Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

The look on the boy’s face makes it evident that his question is no question: his purview extends to all that occurs here. Crivano assesses his cool eyes and easy bearing — so like the Lark’s — and realizes that this is why Serena chose to join Crivano’s conspiracy, to remove his family from Murano. The glassmaker, he recalls, has two elder brothers; those brothers have many sons of their own. Alexandro practices his family trade not only as if he’s studied it diligently, which no doubt he has, but as if he has an inborn genius for it. Yet he will not run this shop in his lifetime.

On the pavement outside, Crivano says, are two gondoliers. You will find them in song, I imagine, asway with drink, and bearing between them a strongbox heavy with coin. This is payment for a piece your shop has made. Collect it from them with my thanks — but do not trouble yourself to fetch the item I’ve purchased. I’ll wait for your father. I have an unrelated matter to discuss with him.

As you wish, dottore. I’ll show you to the parlor.

Is there a chance, Crivano says, that I might linger in your workroom instead? I’m curious to witness the exercise of your craft. Or would my presence compromise confidential procedures?

Alexandro considers this, then smiles. It would, he says, if you are able to scry the insides of our skulls, to see the secrets hidden there. Otherwise there is no danger. I’ll grant you access, but keep well clear of the furnaces and the hot glass. Unless you’re prepared to spend your physic on yourself, dottore.

A nervous grin: for an instant, the boy seems his true age. But this passes, and he leads Crivano through the heavy door.

Crivano wonders whether he shouldn’t have waited in the parlor after all: the air stings his eyes and nose, all but cancels the aroma of his sudarium. The space before him swarms with frenzied scrambling men, silhouetted by the hard coppery light cast by two furnaces that blaze at the workroom’s far end like the infernal tombs of arch-heretics. Alexandro aims him toward a stack of crates in the corner, directs him to take a seat. My father will be with you shortly, he says.

Serena himself works nearby, ladling water into a tub of white batter as a laborer stirs it. Behind them another workman shapes paste from a second tub into small white cakes, sets these cakes to dry on a rack near the smaller furnace. Now Serena laughs; he musses the stirrer’s filthy hair and crosses the factory floor, past rag-draped wooden trays where fused lumps of frit are cooling, to meet the sweat-drenched drudge who breaks the snowy frit with an iron maul. Serena stops him for a moment, bends to pick up a shard, studies it, drops it again. Then he moves to the larger furnace, checking the work of the man who loads the broken frit into crucibles, the man who stirs and skims the molten glass, the man who pours the melt into steaming pans of clean water. Here again Serena stoops, fishes a blob of cool glass from a pan, and holds it to the light that pours through the furnace’s glory-holes.

Crivano makes a quick count of the laborers and arrives at ten: young men, a few boys, mixing the batch, working the glass and the frit, feeding the furnaces, splitting wood. And these are only preparatory gestures: no one has yet begun to work the glass into finished shapes. This task, he guesses, will fall to Serena’s older brothers and their favored sons; in Constantinople it will be Obizzo’s charge. But who will keep the furnaces burning steadily, and how will he know what temperature is right? Who will choose the wood to fire them, the stones to build them, the clay to seal them? The man who skims the crucibles in the long furnace is using a metal scoop with a long handle; Crivano has never seen the likes of it for sale in any tinsmith’s shop. Will such tools have to be made? Who will know how to make them? Has the haseki sultan any notion of what will be required for production to begin?

Serena’s insistence on bringing his family looks less and less like selfishness or sentiment, more and more like the wise recognition of necessity. No doubt the glassmaker has already considered how he’ll find his materials once he’s relocated to Amsterdam — but he isn’t going to Amsterdam. Has Narkis considered this? If Serena isn’t able to begin work quickly he’ll grow frustrated, restive, tempted to a second betrayal, one that the Spanish and Genoese spies in Galata will be eager to assist. And Obizzo! Obizzo will become a rampaging beast.

Narkis needs to address this: these issues of tools, facilities, raw materials. Spiriting the craftsmen out of the Republic’s hands will be wasted if their skills can’t be put to use. What preparations are being made for Serena’s and Obizzo’s arrival? Does Narkis know anything about making glass, really? What should Crivano tell him?

He begins a clumsy impromptu survey of the crates and sacks he sits among. Some of the containers are open, half-full; most contain a glittering powder with the texture of coarse flour. Crivano takes this for crushed quartz: extraordinarily pure, more uniform even than the whitest beach-sands of Egypt. Sacks of magnesia alba, too, and various salts, none in great quantity. More white powder, even finer than the quartz. Some sort of flux, probably. He wets a fingertip in his mouth — the dry air drinking the moisture from the whorls of skin — and dredges it through the powder to taste it. Cool and sharp and bitter. Slick on his tongue. He tastes it again.

I’ll have my niece fetch you a sweet, dottore, if you’re hungry.

Serena strolls up beside him, wiping his forehead with a cotton cloth. He still holds the lump of raw glass in his left hand, kneading it like a worry-stone. Crivano rises and returns Serena’s bow. I was just examining your materials, maestro, he says. This is potash, I suppose?

Soda ash, Serena says. From the Levant. The guild buys it through a syndicate with the soapmakers and the majolica makers, who also use it. I’m told it’s made from the ash of a plant that drinks saltwater like the freshest rain, that can uproot itself and move about on the wind to spread its seed, although whether this is true I cannot say.

It’s true enough: Crivano remembers seeing wagons laden with the dry round shrubs along the Syrian coast, and more blowing free along the roadsides. In Tripoli he saw laborers burning it, packing it for shipment to the West — al-qaly, it was called. What of the crushed quartz? he asks. Where does that come from?

The riverbeds of the Ticino and the Adige. The magnesia is from Piedmont. There are other sources, of course, but these—

Alexandro’s angry voice cuts through the shop: he’s just returned from leading Crivano’s gondoliers to the storeroom, and now stops to berate the man who rakes the contents of the smaller furnace. The workman had become inattentive, probably watching Serena with Crivano; now he blanches, refocuses his attention.

Serena grins. We calcine the batch in the small furnace for five hours, he says. It must be raked all the time, so it will heat uniformly, and fuse into frit without melting. If it melts it becomes worthless. It can even destroy the furnace. Every man you see here, dottore, has the capacity to ruin us all at any moment. This is why you often find glassmakers with black eyes, bloody knuckles, absent teeth.

I fear I have become a spectacle in this room.

Serena’s damaged right hand makes a dismissive gesture, but his expression is not so cavalier. Don’t worry yourself, dottore, he says. All the same, perhaps you’ll indulge me in a respite from the heat. Let us retire to my counting room, where I’ll show you what your friend has purchased.

He leads Crivano to a side door bearing an impressive German lock, which opens with a heavy key. The room beyond is small, neat, lit from beside the desk by a window of modest size; Crivano is seated and leaning toward it for a breath of fresh air before he realizes that it’s glazed. Uniform and colorless, the panes appear in the fog of his breath, then vanish again as he moves away.