Cloud Cuckoo Land (34 page)

THE GARDEN OF THE GODDESS

MAY–JUNE 1453

A
girl. A Greek girl. This fact is so startling, so unexpected, that he almost cannot recover his wits. He who wept at the castrations of Moonlight and Tree, who winced at the killing of trout and hens, has broken a branch over the head of a crop-headed fair-skinned Christian girl younger than his sister.

She lies in the leaf litter unmoving, the spitted partridge still in her hand. Her dress is filthy, her slippers hardly slippers anymore. In the starlight the blood running down her cheek looks black.

Smoke rises from the coals, frogs rasp in the dark, some clockwork inside the night advances one notch, and the girl moans. He binds her wrists with Moonlight's old halter. She moans again, then thrashes. Blood runs into her right eye; she scrambles to her knees and brings her bound wrists to her teeth; when she sees him, she screams.

Omeir glances back through the trees, frightened.

“Quiet. Please.”

Is she calling to someone nearby? He was stupid to make a fire: too much of a risk. As he smothers the embers the girl howls a torrent of language he cannot understand. He tries to clap a hand over her mouth but comes away bitten.

She gets to her feet, takes several dizzy steps into the dark, then falls. Maybe she is drunk: the Greeks are always drunk, isn't that what everyone says? Half-beasts permanently inebriated on their own somatic pleasure.

Yet she is so young.

Probably it is a trick, a witch's disguise.

He tries to simultaneously listen for anyone approaching and
examine the wound on the edge of his hand. Then he takes a bite of the partridge, the skin charred, the center raw, and the girl lies panting in the leaves, blood still flowing down her face, and a new thought rises: Does she guess why he is alone? Does she sense what he has done? Why he isn't rushing into the city with the other victors to claim his rewards?

She squirms away from him. Maybe this creature, too, is alone. Maybe she also has abandoned some post. When he notices that she is crawling toward an object at the base of a tree, he steps in and takes up her sack and she riots. Inside is a little ornamental box and a bundle wrapped in what might be silk—impossible to tell in the dark. She rolls again to her knees, screeching curses in her language, then emits a scream so high and plaintive that it seems more lamb than human.

Terror rockets up his spine. “Please be quiet.” He imagines her scream traveling out through the trees in every direction: across the dark body of water ahead, down the roads leading to the city, directly into the ear of the sultan.

He pushes the sack closer to her and she grabs it with her bound wrists, then staggers again. She is weak. It was hunger that drew her.

Omeir places what's left of the still-warm bird on the ground near her and she picks it up with her teeth and eats like a dog and in the quiet he tries to gather his thoughts. They are far too close to the city. Any moment men, either beaten or triumphant, will come through here on horses. She will be taken as a slave and he will be hanged for desertion. But, he considers, if they find the two of them together, maybe the girl can serve as a kind of shield: a prize he has won. Maybe, traveling with her, he will draw less suspicion than if he were alone.

Her eyes stay fixed on him as she sucks the partridge bones and a breeze rises and the still-new leaves tremble in the darkness. As he tears a strip from his linen shirt a memory ambushes him: of standing with Grandfather in morning light, their trousers wet to the knees with dew, fitting Moonlight and Tree to their first yoke.

The girl remains still and does not scream as he ties the linen
over the wound on her head. Then he hitches Moonlight's lead to the halter binding her hands. “Come,” he whispers. “We must go.”

He puts her sack over his shoulder and pulls her by the lead as though she were a recalcitrant donkey. They pick their way around the rushes fringing a broad wetland, the girl stumbling now and then as the sun rises behind them. In the early light he finds a patch of brown-capped hog mushrooms and squats in their midst eating the caps.

He holds some out to her and she watches him for a bit, then eats as well. The bandage seems to have staunched the bleeding and the blood on her neck and throat has dried to the color of rusted iron. In the noon light they give wide berth to a burned village. A pack of five or six skeletal dogs rushes them and draws dangerously close before Omeir drives them off with stones.

By evening they traverse a landscape pocked with ruins—orchards raided, dovecotes emptied, vineyards burned. When he kneels beside creeks to drink, she does too. Just before nightfall they discover peas in a half-trampled garden and eat, and well after midnight, he finds a little hollow inside a hedgerow beside an unplanted field and secures her lead around the trunk of a cypress. She looks at him, her eyelids slipping, and he watches sleep overcome her terror.

In the moonlight he drags the sack away from her and removes the snuffbox. It's empty, smells of tobacco. A scene Omeir cannot quite make out is painted on the lid. A tall house beneath a sky. Perhaps it is her home?

The bundle is wrapped in dark silk, embroidered with blossoms and birds, and inside is a stack of animal skin stripped of hair, beaten flat, trimmed into rectangles, and bound along one edge. A book. Its leaves are damp and smell like fungus and their surfaces are covered with glyphs in neat lines and upon seeing them he is afraid.

He remembers a tale Grandfather once told about a book left behind by the old gods when they fled the earth. The book, Grandfather said, was locked inside a golden box, which was in turn locked
inside a bronze box, then inside an iron box, inside a wooden chest, and the gods placed the chest at the bottom of a lake, and set water-dragons a hundred feet long swimming around it that not even the bravest men could kill. But if you ever could retrieve the book, Grandfather said, and read it, you would understand the languages of the birds in the sky and of the crawling things beneath the ground and if you were a spirit you would resume again the shape you had on earth.

Omeir rewraps the parcel with trembling hands and re-stores it inside the sack and studies the sleeping girl in the moon shadow. The bite mark on his hand throbs. Could she be a ghost made flesh again? Could the book she carries contain the magic of the old gods? But if her witchcraft were so powerful, why would she be alone, desperate enough to steal his partridge from his fire? Couldn't she have simply turned him into a meal and eaten him? Turned all the sultan's soldiers into beetles, for that matter, and stomped them dead?

Besides, he tries to reassure himself, Grandfather's stories were just stories.

The night wanes and he longs to be home. In another hour the sun will rise over the mountain, and his mother will pick her way through the mossy boulders to fill the kettle at the creek. Grandfather will restart the fire, and the sun will send shadows quivering through the ravine, and Nida will sigh beneath her blanket, chasing one last dream. Omeir imagines climbing into the warmth beside his sister and twining his limbs with hers as they did when they were little, and when he wakes it is late morning and the girl has untied herself and she is holding her sack and standing over him, studying the gap in his upper lip.

After that he does not bother to bind her wrists. They move northwest along undulating plains, hurrying across open fields from copse to copse, the road to Edirne occasionally coming into view far to the northeast. The wound on the girl's head no longer weeps and she seems to never tire, while Omeir has to rest every hour or so,
fatigue sunk into his marrow, and sometimes as he walks he hears the creak of the wagons and the bellowing of animals, and senses Moonlight and Tree beside him, huge and docile beneath the beam of their yoke.

By their fourth morning together, they grow dangerously hungry. Even the girl stumbles every few steps and he knows they cannot go much farther without food. At midday he spies dust rising behind them and they crouch off the road in a little brake of thorns and wait.

First come two banner men, blades knocking against their saddles, the very image of conquerors returning. Then drivers with pack camels loaded with plunder: rolled carpets, bulging sacks, a torn Greek ensign. Behind the camels in loose double-file through the dust march twenty bound women and girls. One howls with grief while the others shuffle in silence, their hair uncovered, and their faces betray a wretchedness that makes Omeir look away.

Behind the women a rawboned ox pulls a wagon crowded with marble statuary: the torsos of angels; a robed and curly headed philosopher with his nose flaked off; a single enormous foot, bone white in the June light. Finally in the rear rides an archer with a shield slung across his back and a bow across his saddle, murmuring a song to himself or to his horse, looking off into the fields as they pass. Across the rump of his horse a little slain goat is tied, and seeing it, hunger vaults inside Omeir. He rises and is about to step out of the brake to call to them when he feels the girl's hand on his arm.

She sits holding her sack, arms scratched, head shorn, desperation written into every line of her face. Little brown birds rustle in the thorns above his head. She taps her chest with two fingers and stares at him, and his heart pounds, and he sits, and in another minute the wagons are past.

That afternoon rain falls. The girl clasps her bundle as she walks, trying everything she can to keep it dry. They make their way through a muddy field and find an abandoned house blackened by fire and
sit starving beneath the thatch, and an oceanic fatigue enters him. He shuts his eyes and hears Grandfather pluck and dress two pheasants, stuff them with leeks and coriander, and set them to roast over a fire. He smells the cooking meat, hears the rain hiss and spit in the coals, but when he opens his eyes there is no fire and no pheasants, only the girl shivering at his side in the growing darkness, bent over her sack, and rain slashing onto the fields.

In the morning, they enter a vast forest. Great dripping pendulums of catkins hang from the trees and they move through them as if passing through thousands of curtains. The girl coughs; rooks screech; something clatters high in the branches above: then silence and the hugeness of the world.

Whenever he stands, the trees bleed away in long streaks and take several heartbeats to right themselves. He aches to see the shape of the mountain on the horizon but it does not appear. Once in a while the girl mutters words, prayers or curses, he cannot say. If only, he thinks, they had Moonlight with them. Moonlight would know the way. He had heard it said that God made men above beasts, but how many times had they lost a dog high on the mountain only to find it covered with burrs back home? Was it by smell or the angle of the sun in the sky or some deeper, hidden faculty, possessed by animals but lost to men?

In the long June dusk, he sits on the forest floor, too weak to go on, and peels bark from the branches of a wayfarer shrub. He chews the bark until it is a paste, and with his last remaining energy, smears as many branches as he can with the sticky lime, as Grandfather used to do.

The girl helps him gather firewood, and the sun drops, and three times he gets up to check his traps, and each time they are empty. All night he drifts in and out. When he wakes he sees the girl tending the little fire, her face pale and dirty, the hem of her dress torn, her eyes as big as fists. He sees a shadow separate from his body and fly off into the forest, over the river, over the house of his family, herds
of deer running through trees high on the mountain, and wolves slipping through the shadows behind, until he reaches the place in the far north where sea dragons slither between mountains of ice and a race of blue giants holds up the stars. When he comes back into his body, shafts of moonlight are falling through the leaves and touching the forest floor in bright shifting patches. Beside him the girl has the sack in her lap and she is running fingers along the lines of the book and murmuring words in her strange language. He listens, and when she stops—as though she has summoned it with her magical book—a flock of stone-curlews comes flowing through the underbrush, clicking and nattering, and Omeir hears the panicked flutter of one caught in a snare, then more, and still more, and the night fills with their shrieks, and she looks at him, and he looks at the book.

The hummocks become foothills and the foothills mountains. They are close to home now, he can sense it. The varieties of trees, the texture of the air, a smell of wild mint halfway up a climb, the bright round pebbles in a streambed: all these are memories, or run parallel to memories. Like oxen, pulling through the rainy dark, maybe there is something in him too, some magnet pulling him homeward.

By the time they come over a ridge and descend a trail to the river road, news of the fall of the city has reached the villages. He keeps the girl bound at the wrists with the rope attached and to each person they pass he tells the same story: victory was glorious; all honor to the sultan, may God keep him; he has sent me home with my rewards. Despite his face, no one seems to begrudge him, and though many eye the dirty bundle and sack he carries, no one asks to see what's inside. A few carters even congratulate him and wish him well, and one gives him cheese, and another a basket of cucumbers.

Soon they near the tall black gorge where the road pinches and the log-bridge extends over the narrows. A few carts come and go; two women drive a gaggle of geese across, on their way to market.
Omeir listens to the river cut deeper through the gorge and then they're across.

In the dusk they pass the village where he was born. A half mile from home, he leads her off the road and to a bluff above the river and they stop beneath the spread boughs of the half-hollow yew.

“The children,” he says, “say that this tree is as old as the first men, and that on the darkest nights their ghosts dance in its shade.” The tree waves its thousand branches in the moonlight. She watches him, eyes alert. He points into its crown, then at the sack she keeps clutched to her chest.