From there the gorge opens, and the mountains turn into hills, and hills into rolling flatlands, and muddy bridleways into proper roads. Moonlight and Tree move easily along the wide surface, their big hipbones rising and falling, happy to be on sure ground. With every passing village, the heralds recruit more men and beasts. Always their pitch is the same: the sultan (God be pleased with him) calls you to the capital where he gathers forces to take the Queen of Cities. Its streets overflow with jewels, silks, and girls; you will have your pick.

Thirteen days after leaving home, Omeir and his oxen reach Edirne. Everywhere gleam mountains of peeled logs and the air smells of wet sawdust and children run the roadsides selling bread and skins of milk or just to gape at the caravan as it rumbles past, and after dark criers on ponies meet the heralds and sort the animals by torchlight.

Omeir, Tree, and Moonlight are directed with the largest and strongest of the cattle to a vast, treeless field on the outskirts of the capital. At one end glows a tent larger than any he has ever imagined—a whole forest could grow beneath it. Inside men work by torchlight, unloading wagons, cutting trenches, and excavating a casting pit like the grave bed for a giant. Inside the pit lie matching cylindrical molds made from clay, one nested in the other, each thirty feet long.

Every daylight hour Omeir and the oxen walk a mile to a charcoal pit and haul cartloads of charcoal back to the enormous tent. As more and more charcoal is brought in, the area inside the tent grows hotter, the animals balking at the heat as they approach, and the teamsters unload the carts while foundry men pitch the charcoal into furnaces, and groups of mullahs pray, and still more men work in teams of three at great bellows, soaked to their bones in sweat, pumping air into the furnaces. In lulls between the chanting, Omeir can hear the fires burn: a sound like something huge inside the tent chewing, chewing, chewing.

At night he approaches the drivers who will tolerate his face and asks what they have been brought here to help create. One says he has heard that the sultan is casting a propeller from iron but that he does not know what a propeller is. Another calls it a thunder catapult, another a torment, another the Destroyer of Cities.

“Inside that tent,” explains a gray-bearded man with gold rings through his earlobes, “the sultan is making an apparatus that will change history forever.”

“What does it do?”

“The apparatus,” says the man, “is a way for a small thing to destroy a much larger thing.”