Cloud Cuckoo Land

“Master, they’re concealing a demon in the byre.”

Silence. Grandfather sets a log on the fire.

“A ghoul or a mage, pretending to be a child.”

“I apologize,” says the traveler. “My attendant has forgotten his place.”

“He has the face of a hare and when he speaks the beasts do his bidding. This is why they live alone, miles from the nearest village. Why their bullocks are so large.”

The traveler rises. “Is this true?”

“He is only a boy,” says Grandfather, though Omeir hears a sharpness creep into his voice.

The servant edges toward the door. “You think that now,” he says, “but his true nature will show in time.”

From his spot at the base of the big dead tree, Seymour gazes up and the owl gazes down and the forest breathes and something happens: the unease mumbling at the margins of his every waking moment—the roar—falls quiet.

There is magic in this place, the owl seems to say. You just have to sit and breathe and wait and it will find you.

Konstance sighs, bracing for it, the great warning story of Crazy Elliot Fischenbacher, who, after his Library Day, would not get off his Perambulator day or night, ignoring his studies and violating every protocol in order to trek alone inside the Atlas until the soles of his feet cracked, and then, according to Mother, his sanity cracked too. Sybil restricted his Library access, and the grown-ups took away his Vizer, but Elliot Fischenbacher unbolted a support from a shelf in the galley and over a series of nights tried to chop through an outer wall, right through the skin of the Argos itself, imperiling everyone and everything. Thankfully, Mother always says, before he could get through the outermost layer, Elliot Fischenbacher was subdued and confined to his family compartment, but in his confinement he squirreled away SleepDrops until he had enough for a lethal dose, and when he died his body was sent out the airlock without so much as a song.

Donkey carts hurry past the oxen teams in both directions, the faces of the carters crimped with impatience or fear or anger or all three. Hatred, Omeir sees, is contagious, spreading through the ranks like a disease. Already, three weeks into the siege, some of the men fight no longer for God or the sultan or plunder but out of a fearful rage. Kill them all. Get this over with. Sometimes the anger flares inside Omeir too, and he wants nothing more than for God to plunge a fiery fist through the sky and start crushing buildings one after the next until all the Greeks are dead and he can go home.

You said write something “fun” we did over summer to get our “grammer mussels flexing” again, so ok, Mrs Tweedy, this summer scientists announced that in the last 40 yrs humans have killed 60 percent of the wild mammals and fishes and birds on earth. Is that fun? Also in the past 30 yrs, we melted 95 percent of the oldest thickest ice in the arctic. When we have melted all the ice in Greenland, just the ice in Greenland, not the north pole, not Alaska, just Greenland, Mrs Tweedy, know what happens? The oceans rise 23 feet. That drowns Miami, New York, London, and Shanghai, that’s like hop on the boat with your grandkids, Mrs Tweedy, and you’re like, do you want some snacks, and they’re like, Grandma, look underwater, there’s the statute of liberty, there’s Big Ben, there’s the dead people. Is that fun, are my grammer mussels flexing?

After morning prayer he goes to find Tree in the pasture where he has staked him and the ox cannot get up. He lies on his side, one horn pointing to the sky. The world has swallowed his brother and Tree is ready to join him. Omeir kneels and runs his hands over the bullock’s flank and watches the reflection of the sky quake in the bullock’s trembling eye.

Does Grandfather look up this morning at this same cloud, and Nida, and their mother, and he and Tree, all five of them looking up at this same drifting white shape as it passes over them all?

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.

He learns of Rex’s death from Hillary in an airmail letter written in purple cursive. Rex, Hillary reports, was in Egypt, working with his beloved papyrus, trying to claw back one more sentence from oblivion, when he had a heart attack.

You were, Hillary writes, very dear to him. His huge, loopy signature takes up half the page.”

SEEMORE6: u still there

MATHILDA: they just said I could have ten xtra minutes

MATHILDA: because u are special u are important u have promise

SEEMORE6: me?

MATHILDA: ya not just to them to me

MATHILDA: to every1

Olivia-the-goddess crouches beside Rachel in her sequined dress. “Aethon doesn’t read to the end of the book?”

“That’s how he writes his story on the tablets,” says Rachel. “How they get buried in the tomb with him. Because he doesn’t stay in Cloud Cuckoo Land. He chooses… What’s the word, Mr. Ninis?”

The beating of hearts, the blinking of eyes. Zeno sees himself walk out onto the frozen lake. He sees Rex in the rainy light of the tea room, one hand trembling over his saucer. The children gaze down at their scripts.

“You mean,” says Alex, “Aethon goes home.”

“Sybil, where are we?”

We are en route to Beta Oph2.

“What speed are we traveling?”

7,734,958 kilometers per hour. You would remember our velocity from your Library Day.

“You’re sure, Sybil?”

It is fact.