Cloud Cuckoo Land (30 page)

H
e crouches among the children behind the L-shaped barrier of shelves and looks at each in turn: Rachel, Alex, Olivia, Christopher, Natalie. Shh shh shh. In the gloom their faces become the faces of a half-dozen little Korean deer that he and Rex came upon one day while gathering wood in the snow near Camp Five: their antlers and noses looming up out of the white, their black eyes blinking, their big ears twitching.

Together they listen to the little door in the plywood wall creak shut. Footfalls move through the folding chairs. Zeno keeps his index finger pressed to his lips.

A floorboard squeaks; underwater bubbles gurgle from Natalie's portable speaker. Is it only one person? It sounds like only one.

Be a police officer. Be Marian. Be Sharif.

Alex holds a can of root beer with two hands as though it were full of nitroglycerin. Rachel huddles over her script. Natalie shuts her eyes. Olivia's eyes fix on Zeno's. Christopher opens his mouth—for a moment Zeno believes the boy is going to cry out, that they are going to be discovered, murdered where they sit.

The footsteps stop. Christopher closes his mouth without making a sound. Zeno tries to remember what he and the children have left scattered among the chairs for someone to see. The dropped case of root beer, multiple cans rolled beneath the chairs. Backpacks. Pages of scripts. Natalie's laptop. Olivia's gull wings. The gold-painted encyclopedia on its lectern. The karaoke light, thankfully, is off.

Footfalls on the stage now. The rustle of a nylon jacket. Icy bands are compressing his chest and Zeno grimaces against the pressure.
θεοὶ
is the gods,
ἐπεκλώσαντο
means they spun,
ὄλεθρον
is death, plague, destruction. Ruin.

That's what the gods do, they spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come.
Not now, gods. Not tonight. Let these children stay children for another night.

T
he smell of fresh paint on the little stage is very strong; it catches at the back of his throat. Shelves block the windows and the lights are off and those strange underwater sound effects—coming from where?—unsettle him. Here's a kid's parka, here a pair of snow boots, here a soda can. Cartoon clouds hang above him. Against the backdrop, a thick book sits open on a lectern. What is this?

Beside his foot lies a spill of photocopied legal pages covered in handwriting. He picks up one, holds it close to his eyes:

• GUARDIAN #2: Though it will seem simple at first, it's actually quite complicated.
  
• GUARDIAN #1: No, no, it will seem complicated at first, but it's actually quite simple.
  
• GUARDIAN #2: Ready, little crow? Here's our riddle. “He that knows all that Learning ever writ, knows only this.”
  

Pistol in one hand, page in the other, Seymour stands on the stage and gazes at the painting on the drop curtain. The towers floating on clouds, trees winding up through the center—it seems like an image from a dream he had long ago. The hand-printed sign on the library door comes back to him:

The world: it's all he ever loved. The forest behind Arcady Lane, the busy meanderings of ants, the zip and swerve of dragonflies, the rustling of the aspens, the tart sweetness of the first huckleberries of July, the sentinels of the ponderosas, older and more patient than any beings he would ever know, and Trustyfriend the owl on his branch overseeing it all.

Are bombs going off in other cities, other nations right now? Are Bishop's warriors mobilizing? And is Seymour the only one who has failed?

He steps off the stage and is moving toward the corner, where three bookcases have been arranged to create an alcove, when the wounded man calls from the bottom of the stairs.

“Hey, kid! I have your backpack. If you don't come downstairs right now, I am going to carry it outside and give it to the police.”

THE RIDDLE OF THE OWLS

MAY 1453

F
rom the top of the occasional swell, she can glimpse the now-distant shape of the city to the northeast, glowing faintly. In all other directions lies nothing but heaving blackness. Wet, exhausted, and seasick, the sack clamped to her chest, Anna ships the oars and gives up bailing. The sea is too large and the boat is too small. Maria, you were always the better sister, the wiser sister, moving on to the next world just as this one broke in half.
An angel in one child
, Widow Theodora used to say,
and a wolf in the other
.

In something deeper than a dream she hurries again across the tiled floor of a vast atrium lined on both sides with tiers of books. She breaks into a run, but no matter how far she seems to travel, the hall does not end, and the light dims, and her fear and desolation deepen with every stride. Finally she approaches a light ahead where a lone girl huddles beside a candle with a single book on a table. The girl raises the book she's holding, and Anna is trying to read the title when Himerius's skiff grinds onto a rock and turns broadside to the waves.

She has just enough time to gather the sack against her dress before she is dumped overboard.

She thrashes, inhales seawater. A swell sucks her out, throws her forward, and her knee strikes a submerged stone: the water is only waist deep. She sputters to the surface and drives her body toward shore, the sack soaked through but still clutched to her chest.

Anna crawls onto a stony beach and huddles over her throbbing knee and opens the neck of the sack. The silk, the book, the bread:
all drenched. Out among the dark seething waves Himerius's skiff is nowhere.

The beach draws an arc in the predawn light: no cover here. She climbs through a storm-driven barrier of driftwood at the tideline into a land of devastation: burned houses, every tree in an olive grove hacked down, the earth rutted as though God has raked away soil with his hands.

At first light she ascends a gentle hillside terraced with grapevines. The rumble of the waves recedes. She takes off her dress and wrings it dry and puts it back on and chews a piece of sturgeon and runs a hand over her cropped hair as dawn traces a pink line over the horizon.

She hoped that over the course of the night she would be swept to a new land, Genoa or Venice or Scheria, the kingdom of brave Alcinous, where a goddess might conceal her in magical mist and escort her to a palace. But she has been carried only a few miles up the coast. The city is still visible in the distance, a saw's blade of rooftops capped by the clustered domes of the Hagia Sophia. A few spires of smoke lift into the sky. Are armed men pouring through the neighborhoods, breaking into houses, herding everyone into the streets? Unbidden, an image rises of Widow Theodora and Agata and Thekla and Eudokia dead in the scullery, tea of nightshade in the center of the table, and she forces it away.

Birdsong rises from the vines. She glimpses a group of soldiers on horseback, maybe a half mile away, moving in the direction of the city, silhouetted against the sky, and she lies as flat as she can against the ground with the damp sack beside her as a fog of gnats clusters around her head.

When the men are out of sight, she creeps to the bottom of the vineyard and wades a stream and hurries up a second rise away from the sea. Atop the next hill, a stand of hazel trees huddle around a well as though frightened. A single cart track leads in and out. She crawls beneath the low-slung boughs and waits in the leaf litter as the silence of the morning beats down upon the fields.

In the quiet she can almost hear the bells of Saint Theophano, the
clatter of the streets, broom and pan, needle and thread. The sound of Widow Theodora climbing the stairs to the workroom, opening the shutters, unlocking the thread cabinet. Blessed One, protect us from idleness. For we have committed sins without number.

She lays out the book and samite hood to dry in the early sun and devours the rest of the salt fish as cicadas sing in the branches above her. The leaves of the codex are saturated, but at least the ink has not bled. All through the brightest hours of the day she sits with her knees against her chest, sleeping and waking and sleeping again.

Thirst twists through her as shadows pool in the grove of trees. She has seen no one come to the well and she wonders if it has been poisoned against the invaders so she does not risk a drink. It's dusk when she reassembles her sack and climbs back through the boughs and moves through the coastal scrub, keeping the sea to her left. A waning quarter-moon holds pace with her as she scrambles over one boundary wall, then another, and she wishes the night were darker.

Every few hundred yards her passage is stymied by water: inlets she must circumnavigate, a brook tumbling through brambles that she drinks from before crashing through. Twice she skirts villages that appear abandoned: no figures moving, no smoke rising. Maybe a few last families hide there, crouched in cellars, but no one calls to her.

Behind her lies slavery and terror and worse. Ahead lies what? Saracens, mountain ranges, ferries where extortionists demand payment for river crossings. The moon sinks away and the thick band of stars that Chryse calls the Way of the Birds stretches wide and gold overhead. Step step step: there comes a point where the pressure of relentless fear perforates rationality and the body moves independently of the mind. It's like climbing the wall of the priory: foothold, handhold, up you go.

Before dawn she is pushing her way through a spindly forest, rounding the edge of what looks like a large body of water, when she sees
firelight twinkling between trunks. She is about to skirt it when the air brings the odor of roasting meat.

The smell is a hook through the gut. A few paces closer: just to see.

A little fire in the woods, flames no higher than her shins. She picks her way through the trees, her slippers crunching leaves. At the fire's edge she can make out what looks like a single headless bird spitted beside the flames.

She tries not to breathe. No figures move; no horses nicker. For a hundred heartbeats she watches the flames burn down. No movement, no shadows: no one tends the meal. Just the bird: a partridge, she thinks. Is it a hallucination?

She can hear the fat sizzling. If it cooks much longer without being turned, the side facing the embers will burn. Maybe somebody was scared off. Maybe whoever made the fire heard news about the capture of the city and took his horse and left his meal.

For a breath she becomes Aethon-the-crow, bone-weary and disheveled, peering through the golden gates, watching a tortoise trudge past with a tower of cakes balanced on his shell.

Though it will seem simple at first, it's actually quite complicated.

No, no, it will seem complicated at first, but it's actually quite simple
.

Logic deserts her. If she could just lift the bird from the coals. Her mind is already concocting the experience of tasting it, its flesh beneath her teeth, its juices spurting into her mouth. She tucks her sack behind a trunk, dashes, and uproots the spit. She has the bird in her left hand, one fraction of her consciousness registering a halter, rope, and oxhide cape at the edge of the firelight, the rest of her wholly bent on eating, when she hears an inhalation behind her.

Such is her hunger that her arm continues to bring the bird to her mouth even as a stroke of lightning cracks from the back of her head to the front, a long, branching fracture of white, as though the vault of the sky has splintered, and the world goes dark.