Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

He thinks again of Lepanto, of the Lark. His friend was never so ardent of spirit as in the weeks before the battle, never so full of song. As the fleets massed in the Gulf of Patras, every eye on the Gold and Black Eagle was upon him; every face grinned and every heart gladdened at his valor. But when the fighting began, the Lark would not shoot. He never retreated from his position on the quarterdeck, never wavered when the Turks swarmed: he pushed them back tirelessly until the moment the cannonball took him. But his arquebus went unfired till Crivano — blood-spray hissing on the overheated barrel of his own weapon — took it up. The Lark was a fine soldier, and had he survived to matriculate at Padua he would have made a marvelous physician, far better than the one Crivano has become. But he was no killer.

Crivano tries to sit up; his sore body refuses. Beneath the sheets his legs twist in inert agony, wrenched by swordsman-footwork, cramped by hours folded in Obizzo’s boat. His arms are no less distressed. He manages to drink a clay cup of water he finds beside the bed, but hasn’t enough strength to lift the pitcher and refill it. He sleeps again.

At some point a girl enters the room: a Jewess, bearing a steaming bowl of soup and a small chunk of bread. She sets these beside the pitcher, refills the cup, and departs, making no attempt to rouse Crivano. He rises to eat and drink — the soup is rich, mild, thick with goosefat — then lies down again. Nearby, perhaps in the next room, he hears a woman in the throes of carnal ecstasy and wonders if this place might be a bawdyhouse. If so, the whore on the other side of the wall is very enthusiastic, or very convincing.

When next he wakes, the light through the room’s small window has acquired the first blush of evening. He feels stronger. He sits up, drinks again — the soup-bowl has gone — and throws off the covers to stand on his trembling legs. He’s naked, bandaged extensively; he loosens his dressings to examine the wounds. Scraped right thumb. Short deep cut on his left arm. Crescent gash on his left side, haloed by a yellow-edged bruise. His ears still hiss and whine with the echo of last night’s pistolshot; his right hand and forearm ache from the jolt of the wooden grip. On the table where the soup was, Crivano finds a steel shaving-mirror — similar to his own — which he uses to check his face: blood crusted in his nostrils, a sooty bruise on his chin. The mirror shows his face in patches, blurry around the rim; it feels familiar in his hand. He realizes that it is indeed his own mirror: one his father gave him years ago, shortly before he left Cyprus. The mirror was packed in Crivano’s walnut trunk, the one that vanished from the White Eagle. How has it come to be here?

He steps to the open window, cautious to avoid unfriendly eyes. As he draws near, a gust further disorders his sleep-mussed hair.

Below is an unfamiliar junction of broad canals. Across the water, rosy sunlight strikes the unadorned façades of a row of buildings, much taller than anything around them: on one, Crivano counts eight rows of small windows between the roof and the waterline. No quay edges the buildings; no water-gate offers access. The walls look as impermeable as those of a fortress or prison. To the left, Crivano spots the onion-dome that crowns the Madonna dell’Orto belltower. That, along with the cast of the sunlight behind him, locates him north and east of the Cannaregio Canal. He’s looking at the walls of the Ghetto.

He becomes aware of a sound: a soft chirp emanating from a nearby chamber, sluggish and monotonous, like a locust’s mating-call. He turns toward the room’s exit. A set of clothes — not his own — hangs from pegs by the door: fresh garments of a sort that might befit a prosperous tradesman. The fabric feels rough and heavy against his skin. Crivano dresses slowly, with effort, then steps through the doorway into the corridor beyond.

He comes to a cluttered kitchen, where a serving-girl hurries to set out a simple meal of bread and cheese and green apples. At the end of the room is a table, Obizzo seated there, crossbow leaned in the corner behind him. The mirrormaker’s big hands are busy at some task, issuing the noise that Crivano has followed here.

He glances up disinterestedly as Crivano limps into view. Good evening, dottore, he says. I see you’ve chosen to go on living.

Crivano opens his mouth, then closes it, unwilling to spend vitality on a reply. He crosses the room to the table. The serving-girl ignores him.

Obizzo has a leather-fletched bolt in his scarred left hand; he scrapes an iron file along its heavy pyramidal tip. Black powder falls with each pass, sprinkling the tabletop, dusting the thick hair on Obizzo’s wrists, sticking to the underside of the file itself, drawn by some weak force hidden in the metal. Crivano leans on a chairback; he’s afraid he’ll be unable to rise again if he sits. Then, after a moment, he sits. Where are we? he says.

South of Saint Jerome. Outside the New Ghetto. Not far from the Cerberus, the locanda where we’ll meet tomorrow night. Your friend brought us here. You remember?

My friend?

Your friend. The physician. The hypocrite Jew.

Crivano nods. Tristão, he says.

If he gave his name, Obizzo says, I don’t remember it.

He stops filing, tests the quarrel’s point with a broad thumb. Then he puts the bolt down and leans forward. Listen, dottore, he says. What about this new plan? I like it, but I don’t trust it. It’s too simple. What do you think?

Crivano squints. New plan? he says.

Your friend hasn’t told you, then. He fears the sbirri may have learned of our arrangements. About the trabacolo we’re to meet in the lagoon, I mean. He says that I should row our party — Serena and his family, the young fugitive nun, and you, and him, which is to say your Jew doctor friend — to the trabacolo just as we’ve planned. Only there we’ll play a trick. We’ll pretend a loading and unloading of passengers. All will get off my boat, then come aboard again, in different garb. I’ll row us to Mestre. From there we’ll go overland to Treviso, to Bassano del Grappa, to Trento, and across the mountains into Tyrol.

As Obizzo is speaking, Crivano looks down at his own raw and bandaged hands on the tabletop. Then he closes his eyes. Recalling Narkis’s tearful face in the darkness off the corte, then imagining that face lifeless, breaking the moon-silvered surface of a canal: a dark oval interrupting the film of light. The last time Crivano sat with Narkis in Constantinople — it was the afternoon before he met Polidoro in the hippodrome, before he delivered the hide of Bragadin to the bailo of the Republic and passed unsuspected into Christendom again — they drank a pot of sweet kahve together at a quiet kıraathane in Eyüp, and Narkis explained the haseki sultan’s plan, and what would be in store for them. Thirteen years of Crivano’s life were contained in that conversation: thirteen years that ended yesterday. When they finished, Narkis upended Crivano’s cup, removed the brass zarf, and lifted it to reveal the pattern left by the dregs. Turning the copper dish with a pale hand, he spoke earnestly of what the leavings portended. Each fleeting moment, Tarjuman effendi, contains every moment. The result of our most mundane act is full of messages that tell us what Fortune wills . Crivano peered at the black-brown circle of sludge — two curved slits in its midst, dark liquid bleeding from its edges, a muddy blot eclipsing the bright metal — and tried not to laugh.

Well, dottore? Obizzo says. What do you think?

Crivano opens his eyes, doesn’t look up. It’s a good plan, he says.

You think so? What if the sbirri are waiting in the lagoon to intercept us? What if informants on the Terrafirma spot us on the road, and send word to the Council of Ten? What then?