Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.
    Images of the city to the south speed through his consciousness, but he has seen neither a city nor a likeness of one and does not know what to imagine, and his visions intermingle with Grandfather’s tales of talking foxes and moon-spiders, of towers made of glass and bridges between stars.
    Out in the night a donkey brays. Omeir says, “They’re going to take Tree and Moonlight.”
    â€œAnd a teamster to drive them.” Grandfather lifts the beam, studies it, sets it back down. “The animals won’t follow anyone else.”
    An axe falls through Omeir. All his life he has wondered what adventures await beyond the shadow of the mountain, but now he wants only to crouch here against the logs of the byre until the seasons have turned and these visitors are a memory and everything has gone back to the way it was.
    â€œI won’t go.”
    â€œOnce,” Grandfather says, finally looking at him, “the people of an entire city, from beggars to butchers to the king, refused the call of God and were turned to stone. A whole city, every woman, every child, turned to stone. There is no refusing this.”
    Against the opposite wall, Tree and Moonlight sleep, their ribs rising and falling in tandem.
    â€œYou will gain glory,” Grandfather says, “and then you will return.”

THREE
    THE CRONE’S WARNING

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    Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio Γ
    â€¦ as I left the village gate, I passed a foul crone seated on a stump. She said, “Where to, dimwit? It’ll soon be dark and this is no time to be on the road.” I said, “All my life I have longed to see more, to fill my eyes with new things, to get beyond this muddy, stinking town, these forever bleating sheep. I am traveling to Thessaly, the Land of Magic, to find a sorcerer who will transform me into a bird, a fierce eagle or a bright strong owl.”
    She laughed and said, “Aethon, you dolt, everyone knows you cannot count to five yet you believe you can count the waves of the sea. You will never fill your eyes with anything more than your own nose.”
    â€œQuiet, hag,” I said, “for I have heard of a city in the clouds where thrushes fly into your mouth fully cooked and wine runs in channels in the streets and warm breezes always blow. As soon as I become a brave eagle or a bright strong owl, it is there I intend to fly.”
    â€œYou always think the barley is more plentiful in another man’s field, but it’s no better out there, Aethon, I promise you,” said the crone. “Bandits wait around every corner to bash your skull and ghouls lurk in the shadows, hoping to drink your blood. Here you have cheese, wine, your friends, and your flock. What you already have is better than what you so desperately seek.”
    But as a bee hurries to and fro, visiting every flower without pause, so my restlessness…

LAKEPORT, IDAHO
    1941–1950

Zeno
    H e’s seven when his father is hired to install a new sash saw at the Ansley Tie and Lumber Company. It’s January when they arrive and the only snowflakes Zeno has seen before are asbestos fibers a druggist in Northern California sprinkled over a Christmas display. The boy touches the frozen surface of a puddle on the train platform, then yanks back his fingers as though burned. Papa pratfalls into a snowbank, smears snow over his coat, and staggers toward him. “Looks! Looks at mes! I big snowman!”
    Zeno bursts into tears.
    The company leases them an under-insulated two-room cabin a mile from town on the edge of a blinding-white plain that the boy will only later understand is the icebound lake. At dusk Papa opens a two-pound can of Armour & Company spaghetti and meatballs