The first thing Nikolaos noticed was the bread.

His mother took it from the oven before dawn and set it on the board with a slap of her palm. It should have cracked at the crust. It should have given off the good smell of wheat and heat and smoke from the little oven behind the house.

Instead it sat there pale and flat, steaming weakly, like a thing pulled from water.

His father looked at it and said nothing.

That was in the spring of the year 536, though Nikolaos did not think of years that way then. He was seventeen. He knew the city by its noises: wheels on stone before sunrise, gulls over the harbors, monks chanting from behind walls, men cursing in Greek and Latin and Syrian at the docks, bronze money striking wood counters, horses blowing through their noses in the cold morning.

Constantinople was supposed to be the center of the world.

That year, the world narrowed to the color of ash.

The sun came up wrong. It did not blaze over the Bosporus. It showed itself behind a gray skin, a round stain in the sky, too weak to warm the tiles. At noon a man could look toward it without lowering his face. Children did it at first and laughed, daring each other. Then their mothers struck their hands away and told them not to stare.

By summer, nobody laughed at the sun.

The cold stayed. Grapes hardened on the vine outside the city. Gardens failed. Men who had always complained about taxes began speaking instead about grain.

Nikolaos’s father, Theodoros, worked near the harbor mending crates and cart wheels. His hands were square, split at the knuckles, with a dark line of dirt that never left the nails. He had once been quick to anger. In that year he grew careful with anger, as though even anger used up too much warmth.

“Eat slowly,” he told them each night.

There were five of them then. His mother, Helena. His father. Nikolaos. His little sister Anna, who was nine and always hungry. His grandmother, who sat by the brazier wrapped in two shawls and muttered prayers into her collar.

By the fourth month of the dimness, they were four.

The grandmother died in the night with her mouth open, not in terror, just trying for more air. Nikolaos and his father carried her before dawn because the streets were quieter then. A dog followed them most of the way.

The ground was hard.

By winter, the cold had gotten inside the walls. It lived in the cups, in the blankets, in the damp stones under the bed. Frost came where frost had no business coming. Men broke furniture for fuel. Women cut old cloaks apart and wrapped the cloth around their children’s feet.

There were arguments in the bread lines. Then fights. Then soldiers.

The city had always been full of smells, but hunger changes a city. Smoke grew sharper. Fish rotted slower in the cold. The bakeries smelled less like bread and more like people waiting.

Nikolaos learned to stand with his elbows out.

His father sold his tools one by one. First the iron clamps. Then the spare axle pins. Then the good knife. The last thing he kept was a small bronze awl worn smooth at the grip.

“With this,” he said, holding it up, “a man can still make a hole.”

Anna laughed because she thought he was joking.

Two weeks later she stopped laughing. Her face thinned. Her lips cracked. She slept with her knees tucked up under her chin, and when she woke, she asked if morning had come.

“It has,” Nikolaos said.

“Then why is it still dark?”

He had no answer that would fit in a room.

His mother went next. Not all at once. She faded in plain sight. She gave Anna the larger share and lied about having eaten earlier. Her wrists became narrow. Her wedding ring slipped off while she washed a pot and struck the floor with a small clean sound.

Nikolaos found it under the stool.

He pressed it into her hand.

“Keep it,” she said.

“No.”

“Niko.”

He hated when she said his name that way. Like she was already far down a road and calling back.

She died before the eighteen months were finished. His father sat beside her until the brazier went cold. After that he took the bronze awl and drove it into the table so hard the point stuck.

Anna lived four more days.

No fever. No wound. Just the slow closing of a small body that had been asked to do too much with too little.

Nikolaos wrapped her in his own cloak. His father tried to help, but his fingers would not work.

The burial places were crowded. Men had stopped making good graves for the poor. A trench outside the walls took Anna and Helena both. Nikolaos wanted to remember where, but there were too many bodies, too much mud, too many hands waiting behind him with their own dead.

His father stood beside him, lips moving.

“What are you saying?” Nikolaos asked.

Theodoros looked at him with dry, red eyes.

“I am counting.”

“What?”

“Steps from the road.”

Nikolaos turned and counted too.

Seven from the road. Three from the broken fig tree. Twelve from the stone with the old red paint.

He repeated it until it cut a path inside his head.

Seven. Three. Twelve.

His father did not last until spring.

He got work unloading sacks from an imperial storehouse and came home one evening with blood under a fingernail where a plank had crushed it. The wound turned black at the edges. He said it was nothing. Men said that about many things before they died.

For three nights he shook on the floor.

On the fourth, he pulled Nikolaos close by the sleeve.

“You will want to become hard,” he said.

Nikolaos bent closer.

“Do not become useless instead.”

That was the last whole thing his father gave him.

When the sun returned, if it could be called returning, Nikolaos was eighteen and alone. The city still stood. The sea still moved. The emperor still ruled from rooms Nikolaos would never see. Priests still sang. Merchants still cheated. The poor still woke early because there was nothing in sleep for them.

He found work because he had his father’s shoulders and his mother’s patience. At first he carried water. Then he hauled charcoal. Then he joined men who repaired storehouse doors and market stalls. He kept the bronze awl.

A hole, his father had said.

A man could begin with that.

Years passed, but not enough of them.

At twenty-two Nikolaos had a room near a courtyard where a widow kept hens in a basket at night so they would not be stolen. He had two tunics. One pair of sandals. A scar across his thumb. He had learned how to judge a man by the way he reached for bread.

He had also learned to speak very little about the dark year. Those who had lived through it did not need telling. Those who had not would not understand why he looked at a clear noon sky with suspicion.

Then the rats began to die.

At first boys kicked them into gutters. Dogs sniffed and backed away. Men complained of the smell. In the warehouses by the harbor, rats lay under sacks, stiff-legged, their mouths open in the dust.

A week later, people began clutching at their groins and underarms.

Nikolaos saw the first swelling on a porter named Stephanos. The man sat against a wall near the docks, sweating through his tunic though the air was mild. He had a lump under his jaw the size of an egg. He kept trying to stand, ashamed to be seen sitting like a beggar, but his legs folded each time.

By evening he was gone.

Soon the city was full of doors marked by silence.

Carts moved through the streets collecting the dead. The men who drove them wrapped cloth over their mouths until the cloths grew filthy and pointless. Churches filled. Then courtyards. Then pits. The living stopped touching one another unless they had to.

Nikolaos did what everyone did at first. He worked, ate what he could find, kept away from coughing men, and listened for news that contradicted the last news.

A baker died in the morning after selling bread at dawn. A soldier dropped in the street with his hand still around his spear. A mother carried her child to a church and died kneeling beside him.

Then Nikolaos found a girl sitting in the alley behind his room, holding a dead hen.

She was perhaps six. Her hair had been cut unevenly, close to the neck. Her face was dirty in the ordinary way of poor children, which made her seem less like an orphan and more like a child between errands.

“That is Mara’s hen,” he said.

The girl looked at the bird.

“She gave it to me.”

“Mara gives nothing.”

“She is dead.”

Nikolaos looked toward the widow’s door.

It was open.

Inside, the room had the stale heat of sickness. Mara lay on her pallet with one arm off the side. Her fingers nearly touched the floor. There was no need to check her breathing, but he checked anyway.

The girl stood behind him.

“What is your name?” he asked.

“Thekla.”

“Where is your mother?”

The child lifted one shoulder.

He almost told her to go to a church. He almost told her to find kin. He almost gave her the dead hen and shut his door.

Instead he saw Anna’s knees tucked under her chin.

“Sit outside,” he said. “Do not touch anything in here.”

Mara had no family that he knew. Nikolaos went to the men with carts and waited until they came. He paid them with the better of his two tunics so they would take her before night.

Thekla watched from the courtyard, silent and stern.

When it was done, he boiled water. He burned Mara’s bedding. He cooked the hen because waste had become its own kind of sin.

The girl ate too fast and vomited by the wall.

“Slowly,” he said.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

“That is what my mother said.”

Nikolaos looked at her for a long moment, then put another small piece of meat in her bowl.

The plague took him nine days later.

It began as pain in the head and a bitter taste. By afternoon his legs shook so badly he had to sit on the floor. That night a swelling rose in his armpit. He touched it once and made a sound he did not recognize.

Thekla stood in the doorway.

“Go,” he said.

She did not move.

“Go away from me.”

“You gave me food.”

“This is not a bargain.”

She left then. He heard her feet slap the stones. He lay back and stared at the ceiling, furious with himself for caring whether she had understood.

The fever came with teeth. It bit his joints, his back, the soft place behind his eyes. Time broke into pieces. Water. Door. Light. Bowl. The girl’s hand holding a cloth but not touching his skin. The taste of vinegar. A priest’s chant from somewhere outside. Flies on the wall.

Once he woke and saw his mother sitting by the brazier.

She was mending Anna’s cloak.

“You are using the wrong thread,” he told her.

She smiled without looking up.

He woke again in darkness and knew by the smell that he had soiled himself. Shame burned hotter than fever. He tried to move. Could not.

Thekla came in with a bucket too large for her arms.

“Leave it,” he said.

“You smell.”

“I know.”

She wrinkled her nose and dragged the bucket closer.

He lived.

He did not recover so much as remain. The swelling split and drained. His fever loosened its grip. His body became thin, with knees too large for his legs and hands that trembled around a cup. Thekla brought water from the courtyard well, paying the widow’s old neighbor with two bent nails and a strip of leather Nikolaos had saved.

When he could stand, he found half the courtyard empty.

When he could walk to the street, he saw grass growing between stones where too few feet passed.

The city had changed shape. Not the walls or domes. Those remained. But the human measure of it had altered. There were houses with no smoke. Shops with shutters closed at noon. Men speaking in low tones because loud voices belonged to the time before.

Nikolaos took Thekla to the trench where his mother and sister had been buried.

He did not know why. Perhaps because the living require witnesses, and there was no one else to bring.

The broken fig tree was gone. The stone with red paint had been turned or stolen. The road had shifted wider under cart wheels and rain.

Seven. Three. Twelve.

He stood there counting from what remained, then stopped.

Thekla watched him.

“Are they here?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Where?”

He opened his hand.

The bronze awl lay across his palm. He had carried it for five years. His father’s last tool. The grip had darkened from his skin.

He knelt and pushed the point into the soil. The ground took it easily. Too easily. He made one hole, then another beside it, then a third.

“What are you doing?” Thekla asked.

“Starting with a hole.”

He planted three fig seeds he had taken from a market stall after the owner died and no one came to claim the fruit.

Thekla crouched beside him.

“Will they grow?”

“I do not know.”

“That is a poor answer.”

“It is the only honest one.”

She considered this, then took the awl from him and made a fourth hole.

“For Mara,” she said.

He nodded.

They planted another seed.

Years later, people would say Nikolaos had survived the cold sun and the great sickness. They would say it with interest, as though survival were an achievement like building a wall or crossing a sea. They would ask what he had seen. They would ask how many had died. They would ask whether the sky had truly been dark at noon.

He learned to give them small answers.

Yes.

Many.

Darker than it should have been.

He did not tell them that the unexpected part was not that he lived. Living was sometimes only the body’s bad habit.

The unexpected part was Thekla.

She grew tall. She became difficult. She stole figs from the very trees she had helped plant and denied it with purple juice on her fingers. She called him old when he was not yet thirty. She married a boatman with kind hands. She named her first son Theodoros and pretended not to see Nikolaos leave the room when she told him.

The four fig trees grew outside the wall where the trench had been. Their roots went down among the unnamed dead.

In good years, the fruit came sweet.

Nikolaos never trusted the sun completely again, but he sat under those trees when the days were clear, and Thekla’s children climbed over his legs, and the city went on making its noise behind him.

Sometimes that was enough.