Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

The air in the room is thick, trapped by shuttered windows, heavy with long-forgotten smells of home. Crivano stands in the entrance with his eyes closed — his mind reassembling the rooms and corridors of the great house in Nicosia, the house this girl was born too late to know — until he has adjusted to the darkness within.

Perina emerges from her blankets like a part-risen shade: a bare white arm from the brown wool, then a tonsured head. The girl watches Crivano as he closes the door, lights two candles atop a low trunk with the wick of his own. She does not speak.

A chair sits beside her bed; Crivano eases into it, puts his candle on a shelf fixed to the bedpost. Perina slides backward, sits up, takes hold of his hand. You are well? she says. Her voice is coarsened by snores. The rough tick of her mattress has left a gridded imprint on her cheek.

I survive, lady, Crivano says.

She smiles.

I am greatly in your debt, he tells her. You must know that. I endangered myself foolishly, and in the course of my rescue you were injured. That fact rests like a capstone upon me.

I was not so badly hurt, dottore. Tristão must have told you.

Yes, Crivano says. He did. May I look?

Her large eyes grow larger in the dim. She does not answer, and she does not move. Wind rattles the shutters. The light falters as the candleflames dance.

Crivano grips the blanket’s edge. You were struck on this side, he says. Were you not?

She nods.

He lifts the cover just enough to examine the pale band of flesh beneath it. A violet quarter-moon darkens Perina’s swollen skin a palm’s-breadth below her half-hidden breast. Had the blow been lower, had it landed more squarely, she might be dead. As it is, she likely won’t think of the wound at all by the time another Sunday has passed. For once, Fortune has smiled.

He lifts the blanket higher, slides the candle closer on its shelf, squints. With a tinge of impatience, she plucks the fabric from his still-weak fingers and draws it aside, baring her body to the knees.

Crivano blinks. His ears fill with too-sharp sounds — the wind, the water, distant voices, the creaks and pops of the settling building — as if he’s about to faint. Take a deep breath, he says: to the girl, to himself. Breathe in as deeply as you are able.

She breathes, wincing as her lungs swell, but neither coughs nor cries out: her ribs remain unbroken. Her strong shoulders angle back: they’re Dolfin’s shoulders, almost exactly. Aren’t they? After so many years of careful forgetting, it’s difficult to be sure. The girl’s oblong areolae wrinkle in the cool air; her nipples grow stiff. Cutis anserina appears on her forearms. Crivano reaches across her lap to replace her blanket. In Dottore de Nis’s care, he says, you will heal very rapidly. Of this I am certain.

Perina looks down, smoothing the blanket to the contours of her hips. We are leaving the city, she says. Going to Amsterdam. We’re to depart tomorrow night. Did Tristão tell you?

We spoke of it, yes.

Her hand closes on his once more. One of them is trembling; he can’t tell which. Perhaps both. You’re coming with us, she says. Are you not?

Crivano looks at the shuttered windows. Of course I am, he says.

You can’t remain here. Every villain in the lagoon now stalks you.

He pulls his hand away, rests it on the black fuzz of her cropped head. I will come to Amsterdam, he says. I will. Of course I will.

She’s weeping now, quietly; her voice remains steady. There are many things I would ask you, she says. So many things. About Gabriel. About my lost brother.

I will tell you, Crivano whispers. I will tell you many things.

He smoothes the short hair at the base of her skull. Then he lowers his heavy head onto her shoulder and closes his eyes. For once — for the last time — permitting himself to remember. How he snatched the slow match from the blood-slimed deck where Captain Bua threw it. How he leapt into the hold as the Turks pushed past the pikemen. How he turned not toward the powder magazine, as ordered, but toward his own hammock, and that of the Lark. Tears inch down his nose, land with heavy taps in the folds of the blanket. After a moment, he feels Perina’s hand on his neck.

They sit together for a long time, both of them near sleep, half-dreaming.

What was your name? Perina says. The name they called you?

Crivano doesn’t answer. He lifts his head, sits up. Keeping his eyes shut. His damp cheeks are cool in the open air.

The things I recall, Perina says, the things told me by my mother and my sister before the plague took them, it all slips away now. I write down as much as I can, of course. But memories do not simply vanish, do they? They alter. They become something else. And there is naught to take bearings against save the shifting memories of other minds. Thus it becomes difficult to know what is true.

Yes, Crivano says. You have spoken fairly.

He’s thinking now of the lies he’s told through the years: to others, to himself. Clearly enough he remembers what he did that day on the Gold and Black Eagle , but he cannot remember why. His mind in those frightful hours was twisted by grief and panic, filled with misshapen fragments, wriggling like grubs churned from the earth by a spade. My mother will never believe I’m dead. If you give her this, then maybe she’ll know . He feared being ransomed; he feared being butchered. He wanted to go home to his family; he wanted to vanish forever. He wanted to live; he wanted to die. But none among those reasons seems adequate to what he did. Something else inhabited him. In that moment, who did he become?

With the Turks howling victory, with cannonballs plucking at the cordage, with his shipmates abovedecks screaming in despair, he ransacked the darkness, the match smoking in his teeth, until his fingers found them: two certificates of matriculation, for Gabriel Glissenti and Vettor Crivano. He tucked his dead friend’s document into his shirt. Then he touched the tip of the slow match to his own, pressing it against the careful letters of his name — the name his father gave him — until the parchment blackened, and the flames took it away.

It was because of your voice, Perina says. You had such a beautiful voice, and you knew every lovely song. My mother spoke of this often, with great affection. What was the nickname they gave you? Until I recall it I’ll be rendered sleepless, even in my great exhaustion. Won’t you take pity on me, dottore?

Crivano opens his eyes. His face is wet, but his vision is clear. Across the room, another gust pushes against the shutters; the candleflames tip away from the windows, and the candles’ shadows stretch toward them.

The Lark, Crivano says. Your family called me the Lark.

With a broad melancholic smile, Perina slides supine on the mattress. Her eyelids droop, as if in a rush to meet the blanket that she draws to her chin. In the morning, she says, our faculties will be restored. Then we shall speak pleasantly and at our leisure of the happy past, and what warm recollections we share will bring us both solace. Now, we want for sleep. Will I be judged greedy, dottore, if I beg you to lull me in the old manner of your boyhood? This small favor, I promise, will discharge any debt you may imagine you accrued last night, and will tilt the balance toward me.

Her blanket-hooded face smiles up at him. Her eyes are squeezed shut against encroaching disappointments. He watches her closely. Much has been lost; much more will be: among those casualties, an ancient name is hardly foremost. But the courage of his forefathers — the fatal courage that Fortune spared him — still persists on the undeserving earth. This brave girl has made him proud.

His throat tightens. He clears it, then leans forward to blow out the candle on the bedpost. The second bell moves across the city, measuring the sun’s retreat; the gaps between the shutters have gone black. Crivano draws a steady breath and tries, as sweetly as he is able, to sing.