Anna holds the cup for her sister.

“How does it taste?”

“Cold.”

Prayers echo in the damp.

“Did you drink it all?”

“Yes, sister.”

Back aboveground, the world is all color and wind. Leaves blow everywhere, scraping through the churchyard, and the bands of limestone in the city walls catch the low-angled light and glow.

“Can you see the clouds?”

Maria turns her face to the sky. “I think so. I feel the world is brighter now.”

“Can you see the banners flapping above the gate?”

“Yes. I see them.”

Anna lofts prayers of thanks into the wind. Finally, she thinks, I have done something right.

For two days Maria is clear-minded and serene, threading her own needles, sewing dawn to dusk. But on the third day after drinking the holy mixture, her headache returns, invisible goblins chewing away once more at the peripheries of her vision. By afternoon her forehead shines with sweat and she cannot rise from her bench without help.

“I must have spilled some,” she whispers as Anna helps her down the stairs. “Or I did not drink enough?”

At the evening meal everyone is preoccupied. “I hear,” Eudokia says, “the sultan has brought in a thousand more masons to complete his fortress upstream of the city.”

“I hear,” Irene says, “that they have their heads cut off if they work too slowly.”

“We can relate,” Helena says, but no one laughs.

“Know what he’s calling the fort? In the infidel language?” Chryse glances over her shoulder. Her eyes glow, a mix of relish and fear. “The Throat Cutter.”

Widow Theodora says that this sort of talk will not improve anyone’s needlework, that the city walls are impregnable, that their gates have turned back barbarians on elephants, and Persians with stone-hurling machines from China, and the armies of Krum the Bulgar, who used human skulls as wine cups. Five hundred years ago, she says, a barbarian fleet so large that it stretched to the horizon blockaded the city for five years, and all the citizens ate shoe leather until the day the emperor took the robe of the Virgin from the holy chapel at Blachernae, paraded it around the walls, then dipped it in the sea, and the Mother of God called up a storm and smashed the fleet on the rocks, and every single one of the godless barbarians drowned, and still the walls stood.

Faith, says Widow Theodora, will be our breastplate and piety our sword, and the women fall quiet. The ones with families head home while the others drift back to their cells, and Anna stands at the well filling the water jugs. Kalaphates’s donkey nibbles at a thin pile of hay. Doves flutter beneath the eaves; the night turns cold. Maybe Maria is right; maybe she didn’t drink enough of the holy mixture. Anna thinks of the eager Italians with their silk doublets and velvet coats and ink-stained hands.

And are there other manuscripts like this one?