Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

Back at the White Eagle, he interrupts Anzolo’s supper to give him Serena’s parcel. This must be delivered to Dottore Tristão de Nis before dawn, he says. You will find him at the house of Andrea and Nicolò Morosini. The men who carry it should be well-armed, entirely trustworthy, and lacking any formal affiliation with this locanda. Its contents are of incalculable worth, and uncertain legitimacy. I intend now to retire, and I should not like to be troubled prior to the fourteenth bell. Oh — have a chambermaid bring a large washbasin, a clean flesh-brush, and a spare pitcher of water to my room. An extra lamp, as well. Immediately, please.

The whore is stepping from her skirts when the knock comes. Crivano opens the door wide enough to gather in what the maid has brought, then shuts and bolts it with muttered thanks. He fills the basin, lights the lamp, and hangs up his own garments while she washes herself. Her eyes linger on the two emblems that mark his skin — the key on his chest, the Sword of the Prophet on his calf — but she asks no questions. Her long shadow stretches over the walls, dulling and sharpening in the erratic light.

When she’s done, he grips her by the neck and washes her again, scrubbing hard until her flesh turns rosy beneath its sun-darkened brown. She makes no protest. He wipes her dry, directs her to the bed, moves the lamps closer. Then he begins to inspect her, minutely, for condylomata and chancres. His eyes are dry and tired. She’s immobile, silent, watching the ceiling. Soft voices rise from the street outside. From somewhere more distant comes the low liquid whistle of a scops-owl.

He stands, washes his own arms past the elbow, and directs her to sit up. Then he tilts her head toward the light and puts his fingers in her mouth. Her tongue, her cheeks, her throat are free from signs of disease. He tips her back onto the wool-stuffed mattress, folds the hinges of her knees, and applies his spit-slick fingers to her anus and vulva. He intends this as a prudent preliminary to copulation, but it soon becomes an end in itself: it is what he wants, what he is doing, why he brought her here. He recalls the invasion of Georgia: lovely young corpses stacked in a barn in Tiflis, the stench of death arrested by the brutal cold. Extraordinary machines! More perfect with their souls gone. He could have spent hours exploring them, days cutting them to pieces.

The hair on her body is curiously fine, the same russet hue as her cropped scalp. On her shins it’s nearly blond. A thin hooked scar, well-healed, traces the lower edge of her left scapula. He pulls her toes, probes the hollows of her armpits, drags his knuckles across the rough verruca on her foot. Pinching her lips, her nipples, her earlobes: the flesh blushes and puffs. His thumbs smooth her brows, brush her closed lids. When her eyes open — their pupils shrinking — he looks at them for a long time. Peculiar colors. Greens and grays and browns. A deep swift stream, churned by the boots of soldiers.

Gradually she becomes impatient, unnerved, uncertain of how this use of her will end. She begins to reach for him, to redirect his actions into something intelligible. Each time she does so he stops her hands: gently at first, then more forcefully, if only to feel the occult architecture of muscle and sinew straining against his own. This is a new invisibility, blood-warm and mindless, hidden under skin. Nothing like the one sought by the alchemists. Every discovery is instantly forgotten.

This continues across what seems like many hours, although Crivano recalls hearing no bells. Only when they’re both clumsy, fumbling, all but asleep, does he let her touch him. She settles an arm around his waist; her hand makes a few perfunctory strokes. He rises to clean himself.

Sometime during the night her snores wake him; he’s uncertain of the hour. Dark. The lamp on the table has burned itself out; the fresher one in the corner still flickers. He slides from bed, refills the new lamp’s reservoir, shapes its wick with a needle until he’s built a steady flame. Then he unlocks his box of physic.

He places his square marble slab on the tabletop, along with a pair of small tin spatulas and a sealed jar of beeswax, and turns to inspect his herbs. Birchbark. Fig-leaf resin. Celandine. The biennial henbane he bought from the apothecary, moments before he met this girl for the first time. Why did he purchase so much of it? Enough to kill everyone in the White Eagle, and many more besides. Might not the sale raise suspicion?

He puts that concern aside, makes his selections, measures them onto the slab. Then he gathers beeswax on a spatula, softens it over the lamp-flame, smears it across the scattered herbs, stirring and scraping them into an ointment. Once he’s gathered it in a vial, he returns to his box, fishes out a long slim razor, and rouses the girl.

She recoils when she sees the blade. He claps a hand over her mouth before she can scream, pinching her nose, pressing her skull downward until the bed-ropes groan. Then he begins to whisper in her ear, and he keeps whispering until her struggles cease, until she understands and accedes to what he’s about to do.

He releases her, then takes hold of her thigh and rolls her quickly over on her stomach. He straddles her, rests his buttocks against her own, bends her back leg. As if she’s a horse he’s shoeing. He tilts the pad of her foot toward the lamp until the wart is clearly visible. Then he begins to cut.

He draws no blood, or very little. As the shaved-away callus litters the sheets, he sweeps it to the floor with the back of his hand. When the area of the verruca is cleared, he applies the poultice, then dresses it with a snug bandage. Clean this every night, he says. Put ointment on it every morning. Don’t walk unless you must. If you do these things, within a month it will cease to trouble you.

He stands, freeing her. She he rolls onto her side, then cocks her leg, prods the bandage. Looks at him. Dottore, she says.

She says nothing else. After a moment, she rolls onto her belly and draws in her limbs, rising sphinx-like on her knees and elbows, swaying sleepily in the lamp’s flame. Crivano watches her for some time. A sound escapes his throat: a wet exhalation, like a small beast dying or being born. Then he climbs across the mattress and commences to use her in the manner of the Greeks, in the same manner the janissaries would sometimes use him, in same the manner he’d sometimes put the Lark to use during the long slow dream of their boyhood, those unspoiled days when nothing was different and nothing would ever change.

When he wakes, sunlight is pressing through the curtains, and the girl still sleeps beside him.

When he wakes again, the sunlight has shifted, grown softer, and the girl is gone. He tries with some success to sink back into slumber, but recollections of the night before — along with concerns about what the girl may have stolen, and the desire to void his bladder — finally rouse him.

Stool and urine in the chamberpot already. Enough water in the pitcher to clean himself. The stack of coins that he left for her is gone, of course, but his own purse still jingles when he lifts it. The ample sheaf of papers in his trunk’s false bottom — letters of advice from a bank in Genoa, an account Narkis established for him — has led him to be somewhat careless with his funds; he turns out the purse on the tabletop to take stock of its contents. Gold sequins, silver ducats, silver soldi, copper gazettes. A few lire and grossi. One scarred and flattened giustina, MEMOR ERO TUI IVSTINA VIRGO visible on its reverse. Coins from other lands: a papal scudi, an English half-groat, a quart d’ecu bearing the device of Henri IV. One blue-green piece he can’t identify. He opens the curtains, winces, holds it to the light. A ducat. A coin of necessity, struck during a siege by a local treasurer from whatever metal could be spared. One side is illegible, worn smooth; the other bears a winged lion, and the year the coin was minted: 1570.