Cloud Cuckoo Land (12 page)

The heavy, eerie rasp it makes as it rolls slowly down the inclined barrel carries all the way to Omeir over the gathered heads. An imam leads a prayer, and cymbals clash and trumpets blow, and along the top of the apparatus the first man, the one in the red cap, packs what looks like dried grass into a hole in the back, touches a lit taper to the grass, then leaps off the platform.

The onlookers go quiet. The sun swings imperceptibly lower, and a chill falls across the field. Once, Maher says, in his home village, a stranger appeared on a hilltop and claimed he would fly. All day a crowd gathered, he says, and every now and then the man would announce, “Soon I will fly,” and would point out various places in the distance he would fly to, and he walked around stretching and
shaking his arms. When the crowd had grown large, so large that not everyone could see, and the sun was nearly down, the man, not knowing what to do, pulled down his pants and showed everybody his ass.

Omeir smiles. Up on the rostrum men are scrambling around the apparatus again, and a few snow crystals sift down from the sky, and the crowd shifts, restless now, and the cymbals start up a third time, and at the head of the field, where the sultan may or may not be watching, a breeze lifts the hundreds of horsetails strung from his banners. Omeir leans against the bole of the tree, trying to stay warm, and the two men clamber over the bronze cylinder, the one in the red cap peering into its mouth, and just then the huge cannon fires.

It's as though the finger of God reaches down through the clouds and flicks the planet out of orbit. The thousand-pound stone ball moves too fast to see: there is only the roar of its passage lacerating the air as it screams over the field—but before the sound has even begun to register in Omeir's consciousness, a tree at the opposite end of the field shatters.

A second tree a quarter mile farther also vaporizes, seemingly simultaneously, and for a heartbeat he wonders if the ball will travel forever, beyond the horizon, smashing through tree after tree, wall after wall, until it flies off the edge of the world.

In the distance, what must be a mile away, rocks and mud spray in all directions, as though an invisible plow rakes a great furrow in the earth, and the report of the detonation reverberates in the marrow of his bones. The cheer that comes up from the gathered crowd is less a cheer of triumph than of stupefaction.

Up on its brace, the mouth of the apparatus leaks smoke. Of the two gunners, one stands with both hands to his ears looking down at what little is left of the man in the red cap.

Wind carries the smoke out over the platform. “Fear of the thing,” Maher murmurs, more to himself than to Omeir, “will be more powerful than the thing itself.”

S
he and Maria queue outside the Church of Saint Mary of the Spring with a dozen other penitents. Beneath their wimples the faces of the nuns of the order resemble dried thistles, colorless and brittle: none look younger than a century. One collects Anna's silver in a bowl and a second takes the bowl and tips it into a fold inside her tunic and a third waves them down a flight of stairs.

Here and there in candlelit reliquaries rest the finger- and toe-bones of saints. At the far end, deep beneath the church, they squeeze past a crude altar crusted a foot deep with candlewax and fumble their way into a grotto.

A well gurgles; the soles of Anna's and Maria's slippers slide on the wet stones. An abbess lowers a lead cup into a basin, draws it back up, pours in a significant measure of quicksilver, and gives it a swirl.

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?

How are they arranged?

On their backs? Or stood up in stacks?

As though she has willed it into existence, a tendril of fog comes trickling over the roofline.

Again she slips past the watchman and descends the twisting lanes to the harbor. She finds Himerius asleep beside his skiff and when she wakes him he frowns as if trying to resolve multiple girls into one. Finally he wipes a hand across his face and nods and urinates a long time onto the rocks before dragging the boat into the water.

She stows the sack and rope in the bow. Four gulls pass overhead, crying softly, and Himerius peers up at them, then rows to the priory on the rock. This time she is more determined. With each movement up the wall, her fear thins, and soon there is only the movement of her body and her memory of the holds, her fingers keeping her against the cold brick, her legs sending her up. She reaches the scupper, crawls through the mouth of the lion, and drops into the big refectory. Spirits, let me pass.

A three-quarter moon sends more light filtering through the fog. She finds the stairs, ascends, travels the long corridor, and steps through the door into the circular room.

It's a ghostland, brimming with dust, little ferns growing here and there from clumps of damp paper, everything moldering to pieces. Inside some of the cupboards are vast monastic records so big she can hardly lift them; in others she finds tomes whose pages
have been conglutinated by moisture and mildew into a solid mass. She fills the sack as full as she can and drags it down the steps and lowers it to the skiff and walks one pace behind Himerius as he carries it through the misty lanes to the house of the Italians.

The clubfooted servant gives a jaw-cracking yawn as he waves them into the courtyard. Inside the workshop, the two smaller scribes are collapsed on chairs in the corner, sound asleep, but the tall one rubs his hands as though he has waited for them all night. “Come, come, let's see what the mudlarks have brought.” He upends the sack onto the table between an array of lit tapers.

Himerius stands with his hands to the fire while Anna watches the foreigner go through the manuscripts. Charters, wills, transcriptions of orations; requests for requisitions; what appears to be a list of personages who attended some long-ago monastic gathering: the Grand Domestic; His Excellency the Vice-Treasurer; the Visiting Scholar from Thessalonica; the Grand Chancellor of the Imperial Wardrobe.

One by one he leafs through the mildewed codices, tipping his candelabra this way and that, and Anna notices things that she missed the first time: his hose are torn on one knee, and his coat is tarnished at the elbows, and ink is spattered up both of his sleeves. “Not this,” he says, “not this,” then murmurs in his own language. The room smells of oak gall ink and parchment and woodsmoke and red wine. A looking glass in the corner reflects the candle flames; someone has pinned a series of small butterflies to a linen board; someone else is copying what looks like a navigational chart on the corner table—the room overflows with curiosity and ardor.

“All useless,” the Italian concludes, rather cheerfully, and stacks four silver coins on the table. He looks at her. “Do you know the story of Noah and his sons, child? How they filled their ship with everything to start the world anew? For a thousand years your city, this crumbling capital”—he waves a hand toward a window—“was
like that ark. Only instead of two of every living creature, do you know what the good Lord stacked inside this ship?”

Beyond the shuttered window the first cocks crow. She can feel Himerius twitching beside the fire, all his attention on the silver.

“Books.” The scribe smiles. “And in our tale of Noah and the ship of books, can you guess what is the flood?”

She shakes her head.

“Time. Day after day, year after year, time wipes the old books from the world. The manuscript you brought us before? That was written by Aelian, a learned man who lived at the time of the Caesars. For it to reach us in this room, in this hour, the lines within it had to survive a dozen centuries. A scribe had to copy it, and a second scribe, decades later, had to recopy that copy, transform it from a scroll to a codex, and long after the second scribe's bones were in the earth, a third came along and recopied it again, and all this time the book was being hunted. One bad-tempered abbot, one clumsy friar, one invading barbarian, an overturned candle, a hungry worm—and all those centuries are undone.”

The flames of the tapers flicker; his eyes seem to gather all the light in the room.

“The things that look fixed in the world, child—mountains, wealth, empires—their permanence is only an illusion. We believe they will last, but that is only because of the brevity of our own lives. From the perspective of God, cities like this come and go like anthills. The young sultan is assembling an army, and he has new war engines that can bring down walls as though they were air.”

Her gut lurches. Himerius inches toward the coins on the table.

“The ark has hit the rocks, child. And the tide is washing in.”

Her life splits in two. There are her hours in the house of Kalaphates, a monotony of fatigue and dread: broom and pan, thread and wire, fetch water fetch charcoal fetch wine fetch another bale of linen. Seemingly every day a new story about the sultan filters into the
workshop. He has trained himself not to sleep; he is leading teams of surveyors outside the city walls; his soldiers at the Throat Cutter have launched a ball that shattered a Venetian galley carrying food and armor from the Black Sea to the city.

For a second time Anna leads Maria to the shrine of the Virgin of the Source, where they buy a blessing from the stooped and withered nuns for eleven
stavrata
, and Maria swallows the mixture of water and mercury and feels better for a day before feeling worse. Her hands throb; she suffers from cramps; some nights she says she feels as though the claws of some devil have closed around her limbs and he is trying to tear her apart.

Then there's Anna's other life, when fog shrouds the city and she hurries through the echoing streets, and Himerius rows her around the breakwater to scale the wall of the priory. If asked, she would say she does it to make money to relieve her sister's suffering—but is there not another part of her that also wants to climb that wall? To bring another sack of mildewed books to the copyists in their ink-filled shop? Twice more she fills a sack with books and twice more it turns out to contain only moldy inventories. But the Italians ask her and Himerius to keep bringing whatever they find, that soon they may unearth something as precious as the Aelian or better—a lost tragedy from Athens or a series of orations by a Greek statesman or a
seismobrontologion
that reveals the secrets of the weather and the wind.

The Italians are not, she learns, from Venice, which they call a mink's den of mercenaries and greed, nor from Rome, which they say is a nest of parasites and whores. They're from a city called Urbino, where they say the granaries are always full and the oil presses overflow and the streets gleam with virtue. Inside the walls of Urbino, they say, even the poorest child, girl or boy, studies numbers and literature, and there is no season of killing malaria as there is in Rome nor a season of chilling fog, like in this city. The smallest of them shows her a collection of eight snuffboxes, on the lids of which are painted miniatures: a great domed church; a fountain in
a town square; Justice holding her scales; Courage holding a marble column; Moderation diluting wine with water.

“Our master, the virtuous count and lord of Urbino, never loses,” he says, “in battle or otherwise,” and the mid-sized scribe adds, “He is magnanimous in all ways, and will listen to anyone who wishes to speak with him at any hour of the day,” and the tall one says, “When His Magnificence dines, even when he is on the field of war, he asks that the old texts be read to him.”

“He dreams,” says the first, “of erecting a library to surpass the pope's, a library to contain every text ever written, a library to last until the end of time, and his books will be free to anyone who can read them.” Their eyes glow like coals; their lips are stained with wine; they show her treasures that they have already procured for their master on their travels—a terra-cotta centaur made in the time of Isaac, an inkpot that they say was used by Marcus Aurelius, and a book from China they say was written not by a scribe with quill and ink but by a carpenter turning a wheel of movable bamboo blocks, and they say this machine can make ten copies of a text in the time it takes a scribe to make one.

It all leaves Anna breathless. All her life she has been led to believe that she is a child born at the end of things: the empire, the era, the reign of men on earth. But in the glow of the scribes' enthusiasm, she senses that in a city like Urbino, beyond the horizon, other possibilities might exist, and in daydreams she takes flight across the Aegean, ships and islands and storms passing far below, the wind streaming through her spread fingers, until she alights in a bright clean palace, full of Justice and Moderation, its rooms lined with books, free to anyone who can read them.

The front appear'd with radiant splendors gay, bright as the lamp of night, or orb of day.

The ark has hit the rocks, child.

You fill your head with useless things.

One night the scribes riffle through another sack of bloated, musty manuscripts and shake their heads. “What we seek,” says the smallest one, slurring his Greek, “is nothing like these.” Scattered among their parchment and penknives are plates of half-eaten turbot and dried grapes. “What our master seeks in particular are compendiums of marvels.”

“We believe that the ancients traveled to distant places—”

“—all four corners of the world—”

“—lands known to them but as yet unknown to us.”

Anna stands with her back to the fire and thinks of Licinius writing
Ὠκεανός
into the dust. Here the known. Here the unknown. Out of the corner of her eye she can see Himerius pilfering raisins. “Our master,” says the tall scribe, “believes that somewhere, perhaps in this old city, slumbering beneath a ruin, is an account that contains the entire world.”