Cloud Cuckoo Land (21 page)

H
e stares at the phone, thinks: Ring. Ring now. But it remains inert.

5:38 p.m.

Bunny will be done with her housekeeping shift by now. Footsore, back aching, she'll be waiting for him to pick her up and drive her to the Pig N' Pancake. Are police cruisers streaking past the window? Are her coworkers talking about something happening at the library?

He tries to imagine Bishop's warriors assembling somewhere nearby, using code words on radios, coordinating efforts to rescue him. Or—a new doubt slithers into place—maybe the police are somehow disrupting his ability to call out. Maybe Bishop's people didn't receive his calls. He thinks of the red lights moving out in the snow, the drone hovering over the hedges. Would the Lakeport Police Department have capabilities like that?

The wounded man is lying across the stairs with his right hand clamped against his bleeding shoulder. His eyes have closed, and the blood on the carpet beside him is drying, traveling past maroon toward black. Better not to look. Seymour diverts his attention instead into the long shadow of the middle aisle between Fiction and Nonfiction. What a shambles he's made of the whole thing.

Is he willing to die for this? To give voice to the innumerable creatures that humans have wiped off the earth? To stand up for the voiceless? Isn't that what a hero does? A hero fights for those who cannot fight for themselves.

Scared and confounded, body itching, armpits sweating, feet
cold, bladder brimming, Beretta in one pocket and cell phone in the other, Seymour removes the cups of his ear defenders and wipes his face with the sleeve of his windbreaker and looks down the aisle toward the restroom at the back of the library when he hears, coming from upstairs, a succession of booming thuds.

IN THE BELLY OF THE WHALE

APRIL–MAY 1453

F
or a mile in either direction, hammers ring, axes chop, camels bray, bark, and bleat. He passes camps of arrow makers, camps of harness makers, cobblers and blacksmiths; tailors are fabricating tents inside yet larger tents; boys scurry here and there with baskets of rice; fifty carpenters construct scaling ladders from debarked logs. Ditches have been cut to carry away human and animal waste; drinking water is stored in mountains of barrels; a great portable foundry has been constructed at the rear.

Men approach from every corner of the camp to ogle the cannon where it gleams, immense and bright, on its cart. The oxen, wary of the commotion, stick close together: Moonlight appears to sleep on his feet as he chews, unable to raise his head above his backline, and Tree finds a place beside him and lies on his side, twitching one ear. Omeir rubs a mixture of spit and crushed calendula leaves into his left hind leg, as Grandfather would have done, and worries.

At dusk the men who have brought the cannon from Edirne gather around steaming cauldrons. A captain climbs to a dais to announce that the sultan's gratitude is immense. As soon as the city is won, he says, they will each be able to choose which house will be theirs, and which garden, and which women will be their wives.

All night Omeir's sleep is broken by the noise of carpenters building a cradle to hold the cannon and a palisade to conceal it, and all the next day the teamsters and oxen work to hoist it into place. An occasional crossbow bolt comes whistling out from the crenelated parapet atop the city's outer wall and sticks into a board or into the mud. Maher shakes a fist at the walls. “We have something a little
bigger than that to throw back at you,” he calls, and everyone who hears him laughs.

That evening in the pasture where they feed the oxen Maher finds Omeir sitting atop a fallen block of limestone and squats beside him and picks at a scab on his knee. They gaze across the encampment to the moat and the chalk-white towers, striped red with brick. In the setting sun the jumble of rooftops on the far side of the walls seems to burn.

“Do you think by this time tomorrow, all of that will be ours?”

Omeir says nothing. He is ashamed to say that the size of the city terrifies him. How could men have built such a place?

Maher enthuses about the house he'll choose for himself, how it will have two stories and channels of water running through a garden with pear trees and jasmine, and how he'll have a dark-eyed wife, and five sons, and at least a dozen three-legged stools—Maher is always talking about three-legged stools. Omeir thinks of the stone cottage in the ravine, his mother making curds, Grandfather toasting pine nuts, and homesickness rolls through him.

Atop a low hill on their left, surrounded by shields, a series of ditches, and a curtain-wall of fabric, the sultan's compound of tents ruffles in the breeze. There are tents for his bodyguards, tents for his council and treasury, for his holy relics and his falconry, his astrologers and scholars and food-tasters; kitchen tents, toilet tents, contemplation tents. Beside an observation tower ripples the sultan's personal tent—red, gold, and as large as a grove of trees. Its interior is painted, Omeir has heard, the colors of paradise, and he aches to see it.

“Our prince, in his infinite wisdom,” says Maher, following Omeir's gaze, “has discovered a weakness. A flaw. Do you see where the river enters the city? Where the walls dip beside that gate? Water has been running there since the days of the Prophet, peace be upon Him, collecting, seeping, chewing away. The foundations there are weak, and the mitering of the stones has begun to fail. It is there that we will smash through.”

Up and down the city walls, sentry fires are being lit. Omeir tries to imagine swimming the moat, clambering over the scarp on the
far side, somehow scaling the outer wall, fighting across the battlements, then dropping into a no-man's-land before the huge bulwark of the inner wall, its towers as tall as twelve men. You would need wings; you would need to be a god.

“Tomorrow night,” says Maher. “Tomorrow night two of those houses will be ours.”

The following morning ablutions are made and prayers recited. Then flagbearers pick their way through the tents to the very front of the lines and raise bright standards in the dawn light. Drums and tambourines and castanets sound throughout the company, a racket meant as much to frighten as to inspire. Omeir and Maher watch the powder makers—many missing fingers, many with burns on their throats and faces—prepare the huge gun. Their expressions are strained from the constant fear of working with unstable explosives and they reek of sulfur and they murmur to one another in their strange dialect like necromancers, and Omeir prays that their eyes will not meet his, that if something goes wrong they will not blame the defect in his face.

Along the almost four miles of land wall, the cannons have been organized into fourteen batteries, none larger than the great bombard Omeir and Maher have helped drag here. More familiar siege weapons—trebuchets, slings, catapults—are loaded too, but all of them seem primitive compared to the burnished guns and the dark horses and carts and powder-stained tunics of the artillerymen. Bright spring clouds cruise above them like vessels sailing to a parallel war, and the sun pushes above the city's rooftops, momentarily blinding the armies outside the walls, and finally, at some signal from the sultan, hidden by a shimmer of fabric atop his tower, the drums and cymbals go quiet and the flagbearers drop their standards.

At more than sixty cannons, cannoneers set tapers to priming powder. The whole army, from barefoot conscripted shepherds in the vanguard with clubs and scythes to the imams and viziers—from the attendants and grooms and cooks and arrowsmiths to the elite corps
of Janissaries in their spotless white headdresses—watches. People inside the city watch too, in sporadic lines along the outer and inner walls: archers, horsemen, counter-sappers, monks, the curious and the incautious. Omeir shuts his eyes and clamps his forearms over his ears and feels the pressure build, feels the huge cannon draw up its abominable energy, and for an instant prays that he is asleep, that when he opens his eyes he'll find himself at home, resting against the trunk of the half-hollow yew, waking from an immense dream.

One after another the bombards fire, white smoke ejecting forward from their barrels as the guns smash backward with the recoil, rocking the earth, and sixty-plus stone balls fly toward the city faster than eyes can track them.

Up and down the walls clouds of dust and pulverized stone rise. Fragments of brick and limestone rain onto men a quarter mile away, and a roar rolls through the assembled armies.

As the smoke drifts away, Omeir sees that a section of one tower in the outer wall has partially crumbled. Otherwise the walls appear unaffected. The gunners are pouring olive oil over the huge gun to cool it, and an officer prepares his crew to load a second thousand-pound ball, and Maher is blinking in disbelief, and it is a long time before the cheers subside enough for Omeir to hear the screaming.

S
he is chopping scavenged wood in the courtyard when the guns fire again, a dozen in succession, followed by the distant rumble of stonework falling to pieces. Days ago the thunder of the sultan's war engines could start half of the women in the workshop weeping. This morning they merely sign crosses in the air over their boiled eggs. A jug wobbles on a shelf and Chryse reaches up and settles it.

Anna drags the wood into the scullery and builds up the fire and the eight embroideresses who are left eat and shuffle back upstairs to work. It's cold and nobody sews with urgency. Kalaphates has fled with the gold, silver, and seed pearls, there's not much silk left, and what clergymen are buying embroidered vestments anyway? Everyone seems to agree that the world will end soon and the only essential task is to cleanse the besmirchment from one's soul before that day comes.

Widow Theodora stands at the workshop window, leaning on her stick. Maria holds her embroidery frame inches from her eyes as she glides her needle through the samite hood.

In the evenings, after she has settled Maria in their cell, Anna treks the mile to join other women and girls in the terrace between the inner and outer walls. They work in teams to fill barrels with turf, soil, and chunks of masonry. She sees nuns, still in their habits, helping to attach barrels to pulleys; she sees mothers taking turns with newborns so others can pitch in.

The barrels are hoisted by donkey-powered cranes to the battlements of the outer walls. After dark, impossibly brave soldiers, in
full view of the Saracen armies, crawl over hastily built stockades, lower the barrels in, and pack the empty spaces around them with branches and straw. Anna sees whole bushes and saplings get lowered into the stockades—even carpets and tapestries. Anything to soften the blows of the terrible stone balls.

Out there, up against the outer wall, when the sultan's guns roar, she feels the detonations roll through her bones and shake her heart where it hangs inside its cage. Sometimes a ball overshoots its mark and goes screaming off into the city, and she hears it bury itself in an orchard or a ruin or a house. Other times the balls strike the stockades, and rather than shatter, they swallow the balls whole, and the defenders along the ramparts cheer.

The quiet moments frighten her more: when the work pauses and she can hear the songs of the Saracens out beyond the walls, the creaking of their siege machines, the nickering of their horses and bleats of their camels. When the wind is right, she can smell the food they're cooking. To be so close to men who want her dead. To know that only a partition of masonry prevents them from doing their will.

She works until she cannot see her hands in front of her face, then trudges home to the house of Kalaphates, takes a candle from the scullery, and climbs onto the pallet beside Maria, her fingernails broken, her hands veined with dirt, and pulls the blanket around them and opens the little brown goatskin codex.

The reading goes slowly. Some leaves are partially obscured by mold, and the scribe who copied the story did not separate the words with spaces, and the tallow candles give off a weak and sputtery light, and she is often so tired that the lines seem to ripple and dance in front of her eyes.

The shepherd in the story accidentally turns himself into an ass, then a fish, and now he swims through the innards of an enormous leviathan, touring the continents while dodging beasts who try to
eat him: it's silly, absurd; this cannot possibly be the sort of compendium of marvels the Italians sought, can it?

And yet. When the stream of the old Greek picks up, and she climbs into the story, as though climbing the wall of the priory on the rock—handhold here, foothold there—the damp chill of the cell dissipates, and the bright, ridiculous world of Aethon takes its place.

Our sea monster battled with another, bigger and more monstrous even than he was, and the waters around us quaked, and ships with a hundred sailors on each sank in front of me, and whole uprooted islands were carried past. I closed my eyes in terror, and fixed my thoughts on the golden city in the clouds…

Turn a page, walk the lines of sentences: the singer steps out, and conjures a world of color and noise in the space inside your head.

Not only, Chryse announces one night, has the sultan used his Throat Cutter to strangle the city from the east, not only has he positioned his navy to blockade the sea from the west, not only has he turned out a limitless army with terrifying artillery pieces—now he has brought in crews of Serbian silver tunnelers, the best miners in the world, to dig passages beneath the walls.

From the moment Maria hears this, a terror of these men seizes her. She places bowls of water around their cell and crouches over them, studying their surfaces for any evidence of subterranean activity. At night she wakes Anna to listen to the scraping of picks and shovels beneath the floor.

“They're growing louder.”

“I don't hear anything, Maria.”

“Is the floor shifting?”

Anna wraps her arms around her. “Try to sleep, sister.”

“I hear their voices. They are talking directly below us.”

“It's only the wind in the chimney.”

Yet, despite logic, Anna feels the fear slipping in. She imagines a platoon of men in caftans crouched in a hole just beneath their pallet, their faces black with soil, their eyes huge in the dark. She holds her breath; she hears the tips of their knives scratch against the undersides of the flagstones.

One evening at the end of the month, walking the eastern section of the city, scrounging for food, Anna is rounding the great weathered bulk of the Hagia Sophia when she stops. Between the houses, tucked against the harbor, the priory on the rock stands silhouetted against the sea and it is on fire. Flames flicker in crumbled windows, and a pillar of black smoke twists into the sky.

Bells ring—whether to urge people to fight the fire or for another purpose, she could not say. Perhaps they ring simply to exhort the people to carry on. An abbot, eyes closed, shuffles past carrying an icon, trailed by two monks, each with a smoking censer, and the smoke from the priory lingers in the dusk. She thinks of those dank, rotting halls, the moldering library beneath its broken arches. The codex back in her cell.

Day after day
, the tall Italian said,
year after year, time wipes the old books from the world.

A charwoman with scars on her face stops in front of her. “Get home, child. The bells are calling the monks to bury the dead, and this is no time to be out.”

When she returns home, she finds Maria sitting rigid in their cell in complete darkness.

“Is that smoke? I smell smoke.”

“It's only a candle.”

“I feel faint.”

“It's probably hunger, sister.”

Anna sits and wraps the blanket around them and lifts the samite
hood from her sister's lap, five of her twelve birds finished—the dove of the Holy Spirit, the peacock of the Resurrection, the crossbill who tried to pry the nails from Jesus's crucified hands. She rolls Maria's thimble and scissors inside it and retrieves the battered old codex from the corner and thumbs to the first leaf:
TO MY DEAREST NIECE WITH HOPE THAT THIS BRINGS YOU HEALTH AND LIGHT
.

“Maria,” she says, “listen,” and starts at the beginning.

Drunken, foolhardy Aethon mistakes a magical city in a play for a real place. He sets off for Thessaly, land of magic, and accidentally turns himself into a donkey. This time she is able to make quicker progress, and as she reads aloud, something curious happens: as long as she keeps a steady stream of words flowing past Maria's ears, her sister doesn't seem to suffer so much. Her muscles loosen; her head falls to Anna's shoulder. Aethon-the-donkey is kidnapped by bandits, gets lashed to a wheel by the miller's son, walks on his tired, cracking hooves to the place where nature comes to an end. Maria doesn't moan in pain or whisper about invisible subterranean miners scratching beneath the floor. She sits beside her, blinking into the candlelight, amusement playing over her face.

“Do you think it's really true, Anna? A fish so large it could swallow ships whole?”

A mouse scrabbles across the stone and rises onto its hind legs and stands twitching its nose at her with its head cocked as though awaiting her answer. Anna thinks of the last time she sat with Licinius.
Μῦθος,
he wrote,
mýthos
, a conversation, a tale, a legend from the darkness before the days of Christ.

“Some stories,” she says, “can be both false and true at the same time.”

Down the hall Widow Theodora touches the worn beads of her rosary in the moonlight. One cell away, Chryse the cook, half her teeth gone, drinks from a jug of wine and sets her cracked hands on her knees and dreams of a summer day outside the walls, walking beneath cherry trees, a sky full of crows. One mile east, in the belly
of a carrack at anchor, the boy Himerius, drafted into the city's stopgap naval defenses, sits with thirty other oarsmen, resting over the shaft of a great oar, his back throbbing, both palms bleeding, eight days left to live. In the underground cisterns beneath the church of the Hagia Sophia, three little boats float on the black mirror of the water, each packed with spring roses, while a priest intones a hymn into the echoing dark.