Dave Duncan - The Alchemist's Apprentice

C arnival revelers were starting to emerge in the alleys and on the canals, the lights had been lit in the corner shrines. Christoforo and Corrado had not drunk themselves stupid and drowned, as I had feared. They were sitting in the bow of the gondola, so obviously pleased with themselves that their father was threatening to send them to confession first thing in the morning.

“I did not give them enough for that,” I said. If I were mistaken, then they would need the Maestro’s professional care very shortly.

“How much did you give them?” he asked narrowly.

“Didn’t they tell you?”

“They said two soldi apiece.”

Blessed Lady help me! I bit the bullet. “Giorgio, I know this isn’t any of my business, but I was their age not so very long ago. My mother was desperately poor, but she let me keep all my earnings as long as I paid for half our groceries. I ate three times what she did, so that was fair, and I learned what honest work was for.” I sighed and said the rest of it: “You are teaching them to tell lies.”

He glowered, but he is a reasonable man at heart. “You gave them more than four soldi?”

“Just believe I gave them four to pass on to you. Now take us all home, please, before I starve to death.”

I took my seat inside the felze, but when we were underway I beckoned Christoforo to join me-Corrado is more canny.

“How much did you win?”

His face puckered with guilt. “Me? Eight soldi. Corrado got six.”

“And what would you have done if you’d lost it all?”

“We weren’t going to gamble it all.”

“You did very well to stop when you were ahead, but believe me, you will lose it all the next time. Gambling is for fools. Tell your brother I said so.” I knew my advice would drive them to exactly the opposite course, because that was how I had reacted at their age. But now they must have enough money to buy a harlot of the lowest sort, so they would be better off losing it at dice. Sometimes life seems unnecessarily complicated.

Back at Ca’ Barbolano, I found the Maestro gone, but my side of the desk upholstered with pages of scrawl. He works that hard only when he is seriously frustrated by something, and it invariably means twice as much work for me. He had been at the crystal ball again, too, for the velvet lay on the floor and the slate was adorned with drunken snail tracks. I left that problem until later-I tend to be prejudiced against the crystal, because it never shows me anything except my next encounter with Violetta. The Maestro says I will outgrow that. I say I don’t want to.

I began by re-shelving all the books, mostly herbals and ephemerides. The reagents I had bought the previous day I stowed in the appropriate bottles, out of reach of any Angeli toddler who might stray into the atelier. After I had mixed the unguent for madonna Polo, I dusted the entire collection of bottles and shelves to leave no evidence that digitalis had ever been present.

Then I lit the lamp over my desk and inspected the litter. The Maestro insists that everything be kept tidy, but is himself the untidiest of men. He had completed three pages of next year’s almanac and four scribbled horoscopes that were the routine jobs I had expected to do that day until murder intervened. He had even made all the calculations, probably more to keep his own mind occupied than out of consideration for me. A fifth horoscope, identified only as “PM,” was obviously the doge and I did not like the look of his immediate future. If you identified him with the Republic itself, which was legitimate synecdoche, and the Republic as Queen of the Sea with the planet Venus, the current conjunction with Saturn was as ominous as it had been for Orseolo. The Maestro posited that the ascendant Turkish Empire should be equated with the moon in some circumstances, and in that case the aspects were even worse. If he had not yet answered Pietro Moro’s mocking challenge to read the name of the murderer in the stars, at least he had found some evidence regarding the name of the intended victim. As I was tucking all the papers away in my work drawer with a bundle of routine letters, including the papal piles, out fell a letter addressed to me.

It had been opened, of course, although I recognized Violetta’s scent on the paper, and he would have done so also. The contents were terse:

Lover-The ball is canceled. Come and entertain me tonight.

– V

Normally I would be down the hall in my bedroom and half changed within a couple of heartbeats of reading that invitation, but tonight I had far too much work to do and too much sleep to catch up. I wrote my regrets on the same paper, sealed it with my signet, and went in search of Bruno, who was always happy to help, just to justify his existence.

I barely needed to explain. He sniffed the paper, grinned, and made the signs for woman-belong-Alfeo. I nodded and off he went. Sending so much beef to deliver so small a load seemed inefficient. I felt I should have enclosed a gift-something pretty, like the Michelangelo David.

Now I had no more excuses to delay tackling the Maestro’s latest prophecy. I brought light and ink and the book to the slate-topped table. It was not as illegible as I had feared, which, as I told you, implied that the events it foretold would not be long delayed. When I had deciphered it, I didn’t like it one bit.

Dark deeds, dark night, but bright the gold.

Gold rains brighter than the eyes of the serpent;

Eyes and legs a-bleeding on the campo,

So unthinkable love will triumph from afar.

Just then Corrado tapped on the door, come to tell me that supper was ready. Before I reached the dining room, I was brought up short by Bruno’s smile, looming over me like a rainbow. He had brought back a reply from Violetta.

Cedet amor rebus, res age, tutus eris.

– V

Which means roughly that business keeps one safe from love-ominous talk when one’s lover is a courtesan. I hoped that it was just another literary conceit I ought to know. (It is, I later learned, an apothegm by Ovid.)

To my astonishment, I found the Maestro already at the table. His eyes were bloodshot and I guessed he had a raging headache, but he was not as haggard as I expected after two foreseeings in two days.

The dining hall would seat fifty at a pinch, but only the Maestro and I eat in it. There I can dream that my family’s fortunes never sank in the Aegean with the fall of Crete, for our dishes are finest porcelain, our knives and spoons are chased silver, as are the special forks with which we lift the food to our mouths, a custom foreigners find very strange. Colored candles burn in golden candlesticks on the snowy linen cloth between the crystal flagons and enameled beakers.

Normally I feast and my master nibbles, but that night I also had to talk; Mama’s superb risotto of Rovigo veal stuffed with oysters grew cold before I was half-done. I told of my visit to the doge, my exchange with Isaia, and the bizarre English couple. Then, I hoped, I was free to eat.

Alas, no. “You saw the latest quatrain?”

I recited what I thought it said and he nodded grumpily.

“It seems to predict violence,” I said. “Whose eyes and legs are going to bleed, do you suppose?”

“Mine. From now on go armed and take Bruno with you everywhere.”

“You are serious?” I am his eyes and his legs, but I had never heard him admit that before.

“Have you ever known me to make a joke?”

“No, master.” I suspect he tried one seventy years ago and nobody laughed. “Why me?” Not getting an answer, I continued. “What else? Unthinkable love? A rain of gold? Eyes of the serpent?”

Seemingly he could make no more sense of the quatrain than I could. He poked more food around his plate aimlessly. He had eaten almost nothing. “You know who is carried shoulder high around the Piazza San Marco, scattering gold coins to the mob.”