Cloud Cuckoo Land Read Online Free PDF Page B

journey home, Licinius explains, consisted of twenty-four books, one for each letter of the alphabet, and took several days to recite, but all Licinius has left are these three quires, each containing a half-dozen pages, relating the sections where Ulysses leaves the cave of Calypso, is broken by a storm, and washes up naked on the island of Scheria, home of brave Alcinous, lord of the Phaeacians.
    There was a time, he continues, when every child in the empire knew every player in Ulysses’s story. But long before Anna was born, Latin Crusaders from the west burned the city, killing thousands, and stripped away much of its wealth. Then plagues halved the population, and halved it again, and the empress at the time had to sell her crown to Venice to pay her garrisons, and the current emperor wears a crown made of glass and can hardly afford the plates he eats from, and now the city limps through a long twilight, waiting for the second coming of Christ, and no one has time for the old stories anymore.
    Anna’s attention remains fixed on the leaves in front of her. So many words! It would take seven lifetimes to learn them all.
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    Every time Chryse the cook sends Anna to the market, the girl finds a reason to visit Licinius. She brings him crusts of bread, a smoked fish, half a hoop of thrushes; twice she manages to steal a jug of Kalaphates’s wine.
    In return, he teaches. A is ἄλφα is alpha; B is βῆτα is beta; Ω is ὦ μέγα is omega. As she sweeps the workroom floor, as she lugs another roll of fabric or another bucket of charcoal, as she sits in the workroom beside Maria, fingers numb, breath pluming over the silk, she practices her letters on the thousand blank pages of her mind. Each sign signifies a sound, and to link sounds is to form words, andto link words is to construct worlds. Weary Ulysses sets forth upon his raft from the cave of Calypso; the spray of the ocean wets his face; the shadow of the sea-god, kelp streaming from his blue hair, flashes beneath the surface.
    â€œYou fill your head with useless things,” whispers Maria. But knotted chain stitches, cable chain stitches, petal chain stitches—Anna will never learn it. Her most consistent skill with a needle seems to be accidentally pricking a fingertip and bleeding onto the cloth. Her sister says she should imagine the holy men who will perform the divine mysteries wearing the vestments she helped decorate, but Anna’s mind is constantly veering off to islands on the fringe of the sea where sweet springs run and goddesses streak down from the clouds upon a beam of light.
    â€œSaints help me,” says Widow Theodora, “will you ever learn?” Anna is old enough to understand the precariousness of their situation: she and Maria have no family, no money; they belong to no one and maintain their place in the house of Kalaphates only because of Maria’s talent with a needle. The best life either of them can hope for is to sit at one of these tables embroidering crosses and angels and foliage into copes and chalice veils and chasubles from dawn until dusk until their spines are humped and their eyes give out.
    Monkey. Mosquito. Hopeless. Yet she cannot stop.
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    â€œOne word at a time.”
    Once more she studies the muddle of marks on the parchment.
πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω
    â€œI can’t.”
    â€œYou can.”
    á¼ŒÏƒÏ„εα are cities; νόον is mind; ἔγνω is learned.
    She says, “He saw the cities of many men and learned their ways.”
    The mass on Licinius’s neck quakes as his mouth curls into a smile.
    â€œThat’s it. That’s it exactly.”
    Almost overnight, the streets glow with meaning. She reads inscriptions on coins, on cornerstones and tombstones, on lead