and continues rowing. The big carrack at anchor seems to float on a looking glass, and Himerius beaches the skiff and drags it above tideline and turns it over and coils the rope carefully over one shoulder and sets off with the sack over the other, Anna trailing behind, like some ogre and his slave from a nursemaid’s rhyme.

They head through the Genoese quarter, where the houses grow fine and tall, many with windowglass and some with mosaics set into the facades and ornate sun balconies overlooking the sea walls fronting the Golden Horn. At the entrance to the Venetian quarter, men-at-arms stand yawning beneath an archway and let the children walk by with no more than a glance.

They pass a series of workshops and stop outside a gate. “If you speak,” says Himerius, “call me Brother. But don’t speak.”

A servant with a clubfoot leads them into a courtyard where a lone fig tree struggles for light and they lean against a wall and cocks crow and dogs bark and Anna imagines the bell ringers climbing right now into the fog, reaching for ropes to wake the city, wool brokers raising shutters, pickpockets slinking home, monks submitting themselves to the first lash of the day, crabs drowsing beneath boats, terns diving for breakfast in the shallows, Chryse stirring the hearth-fire to life. Widow Theodora ascending the stone stairs to the workroom.

Blessed One, protect us from idleness.

For we have committed sins without number.

Five gray stones at the opposite end of the courtyard transform into geese that wake and flap and stretch and cluck at them. Soon the sky is the color of concrete and carts are moving out in the streets. Maria will tell Widow Theodora that Anna has a rheum or a fever. But how long can such a ruse last?

Eventually a door opens and a drowsy Italian in a velvet coat with half-length sleeves looks at Himerius long enough to decide he is insignificant and shuts the door again. Anna digs among the damp manuscripts in the burgeoning light. The leaves of the first she pulls out are so splotched with mold that she cannot make out a single character.