The Cistern
Thallos found the rope ladder still fixed to the siege ramp when the sun was two hands above the ridge, and he did not want to climb it. Nobody had ordered him first. The order had gone to the century...
Stories
The Registry Number
Renate Bieler found the request for her own file between requisitions for a railway engineer and a retired schoolmaster. The three slips had been folded together, probably by the messenger who collect...
One Night Before the Pyre
The chain ran from her ankle to an iron loop set into the wall, and because the loop was low, near the floor, Joan could not stand fully upright without the shackle pulling her foot sideways. She had...
Custer's Luck
Three dead. Nine wounded, two of whom would not see the week out. Custer read the numbers twice, and they held still on the page, and that was the trouble with them. Benteen stood in the tent door wit...
The Prophet and the Poison
The room smelled of figs and something bitter underneath them, a smell Iras had stopped noticing after the third day. Cleopatra sat on the low couch with her feet bare, watching a slave girl drink fro...
Household Gods
Vindolanda, in the ninth year of the Emperor Hadrian The crate had come north with the rest of the prefect’s baggage, and Titus was the one who had to open it. Three months of transport had done what...
The Gentleman Bandit’s Last Ride
The sack smelled faintly of flour and mice. Charles Boles held it open between his hands and considered, for perhaps the hundredth time, the foolishness of the whole business. A grown man in a good wo...
The Beak and the Dark
Being the private notebook of Dr. Amброise Verrin, physician of the parish of Saint-Roch, kept against the express instruction of the magistrate 14 August Six houses marked today. The chalk crosses do...
The Door Beneath Jerusalem
Sir Martin came home in the rain. By then the village had stopped expecting him. His mother was dead. His father’s fields had gone to bramble. The boy who used to run after his horse with a willow swi...
Measured Ground
By the time they uncovered the mosaic, everyone on the site had stopped expecting surprises. The villa had been known for decades. A few test trenches in the 1970s, another survey in the nineties, and...
The Empty Voyage
The fishing boat found them at sunrise. Old Håkon, who had spent forty years working the waters outside Trondheimsfjorden, noticed the sail first. It hung loose against the mast, catching just enough...
The Man Who Turned East
When Einar Thorfinnsson finally saw the strange coastline, he thought first of sheep. The grass rolled over gentle hills, greener than Iceland in summer and richer than anything he'd seen in Greenland...
The Star in the Margin
The first time Yusuf ibn Khalid saw the star, he assumed he had made a mistake. It was the spring of 978, and the observatory outside Rayy had become his second home. Most nights ended with cramped fi...
The Cold Sun
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...
The Ledger Man
Vardry Oakes kept the names in a brown church ledger. He did not ride every night. Men liked to tell it afterward as if the whole county had gone out together, white cloth over every face, horses step...
The Man From the Hold
By the time the hatch opened, Thomas Bell had stopped praying. Not because he had lost faith. He had simply run out of words. The ship had gone quiet in the night. Quiet was worse than shouting, worse...
True Enough to Bury the Dead
The first English sail appeared in the morning, when the tide had gone out and left the oyster beds shining like broken plates. Eli saw it from the cedar bluff. At first he thought it was a cloud caug...
Witch or Healer
They ask whether I danced with the Devil. I tell them I do not remember. That is true. The cell stinks of straw, piss, and damp stone. Light enters through a slit high in the wall, enough to show the...
The River Cage
The water came up through the floorboards first. Patrick O’Shea had thought the sea would come in like a fist, breaking doors and tearing iron from iron. Instead it came quietly, a black shine creepin...
The Saga of the Twice-Fallen King
The first time they found King Hrafn Sigurdsson, he was dying in the mud. It was late autumn by the old reckoning, though the clocks in the agency called it 14 October, 982. The sky over the fjord had...